The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part III
Page 1
Title Page
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
Part III: 1896-1929
Publisher Information
First edition published in 2015 by MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
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© Copyright 2015 MX Publishing and the individual authors
The right of the individuals listed on the Copyright Information page to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
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The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of MX Publishing or Andrews UK.
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Copyright Information
All of the contributions in this collection are copyrighted by the authors listed below. Grateful acknowledgement is given to the authors and/or their agents for the kind permission to use their work within these volumes.
“The Adventure of the Sunken Parsley” ©2015 by Mark Alberstat. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Dark Tower” ©2015 by Peter K. Andersson. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Parson’s Son” ©2015 by Bob Byrne. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Royal Arsenal Affair” ©2015 by Leslie F.E. Coombs. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Foreword” Part III ©2015 by David Stuart Davies. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of The White Bird” ©2015 by C. Edward Davis. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Perfect Spy” ©2015 by Stuart Douglas. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Coptic Patriarch” ©2015 by Séamas Duffy. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Reluctant Corpse” ©2015 by Matthew J. Elliott. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Undershaw: An Ongoing Legacy for Sherlock Holmes” ©2015 by Steve Emecz. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Inspector of Graves” ©2006 by Jim French. All Rights Reserved. First publication of text script, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
Sherlock Holmes photo illustration on back cover © 1991, 2015 by Mark A. Gagen. All Rights Reserved. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Regular Passenger” ©2015 by Paul D. Gilbert. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Two Plus Two” ©2015 by Phil Growick, All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Study and Natural Talent” and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson photo illustrations on back cover and within the book ©2015 by Roger Johnson. All Rights Reserved. First publication of essay, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Blood Brothers” ©2015 by Kim Krisco. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Disembodied Assassin” ©2015 by Andrew Lane. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Botanist’s Glove” ©2015 by James Lovegrove. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Two Sonnets” ©2015 by Bonnie MacBird. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Editor’s Introduction: The Whole Art of Detection” ©2015 by David Marcum. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“A Mistress - Missing” ©2015 by Lyn McConchie. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Hopkins Brothers Affair” ©2015 by Iain McLaughlin and Claire Bartlett. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the authors.
“The Opera Thief” ©2015 by Larry Millett. All Rights Reserved. Original to this collection. This story also appeared, in conjunction with the publication of this anthology, in The Strand Magazine, Issue XLVI. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Strange Case of the Violin Savant” ©2015 by GC Rosenquist. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“Harbinger of Death” ©2015 by Geri Schear. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
“The Adventure of the Avaricious Bookkeeper” ©2015 by Joel and Carolyn Senter. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the authors.
“A Most Diabolical Plot” ©2015 by Tim Symonds and Lesley Abdela. All Rights Reserved. First publication, original to this collection. Printed by permission of the author.
Editor’s Introduction
The Whole Art of Detection
by David Marcum
Part I: The Great Watsonian Oversoul
According to Merriam-Webster, a pastiche is defined as a literary or artistic work that imitates the style of a previous work. Almost from the time that the first Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in print, there were Holmes pastiches as well, side by side with the official sixty tales that are known as The Canon. Some from that period are more properly defined as parodies, but a few were written to sincerely portray additional adventures featuring Our Heroes, Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson,
I personally discovered pastiches at around the same time that I found the original Holmes stories, and began reading them just as eagerly as I did the material found in The Canon. In my mind, a well-written pastiche, set in the same correct time period as the originals, was as legitimate as anything written by the first - but definitely not the only! - of Watson’s literary agents, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the past, I’ve described the whole vast combination of Canon and pastiche as The Great Holmes Tap
estry, with each providing an important thread to the whole, some brighter or thicker than others perhaps, but all contributing to the big picture. Perhaps another comparison would be to say that the union of Canon and pastiche forms a rope, with the Canonical adventures serving as the solid wire core, while all the threads and fibers of the additional pastiches bound around it provide greater substance and strength, with the two being indivisible.
