In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “Fact number four: Arthur remonstrated with Miss Leckie that he had not written A Duet and that its author was, in fact, Grant Allen. That supposition, by the way, is incorrect. Greenhough Smith informed me that the actual author is Marie Corelli. No matter. Upon further questioning, Miss Leckie learned that her, eh, friend had, in fact, never written any of the books bearing his name.

  “Fact number five: Miss Leckie, who is a young person of considerable moral rectitude, was shocked to discover that a gentleman for whom she entertained a high regard was living a lie. She could only respect a man, she informed me, who was, in her colorful phrase, ‘steel true, blade straight.’ In short, Miss Leckie threatened, I don’t think that word is too strong, to break off all social relations with Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle unless he ‘set things right.’ Above all, she meant that the promiscuous, and to her mind mendacious, use of the A. Conan Doyle name must come to an immediate halt.

  “Here we approach the crux of the matter and, if you will permit me, I will merely summarize subsequent events. But, first, may I offer you a brandy? No? A glass of port? Sherry?”

  “Just get on with it, Zeb,” said Watson.

  “Now, Arthur—” Here Dene glanced at the burly sportsman. “—obviously had a serious problem. Not only his social status, but much of his income derives from the various works published under the A. Conan Doyle brand, to borrow a useful term from the cattle ranchers of the American West. Going public with the truth would lead to ridicule and even penury. So he offered a radical counter-proposal to Miss Leckie. Would you share it with us, Arthur?”

  Conan Doyle looked even more uncomfortable. “Words aren’t really my strong suit, but in essence I promised Jean, Miss Leckie, that from now on nobody but I myself would write as A. Conan Doyle. The past is past, I told her, and it can’t be changed. But I pledged that in the future the A. Conan Doyle name would be used for good.”

  “For good? What do you mean by that, Arthur?” asked Watson.

  “I intend, John, to defend those wrongly accused of crimes, to support legal and civic reforms, and, most of all, to promote the cause that Jean has taught me to believe in.”

  “And that, I gather, is spiritualism?” interrupted Watson. “How can you credit such nonsense, Arthur? You, an educated man, a graduate of Edinburgh, a physician . . .”

  “Yes, I knew you were going to mock me, John, and you won’t be the last, but I’ve seen things and heard things that have convinced me that there is an Other World, that spirit communication is possible, that that—”

  “If you say so, Arthur, if you say so. But in my opinion when A. Conan Doyle signs his name to psychical tracts, he will simply be continuing to write fiction by another name.”

  Just then a door quietly opened and an elderly waiter ushered a slightly unsteady Greenhough Smith into the room. “Hello, lads. I see he’s told you the bad news. Henceforth, the proud A. Conan Doyle name, once that of the greatest storyteller of the age, will grace polemics and apologias and histories of spiritualism and, I don’t doubt, books about the edge of the unknown and, who knows, maybe even fairies and the little people.”

  “Come, come,” said Watson. “That’s a little harsh, Herbert. You’ve already stretched the Conan Doyle name pretty far by commissioning what are little better than shilling shockers. Now, don’t look so disingenuous. There’s that revived mummy story, for instance. ‘Lot No. 249,’ if I’ve got the right number. But fairies, really! I’m sure Arthur won’t go to quite that extreme.”

  If possible, Conan Doyle looked even more uncomfortable, as he pretended to glance casually out the club window.

  “Well, perhaps you’re right,” answered the Strand’s editor. “We’ll just have to see. At all events,” Greenhough Smith continued, “I spoke with Miss Leckie and she allowed that those Professor Challenger stories we’ve been stock-piling could still appear. You know the ones, John, the three or four that Kipling and Haggard wrote as a lark on their golfing holidays in Scotland. But Miss Leckie did insist that her future husband would eventually show Challenger coming around to the truth of spiritualism. Having a scientist, even a fictional one, join the movement would apparently give it a great boost. ‘If only,’ she said, ‘Challenger were actually real like Captain Scott or Sir Harry Flashman.’”

  “But what about me?” protested Watson. “What about my own accounts of Holmes’s exploits?”

