The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part XI Read online

  The Missing Empress - Robert Stapleton

  The Resplendent Plane Tree - Kevin P. Thornton

  The Strange Adventure of the Doomed Sextette - Leslie Charteris and Denis Green

  The Adventure of the Old Boys’ Club - Shane Simmons

  The Case of the Golden Trail - James Moffett

  The Detective Who Cried Wolf - C.H. Dye

  The Lambeth Poisoner Case - Stephen Gaspar

  The Confession of Anna Jarrow - S. F. Bennett

  The Adventure of the Disappearing Dictionary - Sonia Fetherston

  The Fairy Hills Horror - Geri Schear

  A Loathsome and Remarkable Adventure - Marcia Wilson

  The Adventure of the Multiple Moriartys - David Friend

  The Influence Machine - Mark Mower

  PART X - 2018 Annual (1896–2016)

  Forword - Nicholas Meyer

  Foreword - Roger Johnson

  Foreword - Melissa Farnham

  Foreword - Steve Emecz

  A Man of Twice Exceptions (A Poem) - Derrick Belanger

  The Horned God - Kelvin Jones

  The Coughing Man - by Jim French

  The Adventure of Canal Reach - Arthur Hall

  A Simple Case of Abduction - Mike Hogan

  A Case of Embezzlement - Steven Ehrman

  The Adventure of the Vanishing Diplomat - Greg Hatcher

  The Adventure of the Perfidious Partner - Jayantika Ganguly

  A Brush With Death - Dick Gillman

  A Revenge Served Cold - Maurice Barkley

  The Case of the Anonymous Client - Paul A. Freeman

  Capitol Murder - Daniel D. Victor

  The Case of the Dead Detective - Martin Rosenstock

  The Musician Who Spoke From the Grave - Peter Coe Verbica

  The Adventure of the Future Funeral - Hugh Ashton

  The Problem of the Bruised Tongues - Will Murray

  The Mystery of the Change of Art - Robert Perret

  The Parsimonious Peacekeeper - Thaddeus Tuffentsamer

  The Case of the Dirty Hand - G.L. Schulze

  The Mystery of the Missing Artefacts - Tim Symonds

  The following contributions appear in this volume:

  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories

  Part XI - Some Untold Cases (1880-1891)

  “A Poem” ©2018 by “Anon.” All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Adventure of the Silver Skull” ©2018 by Hugh Ashton and j-views Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Hugh Ashton appears by kind permission of j-views Publishing. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Adventure at Bellingbeck Park” ©2018 by Deanna Baran. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” ©1944, 2017 by Leslie Charteris and Denis Green. First publication of text script in this collection. Originally broadcast on radio on July 31, 1944 as part of the Sherlock Holmes radio show, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Printed by permission of the Leslie Charteris Estate. Introduction ©2018 by Ian Dickerson. First publication of this revised version, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Singular Tragedy of the Atkinson Brothers of Trincomalee” ©2018 by Craig Stephen Copland. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Strength to Strength” ©2018 by Steve Emecz. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Foreword” ©2018 by Lyndsay Faye. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Most Repellant Man” ©2018 by Jayantika Ganguly. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “A Word From the Head Teacher of Stepping Stones” ©2018 by Melissa Grigsby. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Case of the Gila Monster” ©2018 by Stephen Herczeg. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Bishopgate Jewel Case” ©2018 by Mike Hogan. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Known Unknowns” ©2018 by Roger Johnson. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Unrecorded Holmes Cases: A Sonnet” ©2018 by Arlene Mantin Levy and Mark Levy. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Editor’s Introduction: Only Sixty?” and “Appendix: The Untold Cases” ©2018 by David Marcum. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Singular Adventure of the Extinguished Wicks” ©2017 by Will Murray. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Adventure of the Paradol Chamber” ©2018 by Paul W. Nash. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Bogus Laundry Affair” ©2018 by Robert Perret. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Colonel Warburton’s Madness” ©2017 by Gayle Lange Puhl. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Adventure of Vittoria, the Circus Belle” ©2017 by Tracy Revels. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Mrs. Forrester’s Complication” ©2018 by Roger Riccard. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Grosvenor Square Furniture Van” ©2018 by David Ruffle. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Pimlico Poisoner” ©2018 by Matthew Simmonds. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Vatican Cameos” ©2018 by Kevin P. Thornton. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Inspector Lestrade and the Molesey Mystery” ©2018 by M.A. Wilson and Richard Dean Starr. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the authors.