I believe that pastiches have contributed immensely to the ever-increasing popularity of Holmes and Watson throughout the years. Additional cases and adventures only serve to feed the Sherlockian Fire, and ideally refocus interest back to the original narratives. There are some Sherlockian scholars who want nothing at all to do pastiches, and there are others who don’t even want to classify all of the original sixty stories as being authentic, stating in various essays and books that this or that Canonical tale is spurious. I cannot agree with them.
In my essay, “In Praise of the Pastiche” (The Baker Street Journal, Vol. 62, No. 3, Autumn 2012), I argue that just sixty original stories relating incidents from Holmes’s career are simply not enough. There must be more about the world’s greatest consulting detective to justify that he is the world’s greatest consulting detective, rather than just a few dozen “official” stories that leave too much unanswered. Pastiches fill in the gaps and cracks.
In “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”, Holmes tells Watson that “...I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.” The vast amount of stories that make up the combination of both Canon and pastiche may not be - in fact, it certainly isn’t! - what Holmes had in mind, but it is the closest we’ll get to seeing and observing that overall tapestry of his life and work, the Whole Art of Detection.
Over the years, an incredible number of people have added to the body of work initially introduced by Watson’s first literary agent. Sometimes, people discover lost manuscripts, usually written by Watson, but occasionally narrated by someone else - a Baker Street Irregular perhaps, or a client, or Mycroft Holmes, or a passing acquaintance, or maybe even by Sherlock Holmes himself. On a regular basis, an adventure is discovered in one of Watson’s Tin Dispatch Boxes - and there must have been several of those to hold so many tales! These stories may be narrated in first person, or they may have a third-person omniscient viewpoint. No matter how they are found or transcribed, I believe that each of the “editors” of these later discovered adventures has tapped into what I like to call The Great Watsonian Oversoul.
When I was in high school, my award-winning English teacher, (who sadly never ever taught anything at all about the literary efforts of one Dr. John H. Watson, leaving that joyful task for me to capably take care of for myself,) introduced us to the concept of an “oversoul” - she was using it in relation to how it influenced some poet. Essentially - and I am no doubt remembering this somewhat incorrectly - the idea is that we are all tiny pieces of a greater entity, split off for a time from it, out here in the darkness and trapped in our own heads, before returning at some later point to the protection, warmth, goodness, and omnipotence of the greater whole. I, however, appropriated the idea to describe the overall source of the Holmesian narratives.
To my way of thinking, all of the traditional Canonically-based Sherlock Holmes stories are linked back eventually to this same basis of inspiration, no matter how the later “author” accesses it. Since the mid-1970’s, I’ve read and collected literally thousands of adventures concerning the activities of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and since the mid-1990’s, I’ve been organizing all of them - both Canon and pastiche - into an extremely detailed day-by-day chronology, now covering hundreds of pages and literally thousands of narratives. Among the things that have become apparent to me over the years are: 1) There can never be enough good Holmes stories, relating the activities of the true, correct, and traditional Holmes of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; and, 2) The people who bring these stories to the public, no matter how they go about it, or whether they even realize it, are all somehow channeling Watson.
So one way or another, the spark of imagination that sets these narratives in motion originates in the Great Watsonian Oversoul. That’s not to say that a lot of authorial/editorial blood, sweat, and tears doesn’t go into all of these “discovered” stories, and these efforts should not be negated at all. These works don’t simply appear as finished products - even the ones that are found essentially complete in Tin Dispatch Boxes. It takes a lot of work to first make contact with the Watsonian Oversoul, and then to transcribe what is being relayed in such a way that the public can understand and enjoy it. Sometimes the person relaying the story might misunderstand a fact or two along the way, leading to an odd discrepancy, or the “editor” channeling the tale may weave some little thing from his or her own agenda onto Watson’s original intentions that isn’t quite consistent with the big tapestry. But if the writer listening for that still small Watson voice within is sincere, the overall sense of the Sherlockian events that are being revealed within the story remains true.
