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For Leslie,
bringer of life
A WORD OF EXPLANATION
For a good portion of my adult life I have been involved with and found myself editing missing, unknown, or unearthed manuscripts alleged to have been authored by Sherlock Holmes’s amanuensis, John H. Watson, M.D. It had been years since I had given any thought to this subject when an item in The New York Times last September caught my eye.
An auction had taken place at Sotheby’s in London at which a diary or journal (the catalogue used both terms) supposedly written by Watson had been purchased for a princely £45 million sterling by an anonymous buyer via phone.
I had no idea what to make of this. Did Watson keep a diary? On first blush, as we’ve no mention of it, this appears unlikely. On the other hand, Watson refers constantly to his “copious notes” on which his case accounts are based, which may amount to more or less the same thing. I suspect, by whatever name, Watson was a compulsive chronicler, somewhat in the manner of Pepys or Anaïs Nin. He wrote down everything, if only for the sake of writing it down.
Regardless, I did not expect the anonymous diary purchaser to reveal himself—(or herself)—any time soon.
Nor did they.
But last December I was contacted by Greg Prickman, head of Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries, where my papers are kept. Greg (who has since become librarian of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC) astonished me by saying that the diary in question had been loaned by its purchaser to the university for the period of one year.
“Why in the world would he have done such a thing?” I asked Greg on the phone. “For sure there’re places with bigger endowments than my alma mater.”
“Hey, this isn’t rocket science,” the librarian responded. “Can’t you guess?”
The first response that came into my head was Holmes’s dictum “I never guess: it is an appalling habit, destructive to the logical faculty,” but in truth, not being Holmes, I guess all the time. I’m also a sucker for magic acts and can never correctly figure the solution to any mystery stories.
“Well, I can,” Greg offered from Iowa City. “The donor—and don’t ask who, because I’m not allowed to tell—clearly is aware of your editorial functions on previous Watsonsonia. He knows your papers are held here and is hoping the journal is catnip you’d be tempted to look at and possibly work on.”
“But he doesn’t want to shell out any more dough.”
“Heck, maybe the purchase bankrupted him.”
Sure.
Once he’d connected the dots, I suspected Greg was right. I was in the middle of working on Star Trek: Discovery, but after the show was up and running, I flew to Iowa City (or rather Cedar Rapids), where Greg met me at the airport.
“What do you think?” I asked him, wasting no time. “Fool’s gold or the real McCoy?”
“You’re the expert,” he said, climbing behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee.
“But you must have formed an opinion.”
“Yes, I must.”
This was all I could get out of him. We checked me into the newish Hilton Garden Inn on Burlington, but only long enough to park my bag. Then it was off to the library, where Greg dialed open the big-ass walk-in, temperature-controlled vault reserved for precious manuscripts. Within was a metal desk and an uncomfortable folding chair.
What Greg showed me was an old date book of sorts, whose brittle red leather binding had almost entirely fragmented. Inside were yellowing, lined pages in what looked to me like Watson’s familiar hand. It was some kind of diary, though very hard to make out in places. Truth to tell, the thing was falling apart, and a bunch of pages were altogether AWOL. Some looked like they had been torn out. Greg told me that the document had lain in an airless safety deposit box in a UK bank that had gone under or been swallowed up by a larger bank (he thought Lloyds, but couldn’t recall—wherever it was stashed had no humidifier), before it went under the hammer at Sotheby’s and was snapped up by … who knows? Someone with a lot of kale.
Greg, evidently, but he wasn’t talking. Fishy, fishy, fishy. The world of art and artifacts, as we all know, is cluttered with fakes. There are more Renoirs floating around (many of them in prominent museums) than Renoir ever painted. The anonymous donor or buyer, the Rembrandt in the attic, blahblah.
Still, if this was a phony, someone had gone to an awful lot of trouble. And the whole deal was not without what Holmes might term “features of interest.” Chief among them is that what I read is the account of a failure. There are, of course, cases in which Holmes failed (one has only to think of the word “Norbury”), but here we have what, if true, amounts to the biggest and most consequential failure of the detective’s entire career.
I am—again—in no position to authenticate what follows, and I’ve done the most editorial work I’ve ever performed on a manuscript, which was frequently illegible in its original format, mandating much guesswork. There are snatches of dialogue, brief descriptions, cramped marginalia, instructions (“remember!” or “don’t forget!”), and occasional words in foreign languages. The writer, whoever he was, used both sides of the paper, which added to my difficulties. There was a lot of bleedthrough. The events chronicled occur at the start of the twentieth century, but there is no evidence that Watson (?), who died in 1940, ever revised or corrected what he’d jotted down at the time. Thus the reader will discover no “prescient” anticipations, re-jigged with the benefits of hindsight. The tone, it must be conceded, certainly resembles Watson’s. The matter of dates, for once, is indisputable; this was, after all, a journal, and the diarist had been punctilious in specifying them. Moreover, it is easy to confirm these dates when juxtaposing them with events of record, alluded to in the text. I’ve retained Watson’s orthography; he was writing in English, not American. (I note that I’ve drifted into referring to the writer as Watson, which may reveal a certain willing credulity on my part. I did say I’m a sucker for magic tricks.) As noted above, several pages are inexplicably missing, and another did in fact crumble as I scanned it too hastily. Rather than maintain the diary format (though I’ve retained his use of entry dates here and there), it was, I confess, easier to recast what I could make out in the form Watson might have used had he seen fit to arrange the case for publication. As will be seen, that idea never occurred to him.