  “Well, John,” replied Conan Doyle with a smile, “since you were good enough to share your earnings with me for the cases you wrote up, it’s only fair that you receive the same percentage in return—if you’ll let me continue the chronicles of Baker Street. My writing won’t be a patch on yours, I admit, but lend me your notes for, say, the Mazarin Stone case and that Three Gables affair and I’ll do my very best to make them as thrilling as ‘The Speckled Band’ or ‘Silver Blaze.’”

  “But, Arthur, I say this as an old friend, you don’t realize how much effort I expend on those Strand pieces.”

  “Come now, John, you certainly make it look as if they wrote themselves. I’ll bet almost anyone, given the facts in a case, could scribble out a Sherlock Holmes adventure. ‘It was a wet October night in the year 1892, but Holmes and I were snug in our sitting-room when Mrs. Hudson announced a visitor.’ Nothing to it, see? But now I must take my leave. Miss Leckie awaits in the vestibule. After tea, we’re going on to a séance—Aleister Crowley has introduced us to our very own spirit guide. Such knowledge! Such ancient wisdom! Pheneas might actually make a wonderful subject for a book some day and I’ve already got the title, Pheneas Speaks.”

  After Conan Doyle left, there was a visible sigh of relief. “Oh, Lord,” groaned Dene, “I dread to imagine what kind of third-rate sermons and tedious propaganda will now issue from the pen of A. Conan Doyle. I exerted all my powers to persuade him and the Leckie woman to maintain the status quo, but to little avail. Is there nothing more to be done?”

  “Nothing,” said Greenhough Smith. “It’s a pity, but there you are. Still, the Strand will soldier on. And I’m beginning to feel it may have been time for some changes anyway. Out with the old, in with the new, so to speak. Would you, for instance, care to write a ‘spy’ thriller, John? In my view, The Riddle of the Sands has opened up some fresh possibilities in storytelling. What do you say?”

  “It’s kind of you to offer, Herbert, but I think not. I enjoyed Childers’ book, but then you know how fond I am of any sea story, not just Clark Russell’s. Still, fiction itself is rather beyond me. I’ve simply no imagination whatsoever. No, John H. Watson retired once before from writing and this time it’s probably for good. But I have squirreled away a few of Holmes’s investigations in my box at Cox’s Bank, including that long one involving the Valley of Fear, so I may slip our poor deluded friend the occasional manuscript. I will, that is, if I can escape the gimlet eye of the future Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle. With luck, then, and I say this without any false modesty, there should still be a few good Baker Street adventures even in the future. Overall, though, I suspect that readers will detect a certain falling off. Spiritualism—oh, Arthur!”

  Greenhough Smith shrugged. “As you wish, John. Well, how about you, Dene? Surely, you can be persuaded to take on a thriller—could be good money here.”

  “You editors never give up. As I said before, fiction isn’t my line either.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s not that different from writing for newspapers. Besides, you do dabble in detection, from time to time. There was that crime wave at Blandings and the mystery of Lord Strathmorlick’s courtship and, of course, it was none other than Zebulon Dene who first suggested that it could be Jill the Ripper. Since you’ll be using a pen name, there would be absolutely no risk to your reputation as a, uh, distinguished journalist. Besides, I’ve already done the hard work, coming up with the plots and titles. Now A.E.W. Mason has already signed on to write The Power-House, but you’d be perfect for The Thirty-Nine Steps. Here’s my basic idea: An innocent man, wrongly accused of m
urder, goes on the run from both the police and ruthless enemy agents. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Do say yes, Dene, otherwise Chesterton could end up writing it and, if that happens, he and Mason might take the whole enterprise over to my dreaded competitor Blackwood’s. Please? For a friend? I predict that ‘John Buchan’ could become almost as popular and prolific as ‘A. Conan Doyle.’”

  HE WHO GREW UP READING SHERLOCK HOLMES

  by Harlan Ellison

  A bad thing had happened. No, a “Bad Thing” had happened. A man in Fremont, Nebraska cheated an honest old lady, and no one seemed able to make him retract his deed to set things right. It went on helplessly for the old lady for more than forty years. Then, one day, she told a friend. Now I will tell you a story. Or a true anecdote. For those who wish this to be “a story I never wrote,” have at it; for those who choose to believe that I am recounting a Real Life Anecdote, I’m down with that, equally: your choice.

