Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes

by Estleman, Loren D.

  SONS OF

  MORIARTY

  AND MORE STORIES OF

  SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Authorized and licensed by the

  Estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Edited by

  Loren D. Estleman

  F+W Media, Inc.

  This book is dedicated, as are all my Sherlockian efforts, to the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the finest entertainer since William Shakespeare. A world without Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, and Brigadier Gerard is inconceivable.

  I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him.

  —Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four

  SHERLOCK HOLMES:

  AN ENDURING LEGACY

  I can’t think of a more wildly successful success story. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could only dream of it.

  Name someone who rose to prominence in 1887 and still permeates world culture on the covers of magazines, at the motion-picture box office, on TV, in computer games, on eBooks, in downloads. Still stumped?

  While it’s been said that I Love Lucy, a sitcom phenomenon that’s been with us a mere sixty years, is playing somewhere every minute of every day, I hereby state boldly that right now, someone is reading a Sherlock Holmes story. I’m not even including the hundreds of thousands—millions—who at this moment are exposed to Holmes in some form.

  His creator never saw it coming.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes; he banned the name from family conversation. The skyrocketing popularity of the World’s First Consulting Detective must fizzle out eventually, he thought. Holmes would soon be forgotten, and Doyle with him. He wanted to be remembered for his history of the Boer War.

  Ask anyone what that war was all about. Now ask anyone about Sherlock Holmes.

  Writers are often unreliable on the subject of their work.

  A generation later, his daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, expressed the same kind of fear, turned inside-out. Inundated with requests for permission to publish Holmes pastiches and parodies by other writers, she declared a moratorium on the grounds that the sheer volume of imitations—many, many times the weighty fifty-six stories and four novels of the original Canon—would extinguish her father’s memory. She, too, felt that the creation had devoured its creator; but this time, Holmes’s endurance was the culprit, rather than his fragility.

  She needn’t have worried. While it’s true that many people don’t immediately think of Conan Doyle when Holmes’s name is mentioned, those same people will instantly connect his name with his detective’s.

  It’s a sideways kind of immortality, but hardly unique in literature. Robert Louis Stevenson is less well-known than either Long John Silver or Dr. Jekyll, and while Anna Karenina may pass muster with the bouncer at the door of an exclusive literary nightclub, Leo Tolstoy might need a reference. Daniel Defoe? Let me think. Robinson Crusoe? Oh, of course. A writer is best known for the most vivid shadows thrown by the light of his imagination.

  Holmes and Watson are ubiquitous—as always. At least one film based on their adventures appeared every decade of the twentieth century, a tradition that’s continued into the twenty-first. On steroids.

  The old explanation, that modern audiences yearn for the order and gentility of the Victorian era, doesn’t hold up. How do we account for the popularity of two new TV shows placing Holmes in our own time? What’s so sexy about DNA, anyway? It can’t hold a candle to footprints and tobacco-ash.

  Ironically, the answer lies in the past.

  When Universal Pictures took over the film series starring Basil Rathbone, the producers jettisoned the gaslight and horse-drawn cabs and replaced them with air-raid sirens and all the other trappings of World War II. Londoners enduring the Blitz needed the morale boost: Hitler had the Luftwaffe, but Britain had Sherlock Holmes.

  Clearly, the age of watch-chains and bustles still has its points. It hasn’t hurt the box-office success of two recent Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr., with Jude Law as a dynamic and sexy (as originally intended) Dr. Watson. But in our time of terrorists, serial killers, and drug gangs, the magic of television has given us Sherlock Holmes once again.

  Not that Conan Doyle didn’t try to take him away from us.

  Divorce was out of the question. He loathed the thought of writing more adventures, but knew that simply to stop would be to invite his readers to pester him without mercy. Nothing would do but murder.

