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THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES
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The further adventures of
SHERLOCK HOLMES
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
TITAN BOOKS
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES:
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES
ePub ISBN: 9781848569201
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
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First edition: October 2010
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Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 1979, 2010 Loren D. Estleman
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Printed and bound in the USA.
To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson
– one thrill in return for many
“When a doctor goes wrong, he is the first of criminals.”
– Sherlock Holmes, as quoted in
“The Adventure of the Speckled Band”
Contents
Foreword
Preface
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Acknowledgements
Dr. Jekyll’s “Case Of Identity”: A Word After By Loren D. Estleman
Also Available
Foreword
“You the guy that did the book about Sherlock Holmes?”
Ordinarily I make it a point to answer that kind of query with an appropriate wisecrack, but there was something about this particular visitor that warned me to keep a leash on my devastating wit. He had emerged from the back seat of a black limousine nearly as long as my driveway, flanked by a pair of healthy-looking young men with jaws like pigs’ knuckles and odd bulges beneath the armpits of their tailor-made suits. The fellow in the middle was short and built like a bouncer and had thick black hair in which the marks of his comb glistened beneath the illumination of my porch light. His face was evenly tanned, cleanshaven, and dominated by a pair of solid black wraparound sunglasses, although the sun had long since descended. He looked forty but turned out later to be closer to sixty. When he spoke, he had a Brooklyn accent that dared me to sneer at it. I didn’t.
“I edited The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, if that’s what you mean,” said I. I was determined in spite of his formidable appearance to remain master of the situation. His visit had interrupted my writing and I was anxious to get back to it.
Without turning his head he held out a hand to the young man at his right, who immediately placed in it a package wrapped in brown paper, which he then thrust into my hands.
“Read it,” he ordered.
I opened my mouth to protest, but the eyes of his companions grew cold suddenly, and instead I stepped aside from the door to admit the trio. Once inside, the man in the middle took possession of my favorite easy chair while the others took up standing positions on either side of it, quiet and solid as andirons. I glanced longingly toward the telephone, but my chances of reaching it and dialing for help before one of them showed me what the lumps were in their jackets and pumped me full of lead were less than encouraging, and in any case if this was a robbery or a kidnapping, it was being handled in such a bizarre manner that as a writer I thought it might be worth my while to see it through. All three watched as I sat down on the sofa opposite them and opened the package.
I had all I could do to refrain from groaning when I read the title. Since the publication of Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: Or the Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, of which I was the editor, I had become the recipient of no fewer than three “genuine” Watsonian manuscripts sent to me from scattered corners of the world. I had not required an expert to tell me that none of them was worth the paper it had been forged upon. Nor had I use for another. Faced, however, with a most persuasive argument in the persons of the three strapping fellows in my living room, I read on.
A fresh glance at the handwriting caused my pulse to quicken. I had spent too much time decoding Watson’s earlier manuscript not to recognize his careless scrawl when I encountered it again. It was written on ancient vellum, with many corrections in the margins — signs of the Victorian perfectionist which were usually lost when A. Conan Doyle, hisfriend and literary agent, copied out his works for publication. I was immediately convinced of its authenticity. Quite forgetting my “guests,” I continued reading and finished the manuscript in that one sitting. When I set it aside some three hours later I was burning with curiosity, but I managed to appear casual as I asked the fellow in the dark glasses how the artifact had come into his possession. The story he told bears repeating.
In 1943, while serving a five-year penitentiary sentence for armed robbery, my visitor, who gave his name as Georgie Collins (a pseudonym; I was better off, he said, not knowing his real identity), was approached by the U.S. Army and offered the chance to shorten his term if he joined the service. He accepted, and a year later found himself in France during the post-D-Day Allied offensive.
One day he and a small patrol stormed a bombed-out chateau near Toulouse, “blew away” a nest of Germans hidden inside, and set to work searching the rubble for much-needed supplies. In a space between two walls Collins spotted a tattered sheaf of papers, covered with dust and bound with a faded black ribbon. After reading only a few lines he saw the discovery for what it was and, making sure that none of his colleagues was observing him, tucked the manuscript away inside his ru
cksack.