  Once upon a time, not so long ago . . .

  A man in an 8th floor apartment in New York City lay in his bed, asleep. The telephone beside him rang. It was a standard 20th Century instrument, not a hand-held device. It was very late at night, almost morning, but the sun had not yet risen over the decoupage skyline of Manhattan. The telephone rang again.

  He reached across from under the sheet and picked up the phone. A deep male voice at the other end said, very slowly and distinctly, “Are you awake?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you awake enough to hear me?”

  “Whuh? Whozizz?”

  “Are your bedroom windows open . . . or shut?”

  “Whuh?”

  “Look at the curtains!”

  “Whuh . . . whaddaya . . .”

  “Sit up and look at the curtains. Are they moving?”

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Look!”

  The man’s three-room apartment was on an airshaft in mid-Manhattan. It was in the Fall, and cold. The windows in his bedroom were tightly closed to shutter out the noises from the lower apartments and the street below. The curtains were drawn. He slumped up slightly, and looked at the curtain nearest him. It was swaying slightly. There was no breeze.

  He said nothing into the phone. Silence came across the wire to him. Dark silence.

  A man, more a shadow, stepped out from behind the swaying curtain and moved toward the man in the bed. There was just enough light in the room for the man holding the phone in his hand to see that the man in black was holding a large raw potato, with a double-edged razor blade protruding from its end. He was wearing gloves, and at the end of the gloves, at the wrists, just slightly outstanding, the man in the bed could see the slippery shine of thin plastic food-server gloves. The man in black came to the bed, stood over the half-risen sleeper, and reached for the phone. Keeping the slicing-edge of the razor blade well close to the neck, he took the receiver in his free hand.

  From across the line: “Just say yes or no.”

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Is he sitting up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he see you . . . and whatever you have at his throat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give him back the phone. Do nothing till I tell you otherwise.”

  “Okay.” He handed the receiver back to the man quivering beneath the razor blade. The eyes of the man were wide and wet.

  Across the line: “Do you believe he’s serious?”

  “Huh?

  “All I want from you is yes or no.”

  “Who’re . . .”

  “Give him the phone.” Pause. Again: “Give him the phone!”

  The frightened man handed back the instrument.

  “I’ve told him to say yes or no. If he says anything else, any filler, any kind of uh-huh-wha . . . can you cut him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not seriously, the first time. Let him see his own blood. Make it where he can suck it and taste it.” The man in black said nothing, but handed the receiver back, laying it tight to the other man’s ear. “Now,” came the motionless voice out of nowhere, “are you convinced he’s serious and can do you harm? Yes or no?”

  “Listen, whoever the hell you are . . .”

  The potato swept down across the back of the man’s hand, from little finger to thumb. Blood began to ooze in a neat, slim line, but long, almost five inches. He dropped the phone on the bed; blood made an outline on the top sheet. He whined. It may have been the sound of a stray dog sideswiped by a taxi in the street far below, faint but plangent. The man with the razor-in-a-potato reached toward the pale white throbbing throat and nodded at the dropped phone. All else was silence.

  Sucking on his knuckles, he lifted the instrument with a trembling, slightly-bleeding hand; and he listened. Intently.

  “Now. Listen carefully. If you say anything but yes or no, if you alibi or try to drift in anything but a direct, straight answer, I have told him to get a thick towel and jam it into your mouth so no one will hear you scream as he slices you up slowly. And your brother Billy. And your mother. Do you understand?”

  He began to say, “. . . uh . . .” The potato moved slightly. “Yes,” he said quickly, in a husky voice, “yes. Yes, I understand.”

  The level, determined voice off in the distance said, “Very nice. Now we can get down to it.”

  The man in the bed, with morning light now glinting through the curtains and shining off the razor blade poised quivering near his throat said, “Yes.”

  “You hold a painting by a nearly-forgotten pulp magazine artist named Robert Gibson Jones . . .” The voice paused, but the man beneath the razor blade knew it was merely a lub-dub, a caesura, a space in which, if he said the no or I don’t know what you’re talking about or it’s at my cousin’s house in Queens or I sold it years ago or I don’t know who bought it or any other lie, his body would be opened like a lobster and he would lie in his own entrails, holding his still-beating heart in his fingertipless hands. Throat cut ear to ear. Immediately.

