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

  As always, I want to thank with all my heart my patient and wonderful wife of nearly thirty years (as of this writing,) Rebecca, and our son, Dan. I love you both, and you are everything to me!

  I can’t ever express enough gratitude for all of the contributors who have donated their time and royalties to this ongoing project. I’m so glad to have gotten to know all of you through this process. It’s an undeniable fact that Sherlock Holmes authors are the best people!

  The royalties for this project go to support the Stepping Stones School for special needs children, located at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes. These books are making a real difference to the school, and the participation of both contributors and purchasers is most appreciated.

  Next is that wonderful crew of people who listen to my complaints and manic enthusiasms, read my Sherlockian thoughts and dogma, and offer support, encouragement, and friendship, sometimes on a nearly daily basis, and sometimes more irregularly as daily business gets in the way of replies. Many many thanks to (in alphabetical order): Derrick Belanger, Bob Byrne, Steve Emecz, Roger Johnson, Mark Mower, Denis Smith, Tom Turley, Dan Victor, and Marcia Wilson.

  I want to thank the people who wrote forewords to the books:

  Lee Child –Many people might not realize that in another life, you worked at Granada Television from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1990’s, during the glory days when Jeremy Brett’s Holmes was being produced. Thanks for your perspective on The Great Detective.

  Michael Cox - Thank you so mjuch for giving your thoughts about pastiche and the making of the Granada Holmes series. And I especially thank you for making sure that those programs adhered to the TRUE Canon and the TRUE Holmes!

  Rand Lee - I can’t thank you enough for writing a foreword and giving some information about your father, one of my favorite writers of all time, Manfred Lee, half of Ellery Queen. As I’ve explained elsewhere, Ellery’s adventures are some of the best stories anywhere, period. Go read them, people!

  Roger Johnson - Several years ago, when I first found one of Watson’s old notebooks and prepared it for publication, I sent a copy to Roger, because it really mattered to me that he review it. He was very receptive, and we began to email. Since then, I’m glad to have become friends with both him and his wonderful wife, Jean Upton. Roger always takes time to answer my questions and to participate in various projects, and he and Jean were very gracious to host me for several days during part of my second Holmes Pilgrimage to England in 2015. In so many ways, Roger, I can’t thank you enough.

  Melissa Farnham - Thanks for the work that you do, and personally for taking time last year, when I was able to attend the Grand Opening event at Undershaw, to take my picture while I was sitting in Conan Doyle’s study. I’ll never forget it!

  Thanks also to Jeff Campbell for sparking the initial idea of this collection, Rich Ryan, (who put me in touch with Lee Child, leading to Mr. Child’s foreword for these books,) and James Lovegrove, who answered a question about storm directions at Holmes’s retirement villa.

  And last but certainly not least, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Author, doctor, adventurer, and the Founder of the Sherlockian Feast. Present in spirit, and honored by all of us here.

  As always, this collection has been a labor of love by both the participants and myself. As I’ve explained before, once again everyone did their sincerest best to produce an anthology that truly represents why Holmes and Watson have been so popular for so long. These are just more tiny threads woven into the ongoing Great Holmes Tapestry, continuing to grow and grow, for there can never be enough stories about the man whom Watson described as “the best and wisest... whom I have ever known.”

  David Marcum

  August 7th, 2017

  The 165th Birthday of Dr. John H. Watson

  Questions, comments, or story submissions may be addressed to David Marcum at [email protected]

  Foreword by Lee Child

  Not long ago, series editor David Marcum e-mailed me to remind me that the deadline for this foreword was coming up fast. At that moment I was reading an in-depth true-crime story in a prestigious weekly magazine. The case involved a man found dead in his car. There was evidence of a pre-existing heart condition, and of recent sexual excitement, and of a low dose of a certain dangerously stimulative drug in his system. The drug in question was obtainable only through a particular type of doctor’s office. There was a twenty-minute window during which the alleged perpetrator’s movements were not accounted for. The prosecutor developed a narrative whereby the alleged perpetrator must have had both prior knowledge of the victim’s heart condition and foreknowledge of his upcoming sexual excitement, thereby allowing him to use a small - and therefore hopefully undetectable by taste - dose of the drug to lethal effect. The perpetrator was alleged to have taken a fast, circuitous twenty-minute there-and-back route to the crime scene, where he was alleged to have delivered the mild-but-fatal dose in a go-cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. No other explanation would fit the facts. The journalist called it a “Holmesian solution”. My eyes were on the word “Holmesian” when David’s e-mail pinged in on my phone.

  Coincidence? To some extent, but not as much as you think. Sherlock Holmes is by far the most deeply embedded fictional character in our adult culture. Beyond by far. His penetration as a metaphor, worldwide, into every area of discourse is unparalleled. In fact my own character, Jack Reacher, a brainy detective but famous as a wanderer who eschews possessions, was once described as “Sherlock Homeless”. By a journalist in Spain. People make Holmes puns even in foreign languages.

