The Sherlockian
Page 1
G R A H A M M O O R E
VIKING CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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Published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2010
Simultaneously published in the United States by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing,
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Copyright © Graham Moore, 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
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ISBN: 978-0-670-06520-2
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The Sherlockian is a work of historical fiction. All of the contemporary characters in the novel are the product of the author’s imagination.
For my mother, who first taught me to love mysteries when I was eight years old. We lay in bed passing a copy of Agatha Christie’s A Murder in Three Actsback and forth, reading to each other.
She made all of this possible.
CHAPTER I
The Reichenbach Falls
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle
The doll and its maker are never identical
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
London Opinion, December 12,1912
August 9, l893
Arthur Conan Doyle curled his brow tightly and thought only of murder.
“I’m going to kill him,” Conan Doyle said as he folded his arms across his broad frame. High in the Swiss Alps, the air tickled Arthur’s inch-thick mustache and seemed to blow straight through his ears. Set far back on his head, Arthur’s ears always appeared to be perking up, listening to something else, something distant and behind him. For such a stocky man, he had a nose that was remarkably sharp. His hair had only recently begun to gray, a process that Arthur couldn’t help but wish along. Though he was but thirty-three years of age, he was already a celebrated author. An internationally acclaimed man of letters with light ocher hair would not do so well as a wizened one, now, would he?
Arthur’s two traveling companions ascended to the ledge on which he stood, the highest climbable point of the Reichenbach Falls. Silas Hocking was a cleric and novelist well known as far away as Arthur’s London. His recent offering of religious literature, Her Benny, was a work Arthur held in high regard. Edward Benson was an acquaintance of Hocking’s and was much quieter than his gregarious friend. Though Arthur had met the two men only this morning, over breakfast at the Rifel Alp Hotel in Zermatt, he felt that he could confide in them safely. He could tell them of his mind, and of his dark plans.
“The fact is, he has gotten to be a kind of ‘old man of the sea’ about my neck,” continued Arthur, “and I intend to make an end of him.” Hocking huffed as he stood beside Arthur, gazing at the vast expanse of the Alps before them. Tufts of snow melted yards beneath their feet into a mighty stream of water that had, millennia ago, driven a path through the mountain as it poured loudly into the frothing pool below. Benson silently pressed a mittenful of snow into a tight ball and dropped it whimsically into the chasm. The force of the wind tore bits off the snowball as it fell, until it disappeared in the air as a series of white puffs.
“If I don’t,” said Arthur, “he’ll make a death of me.”
“Don’t you think you’re being rather rough on an old friend?” asked Hocking. “He’s given you fame. Fortune. You two have made a handsome couple.”
“And in plastering his name across every penny dreadful in London, I’ve given him a reputation which far exceeds my own. You know I get letters. ‘My beloved cat has vanished into South Hampstead. Her name is Sherry-Ann. Can you find her?’ Or, ‘My mum had her purse snatched exiting a hansom in Piccadilly. Can you deduce the culprit?’ But the thing of it is, the letters aren’t addressed to me—they’re addressed to him. They think he’s real.”
“Yes, your poor, admiring readers,” pleaded Hocking. “Have you thought of them? People seem so terribly fond of the fellow.”
“More fond of him than of me! Do you know I received a letter from my own Mam? She asked—knowing I would of course do anything she ever required—she asked that I sign the name Sherlock Holmes to a book for her neighbor Beattie. Can you imagine? Sign his name rather than my own. My Mam speaks as if she’s Holmes’s mother, not mine. Gah!” Arthur tried to contain his sudden burst of anger.
“My greater work is ignored,” he continued. “Micah Clarke? The White Company? That charming little play I concocted with Mr. Barrie? Overlooked for a few morbid yarns. Worse still, he has become a waste of my time. If I have to concoct another of those tortuous plots— the bedroom door always locked from the inside, the dead man’s indecipherable final message, the whole thing told wrong end first so that no one can guess the obvious solution—it is a drain.” Arthur looked to his boots, showing his weariness in his bowed head. “To put it frankly, I hate him. And for my own sanity, I will soon see him dead.”
“How will you do it, then?” teased Hocking. “How does one go about killing the great Sherlock Holmes? Stab him in the heart? Slit his throat? Hang him by the neck?”
“A hanging! My, are those words a balm upon my mind. But no, no, it should be something grand—he is a hero, after all. I’ll give him one final case. And a villain. He’ll be in need of a proper villain this time around. A gentlemanly fight to the death; he sacrifices himself for the greater good, and both men perish. Something along those lines.” Benson pounded another snowball into being and lobbed it gently into the air. Arthur and Hocking watched its open-ended arc as it vanished into the sky.