  He said nothing, and in a moment the voice at the other end continued, “You have been offered three purchase prices by four bidders. Each of them is eminently fair. You will take the middle bid, take the painting in perfect condition, and sell it this morning, Is that clear?”

  The man holding the phone, whose blood was now pulsing onto the bedspread, said nothing. The voice from Out There commanded, “Give the phone to . . .” He held the instrument out to the dark figure poised above him. The potato-blade man took the phone and listened for a few seconds. Then he leaned close enough to the other so the man snugged in his pillow could see only the slightly less-black line where the knit watch-cap covering the potato-man’s head gave evidence he had eyes. No color discernible. “Is that clear?” Then he said into the phone, “Says he understands,” and he listened for a few more moments. There was moisture at the temples of one of the men in the bedroom. The connection was severed; the razor blade sliced through the cord of the telephone receiver: the man in the bed was swiping at the back of his left hand, sucking up the slim tracery of blood. The figure all in black said, “Now close your eyes and don’t open them till I tell you to.”

  When the bleeding man finally opened his eyes, a minute or two after total silence, even though he thought he’d heard a bump of the apartment door to the hall closing . . . he was alone.

  An haute couture newsletter editor on le Rue Montaigne dans le huite arrondissement, greatly hacked-off at her Third Editorial Secretary, demanded an appearance, en masse, of all her “verticals,” the 21st Century Big Business electronic word for “serfs,” “minions,” “toadies,” “go-fers,” “vassals,” “water-carriers,” “servants.” Slanguage today. She fired five of them. The wind blew insanely near the northern summit of Mt. Erebus in Antarctica.

  Within the hour, one of two thin-leather driving gloves, black in color, had been weighted with stones from the East River and sealed with a piece of stray wire from a gutter, and had been tossed far out into the Hudson. An
other glove, same color, filled with marbles from a gimcrack store on Madison Avenue, sealed with duct tape, went into the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Items were dropped in dumpsters in New Jersey; a pair of common, everyday, available-everywhere disposable gloves used by food-handlers were shredded, along with five heads of cabbage, in an In-Sink-Erator in a private home in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. One of a pair of undistinguished off-brand sneakers was thrown from a car on the New Jersey Turnpike into the mucky deep sedge forty feet from the roadway. The other piece of footwear was buried two feet under a garbage dump in Saranac Lake. A day and a half later. But quickly.

  But only three hours and twenty-one minutes after the closing of a door in mid-Manhattan, a man in an 8th floor apartment called a woman in McLean, Virginia, who said, “It’s a little early to be calling so unexpectedly after what you said last time we talked, don’t you think?” The conversation went on for almost forty minutes, with many question marks hindering its progress to an inevitable conclusion. Finally, the woman said, “It’s a deal. But you know you can never hang it or display it, is that okay with you?” The man said he understood, and they agreed at what time to meet on the third stairwell of the Flatiron Building to exchange butcher-paper-wrapped parcels.

  In a second-floor flat in London, a man removed one of three hardbacked books from a stylish slipcase. He took the book to a large Morris chair and sat down beneath the gooseneck reading lamp. He glanced to the wall where the overflow of light illuminated a large and detailed painting of a long-extinct prehistoric Lepidopteran. He smiled, addressed his attention back to the book, turned a few pages, and began reading. In a shipping office in Kowloon, a young woman, badly trained for her simple tasks, placed a sheet of paper from a contract in the wrong manila folder, and for days, across three continents, “verticals” raged at one another.

  Sixty-five minutes after the exchange of parcels at the Flatiron Building in New York, a 70 lb. triangular concrete cornice block from a construction pile did not somehow unpredictably come loose while being hoisted on pulleys above Wabash Avenue in Chicago, but a white man whose collar fit too snugly did not, also, go to his office at the international corporate office where he was a highly-paid Assessment Officer: instead, he made a dental appointment, and later in the day he removed his daughter from the private pre-school she had been attending. Nothing whatever happened in the Gibson Desert in west central Australia; nothing out of the ordinary.