Murder, My Dear Watson

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The game's afoot! Read all-new Sherlock Holmes stories and speculative essays, praised as "of the highest order and should be required for every Sherlockian shelf" (Rocky Mountain News).

Eccentric, coldly rational, brilliant, doughty, exacting, lazy-in full bohemian color the world's most famous literary detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his loyal companion Dr. John Watson, investigate a series of previously unrecorded cases in this collection of totally original and confounding tales. As in the popular debut Murder in Baker Street, Anne Perry and ten more popular mystery writers celebrate the mind and methods of Sherlock Holmes.

Includes new tales by:

• Sharyn McCrumb
• Loren D. Estleman
• Carolyn Wheat
• Malachi Saxon
• Jon L. Breen
• Bill Crider
• Colin Bruce
• Lenore Carroll
• Barry Day
• Daniel Stashower

And brilliantly insightful essays including:

• Christopher Redmond on illuminating the vast possibilities that new technology offers in "Sherlock Holmes on the Internet"
• Editors Lellenberg and Stashower's "A Sherlockian Library" details fifty essential books for the Arthur Conan Doyle fan
• Philip A. Shreffler's essay explores one of English literature's most famous friendships in "Holmes and Watson, the Head and the Heart"

Release date: November 6, 2003

Publisher: Running Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

Jon Lellenberg

SHERLOCK HOLMES IMITATIONS have been appearing in print —and, later, on stage and screen—almost from the moment that the original short stories began running in The Strand Magazine in 1891. So striking and eccentric a character as Sherlock Holmes, with such pronounced attributes and manner of speech, could hardly fail to prompt considerable lighthearted parody. And the fact that everyone seemed to be reading Sherlock Holmes guaranteed A. Conan Doyle’s imitators that everyone would recognize and understand their parodies as well. Many were done by writers whose status, then and forever, was minor, but others, such as A. A. Milne and P. G. Wodehouse, cut their literary teeth on Sherlock Holmes parody when they were young, and writers of the stature of Bret Harte, James Barrie, Mark Twain, and O. Henry did not hesitate to write Sherlock Holmes parodies in those early days as well.

Sherlock Holmes was on stage quickly as well, but it was 1899 when he first attained theatrical stardom in the person of William Gillette, America’s greatest actor and playwright of that day. Writing with the blessing of Conan Doyle, Gillette turned elements of various Sherlock Holmes stories into a superior melodrama that became a Broadway hit and then a nationwide sensation. Similar success followed when Gillette took the play to England, where, after its London run, traveling companies performed it throughout the British Isles and on the Continent. In time there would be a motion picture (now lost, alas!), and then a Farewell Tour, which began touring America in 1928 and only ended in 1932. Gillette even played the role the first time that Sherlock Holmes was dramatized on radio, in 1930.

Gillette’s impact upon the public conception of Sherlock Holmes was second only to Conan Doyle’s: the actor became the model for the American illustrations of the stories when Conan Doyle brought Holmes back to life in 1903; he was imitated for decades by subsequent portrayers of Sherlock Holmes on stage and screen; Orson Welles adapted Gillette’s play for radio in his Mercury Theater of the Air, and the play continues to be performed to this day—sometimes by companies as august as the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose 1973 revival of it in England and America triggered a new Holmes craze not over yet.

Gillette drew upon the actual Sherlock Holmes stories for his play’s situations and plot, which pitted Holmes and Watson against Professor Moriarty, but he did not hesitate to invent new characters and situations as well. One new character was the detective’s ingenue client Alice Faulkner. When Gillette’s writing of the playscript had reached a certain impasse, he cabled Conan Doyle diffidently: “May I marry Holmes?” The answer from the character’s creator gave license to uncounted liberties taken with Sherlock Holmes ever since. “You may marry him or murder him or do what you want with him,” ran Conan Doyle’s reply—and Gillette ended his play with Alice Faulkner in Sherlock Holmes’s arms.

