The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Страница 2

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edited by Herbert Harris (London: Victor Gollancz, 1983). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent Peters, Fraser & Dunlop.

"The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech" 1997 by David Langford. First publication, original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

"The Enigma of the Warwickshire Vortex", 1997 by F Gwynplaine MacIntyre. First publication, original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.

"The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger" © 1997 by Michael Moorcock. First commercial publication, original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author and the author's agent Curtis Brown Ltd.

Introduction: The Life and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

For more years than I care to remember I have been researching the life of the first and best known of all private consulting detectives, Mr Sherlock Holmes. It has not been easy. Devotees of the Sherlock Holmes cases will know that his friend and colleague Dr John Watson kept an assiduous record of many of the cases after they first met in January 1881, but he was not involved in them all.

When Holmes was reflecting over his cases in the hours before his cataclysmic struggle with Professor Moriarty in "The Final Problem", he remarked to Watson that he had investigated over a thousand cases. That was in April 1891. In "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist" Watson comments that between 1894 and 1901 Holmes had been involved in every public case of any difficulty plus many hundreds of private cases. Watson goes on to say that "I have preserved very full notes of all these cases."Yet when you look at the standard omnibus volume of Sherlock Holmes you will find only fifty-six short stories and four novels, sixty cases in all. In writing up these cases Watson makes tantalizing passing references to others, such as the repulsive story of the red leech, or the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons on the island of Uffa, but though he kept notes of these stories he did not complete all of them as finished cases. Even then he refers to just short of a hundred cases, so that in total we know of only about 160 cases, which is likely to be less than a tenth of all of the cases Holmes investigated. How wonderful it would be to know about the others. That has been my life's work.

The obvious starting point was Watson's papers. He told us in "The Problem of Thor Bridge" that they were filed away in a despatch box stored in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross. Imagine my horror when, many years ago, in attempting to gain access to these records I discovered two things. Firstly that Watson was clever and had stored only some of his records in that bank vault, and that others were hidden elsewhere. But more frustrating was that I had been pipped at the post. The Cox Bank papers had already been collected by someone else and though he provided a name and identity for the purposes of the bank, I have never been able to trace him, and suspect that the identity he gave was false. Watson was fearful that his papers might be stolen. When he published the case of "The Veiled Lodger" in January 1927 he alerted the public to the fact that attempts had already been made to gain access to his papers and he gave a warning to one individual, whom he doesn't name, that facts would be revealed about him if he didn't desist. Occasionally stories purporting to be from these files have surfaced in books and magazines. Some may well be genuine, or at least give that appearance, but most are almost certainly false, written by those seeking to gain some reflected glory from the fame of Sherlock Holmes.

Over the years I have tracked down some of the original cases from papers at Scotland Yard, old newspaper files, and documents held in private archives. On rare moments I have stumbled across papers which almost certainly came from Watson's despatch box, but I fear that most of those records are hidden in one or more private collections, possibly not even in England, purchased, I dare say, for a phenomenal price.

The trail is complicated by many false avenues and windings. Not even Watson was helpful. Frequently in his published cases he disguised the names of individuals, for obvious reasons, and falsified dates and locations, so that when he recorded that Holmes was investigating such-and-such a case it was as likely that Holmes was somewhere else at that time involved in a very private affair. Watson did his job well in masking the trail, and it will probably never be fully uncovered.

However, the time has come for me to share the product of some of my research. It is far from complete, but for fear that something may happen to me or to my own papers, I thought

it was right to place some of it in print. Perhaps the existence of this book may bring me into contact with others who have access to further papers. Who knows?

In this volume I have pieced together something of the investigations of Sherlock Holmes and have presented twenty-six new cases completed by fellow researchers who have helped me in my quest. I have endeavoured to show where these cases fit into Holmes's career and how they relate to the known cases. In an appendix at the end of this book I also provide a complete chronology of Holmes's life and known cases, including some of the other write-ups of his investigations where I believe there has been a genuine effort to get at the truth.

Let us begin our quest, therefore, and return to the early days of Sherlock Holmes.

Mike Ashley

Part I: The Early Years

There is precious little record of Holmes's early life. It is unusual that someone so famous could keep the details of his life so secret that it becomes necessary to think that it was deliberate. Holmes had little interest in the trivia of personal biography, so it is unlikely that he would have bothered to have disguised the trail. But others may certainly have done so in order to protect him, and thoughts turn immediately to his elder brother Mycroft Holmes who had considerable influence in government circles and could have easily pressed the right buttons in order to close whatever shutters were necessary.

We must therefore rely on what Watson himself tells us. In "His Last Bow", which takes place in August 1914, Watson refers to Holmes as "a tall, gaunt man of sixty". It is the only occasion where he mentions his age. We must be careful as he was describing Holmes in disguise as the Irish-American spy Altamont. Had Holmes aged himself or made himself look younger? We don't know. And did Watson mean precisely sixty, or was he in his sixtieth year- in other words fifty-nine? If we accept it at face value, and since no other clue is given as to Holmes's birthday, then we must conclude that Holmes was born in either 1853 or 1854, or at the latest in 1855. I prefer the earlier date because in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" Holmes refers to himself as middle-aged which suggests forty-something. That story took place in 1889 or 1890 which would make Holmes's year of birth earlier than 1850, but middle-aged is an indeterminate phrase and we can assume that a birth year somewhere in the early 1850s is as close as we'll get. We may take some clue from the year in which Holmes retired, which was at the end of 1903. Did he do this on his fiftieth birthday? It would be an appropriate landmark.

Holmes came from a line of country squires but somewhere in his veins was the blood of the French artist Claude Vernet, from whose family Holmes also claimed descent. We do not know where Holmes was born, but his general dislike of the countryside suggests that he was raised somewhere remote, and as we shall see he certainly spent some of his youth in Ireland. This coupled with his reticence to discuss his childhood suggests that it might not have been happy, and we can imagine an almost reclusive child already intent upon his studies in logical deduction. Holmes was almost certainly educated at a private school before progressing to university.

It is at university that his abilities as a solver of puzzles came to the fore. Two of the recorded cases throw some light on Holmes's University days. "The Gloria Scott", Holmes tells us, was the first case in which he was engaged. He refers to the case again in "The Musgrave Ritual" saying that the Gloria Scott case "first turned my attention in the direction of the profession which has become my life's work." It is thus of some importance to date this investigation, but it is here that we first encounter Watson's masking of facts. We could put a rough dating on it on the assumption that Holmes went to university when he was about eighteen or nineteen, which would place it in the period 1868 to 1872, and he talks about it occurring after two years at university, or between 1870 and 1874. In "The Veiled Lodger" Watson tells us Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years. Since he retired in 1903, counting back would bring us to 1880, but we must also deduct the years of the Great Hiatus between "The Final Problem" in April 1891 and Holmes's return in "The Empty House" in early 1894, a gap of three years. So he established himself as a consulting detective in 1877. We know from "The Musgrave Ritual" that Holmes set up his practice soon after university, so we can imagine he finished his university years around 1876.A span of university education from 1872 to 1876 therefore sounds realistic in the chronology and would place the Gloria Scott case in about 1874.