  How did this happen? Let’s agree Conan Doyle was a fine, original writer, but he wasn’t unparalleled or by far the best in history. When reading The Canon we are entirely satisfied, but we know Holmes isn’t world famous more than a century later because of the quality of the prose alone. The plots of the stories have a better claim to immortality, being necessarily complicated and ingenious, and often unhinged enough, in a Victorian way, to sear themselves in our memories. But are plots enough that around the world probably a thousand journalists a day use a Holmes metaphor in their work?

  The conventional analysis is no, it’s the character that counts. It’s Sherlock Holmes himself. But I think that’s incomplete. Sherlock Holmes is two things: What he is, and what he does. His character and his process supply two different needs. One is primary, and the other is secondary. As a person, he’s fascinating, compelling, and deserves every bit of his enduring appeal, but what he does is much more important.

  First, he explains the incomprehensible. That has been a universal human desire dating back to the earliest reaches of our prehistory, ever since we first glanced at the stars with enough new intellectual capacity to wonder what they were. We retain powerful ghost traces of that desire today, and we carry equally powerful primeval memories of the satisfaction - the joy, even - we feel when our questions are answered. Holmes first excites our desire, and then brings the joy. Because we understand the conventions of narrative fiction, we know all along we will get the explanation, so the twin emotions are blended. We wonder why, say, red-headed men are being lured to a certain place, and we thrill with the delicious feeling of knowing, just knowing, we’re going to find out soon, and it’s going to be good. Whether by fantastically smart design, or fantastically good fortune, Conan Doyle has Holmes stroking and massaging a DNA remnant ten million years in the making.

  And second, Holmes gives us the deep human pleasure of seeing something done superbly well. It’s why we love the great magicians, and the great athletes, and acrobats and gymnasts and jugglers. Sherlock Holmes gives us the mental equivalent. Our separate indrawn breaths in our individual reading places add up to stadium-sized gasps. Like his physical counterparts, Holmes’s ratiocination can be dazzling, and is never less than solidly satisfying. It’s something done well, which is alway
s a pleasure.

  As will be reading the stories in this book. They are all solid, non-gimmicky, respectful, disciplined celebrations of The Canon. They’re about taking one step further into the world we imagine so vividly. They are about thinking your way into the front room in Baker Street, and staying there a spell, and looking around, and asking, “What if this happened?” The result: These stories, and the pleasure of seeing something done well.

  Lee Child

  New York, July 2017

  Foreword by Rand B. Lee

  My father, Manfred B. Lee, would have loved Eliminate the Impossible. Co-author with our cousin Frederic Dannay of the Ellery Queen mysteries, Dad was a Sherlock Holmes fan from boyhood. Born Emanuel Benjamin Lepofsky in 1905 to a poor blue collar Jewish family in Brownsville, a suburb of Brooklyn, New York, young Manny’s early world was not that different from Holmes and Watson’s. Gaslight illuminated the neighborhood where he grew up. “Iceboxes” kept food from spoiling, cooled not by electricity and chemicals but by chunks of ice delivered by the iceman. Automobiles, airplanes, and motion pictures were still thrilling novelties, and communication was accomplished by letter writing, telephone, or telegraph. There were no ATM’s - if you wished to get cash from your banking account, you needed to visit the bank, in person, before closing Monday through Friday.

  My father’s early years were marked not only by the humiliations of poverty and anti-semitism, but also by the horrors of World War I, the global influenza epidemic, and the Great Depression. I have always felt that the logic-driven rationalism of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, in which Holmes’s observational skills and scientific acumen brings balance and closure to even the most gruesome puzzles, satisfied Dad’s craving for justice and the triumph of reason over chaos. In the character of Ellery Queen, the gentleman detective, Holmes’s powers of reasoned observation were reincarnated, softened a bit by Dr. Watson’s capacity for empathy.

  Rand B. Lee

  May 2017

  Where Pastiche Begins...

  by Michael Cox

  In the early 1980’s, when I set out to make the best possible Sherlock Holmes series for television, I gave no thought to the question of pastiche. In my innocence, I thought that our films would be based fairly and squarely on Conan Doyle’s original stories and that was that. To begin with that belief held true. The first of The Adventures, no matter which collection of stories they came from, were entirely faithful to the originals with very few additional flourishes.

  Then we reached the adventure of “The Greek Interpreter”, and I have to admit that an element of pastiche began to creep in. It happened because the grammar of film demands a different structure from the grammar of prose fiction. Conan Doyle brought the story to a curious conclusion. Once the interpreter has been rescued, he presents us with a series of unanswered questions about the fate of the villains. On the screen this would have left us feeling unsatisfied and deprived of a climax. So we supplied our own answers. I believe that they were in the style of the original and I hope they were satisfying as well as exciting. Above all, they obeyed the film maker’s imperative: Don’t tell me, show me!

  As time went by, we took more liberties with the stories, although we were always determined to keep the original plots intact. Our most substantial addition was the one we made to “The Final Problem”. This is a curious detective story because there is no problem to solve and no mystery for Holmes to tackle. There is simply the battle of wills between The Master and Moriarty which leads to the shocking finale at the Reichenbach Falls. So we added a crime: The theft of the Mona Lisa and Holmes’s success in recovering it through his pioneering study of fingerprints.