So, in a sense, if we take liberties with Sherlock Holmes today, in our admiring way, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has no one but himself to blame. Once again we present a new set of tales about the Great Detective, by writers who know him well but not too worshipfully; plus some nonfiction contributions that survey the cultural phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes, from the cold type of Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887 and The Strand Magazine in the 1890s to the computers and Internet of today.



Colin Bruce

THE MOST SPECTACULAR natural event of our times was of course the Great Comet of 1882. Despite the excellence of modern astronomy, the sight probably inspired as much superstitious awe as it did scientific fascination, and during its closest approach in the month of September, the talk in London—and no doubt in almost all other parts of the world—was of little else. My regular readers may have wondered that it is mentioned nowhere in my memoirs. I can now reveal that there was indeed a Sherlock Holmes case involving this strange period. I have not written of it until now because the story is tangled up with another which shows me up in a very bad light. But now I feel the tale must be told, and in full, if only as a warning to future generations against more than one kind of folly.

I HAD SLEPT very badly, and came down early for breakfast. Yet I was not looking forward to the meal, for I had decided that this was the occasion when I must break the news to Sherlock Holmes that I could no longer serve as his companion and assistant. I must throw myself wholly into my medical work, putting in the longest possible hours with no side distractions; and furthermore I must move to wherever the best fees were to be earned.

So I was somewhat relieved, as well as surprised, to find that my colleague had breakfasted already, and was donning his coat and gloves. I was able to deduce from the suitcase by his side that he was setting off on a substantial journey.

“Good morning, Holmes. I thought you were currently detained in town by the Threadneedle Street affair?”

He shook his head. “No, Watson, that has progressed to the point where it can be handed over to Lestrade with reasonable certainty that it will not come unstuck. I am off to the South Coast, I am not sure for how long. I will see you possibly tonight, but more likely not for a few days.” And with that he was gone.

I found myself once again alone with my troubled conscience. And now I must tell you the cause. You may recall that after being invalided out of the Afghan war with a bullet in the leg, I was evacuated to a hospital in Peshawar. That conflict is often described as part of The Great Game: the slow unending struggle between Imperial Russia to the north and Imperial Britain to the south to control the centre of gravity of the Asian continent. But I was there, and I can assure you it was no game: indeed I returned scarred as much in my soul as on my body. This may partly explain, though it certainly does not excuse, what followed.

Due to the flood of war wounded, there was an acute shortage of nurses in Peshawar, and their efforts were supplemented by female volunteers from the British families there. One such—I will call her Sarah, though that is not her real name—was herself the daughter of a surgeon at the hospital. By then I was in a recuperative ward, awaiting passage back to Britain. Although in very black spirits, my medical needs were slight, and the regular staff quite understandably neglected me in favour of those with more immediate needs. But Sarah overlooked no-one. She always delayed for a chat at the beginning and end of her shift, and my spirits were always lightened as much by looking forward to those talks as for their brief duration. When I was transferred to a small cottage within the hospital grounds, it was natural that she should volunteer to be my daily visitor and housekeeper. Our feelings grew for one another, but of course I could not speak my wishes. How could I ask such a girl to marry a cripple with no means of support beyond a small war pension? For at the time, it still looked as though I would end up on crutches at best, in a wheelchair at worst. In the end I am sure that the unexpected completeness of my recovery owed as much to her nursing as to any surgery.

Then suddenly came the news that there would be a spare berth on the Orontes, sailing for England the next day. That last evening together, our tenderness for one another overcame our scruples. I take full responsibility for what followed. I never saw her again, and though I wrote to her from London at increasing intervals, my letters went unanswered.

Until a week ago. Then had come a letter from Eastbourne, unstamped, so the postman had asked whether I wished to receive it, and was prepared to pay the postage. Thankfully, I had decided to do so, even though he would not permit me to see the envelope first. (Apparently this is because some people try to communicate free of charge, by the way they space the address on the envelope: for example soldiers who merely wish to reassure their family at home that all is well with them. Rather ingenious!)

But I digress. The letter was from Sarah, but written in a bitter tone quite unlike that of the sweet girl I once had loved—and no wonder. She had paid the price for our folly: it had left her with child. She had written to me several times, but with no certain address to write to, and receiving no reply, had been too proud to try to contact me again, despite the horror that followed. For her family had taken the sternest view possible, buying her a third-class ticket home, giving her a small amount of money, and telling her that they never wished to see or hear from her again.