  The following contributions appear in the companion volume:

  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories

  Part XII - Some Untold Cases (1894-1902)

  “It’s Always Time” ©2018 by “Anon.”. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “A Correspondence Concerning Mr. James Phillimore” ©2018 by Derrick Belanger. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” ©2018 by Nick Cardillo. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Shanghaied Surgeon” ©2018 by C.H. Dye. All Rights Reserved. Originally published in a different and short version online as “Sink the Friesland”, September 2009, and also as “The Adventure of the Shanghaied Surgeon”, December 2014. First publication of this revised and expanded version, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author
.

  “A Shame Harder Than Death” ©2018 by Thomas Fortenberry. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Abernetty Transactions” ©2012, 2018 by Jim French. All Rights Reserved. First publication of text script in this collection. Originally broadcast on radio on September 23, 2012 as Episode No. 106 of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Printed by permission Lawrence Albert for Jim Albert’s Estate.

  “The Adventure of the Black Plague” ©2018 by Paul D. Gilbert. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Curious Case of the Coptic Patriarchs” ©2018 by John Linwood Grant. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.’

  “The Adventure of the Exalted Victim” ©2017 by Arthur Hall. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Vigor the Hammersmith Wonder” ©2018 by Mike Hogan. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Adventure of the Dishonourable Discharge” ©2018 by Craig Janacek. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Trusted Advisor” ©2018 by David Marcum. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “A Repulsive Story and a Terrible Death” ©2018 by Nik Morton. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “The Conk-Singleton Forgery Case” ©2017 by Mark Mower. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Another Case of Identity” ©2018 by Jane Rubino. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Dr. Agar and the Dinosaur” ©2018 by Robert Stapleton. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.

  “Some Untold Cases”, Parts XI and XII of

  The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories,

  are dedicated to

  Philip K. Jones

  Phil passed away in June 2018.

  As well as being a wonderful and very supportive

  Holmesian collector and reviewer,

  he was devoted to Sherlockian Pastiche

  and an expert in the area of Untold Cases.

  The theme for this collection grew from his suggestion,

  and he will be missed.

  Editor’s Introduction: Only Sixty?

  by David Marcum

  There are certain numbers that are triggers to deeply passionate Sherlockians. One of these is 221. I’ve discussed this with other people of like mind. If you’re one of us, you know that feeling - when you’re going through your day and look up to see that it’s 2:21-hopefully in the afternoon, because you should be asleep for the other one. Seeing that it’s 2:21 o’clock is a little thrill.

  One can encounter 221 all over. Sometimes a lucky Sherlockian will be assigned 221 as a hotel room. (In her retirement home, my mother-in-law lived next door to someone in room 221, and I couldn’t walk by that door without noticing it.) Maybe you have an office numbered 221, or at least you might have an appointment in one. If you’re very lucky, your house number is 221 - and I wonder how many non-London Baker Streets are there scattered throughout the world that have a 221 address?

  I often notice when I reach page 221 in a book, and I know from asking that other Sherlockians do the same. (I was tickled a couple of years ago, while reading Lyndsay Faye’s excellent collection of Holmes adventures, The Whole Art of Detection, to see that the story she’d written for the first MX collection, “The Adventure of the Willow Basket”, began on page 221.)

  Any American interstate that’s long enough will have a marker for Mile 221, and just east of Nashville, Tennessee, where I’m sometimes able to attend meetings of The Nashville Scholars of the Three Pipe Problem - a scion of which I’m a proudly invested member - there’s a big sign for Exit 221B on the eastern side of Interstate-40. (My deerstalker and I have several photos in front of it.)

  221 is a number that makes a Sherlockian look twice, but there’s another - 1895.

  1895 is a year that falls squarely within Holmes’s Baker Street practice - and I specify that location, because he had a Montague Street practice and unofficially a retirement-era Sussex practice as well, where he carried out the occasional investigation, while also spending a great amount of time first trying to prevent, and then trying to prepare for, the Great War of 1914-1918. But he was in Baker Street from 1881 to 1891 (when he was presumed to have died at the Reichenbach Falls,) and then again from 1894 (when he returned to London in April of that year) until autumn 1903, when his “retirement” began.

