The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part II
Title page
The MX Book ofNew Sherlock Holmes Stories
Part II: 1890-1895
Edited by David Marcum
Publisher information
2015 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
First edition published in 2015
© Copyright 2015 MX Publishing
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Copyright information
All of the contributions in this collection are copyrighted by the authors listed below. Grateful acknowledgement is given to the authors and/or their agents for the kind permission to use their work within these volumes.
“The Verse of Death” ©2015 by Matthew Booth. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Riddle of the Rideau Rifles” ©2007 by Peter Calamai, All Rights Reserved. Originally appeared in Locked Up: Tales of Mystery and Mischance along Canada’s Rideau Canal Waterway. This version printed by permission of the author.
“Lord Garnett’s Skulls” ©2015 by J.R. Campbell. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Foreword” Part II ©2015 by Catherine Cooke. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Saviour of Cripplegate Square” ©2002 by Bert Coules. All Rights Reserved. First publication of text script in this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Case of the Anarchist’s Bomb” ©2015 by Bill Crider. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Bachelor of Baker Street Muses on Irene Adler” ©2015 by Carole Nelson Douglas. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Undershaw: An Ongoing Legacy for Sherlock Holmes” ©2015 by Steve Emecz. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of Willow Basket” ©2015 by Lyndsay Faye. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“A Study in Abstruse Detail” ©2015 by Wendy C. Fries. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Man on Westminster Bridge” ©2015 by Dick Gillman. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Murderous Numismatist” ©2015 by Jack Grochot. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Poison Tea Epidemic” ©2015 by Carl L. Heifetz. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Lady on the Bridge” ©2015 by Mike Hogan. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Sleeping Cardinal” ©2015 by Jeremy Branton Holstein. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Study and Natural Talent” and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson photo illustrations on back cover and within the book ©2015 by Roger Johnson. All Rights Reserved. First publication of essay, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Affair of Miss Finney” ©2015 by Ann Margaret Lewis. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Editor’s Introduction: The Whole Art of Detection” ©2015 by David Marcum. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Case of the Unrepentant Husband” ©2015 by William Patrick Maynard. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of St. Nicholas the Elephant” ©2000, 2015 by Christopher Redmond. All Rights Reserved. The original version of this story appeared at www.sherlockian.net. First book appearance original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Larceny in the Sky with Diamonds” ©2015 by Robert V. Stapleton. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Glennon Falls” ©2015 by Sam Wiebe. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Onion Vendor’s Secret” ©2015 by Marcia Wilson. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Bookshop Owner” ©2015 by Vincent W. Wright. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
Other parts
These additional adventures are contained inThe MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
PART I: 1881-1889
Foreword - Leslie S. Klinger
Sherlock Holmes of London - A Verse in Four Fits - Michael Kurland
The Adventure of the Slipshod Charlady - John Hall
The Case of the Lichfield Murder - Hugh Ashton
The Kingdom of the Blind - Adrian Middleton
The Adventure of the Pawnbroker’s Daughter - David Marcum
The Adventure of the Defenestrated Princess - Jayantika Ganguly
The Adventure of the Inn on the Marsh - Denis O. Smith
The Adventure of the Traveling Orchestra - Amy Thomas
The Haunting of Sherlock Holmes - Kevin David Barratt
Sherlock Holmes and the Allegro Mystery - Luke Benjamen Kuhns
The Deadly Soldier - Summer Perkins
The Case of the Vanishing Stars - Deanna Baran
The Song of the Mudlark - Shane Simmons
The Tale of the Forty Thieves - C.H. Dye
The Strange Missive of Germaine Wilkes - Mark Mower
The Case of the Vanished Killer - Derrick Belanger
The Adventure of the Aspen Papers - Daniel D. Victor
The Ululation of Wolves - Steve Mountain
The Case of the Vanishing Inn - Stephen Wade
The King of Diamo
nds - John Heywood
The Adventure of Urquhart Manse - Will Thomas
The Adventure of the Seventh Stain - Daniel McGachey
The Two Umbrellas - Martin Rosenstock
The Adventure of the Fateful Malady - Craig Janacek