She had struggled to bring up the boy as a “widow,” working as a seamstress in a town where no-one knew her, but times had become desperately hard. Her landlord was about to evict her. If I had no feelings for her, had I none even for my son? She had at last found my address from the Medical Register, and with no pride left, she was begging for my help. My financial help, that is, for she was unwilling to see me under any circumstances.

At first I almost disbelieved the letter was from her: her personality seemed to have changed so completely. Then I reflected how sustained hardship can transform the strongest character, and the realisation that any such change was entirely my fault was almost too much for me. Of course I sent what money I could afford at once. But I realised that my own future must now be very different. No longer could I be a part-time doctor who spent much of his energy playing at detective work. I must leave Baker Street, bid Sherlock Holmes find another assistant, and devote myself to a life of hard work to support the good woman and the even more innocent child for whose predicament I was responsible.

Napoleon famously remarked that an army marches upon its stomach, and with this maxim he led France to capture much of Europe. If so, it is surely upon the traditional English breakfast that the backbone of our Empire depends. For after a long night wrestling with my guilty thoughts, Mrs Hudson’s generous breakfast table, with its usual spread of scrambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms, deviled kidneys, and fried bread, all served by the lady herself, did more to restore my spirits than I would have believed possible. No wonder the Continentals struggle to keep up with us, starting the day as they do with a scrap of croissant and a cup of coffee. I arrived at my surgery if not cheerful, then at least confident that I had the strength to deal with whatever life’s caprices should set before me.

Alas for such confidence! Perhaps the cruellest of the many tricks that the Fates play upon us is their unfair habit of dealing not one but two blows in quick succession, like a boxer who first sets his opponent reeling from a head blow, then delivers a low punch with even greater force.

Two letters rested on the mat. The first was one of those unsolicited commercial letters which have become such a pest in the mails recently: I now receive as many as one or two every week! It contained an offer of life insurance from a company I had never heard of. The payment offered in the event of early death was generous, but the premiums payable were outrageous even in proportion, and I consigned the thing to the wastebasket without a second thought.

The second item was more interesting. It came from a Dr. Nagel at an address in Harley Street. Although the letter was printed, it was written in a frank and engaging way that warmed me as though I was being addressed personally. It opened with a reminder of the old saw that we doctors know full well that half the medicines we prescribe are ineffective—the problem is that we do not know which half! Dr. Nagel proposed to set up a reporting system whereby well-respected general practitioners (here I felt a glow of pride at being so chosen) would report honestly, in confidence, on the success or failure of each course of treatment they performed. As the reports came in, so medicine would gradually be transformed from an intuitive art into an exact science.

This was obviously a project I should become involved in, now that I was committing myself fully to doctoring. Dr. Nagel had an initial request for those taking part. Had I seen a recent article in The Lancet describing a diagnostic test for Marchant’s syndrome that could be performed overnight, using no more than a drop of blood and common chemicals available in every surgery? If so, I probably remembered that the test seemed pretty much infallible in detecting the disease in its earliest stages. It was also claimed that the test would rarely give false positives: that is to say, only one time in a hundred would it wrongly indicate that someone who was in fact not suffering from Marchant’s had the disease. Dr. Nagel wanted all the doctors taking part in his scheme to help verify the latter claim, by performing the test on themselves and reporting the results. I mixed the required chemicals immediately. The task occupied me until my first patient of the morning arrived. Then I placed the test-tube to one side, to give the reaction time to complete.

I did not have a chance to examine it again until the lunch hour. Indeed, I had been out to visit the pie-seller on the corner, and was consuming his wares, before I remembered the experiment. I retrieved the test-tube and held it up to the window. For several seconds, my mind simply refused to accept the implications of the bright blue colour that was evident. Not until I had leafed through The Lancet with trembling fingers to confirm what I already knew, that the colour showed proof—or to be exact, a 99 percent chance, which is surely proof for all practical purposes—of the presence of Marchant’s, did the awfulness of my situation hit me.