For good reason.
For that same good reason, Watson never appended a title to his notes. “The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols” has been supplied by me, in addition to occasional explanatory footnotes.
Lastly, it must be stipulated that notwithstanding the foregoing, any errors in what follows are Watson’s, not mine.
Nicholas Meyer
Los Angeles, 2019
PART ONE
ENGLAND
1.
A REU
NION
“My dear Watson, you astonish me,” proclaimed a smiling Sherlock Holmes, sitting to my right on a crimson banquette in the newly refurbished Grill Room of the Café Royal. “Baccarat.” He tapped the bulbous glass approvingly. “And a more than decent claret within it. To say nothing of a splendid veal chop, Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, and the promise of mince pie to come,” he added, “followed no doubt by an excellent coffee, brandy, and cigar. Such largesse! It is inescapable that your practice in Pimlico is thriving. Or can it be that after a mere two years, domesticity has begun to pall?”
Accustomed to his familiar teasing on the subject of my marriage,* I declined to rise to the bait.
“My bride, as I delight in terming her, is, it happens, an excellent chef. I need not dine out for culinary gratification.”
“How else then to explain such reckless extravagance in an ex–army surgeon?”
“It is my turn to confess astonishment,” I shot back, hardly able to conceal my amusement. “Can you think of no occasion for such a repast?”
“Occasion?” Holmes raised a quizzical eyebrow. His grey eyes twinkled amid the gleam of a dozen gas jets, whose mirrored reflections multiplied their number and gave the place its pleasing ambience, and waved a languid arm with extended fingers in the general direction of the glittering assemblage. I was pleased to see the well-loved establishment had chosen to retain its old-fashioned illumination. Incandescent lights were sure to prove less atmospheric.
“You cannot guess?”
He frowned.
“I never guess.”
I sat back, more than pleased with myself.
“Let us marshal the facts,” I suggested. “The date, for example.”
He frowned once more, twirling the stem of his glass between a thumb and forefinger.
“The date…”
“The sixth of January.”
“What of it?”
“Come now, Holmes. January sixth is your birthday.”
“Oh, that.” He swallowed a mouthful of claret with a dismissive expression that belied the vintage.
“Not merely January sixth, 1905. You are fifty years old today. If that is no occasion for celebration, I cannot imagine what is.”
“I’m not at all sure I concur,” my singular companion mused. “About being fifty, I mean. As you know, I can never remember the year of my birth. I was doubtless too young to make note of it at the time.”
We studied one another after the fashion of friends who’ve not seen one another recently. I know his eagle eye discerned my avoirdupois; it was not that hard to perceive. But I must say, though his jet hair was now agreeably flecked with silver, the detective did not look his age. His eyes remained as bright, his nose as hawklike and imperious, his jawline as firm as ever I knew them.
There was a caesura during our mutual inventory while a silent waiter topped up our glasses. The man was hardly out of earshot when I made so bold as to respond.
“As your biographer, I, on the other hand, am certain of your age. Be that as it may,” I rushed on before he could debate me, “here we find ourselves at the dawn of the twentieth century, and whether you are fifty or else forty-nine or fifty-one, you are indubitably at the zenith of your capacities and—”
“Ready for retirement, you’re about to say.”
“I was about to say no such thing!”
“Well, I was. Think, if you will, about 1904,” he persisted. “Surely the most boring year on record, and the new one gives no promise of a better.”
“Holmes, really.”
“From a criminal standpoint, I mean. Oh, for all I know great things are in the works elsewhere, and we have captured Lhasa—which I can tell you from personal experience is nothing to boast of—* but crime, I’m sorry to say, has reached an all-time nadir. There is a positive dearth of imagination amongst the criminal class nowadays. Embezzlement is the best they can manage. Tricks with numbers.”
“Does the body found two days ago near London Bridge not arouse your interest? The Daily Telegraph says the unfortunate creature had been stabbed. Perhaps,” I added, hoping to rouse him, “it is still the handiwork of Saucy Jack?”
He all but rolled his eyes. “Come, my boy, you can do better than that. Saucy Jack, as you are pleased to call him, added mutilation to his murders, always limited himself to slatterns from the East End, and never disposed of their remains in the Thames. I’ve no doubt the well-dressed, tallow-haired woman found by the police launch will prove merely the victim of a domestic tragedy. Her husband or lover will shortly be apprehended and the sordid matter speedily brought to its equally sordid conclusion.” Here he heaved a sigh. “Ergo, what is left for me, but retirement? Somewhere in the country, I shall rusticate among flora and fauna.”