... and PART III: 1896-1929
Foreword - David Stuart Davies
Two Sonnets - Bonnie MacBird
Harbinger of Death - Geri Schear
The Adventure of the Regular Passenger - Paul D. Gilbert
The Perfect Spy - Stuart Douglas
A Mistress - Missing - Lyn McConchie
Two Plus Two - Phil Growick
The Adventure of the Coptic Patriarch - Séamus Duffy
The Royal Arsenal Affair - Leslie F.E. Coombs
The Adventure of the Sunken Parsley - Mark Alberstat
The Strange Case of the Violin Savant - GC Rosenquist
The Hopkins Brothers Affair - Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett
The Disembodied Assassin - Andrew Lane
The Adventure of the Dark Tower - Peter K. Andersson
The Adventure of the Reluctant Corpse - Matthew J. Elliott
The Inspector of Graves - Jim French
The Adventure of the Parson’s Son - Bob Byrne
The Adventure of the Botanist’s Glove - James Lovegrove
A Most Diabolical Plot - Tim Symonds
The Opera Thief - Larry Millett
Blood Brothers - Kim Krisco
The Adventure of The White Bird - C. Edward Davis
The Adventure of the Avaricious Bookkeeper - Joel and Carolyn Senter
Editor’s Introduction: The Whole Art of Detection
by David Marcum
Part I: The Great Watsonian Oversoul
According to Merriam-Webster, a pastiche is defined as a literary or artistic work that imitates the style of a previous work. Almost from the time that the first Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in print, there were Holmes pastiches as well, side by side with the official sixty tales that are known as The Canon. Some from that period are more properly defined as parodies, but a few were written to sincerely portray additional adventures featuring Our Heroes, Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson,
I personally discovered pastiches at around the same time that I found the original Holmes stories, and began reading them just as eagerly as I did the material found in The Canon. In my mind, a well-written pastiche, set in the same correct time period as the originals, was as legitimate as anything written by the first - but definitely not the only! - of Watson’s literary agents, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the past, I’ve described the whole vast combination of Canon and pastiche as The Great Holmes Tapestry, with each providing an important thread to the whole, some brighter or thicker than others perhaps, but all contributing to the big picture. Perhaps another comparison would be to say that the union of Canon and pastiche forms a rope, with the Canonical adventures serving as the solid wire core, while all the threads and fibers of the additional pastiches bound around it provide greater substance and strength, with the two being indivisible.
I believe that pastiches have contributed immensely to the ever-increasing popularity of Holmes and Watson throughout the years. Additional cases and adventures only serve to feed the Sherlockian Fire, and ideally refocus interest back to the original narratives. There are some Sherlockian scholars who want nothing at all to do pastiches, and there are others who don’t even want to classify all of the original sixty stories as being authentic, stating in various essays and books that this or that Canonical tale is spurious. I cannot agree with them.
In my essay, “In Praise of the Pastiche” (The Baker Street Journal, Vol. 62, No. 3, Autumn 2012), I argue that just sixty original stories relating incidents from Holmes’s career are simply not enough. There must be more about the world’s greatest consulting detective to justify that he is the world’s greatest consulting detective, rather than just a few dozen “official” stories that leave too much unanswered. Pastiches fill in the gaps and cracks.
In “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”, Holmes tells Watson that “... I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.” The vast amount of stories that make up the combination of both Canon and pastiche may not be - in fact, it certainly isn’t! - what Holmes had in mind, but it is the closest we’ll get to seeing and observing that overall tapestry of his life and work, the Whole Art of Detection.
Over the years, an incredible number of people have added to the body of work initially introduced by Watson’s first literary agent. Sometimes, people discover lost manuscripts, usually written by Watson, but occasionally narrated by someone else - a Baker Street Irregular perhaps, or a client, or Mycroft Holmes, or a passing acquaintance, or maybe even by Sherlock Holmes himself. On a regular basis, an adventure is discovered in one of Watson’s Tin Dispatch Boxes - and there must have been several of those to hold so many tales! These stories may be narrated in first person, or they may have a third-person omniscient viewpoint. No matter how they are found or transcribed, I believe that each of the “editors” of these later discovered adventures has tapped into what I like to call The Great Watsonian Oversoul.