Surreptitiously questioning the locals, Collins learned that the chateau had been used for medical research by Doctor, later Sir, John H. Watson when he served as a civilian attached to the British Army during the First World War. The area had been heavily shelled even then; it seemed likely that during one of these bombardments the manuscript had been dislodged from the top of a table or bureau and had fallen through a hole in the wall and been left behind in the confusion of the final days of the war.
History repeated itself. Shortly after his return to the States, Georgie Collins married his childhood sweetheart and tossed the rucksack containing the manuscript into a utility closet in his home, where it lay forgotten among his other war mementos for more than three decades. If not for the popularity of the other lost work which I had edited, he said, it might still be there.
When I asked him why he had come to me, Collins smiled for the first time. He had very white teeth, very even — the work, no doubt, of an expensive cosmetic dentist.
“I got a sudden need for cash,” he said. “When I heard about this here Sherlock Holmes book you did, I remembered that thing I found in France and figured you might be willing to do whatever it is you do with these things and split the take with me. I don’t know nothing about editing. The only editor I ever knew got blew up in his car when he tried to publish a piece about an acquaintance of mine.”
I explained to him that profits are a long time coming in the publishing business and asked if he was prepared to wait several months for his share. The smile fled from his features.
“I ain’t got that kind of time. How much can you give me right now, tonight?”
“How much do you want?”
The figure he quoted had too many zeros. I countered with one of my own. His frown grew dangerous. Sensing his displeasure, the men beside his chair perked up like dogs anticipating the signal to attack.
“Chicken feed,” he snarled.
I summoned up my courage and shrugged. “It’s most of what I own. I need something to live on. You can consider it a down payment.”
He scratched his chin noisily. “All right, I’ll take it. In cash.”
“I don’t have that much on hand. Will you take a check?” I reached for my checkbook.
“I only deal in cash.”
“I’ll have to go to the bank, and it won’t be open again until Monday.”
He fidgeted in his chair, made faces. Finally: “Okay, I’ll take the check. Make it out to cash.”
I did so, and handed it to him. “It’s good,” I said as he studied it closely.
“I believe you.” He folded the check and put it away inside his coat. “You don’t look that dumb.”
My writer’s curiosity got the better of me and I asked him why he needed the money in such a hurry. To my surprise, he seemed unruffled by the question.
“Travel expenses. Some people are looking for me, and some others don’t want me found. So I’m taking a vacation. Every cent I got is tied up in the — in my business.” He got up and stood looking down at me. The lamplight glinted off the opaque lenses of his glasses. “Do a good job with it. You’ll be hearing from me again soon.”
He turned upon his heel and left, but not before one of the young men, slipping his hand inside his jacket, leaned out through the doorway, glanced to right and left, then straightened and nodded to his chief. The three went out together. A moment later I heard the engine of the limousine purr into life, then a crunch of gravel as it swept into the road and was gone. By that time I had already snatched up a pencil and set to work.
The prospect of editing this manuscript presented much the same difficulties as I had experienced with the first. I have established that Watson’s handwriting was abominable; worse, the existence of a surprising number of redundancies and mixed metaphors made it abundantly clear that this was a first draft and that much revising was necessary before it could be allowed to go to the typesetters — revising which, possibly because of the war and the subsequent misplacing of the manuscript, Watson was unable to accomplish. I have, therefore, taken it upon myself to provide those corrections which I am certain the good doctor would have supplied had not time and circumstances been working against him. I am prepared to take the consequences for this literary blasphemy, with the understanding that wherever possible I have left Watson’s prose untouched, and that where this was not possible I have endeavored to keep to his distinctive style. The book, then, is ninety per cent original.