I would die within a year. Within a year at the most. My hopes and plans, my guilts and worries: soon all would be equally irrelevant. It is not the first time I have faced death: it came close to me in Afghanistan, and several times since I have willingly followed Sherlock Holmes into great danger. But I now realised that my courage in those situations had sprung from the fact that I had stood a sporting chance—indeed, a better than even chance—of survival. Now hope must be abandoned.

I got through my early afternoon surgery somehow, though five minutes after each patient had left I could not have told you who each was, or what malady they were suffering from. Tea-time found me motionless in my chair, staring at the wastebasket. Somehow I had the feeling of something forgotten, something urgent to be done.

The other letter! Not the one from Dr. Nagel, but the offer of life insurance I had so contemptuously cast aside. If there was nothing I could do for myself, I could still help Sarah, and the child whose name she had not even told me. I retrieved the crumpled sheets, and read the document more carefully. The monthly instalments were indeed substantial, but I would not be paying them for long. And the payment on my death in a year’s time would be sufficient to pay for a good education for my son, and still keep Sarah in comfort if not luxury for the rest of her life.

There was of course the usual declaration that to the best of my knowledge, I did not suffer from any illness of a life-threatening nature. I signed without a qualm. After all, I was not doing this for myself. Surely the welfare of my once beloved and her son were more important than the profits of a life insurance company? No-one could ever know that I had by the wildest of coincidences tested myself for Marchant’s syndrome that same day: there had been no witnesses. Thus I rationalised a fraudulent act involving more money than I had ever seen, or indeed would now ever see, in my whole life. I went out to the waiting-room and had two patients who knew me personally witness and date the document as required.

MY HOMECOMING THAT evening was somewhat unusual. I was met in the hallway by Mrs. Hudson.

“Doctor! Is your colleague not with you?”

“I am afraid not. I doubt he will be back before tomorrow at the earliest. Has a client come with urgent business?”

“Not a client, sir, but Mr. Mycroft Holmes. He gave me a sealed note that he made me promise to hand to his brother by six-o-clock tonight, and there is less than an hour left. He stressed that the matter was most important.”

I raised my eyebrows. Mycroft was a rare visitor: we saw him once a year if that, not because of any lack of cordiality between the brothers, but rather because his work was so important, and his habits so fixed, that rarely did he venture farther than the little zone encompassing his residence, his club, and his desk at the Foreign Office. It took something very serious to fetch him further afield. I persuaded Mrs Hudson that in the circumstances she could give the envelope to me, and tore open the seal. The contents were something of an anticlimax. A strip of paper bore the message: “Stock market down ten points. Gold up tuppence an ounce. Use the enclosed.”

The other item was a ticket for an unspecified performance at the Royal Albert Hall at seven o’clock that evening.

I hastened to reassure Mrs. Hudson that even the likes of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes sometimes leave quite trivial communications for one another. Having soothed her down, it occurred to me that in his absence, I would be doing Sherlock Holmes a favour if I used the ticket myself, and reimbursed him for it when he returned. I had no wish to spend another evening moping alone in our rooms, and the last event I had attended at the Albert Hall had been most enjoyable, one of the famous Promenade Concerts.

The walk across Hyde Park to the Hall was rewarding in itself. There was no moon, but the whole landscape was lit by the ethereal glow from the great comet which hung low in the southern sky like a vast candle flame. At a casual glance you might have mistaken it for a cloud, but as you looked more closely your eye was drawn to the pattern of fine lines of glowing gas which arced out from an invisible centre point, with a hint of further colour and structure beyond that which you could discern. All around I heard the murmur of awed voices and saw upturned faces, for a large crowd of people were strolling in the same direction as myself. By the time I was near enough to the Hall for the comet to become hidden behind its great bulk, I had to slow as the crowd thickened into a queue heading up the steps of the nearest entrance. It edged forward gradually: tonight’s performance was evidently a sell-out.

