The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part V Read online

  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories

  Part V - Christmas Adventures

  Compiled by

  David Marcum

  First edition published in 2016 by

  MX Publishing

  335 Princess Park Manor

  Royal Drive

  London, N11 3GX

  www.mxpublishing.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  © Copyright 2016 MX Publishing

  The right of the individuals listed on the Copyright Information page to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of MX Publishing or Andrews UK Limited.

  Cover Design by Brian Belanger

  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 Adventure of the Improbable Intruder ©2016 by Peter K. Andersson. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Deceased Doctor ©2016 by Hugh Ashton. All Rights Reserved. Hugh Ashton appears by kind permission of Inknbeans Press. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Knighted Watchmaker ©2016 by Derrick Belanger. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Case of the Christmas Star ©2016 by S.D. Bennett. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Case of the Ruby Necklace ©2016 by Bob Byrne. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Curious Case of the Well-Connected Criminal ©2016 by Molly Carr. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Vanishing Man ©2016 by Mike Chinn. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Blue Carbuncle ©1990 by Bert Coules. All Rights Reserved. First publication of text script in this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  A Christmas Goose ©2016 by C.H. Dye. All Rights Reserved. Originally published in a different and short version online as Goose, December 2013. First publication of this revised and expanded version, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Golden Hunter ©2016 by Jan Edwards. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Handsome Ogre ©2016 by Matthew J. Elliott. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  Undershaw: An Ongoing Legacy for Sherlock Holmes ©2016 by Steve Emecz. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  A Word From the Head Teacher at Undershaw ©2016 by Melissa Farnham. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Case of the Christmas Trifle ©2016 by Wendy C. Fries. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Man Who Believed in Nothing ©2001, 2016 by Jim French. All Rights Reserved. First publication of text script in this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Christmas Stocking ©2016 by Paul D. Gilbert. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of Marcus Davery ©2016 by Arthur Hall. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Christmas Cracker ©2016 by John Hall. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Christmas Card Mystery ©2016 by Narrelle M. Harris. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  This bids to be the merriest of Christmases. ©2016 by Roger Johnson. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  Foreword ©2016 by Jonathan Kellerman. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  A Bauble in Scandinavia ©2016 by James Lovegrove. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Stolen Relic and Editor’s Introduction: The Compliments of the Season ©2016 by David Marcum. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Question of the Deathbed Conversion ©2016 by William Patrick Maynard. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Queen’s Writing Table ©2016 by Julie McKuras. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Mile End Mynah Bird ©2015 by Mark Mower. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Ballad of the Carbuncle ©2016 by Ashley D. Polasek. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Empty Manger ©2016 by Tracy J. Revels. All Rights Reserved. Originally published in a substantially shorter version at the Classic Specialties website, December 1999. First publication of this revised and expanded version, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  A Perpetrator in a Pear Tree ©2016 by Roger Riccard. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Jet Brooch ©2016 by Denis O. Smith. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Case of the Reformed Sinner ©2016 by S. Subramanian. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Missing Irregular ©2016 by Amy Thomas. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Purple Poet ©2015 by Nicholas Utechin. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

 
The Adventure of the Long-Lost Enemy ©2016 by Marcia Wilson. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  The Adventure of the Christmas Surprise ©2016 by Vincent W. Wright. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  Editor’s Introduction

  The Compliments of the Season

  by David Marcum

  “I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.”

  – “The Blue Carbuncle”

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  It has been said that Charles Dickens invented our modern idea of how to celebrate Christmas. In the early days of Victoria’s reign, Christmas was a subdued affair in England, a time for quiet reflection, worshiping at church, and staying around one’s hearth. But Dickens, perhaps trying to rewrite his own bleak childhood memories, almost single-handedly gave people the idea that December 25th was something more than another somber religious date on the calendar. It could be a time of festivity, of mystery and merriment and wonder.

  In his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), which so captured England’s heart, Dickens portrays scenes of a season filled with holiday festivities and good will as the members of the Pickwick Club celebrate with their friends. And there is even a Christmas ghost story, in which a bitter old man is changed on Christmas Eve by a supernatural encounter. No, it’s not the more famous A Christmas Carol (1843), the story that everyone knows about Ebenezer Scrooge and his amazing redemption. Rather, it’s “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”, a shorter tale related by Mr. Wardle to the Pickwickians, in which bitter church sexton Gabriel Grub learns that “setting all the good of the world against the evil . . . it was a very decent and respectable world after all.”

  Dickens refined his ideas of a proper Christmas, with decorations and singing and wishes for snow and a fat goose, in his later more famous story, wherein Ebenezer Scrooge is taken here and there across London and elsewhere, through his past, present, and future. It’s an amazing story that has resonated from the time it was written to the present day - so much so that it’s one of the most filmed of all narratives, with dozens upon dozens of adaptations. Some of the more notable are the musical version starring Albert Finney - a personal favorite of mine: “Thank you very much!”, the much grimmer variant with a heavy-set Scrooge played by George C. Scott (who also once played a mentally ill character who erroneously believed that he was Sherlock Holmes), the old classics with Alistair Sim or Reginald Owen (who listed among his many roles a heavy-set Holmes), and more recently that of Patrick Stewart and the unique animated version starring Jim Carrey.

  Whenever one of these versions is on television, I have to stop and watch - not so much at this point to see the very familiar story, which I know by heart backwards and forwards, especially as I re-read A Christmas Carol nearly every December. No, the big reason that I watch now is to see how each of these films portrays the dark, narrow, and very atmospheric streets of Victorian London.