  Wisely, having established his detective as without parallel, he couldn’t let him be taken out by any of the petty swindlers, would-be bank robbers, and sundry trash he’d already shown he could outwit on deadline. Enter Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime; and the super villain was born. (His adapters have spent countless hours working this afterthought into Holmes’s backstory.) I can’t think of a suspense writer who hasn’t commandeered the concept to his own ends. This pair of opposite equals would end their lives in a bloody draw.

  He paid for this sin. “You brute!” wrote one outraged fan; in our modern hyper-violent world, there would be death threats.

  Personally, I don’t buy that Sir Arthur was committed to his plan. If he truly wanted to eradicate Holmes, he’d have done the deed in full view of the faithful Dr. Watson, and remove all doubt. Leaving a convenient note on the cusp of the grim Reichenbach Falls was the nineteenth-century equivalent of that infamous episode of the TV series Dallas in which hero Bobby Ewing’s death was revealed to have been only a dream. No writer with the vision to invent both the world’s first consulting detective and literature’s first arch-fiend would fail to leave himself an out. (He was pestered anyway; even the Grim Reaper was no match for a public determined not to quit cold turkey.) At the end of “The Final Problem,” he might as well have paraphrased a delicious line at the end of every James Bond film: “Sherlock Holmes Will Return in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House.’”

  Had he done so, however, we’d never have had that poignant Out Our Way panel by cartoonist J. R. Williams, showing a little boy reading in bed with a stricken look on his face and the caption: “The death of Sherlock Holmes.”

  With the exception of two stories—both, significantly, excluding Watson as narrator—I can’t help thinking that the writer was having enormous fun with his creations, despite his grumping en familie. The witty banter, the circumlocutive reasoning in regard to arcane clues, and the wild races through hew hedges, Medieval thoroughfares, and down the racing Thames, fairly drip with endorphins. A writer is most enjoyable when he’s enjoying himself. This much I know.

  Was Conan Doyle an innovator?

  On the face of it, the evidence against him is damaging. One page into Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and anyone remotely familiar with Holmes’s methods and living arrangements must see that coincidence doesn’t apply. Granted, characterization wasn’t Poe’s long suit; apart from his feats of ratiocination, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin is notable only for his insistence on keeping his curtains drawn and his candles burning to simulate eternal night, and the narrator has neither name nor apparent existence outside the association. Poe’s imitator would give us the endearing, infuriating idiosyncrasies unique to his detective, Watson’s private life, medical practice, and above all the caring and patience required to wean his friend from his destructive addictions to cocaine and morphine.

  Well, I’m okay with that; and I’ve been a victim of plagiarism myself. In my case, the perpetrator merely copied a story I’d published word-for-word, changing only some character names and geographical references, and revealing no talent beyond a rudimentary knowled
ge of cut-and-paste. Conan Doyle at least brought skill to the enterprise. Some purists sniff and say, “That’s like complimenting a thief for investing the money more wisely than his victim.” Possibly so, but I can’t help noting similarities in the relationship between Dickens’ convict and young Pip in Great Expectations and that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver and Jack Hawkins in Treasure Island, and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres was hardly the first attempt to recast Shakespeare in a contemporary setting, or even to select King Lear as the vehicle. The Bard himself borrowed freely from Plutarch and Christopher Marlowe; the Elizabethan Age was a cesspool of intellectual theft. So I’m going to look the other way, consoling myself that Poe hasn’t suffered. In fact, his stories have remained in print for more than 150 years.

  The pilferage, if that’s what it was, didn’t stop with Conan Doyle. Sax Rohmer’s sharp-profiled, pipe-smoking Sir Denis Nayland-Smith and his physician biographer, Dr. Petrie, are doppelgängers for Holmes and Watson, and the titular devil doctor in The Insidious Fu-Manchu would face legal action by Professor Moriarty were that party not smashed to bits at the base of the falls. For that matter, all the Blofelds, Drs. Mabuse and No, Svengalis, Zecks, Wo Fats, Lex Luthors, Sumurus, Jokers, (and, yes, even yours truly’s Madame Sing) owe their inspirations to the fertile mind of the retired practitioner from Scotland.