When I finally reached my seat, however, after wending my way through that maze of cramped little corridors and stairways that make the Promenade-goer feel like a rat in a warren, albeit helpfully directed at every turn by an usher inspecting the seat number on his ticket, I gazed about the Hall in some bafflement. It was obviously not a concert we were expecting, for there was not a musical instrument in sight. The few props visible on the stage floor below (for my seat had turned out to be high up in the Gods) reminded me more of a conjurer’s set.

Before I could speculate further, the electric chandeliers above us dimmed, the audience quietened, and a figure in evening dress took the podium and bowed briefly. I say figure because the young man (as he turned out to be) had long blond hair, and his voice, when he spoke, was so high-pitched that it could equally have been a girl’s.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am Mr. James Moriarty. Perhaps you are surprised at being addressed by one so young, but I can assure you I am a qualified mathematical physicist. I replace your expected speaker, Professor Morrison because—as you can imagine—my seniors in the department of astronomy are fully occupied at present, in the study of the comet which is at this moment lighting the sky outside. Yet I think I will not disappoint you, for my nominal superiors are perhaps a little set in their ways, a little unimaginative in their teaching methods. I will endeavour not merely to inform you, but to keep you awake.”

There came a titter from the young students who occupied the standing-room on the floor of the hall. I did not approve—even if his words were partly in jest, I believe that one’s elders should be treated with respect—but as he continued, I could not help being impressed by his skill.

He described first how the bodies of the solar system revolve not around the Earth, as the ancients thought, but around the gigantic ball of flaming gases that is the Sun, for the Sun’s mass is a million times greater then the Earth’s—if the latter was represented by a mouse, then the Sun would mass as much as an elephant! As he spoke, one of the electric chandeliers brightened tremendously to represent the Sun, and the others went out altogether.

Then he called the planets into existence one by one. And as he did so, each appeared in the air above us, seemingly hanging in space, and slowly orbiting the chandelier at the appropriate distance. Of course I could guess it was all done with wires, but it was impressive nevertheless. First came a charred little ball representing Mercury, then a larger milky-white one for Venus. Earth herself was represented by a slowly spinning globe: with the opera-glasses provided by every seat, you could clearly make out the continents and oceans. Red Mars was followed by a huge sphere representing Jupiter, and similar ones for the great, cold planets beyond. As each body was revealed, Moriarty described what astronomers had been able to deduce about it. When all were in view, his tones became soft and hypnotic as he described the great age of the solar system, the billions of years for which each planet had followed the same constant, near-circular path.

So could we rest assured that celestial mechanics was always benign, predictable, all but eternal, he almost purred? He implored us to watch carefully. Seemingly from far away, a trumpet note sounded. Then came a hissing sound, growing ever louder, nervously reminiscent of a boiler about to explode. And down from the edge of the ceiling swooped the comet!

It seemed a ball of ice, but it evaporated furiously even as we watched, trailing a cloud of steam very much like a comet’s tail. And it wove a desperately unpredictable path which ever and again took it close to members of the audience. At one point it seemed to head straight for me at incredible speed. I am not a nervous man, yet I could not prevent myself flinging my hands up to protect my face. But whoever was operating the hidden wires was very skillful: again and again, it seemed that the thing must hit some person, but it never did. It would have caused a nasty burn, for it must in reality be a lump of dry ice, solid carbon dioxide whose intense cold can scald skin as badly as boiling water. But in the end, it was against the hanging sphere representing the Earth that the thing collided and stuck. The last of the ice quickly evaporated, leaving a large blemish on the affected globe.

Mr. Moriarty seemed most taken aback at the mishap. He hastened to explain that the chances of a comet striking the Earth in reality were remote—very remote indeed. But the spell had been broken, and the audience were no longer inclined to accept his word without question. For the first time hands were raised, and questions put.

Perhaps one individual comet was unlikely to hit Earth, but how many comets lurked out in the depths beyond Neptune? No-one knew, Moriarty replied, for they were beyond detection by current telescopes at such distances. But some estimates put their number in the millions, or even billions.

This answer left an uncomfortable impression. Someone had the boldness to ask the obvious: was the great comet currently visible in the skies going t. . .