The narrative provides two significant revelations which may or may not clear up a number of outstanding arguments among Sherlockians, depending upon how they are received. First, the appearance of Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft in 1885 would indicate that Watson, writing of his first meeting with the elder Holmes in “The Greek Interpreter,” was guilty of literary license. Since this initial encounter would of necessity predate the events contained herein, it was impossible for Mycroft to have said, upon being introduced, “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler.” As every student knows, the first of these chronicles, A Study in Scarlet, did not appear until December of 1887, more than two years after the events described in the present account. If Mycroft did indeed make that statement, he would have had to have done so on some later occasion. This is not so difficult to accept, as Watson was sometimes known to telescope conversations made on different occasions into one in order to make his account more complete. A case in point: Watson asserts, in “The Final Problem,” that he has “never” heard of the evil Professor Moriarty when in fact, as we are shown in The Valley of Fear, which predates that account, he is already fairly well informed upon the subject. Since “Problem” appeared first, the good doctor obviously chose to include Holmes’s introductory description of the wicked scholar from some earlier occasion in order not to confuse his readers, who were unaware of the professor’s existence. This same reasoning may account for Mycroft’s opening lines in “The Greek Interpreter,” a case which we now see had to have taken place prior to January of 1885.
Second, we are at last made aware of Watson’s alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine before taking his degree at the University of London in 1878. The subject has long been a controversial one among erudite Sherlockians, who, knowing that the London facility of Watson’s day was not a teaching institution but merely a clearinghouse of diplomas, have spent many hours arguing over where Holmes’s Boswell attended classes. Perhaps it is there that he met Conan Doyle prior to the latter’s graduation from the same university in 1881 and sowed the seeds for the working relationship which was to make the name of Sherlock Holmes synonymous with the art of detection.
The following, with some slight interference of my own, is a chronicle in Watson’s own words of the period between October 1883 and March 1885 — hitherto a Sherlockian mystery — and of those events connected with the bizarre relationship of Henry Jekyll to Edward Hyde as viewed from a fresh angle. Whether or not, as in the case of their brush with Count Dracula in 1890, the part played by Holmes and Watson had any effect upon its outcome will likely remain a point of debate among scholars for some time to come. In my opinion it was the Baker Street sleuth’s bloodhound tenacity which forced Mr. Hyde to live up to his name.
As for Georgie Collins, I was to hear of him again sooner than either of us expected. Two days after our parting I read in the newspaper of the death of a reputed underworld chief who had been gunned down that morning along with his two bodyguards at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. He had been sought by a grand jury investigating the mysterious disappearance of a famed labor leader, and it was believed that he had been silenced by his gangland cronies. Found upon his person was a one-way ticket to Mexico and a substantial amount of cash worn in a money belt. A photograph identified as one taken of the victim two years before, during his trial for income tax evasion, showed my visitor of the other night handcuffed between two gray-looking federal agents. Although the name beneath the pictu
re was different, there was no mistaking the hard white smile he was flashing. Only the sunglasses were missing.
Whatever his sins, and however base his motives, Georgie Collins is responsible for the present volume’s existence; because of this, his place among the great literary patrons of history is assured. I will therefore take the risk of official disapproval by dedicating this Foreword to his memory.
Loren D. Estleman
Dexter, Michigan
December 15, 1978
Preface
One might think, now that the world is falling down about our ears, that interest in a man whose entire career was with few exceptions dedicated to the eradication of domestic evils would naturally diminish in the face of danger from without. That, however, is not the case. My publishers have for some time been badgering me to dip once again into that battered tin dispatch-box in which I long ago packed away the last of my notes dealing with those singular problems which engaged the gifts of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and to lay yet another of them before an eager public. For a long time I demurred — not because of any unwillingness upon my part but rather in deference to the wishes of my friend, who has since his retirement repeatedly enjoined me from taking any action to enhance fame which has of late proved cumbersome to him. The reader may imagine my reaction then, when, one day last week, I answered the telephone in my Kensington home and recognised Sherlock Holmes’s voice upon the line.
‘Good morning, Watson. I trust that you are well.’
‘Holmes!’
‘Whose call were you anticipating so anxiously, or does that fall under the heading of “most secret”?’
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll & Mr Holmes Page 1