Rather than have him pursue this bucolic if querulous train of thought, I produced the parcel I had hitherto sought to conceal. This time both eyebrows were hoisted aloft.
“What have we here?”
“A gift. Not from me,” I hastened to add, knowing his distaste for the sentimental. “My surprise supper was all I dared, but Juliet also wishes you a happy birthday. Go on, man, open it.”
With a sigh of what I took to be resignation, Holmes employed the knife he had lately applied to his veal chop to slice the knotted twine and unwrap what proved to be a sizable tome.
“War and Peace,” he murmured. “A novel by”—he twisted the volume—“Count Tol-stoy, in a first English translation by Constance—ah.” He smiled with a shake of his head. “Garnett. Your wife’s sister-in-law, if I am not mistaken?”*
“Constance has cornered the market on the Russians,” I conceded. “This one is just published. I know you do not, as a rule, read novels, but—”
“But our friend in Vienna recommends this one highly,” Holmes concluded to my consternation.
“How on earth did you know that?”
He chuckled as he idly thumbed the uncut leaves with some skepticism. “You know my methods, Watson, yet when I explain them you are always disappointed. I know you doctors like to keep in touch, though I doubt even our friend, with his keen mind, could keep track of all these Russian names.”
“You forget, he endorsed Crime and Punishment, by that other Russian with the unpronounceable name, calling it the greatest novel ever written.”
Holmes continued perusing the pages. “They all have unpronounceable names,” he remarked, then looked up, smiling. “But so he did. One day I must give it a try. Please thank Mrs. Watson for her—”
“Well, well, the birthday boy in the flesh.”
A large shadow darkened our table, coming between the chandelier and the remains of our meal. The voice behind it sounded as though it emanated from a well.
We looked up in joint surprise to behold a backlit mass of corpulent humanity.
“Mycroft.” Holmes looked at me reproachfully. “In the flesh,” he echoed quietly.
“Holmes, I give you my word, I had no idea—”
His brother interrupted in a smooth rumble. “And I give you mine, your amanuensis had none, Sherlock. But I have my methods, as you would say, and I could scarcely allow such a momentous occasion to pass unremarked.” He surveyed our table. “What a pity your waiter’s wife has abandoned him and their two children in favor of a groom in the stables of the Life Guards.”
“Royal Horse Guards,” Holmes corrected him in a flat tone. “And she only left after he joined the ranks of Italian anarchists. Let us hope our table has not been mined,” he added. Mycroft chose to ignore this.
“Ah, presents, to be sure.” He fastened his eyes on mine. “When he was a boy, his birthday, coming as it does so soon after Boxing Day, was always experienced as a disappointment. No more gifts, you see. He must content himself with stale New Year’s Day trifle and, when he was older, flat champagne.”
“Will you join us?” I inquired with some reluctance.
“Mycroft is on his way elsewhere,” his younger brother murmured, staring a
t his plate. “Hence he makes no move to divest himself of his greatcoat.”
“Still at your parlour tricks.” Mycroft chuckled with what sounded like the reverberations of a volcano. “I will leave you to them—albeit we are far from the parlour. Many happy returns of the day, Sherlock.” The Silenus extended an enormous paw, which the detective touched briefly with his fingertips. “Doctor.” And with a silent grace for which one would scarcely have given him credit, the great man, if I may so term him, glided from the room.
“How curious of him to trouble about your birthday,” I observed, eyeing his retreating form. I was irresistibly reminded of an iceberg on the move.
“My brother had no more idea than I it was my birthday, let alone any thought of celebrating it.”
“Whatever can you mean?”
Holmes opened the hand that had recently taken that of his brother. In the palm nestled a crumpled page seemingly torn from an engagement diary. Seeing that he offered it to my inspection, I opened the scrap and read: Diogenes. Tomorrow. 10:00.
“Ah.”
“Indeed. Perhaps I spoke too soon.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“About 1905 being as dull as its predecessor. As you know, Mycroft never troubles about me unless the Foreign Office is at a loss.”
I could see Holmes’s spirits lifting.
“And I never understand why, with his own formidable intellect and vaunted powers of deduction, your brother ever turns to you.”
The mince pie arrived garnished with ice cream and Holmes tucked into it with a will, declaring it between mouthfuls unsurpassed in his experience. Still constitutionally thin as a musket (another sore point from my perspective), it was remarkable how much his metabolism allowed him to consume with no discernible effects.
He chewed meditatively, evidently still pondering my question.
“Superior powers, you tactfully refrain from saying. Ah, but you forget, my dear doctor, how incurably lazy Mycroft can be. Idleness is his métier. If he is allowed to remain in his chair, a vast thinking machine, cross-indexing data and sifting through alternatives, my brother is in his element.” He shrugged. “But if it involves any form of exertion, any physical activity, then no, absolutely no. Therefore—” At which point, having inhaled his slice of pie, Holmes turned his attention to the contents of the humidor proffered by our anarchistically inclined waiter and, with the gleeful countenance of a small boy on Christmas morning, selected a slender panatela.
The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols Page 1