“If you want to save on funeral expenses,” Hocking said with a chuckle, “you could always toss him off a cliff.” He looked to Arthur for a reaction but found no smile on his face. Instead Arthur curled his brow in the tight-faced frown he wore when he was in the midst of his deepest thinking.
He gazed at the jaws of the chasm below. He could hear the roar of the falling water and the violent crush it made at the mouth of the rock-speckled river. Arthur felt himself suddenly terrified. He
imagined his own death on those stones. Being a medical man, Arthur was more than familiar with the frailty of the human body. A fall of this height . . . His corpse banging, slapping against the rocks all the way down . . . The dreadful cry caught in his mouth . . . Torn limb from limb on the crust of the earth, the wisps of grass stained with his blood . . . And now, in his thoughts, his own body vanished, replaced by someone leaner. Taller. A thin, underfed ribbon of a man, in a deerstalker cap and long coat. His hard face obliterated, once and for all, on a spike of gunmetal stone.
Murder.
CHAPTER 2
The Baker Street Irregulars
“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business
to know what other people don’t know.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”
January 5, 2010
The five-penny piece tumbled into Harold’s palm. The coin felt heavy as it landed, heads up, and Harold closed his fingers around the worn silver. He squeezed for a few seconds before he realized that his hands were shaking. The room exploded in applause.
“Hurray!”
“Welcome aboard!”
“Congratulations, Harold!”
Harold heard laughter, and more clapping. A hand slapped him on the back, and another rubbed his shoulder warmly. But all Harold could think about was the coin in his own right hand. In his left, Harold gripped his new certificate. The coin had been glued, poorly, to the lower left corner and had become unattached when Harold overexcitedly grasped the paper. The coin had fallen off, and Harold had caught it midflight. He looked down at the tiny silver piece. It was a Victorian-era shilling, worth only five pennies in its day. It would be worth a lot more than that now, and to Harold it was worth a fortune. He blinked away the moisture that had formed in the corners of his eyes. The coin meant that he had arrived. That he had achieved something. That he belonged.
“Welcome, Harold,” said a voice behind him. Someone tousled the deerstalker cap on his head. “Welcome to the Baker Street Irregulars.”
These words, which Harold had hoped to hear for so long, sounded foreign and strange now as he finally heard them. All these people— two hundred bodies, laughing and joking and patting backs—they were all clapping for Harold. This Harold. Harold White, twenty-nine years old, with the slight belly, with the thick eyebrows, with the astigmatism, with the sweaty, shivering hands.
Harold couldn’t believe that he really deserved all this. But he did. He belonged here.
The Baker Street Irregulars were the world’s preeminent organization devoted to the study of Sherlock Holmes, and Harold was its newest member. Harold had published his first article in the Baker Street Journal, the Irregulars’ quarterly publication, two years earlier. “On the Dating of Bloodstains: Sherlock Holmes and the Founding of Modern Forensics,” Harold had titled the piece. It had explored the historical connections between Holmes’s first experiments in A Study in Scarlet with the work of Dr. Eduard Piotrowski. (“Dr. Piotrowski, practicing in Kraków in the 1890s, beat in the heads of baby rabbits and recorded the patterns made by the blood bursting from their skulls. Holmes’s experiments were similarly gory, though he at least had the decency to use his own blood, as well as the labors of his own skull,” Harold had written. He thought this was his most amusing line in the piece.) Harold had published two other articles after, in smaller Sherlockian magazines. Tonight was his first time at the Irregulars’ invitation-only annual dinner. Just to be included among the guests at the Irregulars’ dinner was an immense honor—but to be offered membership, at such a young age, with such a small history of scholarship to his name? Harold couldn’t think of another Irregular who’d been offered membership this quickly, after only one dinner.
Harold White, in the cheap black suit that hung loosely on the shoulders, in the chicken-stained tie, was in the middle of the proudest moment of his life. He adjusted the plaid deerstalker hat that rested magnificently on his head. The hat was by far his favorite possession. He’d owned it since he was fourteen years old, since he had first become obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and dressed as the famed detective for Halloween. As his love of Holmes grew from childish infatuation to mature study, what had once been a costume prop eventually became day-to-day clothing. He’d worn the hat proudly at his graduation from Princeton, even temporarily sewing a tassel on top for the occasion. As Harold moved from his nervous teens to his tedious twenties, the hat served him well through the cocktail parties, the autumn picnics, the friends’ weddings that cropped up more and more often. He had worn it when he accepted his first career-oriented job as a New York publisher’s assistant. He had worn it as he separated from his longest-lasting girlfriend, Amanda, about whom Harold never spoke.