  And since this book is about Sherlock Holmes - and not Dickens (or Scrooge or even Gabriel Grub) - that seems to be a good place to begin the pivot to Our Heroes, the Detective and the Doctor. Although Dickens was writing his great works decades before Holmes and Watson first appeared in print, fittingly in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, there are a great many similarities between the Dickensian London and that in which Holmes carried out his business. Can anyone doubt that the opium dens and the dangerous little streets along the Thames, so ably described in “The Man With the Twisted Lip”, weren’t directly related to the same vile alleys memorialized by Dickens? And the unique and larger-than-life people who wander through Dickens’s stories could be the very parents and grandparents of some of the clients and policemen and Irregulars who climbed the seventeen steps to Holmes and Watson’s Baker Street sitting room.

  So if one such as myself sees Dickens’s London and then looks for foreshadowing of that Great Cesspool that Watson described so well, then how can one not see a connection between that same kind of Dickensian Victorian Christmas and Sherlock Holmes?

  Of course, this isn’t a new idea. There have been quite a number of previously related adventures telling about what Mr. Holmes of Baker Street was up to during those various Christmases in the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century, and so on into the Twentieth. The first that come to mind must be those two well-known and highly respected volumes, Holmes for the Holidays (1996) and More Holmes for the Holidays (1999), each edited by the late Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg, and Carol-Lynn Waugh. Containing fourteen and eleven stories respectively, these were the first anthologies of their kind to feature stories specifically sharing Holmes’s Christmas-related cases. (There are even a couple of tales that feature descendants of individuals involved in A Christmas Carol.) I remember how enthusiastic I was when I first discovered Holmes for the Holidays on a book store shelf. This was in those dark days when finding new stories about The Master was almost always a surprise, a rare and difficult thing, as one couldn’t learn the release dates for upcoming Holmes books for the next year simply by looking on the internet - one had to rely on frequent trips to the bookstore and serendipity.

  In addition to these fine additions to any Holmes library, there have been a number of other stories spread throughout different collections. Probably the best of them all is Denis O. Smith’s “The Christmas Visitor”. Val Andrews brought us one of his finer efforts in Sherlock Holmes and the Yuletide Mystery. A lesser known novel is Sherlock Holmes’s Christmas by David Upton. John Hall produced “The Christmas Bauble”, featured both as a short story in the new Strand Magazine, and then adapted for broadcast on radio’s Imagination Theatre.

  Elsewhere on radio was “The Night Before Christmas” (1945, with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce), and “The Christmas Bride” (1947, with John Stanley and Alfred Shirley). And then there was the film Young Sherlock Holmes, released in early December 1985, and also set around Christmas-time - although it wasn’t explicitly a Christmas story - and that wasn’t Watson featured in the story, but someone else entirely. (Ah, but that’s an essay for a different book.)

  There isn’t space here to tell of all the other impressive stories relating what Holmes and Watson did during this-or-that Christmas. And what has appeared in print doesn’t even begin to match the level of excellent writing about Holmes and Christmas that one can find at fan-fiction sites on the web. In fact, for the last several years there has been a writing activity at fanfiction.net in which a group of authors each compose and post something for the entire month of December, for every turn of the calendar, either a complete story, ranging from very short to full-length, to something serialized across the whole month.

  So, if there are already so many of them out there, why another book of Holmes Christmas adventures? Well, that requires a two-part answer. The first and shortest is that, for someone like me - and hopefully you too! - there can never be enough traditional tales about Holmes and Watson, two of the best and wisest men whom I have ever known. (And after reading and collecting literally thousands of stories about them for over forty-one years, I do feel like I know them.)

  The other reason relates to the ever-increasing popularity of these MX Anthologies.

  When I first had the idea for a new Holmes anthology in early 2015, the plan was to contact possibly a dozen or so “editors” of Watson’s notes and see if they were interested. The idea grew and grew until the first collection was three volumes - really one big book spread out under three covers - and containing more new Holmes stories than had ever been assembled before in one place at one time. A big part of what made the project so special was that the authors donated their royalties to the Stepping Stones School for special needs students, then plannin
g to move into one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes, Undershaw. By the time the first three books were released in October 2015, renovations were well under way at the school’s future home, and it also quickly became apparent that the need for future volumes of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories was very strong. The process for producing more anthology volumes was in place, a desire for more traditional Holmes stories is always there, the school can always use more funding as provided by the sale of the books - and more and more authors wanted to participate.

  Therefore, it was announced that there would be another anthology, the next in what would now be an ongoing series. But there was so much interest that it was quickly determined that two volumes would be necessary in 2016. Consequently, Part IV - 2016 Annual came out in the spring of 2016, and a second book, this book, was planned for the fall. But it couldn’t simply be the Part V - 2016 Annual - Part II. It needed something to set it apart. And then it hit me - by releasing it in the fall, in time for the holidays, this book could be a new Christmas collection. After all, it has been twenty years since Holmes for the Holidays and its sequel. It was time.

  And many authors and friends of the project answered the call, as seen by the thirty stories contained in this volume. As always, I’ve arrange them chronologically, as that seems to work best. In almost every case, the stories are completely new for this volume. (In typical Watsonian Obfuscation, there are a couple that have previously appeared, but in substantially different or shorter versions on the internet, and the scripts by Bert Coules and Jim French have been broadcast on radio, but they have never appeared in print as text versions. And it’s very interesting to see the styles of how each script is presented.)

  Some of the stories are inextricably plotted with the trappings of Christmas. Others are set during late December, and even though they could have occurred at any time of the year, they are certainly influenced by the season that surrounds them. In some tales there is festivity, and in others tragedy. Watson might be having a bad year in this one, and Holmes in that one - the same as each of us have high and low Yuletide seasons.