When I was in high school, my award-winning English teacher, (who sadly never ever taught anything at all about the literary efforts of one Dr. John H. Watson, leaving that joyful task for me to capably take care of for myself,) introduced us to the concept of an “oversoul” - she was using it in relation to how it influenced some poet. Essentially - and I am no doubt remembering this somewhat incorrectly - the idea is that we are all tiny pieces of a greater entity, split off for a time from it, out here in the darkness and trapped in our own heads, before returning at some later point to the protection, warmth, goodness, and omnipotence of the greater whole. I, however, appropriated the idea to describe the overall source of the Holmesian narratives.
To my way of thinking, all of the traditional Canonically-based Sherlock Holmes stories are linked back eventually to this same basis of inspiration, no matter how the later “author” accesses it. Since the mid-1970’s, I’ve read and collected literally thousands of adventures concerning the activities of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and since the mid-1990’s, I’ve been organizing all of them - both Canon and pastiche - into an extremely detailed day-by-day chronology, now covering hundreds of pages and literally thousands of narratives. Among the things that have become apparent to me over the years are: 1) There can never be enough good Holmes stories, relating the activities of the true, correct, and traditional Holmes of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; and, 2) The people who bring these stories to the public, no matter how they go about it, or whether they even realize it, are all somehow channeling Watson.
So one way or another, the spark of imagination that sets these narratives in motion originates in the Great Watsonian Oversoul. That’s not to say that a lot of authorial/editorial blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t go into all of these “discovered” stories, and these efforts should not be negated at all. These works don’t simply appear as finished products - even the ones that are found essentially complete in Tin Dispatch Boxes. It takes a lot of work to first make contact with the Watsonian Oversoul, and then to transcribe what is being relayed in such a way that the public can understand and enjoy it. Sometimes the person relaying the story might misunderstand a fact or two along the way, leading to an odd discrepancy, or the “editor” channeling the tale may weave some little thing from his or her own agenda onto Watson’s original intentions that isn’t quite consistent with the big tapestry. But if the writer listening for that still small Watson voice within is sincere, the overall sense of the Sherlockian events that are being revealed within the story remains true.
Part II: The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
Thi
s collection of new Sherlock Holmes adventures came about by listening to that still small voice. One Saturday morning in late January 2015, I popped awake, several hours earlier than I had intended, having just had a full-fledged and vivid dream about a new Holmes anthology. Now, I’ve tapped into the Oversoul and “edited” a few of Watson’s works myself, but I hadn’t tried anything like this before. If I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep, the idea would probably have disappeared. But it had grabbed me by then, so I quietly got up and started making a wish list of “editors” of Watson’s works that I already knew and admired, in order to see if they would be willing to go through the effort to come up with some more new adventures
I emailed Steve Emecz of MX Publishing, and he enthusiastically liked the idea. Early on, we agreed that the author royalties for the project would be used to support Undershaw, the home where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was living when both The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as some of the later Holmes adventures, were written. MX Publishing has supported this effort in the past, so this decision was an easy one.
The same morning that I had the idea, I began to email authors, and I immediately started receiving positive responses. I was then emboldened to start asking still more people, and quickly the whole thing escalated. I reached out to friends to help me track down some authors in England that could only be reached by the old-fashioned mail. People already participating suggested still more folks who might also want to tap into the Oversoul and contribute a story to the anthology. It quickly grew to the point where it obviously needed to be two volumes, and sometime after that, it became three. (If it hadn’t been split into multiple books, the whole thing would have become so fat that the book spines would have cracked apart.) It was always important to me that this collection, although finally presented under three covers, be considered as one unified anthology. As such, it is the largest collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories assembled in the same place.
These volumes have contributors from around the world: the U.S. and Canada, all over Great Britain, India, New Zealand, and Sweden. There are a couple of British expatriates who were living in Asia at the time they made their contributions, and two American ex-pats in London and Kuwait as well. Early on, I let all of the participants know that, since we had contributors from all around the globe, the format and punctuation of the books would be uniformly consistent, but they could use either British or American spellings in their finished works. Therefore, if you see some stories with color and others with colour, for example, that’s why.