The Irregulars’ dinner, held this year at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-fourth Street, fell amid a grand week of Sherlockiana. For four days around January 6, Holmes’s birthday, all the world’s societies devoted to the celebration of Sherlock Holmes gathered in New York. Lectures, tours, book signings, sales of Victorian antiques and firstedition printings—for a Sherlock Holmes devotee, it was heaven.
Of the hundreds of Sherlockian societies in attendance, however, the Baker Street Irregulars were by far the oldest, the most senior, and the most exclusive. Truman and FDR had claimed membership, as had Isaac Asimov. Only the Irregulars, and their few guests, could attend the annual dinner, and their rare invitations were the object of heated cravings from Sherlockians the world over. The Irregulars were even responsible, as everyone knew, for deducing January 6 as the day of Holmes’s birth. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had never actually written the date January 6 in the “Canon”—that is, the four novels and fifty six short stories that make up all the original adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But an extensive, Talmudically deep reading of these tales allowed Christopher Morley, one of the founding Irregulars, to propose January 6 as the most likely candidate for Holmes’s birthday. All the other organizations were considered “scion” groups of the Irregulars and needed an official sanction from the Irregulars in order to form. Applications for membership in the Irregulars did not exist—if you distinguished yourself in the field of Sherlockian studies, they would find you. And if the leader of the Irregulars deemed you qualified, you would be presented with a shilling piece as a sign of your membership—like the coin, the faded and ancient silver, that Harold squeezed between his whitening knuckles.
The applause dissipated into chatter. Chairs were pushed back from the dining tables, white linen napkins draped across the plates of halfeaten chickens and boiled vegetables. Tumblers of scotch were downed in long gulps. Hands were shaken. Good-byes were offered.
Harold felt suddenly foolish, clutching his shilling. He had fantasized about this moment since he’d first learned of the Irregulars. And now it was over. He wondered what he would have to do next to have this feeling back. He wanted so much to hold on to his successes and not let them fade away into the dull clamor of normal life. Harold watched servers collect the silverware, sweeping the dirty forks and dull butter knives into plastic tubs.
Harold lived in Los Angeles and worked as a freelance literary researcher. His primary employers were movie studios, whose legal departments hired him to defend against charges of copyright violation. If an angry novelist sued the makers of the summer’s biggest action blockbuster, claiming that they had stolen the idea from his little-read political thriller of twenty years back, it was Harold’s job to write a brief saying that no, in fact both works took their basic plot elements from a lesser-known Ben Jonson play, or one of Dostoyevsky’s difficult short stories, or another work that was similarly obscure and similarly in the public domain. Harold’s name was well used and well lauded in the legal departments of the studios, except in the rare cases when they would sue one another.
Harold’s main qualification for this position was that he had read everything. He had simply read more books—more fiction—than anyone else whom either he or his
employers had met. This had been accomplished, at his age, via an acute ability to speed-read. As a child, as he ploddingly read through the pages of every Sherlock Holmes mystery, his desire—his animal need—to know what happened next posed a problem: It took him longer to get through the stories than he could bear. So he taught himself to speed-read from a mail-order self-help book. His fellow students would tease him about this ability, as they found it unthinkable that anybody could read a four-hundredpage novel in two hours and still have any significant amount of information retention. But Harold could. And he would prove it to them, reading books alongside his peers and letting them quiz him about plot elements and descriptive passages. Sure enough, Harold retained more information, more quickly, than anyone he had met at his grade school in Chicago, in his college years at Princeton, or in his adult life since.
“Harold!” came a deep and resonant voice from behind. A set of hands squeezed Harold’s shoulders. He turned and looked up into the face of Jeffrey Engels. A snow-haired Californian with a nearly permanent grin etched into his cheeks, Jeffrey was easily the best-liked and most respected Sherlockian in the room. Harold suspected that it was Jeffrey, in fact, who had campaigned for Harold’s investiture in the Irregulars. But he knew better than to ask, as Jeffrey would never tell him, one way or the other.
“Thank you,” said Harold.
Jeffrey ignored Harold’s comment. His usual grin was gone, replaced with a dour stare.
“This affair has taken a grave turn,” said Jeffrey quietly.
“To what?”
“To murder!” replied Jeffrey.
CHAPTER 3
The Final Problem
“You know a conjuror gets no credit
when once he has explained his trick.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,