  Dame Agatha Christie—may her tribe increase—based the eccentric Hercule Poirot and his docile companion Captain Hastings solidly on her inspiration; the Belgian detective’s boredom with commonplace crime and keen interest in the outré bear close comparison. I would go so far as to say that when Hollywood discovered Holmes and Watson, the “buddy film” was born.

  Why Sherlock Holmes? The world has had its share or Herculeses, Robin Hoods, and Supermen. Why make room for another mythic hero?

  Because the room is vacant.

  There will always be a world in which the fog hovers thick around black vs. white; where the difference between goodness and dark deeds hangs on the tick of a clock, the hammer of a well-worn service revolver gripped in a steady hand; where “it is always 1895,” to quote the great Sherlockian Vincent Starrett. A solitary image stands in the No Man’s Land in between: a hawklike profile in a fore-and-aft cap, drawing on a curved-stem pipe, with a staunch presence at his side, poised to pounce. John Wayne’s Ringo Kid, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Caine, framed in their bright doorways, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, are but an extension of this Malloryan myth. It may not have begun with Conan Doyle; we must confer with Homer on that. But he will remain forever in those ranks.

  “Come, Watson, come! The game’s afoot!”

  So it’s become a cliché. What truth hasn’t?

  The contributors chosen for this anthology have had the candor to acknowledge their debt (and to receive the imprimature of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate). They have managed to capture the spirit and cadence of the originals, and to expand the creator’s vision to embrace problems that never came Holmes’s way—or perhaps they did, and for Watson’s own reasons were consigned to the fabled tin dispatch-box where he kept his notes on adventures he didn’t publish, to be rescued and trotted out by his literary descendants. They are all well-established authors, creators of their own characters, and represent every genre including that catch-all, mainstream. With me, they share an admiration for their inspiration, as well as vivid memories of youthful evenings sitting up in bed, reading of the death of Sherlock Holmes, registering horror, then skepticism. He was never born, and so he can never die.

  —Loren D. Estleman

  CONTENTS

  John Lutz

  The Infernal Machine

  Robert L. Fish

  The Adventure of the Double-Bogey Man

  Anne Perry

  The Case of the Bloodless Sock

  Al Sarrantonio

  Sherlocks

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Field Bazaar

  Adrian Conan Doyle

  The Deptford Horror

  Lenore Carroll

  Before the Adventures

  Loren D. Estleman

  Sons of Moriarty: A Sherlock Holmes Novella

  Chapter I. The Assassin’s Daughter

  Chapter II. The Gravedigger’s Story

  Chapter III. Lestrade in Earnest

  Chapter IV. Stranger’s Field

  Chapter V. The Clown Fails to Laugh

  Chapter VI. The Black Hand

  Chapter VII. The Drop

  Chapter VIII. The Price of Failure

  Chapter IX. Little Italy

  Chapter X. Crown of Thorns

  Chapter XI. Lungo

  Chapter XII. We are given a Hand

  Chapter XIII. Advice from a Barber

  Chapter XIV. Pasta and the Press

  Chapter XV. I Owe My Life to a Cigar

  Chapter XVI. Triumph

  Chapter XVII. Tragedy

  Copyright

  THE INFERNAL MACHINE

  BY JOHN LUTZ

  Since his career began in 1975, John Lutz has published many novels of suspense, including SWF Seeks Same, which was filmed as Single White Female, and hundreds of short stories of suspense. “The Infernal Machine” centers around a murder involving Richard Gatling’s fearsome precursor to the modern machine gun.

  Not that, at times, my dear friend and associate Sherlock Holmes can’t play the violin quite beautifully, but at the moment the melancholy, wavering tunelessness produced by the shrill instrument was getting on my nerves.

  I put down my copy of the Times. “Holmes, must you be so repetitious in your choice of notes?”

  “It’s in the very repetitiveness that I hope to find some semblance of order and meaning,” he said. He held his hawkish profile high, tucked the violin tighter beneath his lean chin, and the screeching continued—certainly more piercing than before.