  1895 isn’t especially known as Holmes’s busiest or most famous year. Make no mistake, there were some interesting cases then: “Wisteria Lodge”, “The Three Students”, “The Solitary Cyclist”, “Black Peter”, and “The Bruce-Partington Plans”. But 1894 is when Watson specifically mentions, in “The Golden Pince-Nez”, the three massive manuscript volumes which contain his and Holmes’s work. And it was the 1880s, before The Great Hiatus, where all of those beloved adventures recorded in The Adventures and The Memoirs occurred. “The Speckled Band”, possibly one of the most famous of them all, took place in 1883. All four of the long published adventures, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, and perhaps the most famous of tales, The Hound of the Baskervilles, occur chronologically before 1895.

  And yet, 1895 is still the representative year most mentioned by Sherlockians - “where it is always 1895” said Vincent Starrett at the conclusion of his famous poem 221B, written in 1942, and so it is subsequently referenced in essays and gatherings and toasts as the year.

  Written in the early days of U.S. involvement in World War II - but several years after much of the rest of the world had already tipped into the conflagration - the closing couplet of Starrett’s poem reflects his likely despair at the terrible conflict:

  Here, though the world explode, these two survive,

  And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

  I’m not a Starrett scholar, but I suspect that he was looking back to a more innocent time - or so it seemed when compared to the terrible war-torn world of 1942. (For many of the people actually in 1895, the world was a relatively terrible place for them too, for all kinds of different reasons.) But did Starrett simply mean to invoke the whole Holmesian era, a bygone past, or did he specifically want to focus on 1895? It’s likely that the former is true, and that he simply used 1895 because five rhymes with survive. It could have just as easily have been a different number - although with less effect:

  Here, though the world explode, these two are fine,

  And it is always eighteen ninety-nine.

  Imagine - but for a different word choice, we could have been finding ourselves misty-eyed when referring to 1899. Or Starrett could have used 1885 and still made the original rhyme work. Still, it’s 1895 that we have, and so that’s what we’ll be going on with as the year that we associate with Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson - although I’m quick to point out that it’s 1895, along with several decades on either side of it.

  Sixty Stories

  Having explored 221 and 1895, there’s another Sherlockian number that might not immediately spring to mind, but that doesn’t diminish it, because it holds a great deal of power for some Sherlockians. That number is 60-as in, sixty stories in the original Sherlockian Canon. For some die-hard types out there, this is it. No more, forever, period, The End. There can only be sixty Holmes stories and
anything beyond that is fraudulent abomination. (Except, of course, for those one or two stories on their lists that get a free pass because they’re written by a friend, or a celebrity worthy of desperate cultivation, or by some deceased literary person.) It’s amusing for me to read various scholarly works, such as Martin Dakin’s A Sherlock Holmes Commentary (1972), that don’t even really like all of the original sixty Canonical adventures, let alone anything post-Canonical, picking apart the originals and speculating that this or that later Canonical narrative is a forgery.

  I don’t buy into that philosophy. Early on, I ran out of Canonical stories to read and wanted more. And I found them - some admittedly of lesser quality, but some better than the originals. Even at a young age, I understood that some of the original tales weren’t quite as good as others, but those first sixty stories, presented by the First Literary Agent and of whatever varying levels of quality, were about the true Sherlock Holmes, and they let me visit in his world, and I wanted more. Thankfully, before I’d even read all of The Canon, I’d discovered those post-Canonical adventures designated as pastiches, so even as I re-read the original adventures countless times, I also read and re-read all of those others that told of new cases, or filled in the spaces between the originals.

  Luckily, even Watson never acted as if Holmes only solved sixty cases and that was it. No matter how intriguing a personality is Sherlock Holmes, or how vivid his adventures are that they make a visit to Baker Street sometimes more real than tedious daily life, how could we truly argue that he’s the world’s greatest detective based on a mere and pitifully few sixty stories?

  In “The Problem of Thor Bridge”, Watson tells us that:

  Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine. Some, and not the least interesting, were complete failures, and as such will hardly bear narrating, since no final explanation is forthcoming. A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader... Apart from these unfathomed cases, there are some which involve the secrets of private families to an extent which would mean consternation in many exalted quarters if it were thought possible that they might find their way into print. I need not say that such a breach of confidence is unthinkable, and that these records will be separated and destroyed now that my friend has time to turn his energies to the matter. There remain a considerable residue of cases of greater or less interest which I might have edited before had I not feared to give the public a surfeit which might react upon the reputation of the man whom above all others I revere. In some I was myself concerned and can speak as an eye-witness, while in others I was either not present or played so small a part that they could only be told as by a third person.