  Over the years that the series ran, we changed Watsons and the production team also changed. I moved into the background, and after more than thirty episodes disappeared altogether. When these changes were introduced, the scripts remained faithful to Doyle, but towards the end there were some extraordinary lurches into pastiche. Chambers Dictionary rather unkindly defines this as “a jumble”, and “The Eligible Bachelor” (or “The Unintelligible Bachelor” as one critic described it,) is a good example. Unhappily, “The Last Vampyre” is another. Both these episodes suffered from the schedulers’ demand for two-hour films, rather than the shorter format with which we began. Holmes has usually been happier in short stories.

  Unfortunately, the writers were not aware of the very sensible rules which David Marcum has laid down for the contributors to this anthology. Neither (dare I say?) were the creators of the BBC series Sherlock. But you are in good company here. You can sit back and enjoy the additions to the Holmes Canon between the covers of this book. They all show a proper respect for that great storyteller, Arthur Conan Doyle, and add to our enjoyment of the world he created.

  Michael Cox

  Producer, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  Granada Television 1981-1985

  March 2017

  “Rubbish, Watson, Rubbish!”

  by Roger Johnson

  Sherlock Holmes made his opinion absolutely clear. He dismisses the legend of the Baskerville family as of interest only to “a collector of fairy tales”, and when Dr. James Mortimer confesses uncertainty as to whether the phantom hound of the legend has returned to Dartmoor, Holmes says, “I see that you have quite gone over to the supernaturalists.”

  On another occasion, when the topic of vampirism in rural Sussex is raised, he exclaims, “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.”

  But more familiar perhaps is his statement a minute or so later: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

  Arthur Conan Doyle had been interested since childhood in the supernatural, mainly as a concept in fiction. It was not only for the “tales of ratiocination” that he revered Edgar Allan Poe, and ACD himself wrote some excellent ghost stories, including “The Leather Funnel”, “Lot No. 249”, “The Ring of Thoth”, and “The Captain of the Pole Star”. In the early 1880’s, perhaps inspired by a lecture he attended at the Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society, he began to take a serious interest in the theory that the dead have merely passed from one sphere of life to another, and that they can communicate with the living. It was not until some three decades later that he became a leading advocate for spiritualism, but the belief was there, growing, all along.

  It’s important, incidentally, to realise that Conan Doyle thought of spiritualism in terms of scientific research and discovery. He was by no means the only trained scientist to believe that communication with the dead was possible, and was not “supernatural” in the usual meaning of the word, but rather the revelation of a higher level of nature.

  Yet he never inserted his spiritualist beliefs into the Sherlock Holmes stories. Some think that he might have done so if he had been fonder of the detective, but there’s very little evidence in the stories of any deep religious faith or adherence to a philosophy such as Buddhism. To Sherlock Holmes, they would have been as disruptive as - well, as grit in a sensitive instrument or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses.[1]

  More to the point as far as this book is concerned, Conan Doyle never had Holmes confront actual ghosts, vampires, werewolves, or anything of that sort. The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Sussex Vampire” are firmly in the tradition that we might call “the impossible explained”. Over a century before, the novels of Ann Radcliffe - notably The Mysteries of Udolpho - had made the device very popular, but Conan Doyle added the important element of logical reasoning to prove that the supposed supernatural was nothing of the sort. And in doing so, he harked back much farther in time, to the story of Daniel and the idol in the Old Testament Apocrypha.[2]

  “No ghosts need apply...” And yet, for m
any years pasticheurs have refused to take Sherlock Holmes at his word. The results (are you surprised?) have been variable. The trend began, or at least became fashionable, with Loren D Estleman’s novel Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula, or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, and the aristocratic Romanian immigrant has been by far the most popular choice of supernatural opponent. Fred Saberhagen, in a series that begins with The Holmes-Dracula File, actually posits a blood relationship between the detective and the vampire.

  Holmes, with or without Watson, has faced the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos”. He has opposed evil Faeries, and been recruited to assist the famous psychic sleuths John Silence and Thomas Carnacki. There are anthologies with titles like Gaslight Grimoire, Shadows Over Baker Street, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Ghosts in Baker Street.

  Some of these books and some of the short stories are of high quality: Well conceived, well executed, and immensely entertaining. Ron Weighell’s The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, though rare, is well worth looking out for. His knowledge of the occult is matched by his knowledge of Sherlock Holmes. The great bulk of Holmes pastiche, however, makes one nostalgic for the days when it was a good deal harder to get a book accepted for publication.

  Fortunately we have the ideal antidote in David Marcum, Steve Emecz, and all the contributors to the present volumes. They know that when Sherlock Holmes investigates an apparently supernatural phenomenon, he should (a) find that the occurrence is actually down to natural causes - and (b) that the natural causes were made possible by human agency.

  What more could one reasonably wish for?

  Roger Johnson, BSI, ASH

  Editor: The Sherlock Holmes Journal