  “Holmes!”

  “Very well, Watson.” He smiled and placed the violin back in its case. Then he slumped into the wing chair opposite me, tamped tobacco into his clay pipe, and assumed the attitude of a spoiled child whose mince pie has been withheld for disciplinary purposes. I knew where he’d turn next, after finding no solace in the violin, and I must confess I felt guilty at having been harsh with him.

  When he’s acting the hunter in his capacity of consulting detective, no man is more vibrant with interest than Holmes. But when he’s had no case for some weeks, and there’s no prospect of one on the horizon, he becomes zombie-like in his withdrawal into boredom. And it had been nearly a month since the successful conclusion of the case of the twice-licked stamp.

  Holmes suddenly cocked his head to the side, almost in the manner of a bird stalking a worm, at the clatter of footsteps on the stairs outside our door. From below, the cheerful voice of Mrs. Hudson wafted up, along with her measured, lighter footfalls. A man’s voice answered her pleasantries. Neither voice was loud enough to be understood by us.

  “Visitor, Watson.” Even as Holmes spoke there was a firm knock on the door.

  I rose, crossed the cluttered room, and opened it.

  “A Mr. Edgewick to see Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Hudson said, and withdrew.

  I ushered Edgewick in and bade him sit in the chair where I’d been perusing the Times. He was a large, handsome man in his mid-thirties, wearing a well-cut checked suit and polished boots that had reddish mud on their soles. He had straight blond hair and an even blonder brush-trimmed moustache. He looked up at me with a troubled expression and said, “Mr. Holmes?”

  I smiled. “You’ve recently come from Northwood,” I said. “You’re unmarried and are concerned about the well-being of a woman.”

  Holmes, too, was smiling. “Amazing, Watson. Pray tell us how you did it.”

  “Certainly. The red clay on Mr. Edgewick’s boots is found mainly in Northwood. He’s not wearing a wedding ring, so he isn’t married. And since he’s a handsome chap and obviously in some personal distress, the odds are good ther
e’s a young woman involved.”

  Holmes’s amused eyes darted to Edgewick, who seemed flustered by my incisiveness.

  “Actually,” he said, “I am married—my ring is at the jeweler’s being resized. The matter I came here about only indirectly concerns a woman. And I haven’t been to Northwood in years.”

  “The hansom cab you arrived in apparently carried a recent passenger from Northwood,” Holmes said. “The mud should dry on this warm day as the hansom sits downstairs awaiting your return.”

  I must admit my mouth fell open, as did Edgewick’s. “How on earth did you know he’d instructed a hansom to wait, Holmes? You were nowhere near the window.”

  Holmes gave a backhand wave, trailing his long fingers. “If Mr. Edgewick hasn’t been to Northwood, Watson, the most logical place for him to have picked up the red mud is from the floor of the hansom cab.”

  Edgewick was sitting forward, intrigued. “But how did you know I’d arrived in a hansom to begin with, and instructed the driver to wait downstairs?”

  “Your walking stick.”

  I felt my eyebrows raise as I looked again where Edgewick sat. “What walking stick, Holmes?”

  “The one whose tip left the circular indentation on the toe of Mr. Edgewick’s right boot as he sat absently leaning on it in the cab, as is the habit of many men who carry a stick. The soft leather still maintains the impression. And since he hasn’t the walking stick with him, and his footfalls on the stairs preclude him from having brought it up with him to leave it outside in the hall, we can deduce that he left it in the hansom. Since he hardly seems a careless man, or the possessor of a limitless number of walking sticks, this would suggest that he ordered the cab to wait for him.”

  Edgewick looked delighted. “Why, that’s superb! So much from a mere pair of boots!”

  “A parlour game,” Holmes snapped, “when not constructively applied.” Again his slow smile as he made a tent with his lean fingers and peered over it. His eyes were unwavering and sharply focused now. “And I suspect you bring some serious matter that will allow proper application of my skills.”