Part II: The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
This collection of new Sherlock Holmes adventures came about by listening to that still small voice. One Saturday morning in late January 2015, I popped awake, several hours earlier than I had intended, having just had a full-fledged and vivid dream about a new Holmes anthology. Now, I’ve tapped into the Oversoul and “edited” a few of Watson’s works myself, but I hadn’t tried anything like this before. If I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep, the idea would probably have disappeared. But it had grabbed me by then, so I quietly got up and started making a wish list of “editors” of Watson’s works that I already knew and admired, in order to see if they would be willing to go through the effort to come up with some more new adventures
I emailed Steve Emecz of MX Publishing, and he enthusiastically liked the idea. Early on, we agreed that the author royalties for the project would be used to support Undershaw, the home where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was living when both The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as some of the later Holmes adventures, were written. MX Publishing has supported this effort in the past, so this decision was an easy one.
The same morning that I had the idea, I began to email authors, and I immediately started receiving positive responses. I was then emboldened to start asking still more people, and quickly the whole thing escalated. I reached out to friends to help me track down some authors in England that could only be reached by the old-fashioned mail. People already participating suggested still more folks who might also want to tap into the Oversoul and contribute a story to the anthology. It quickly grew to the point where it obviously needed to be two volumes, and sometime after that, it became three. (If it hadn’t been split into multiple books, the whole thing would have become so fat that the book spines would have cracked apart.) It was always important to me that this collection, although finally presented under three covers, be considered as one unified anthology. As such, it is the largest collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories assembled in the same place.
These volumes have contributors from around the world: the U.S. and Canada, all over Great Britain, India, New Zealand, and Sweden. There are a couple of British expatriates who were living in Asia at the time they made their contributions, and two American ex-pats in London and Kuwait as well. Early on, I let all of the participants know that, since we had contributors from all around the globe, the format and punctuation of the books would be uniformly consistent, but they could use either British or American spellings in their finished works. Therefore, if you see some stories with color and others with colour, for example, that’s why.
The contributors to these anthologies come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some are professional best-selling authors. Others, like me, write for fun, but have day jobs elsewhere. A few are noted fan-fiction authors, taking this opportunity
to write for a wider and different kind of audience. (I’ve always felt that some of the best Holmes writing has appeared as fan-fiction, and that a great Holmes story doesn’t have to be found in a published book.)
There are several here who are writing a Holmes story for the first time. In the case of a few of these, I specifically invited noted Sherlockians who have worked long and hard to promote the World of Holmes but haven’t written a pastiche before, with the idea that someone - and I can’t think of who - once said that every Sherlockian should write at least one pastiche in their lives. This was their chance, and they did a great job with it.
A number of our authors have not been previously associated with MX. Welcome to the MX family! I’m aware that a few of these authors have already caught the Holmes-adventure-writing bug and are working on additional stories for future MX books of their own. I can’t wait to read them!
Early on, I decided to arrange the stories chronologically, extending from 1881, when Holmes and Watson first met, to 1929, the year of Watson’s death. This allowed for a logical arrangement of the stories, covering the entire period of Holmes and Watson’s friendship and professional partnership. I was greatly influenced by that wonderful volume edited by Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (1997). He also arranged the stories within by date, and as a hard-core chronologist, I have a great appreciation for that method.
My conditions for participation in the project were very basic. First and most important, as the editor of this collection I was very firm that Holmes and Watson had to be treated with respect and sincerity, and as if all involved were playing that fine old Sherlockian tradition, The Game. For those unfamiliar with this idea, Holmes and Watson are treated as if they were living, breathing, historical figures, and as such they cannot be transplanted to other eras, or forced to do something that is completely ridiculous for the time period in which they existed, such as battling space aliens. The stories had to be set in the correct time periods, ideally from 1881 to 1929. There could be no parody, nothing where Holmes was being used as a vampire-fighting Van Helsing, and nothing where he was incorrectly modernized, as if he is some version of Doctor Who to be reincarnated as whatever version of hero the current generation needs him to be.