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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  INTRODUCTION

  The Incident of the Impecunious Chevalier

  The Dollmaker of Marigoto Walk

  The Aventure of the Forgotten Umbrella

  Call Me Wiggins

  Mycroft’s Great Game

  The Witch of Greenwich

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 - THE BLACK DEATH

  CHAPTER 2 - THE EMPTY COFFIN

  CHAPTER 3 - BOG TOWN

  CHAPTER 4 - MONSIEUR VICTOR

  CHAPTER 5 - FIREWORKS

  CHAPTER 6 - PLAGUE OVER LONDON

  CHAPTER 7 - HORROR IN A LONDON FOG

  EPILOGUE

  Years Ago and in a Different Place

  Mrs. Hudson Reminisces

  Cabaret aux Assassins

  A Study in Orange

  The Riddle of the Young Protestor

  The Adventure of the Celestial Snows

  And the Others …

  Also by Michael Kurland

  About the Authors

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention; a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then—well, then you’d be reading Shakespeare instead of Sherlock Holmes. Henry V, or Hank Cinque, as we like to call him, to be exact. What do William Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle have in common? They both, without really trying, created fictional characters that have attained the literary equivalent of immortality.

  Without really trying? Yes, I think it’s true of both Shakespeare and Conan Doyle. Not that they weren’t doing their best to create wonderful stories for their public, but neither assumed that his creations would outlive him by centuries. Look at what Shakespeare named some of his plays: The Comedy of Errors—hey, it’s a comedy; the characters keep making these errors, that’s what makes it funny. As You Like It—as good as saying, “I think this plot is dumb, but the groundlings like this sort of thing, so here it is.” Much Ado About Nothing—how self-effacing can you get? Love’s Labour’s Lost—sounds like a bad sitcom. (Shakespeare apparently also wrote a play called Love’s Labour’s Won, which has been, er, misplaced. If you can find a copy, say on the back shelf of some old library, you might get a favorable mention in a couple of textbooks yourself.)

  And Conan Doyle, as we well know, thought so little of his popular consulting detective that he did his best to kill him off, to leave himself more time to write his serious historical works, like Micah Clarke and The White Company.

  What can one possibly say about Sherlock Holmes that hasn’t been said before? His exploits have been written up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (we’ll drop for the moment the pretense that Conan Doyle was merely the “agent” for Dr. John Watson); expanded on by Adrian Conan Doyle, John Dickson Carr, and others; pastiched by August Derleth, Robert L. Fish, Anthony Boucher, John Lennon, and scores of others; parodied by Mark Twain, Stephen Leacock, P. G. Wodehouse, and untold legions of others.

  Every aspect of Holmes’s fictional existence has been discussed, dissected, and the conclusions disponed and disputed by such literary lumi naries as Vincent Starrett, William Baring-Gould, Ronald Knox, Rex Stout, and Dorothy Sayers, to name just the ones who come to mind most easily. (If you are a Holmes aficionado you probably have your own list of favorite Irregulars, and you’re slightly miffed at me for not mentioning Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, John Kendrick Bangs, Martin Gardner, Michael Harrison, John Bennett Shaw, Nicholas Meyer, John Gardner, or possibly Colin Wilson. Well, sorry; they just didn’t come to mind.)

  It has been said, by the sort of people who say these things, that there are only five universally recognized fictional characters: Santa Clans, Romeo, Superman, Mickey Mouse, and Sherlock Holmes. Some would expand the list to add Don Quixote, Don Juan, King Kong, Dorothy (the Wizard’s Dorothy, you know), Bugs Bunny, Wonder Woman, Charlie Chan, James Bond, and perhaps Peter Pan to that list, and, as my grandmother used to say, they’re right, too.

  Then there are the ones that have fallen by the wayside. Fifty years ago almost any literate adult whose native language was English could recognize Raffles, Nick Carter, Stella Dallas, Ephram Tutt, Bertie Wooster, and Bulldog Drummond, for example. But membership in this club for the fictional elite is transient for most; characters age and fade away from the public consciousness to be replaced by more youthful, contemporary cre-actions.

  But Sherlock Holmes lives on.

  It has been estimated, by the sort of people who estimate these things, that there are over a billion people living today who could tell you, at least in some vague fashion, who Sherlock Holmes was. Many of them don’t realize that he is a fictional character, or that if he were real he’d be well over a hundred years old now, as is shown by the volume of mail the Lon don post office continues to get addressed to 221B Baker Street.

  What is there about this creation of Dr. Conan Doyle’s that enabled him to so quickly enter the pantheon of fictional immortals, rise to be numbered among the top five, and remain there for over a century? I’ll give you my theory, but you’ll have to put up with a little digression. Here goes:

  The detective story took some time to come into being. Edgar Allan Poe is usually credited with being its first practitioner, with his stories involving the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. (Did Holmes ever meet Dupin? See “The Adventure of the Impecunious Chevalier,” from the quill pen of Richard Lupoff, in this very volume.) There had been detectives in stories before Dupin; there had been stories of detection before Dupin. What, then, made Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue the first true detective story? Simply it was the first story where:

  • The detective is the main character of the story.

  • The matter to be detected is the principal problem of the story.

  • The detective detects; that is, he solves the problem by the application of observation guided by intelligence.

  The last Dupin story was published in 1845. Over the next four decades, until Arthur Conan Doyle decided to call the main characters in his first detective novel Sherlock Holmes and John Watson instead of Sherringford Holmes and Ormond Sacker (as indicated by a rough page of preliminary notes, still preserved, plotting out A Study in Scarlet), few detectives worthy of the name were introduced to the world of fiction. Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket (Bleak House, 1853) and Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone, 1868) are credible police officers, and their actions advance the plots of their respective books, but they are minor characters (no less than four other characters do their share of detecting during the course of The Moonstone), and in each book the solving of the crime takes second place to the novelists’ examination of how the situation affects the other characters.

  With L’Affair Lerouge (English title: The Lerouge Case; U.S. title: The Widow Lerouge), first published in 1866, Emil Gaboriau introduced Lecoq, a detective who uses observation, reflection, and ratiocination (Poe’s word for what Dupin did; it means thinking logically) to solve his cases. Lecoq is an amalgam of Dupin and François Eugene Vidocq, a real detective who rose from being a professional thief to head the Paris Police Department in 1811. Vidocq wrote four volumes of memoirs after his forced retirement in 1827, which gave highly fictionalized accounts of his prowess as a detective.

  It seems fitting that the first
English language detective novel was written by a woman: Anna Katherine Green. It was called The Leavenworth Case, it was first published in 1848, and it was a bestseller. In his book Bloody Murder, Julian Symons recounts that The Leavenworth Case was the favorite reading of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Since Baldwin didn’t first serve as prime minister until 1923, it’s clear that the book, as we professionals put it, had legs.

  There were also any number of interior imitators of Poe and Gaboriau and Green. From 1870, with the publication of “The Bowery Detective” by Kenward Philp, until the 1920s the so-called dime novels published hundreds, perhaps thousands, of detective stories; strong on action, suspense, disguises, racy dialog, good men turned bad, bad men who want to be good. They were weak on characterization, plot, and anything approaching actual detection, but they moved fast and, with a combination of nonstop action and exotic locales, they provided a welcome anodyne from the dullness and drudgery of everyday life.

  And then, in 1887, came A Study in Scarlet, and all lesser attempts were washed away as though they had never been. Sherlock Holmes was instantly recognized as the master of detection, by a public who had been waiting for just such a hero without knowing what it was they were waiting for until it appeared.

  To the readers of the latter years of the nineteenth century Sherlock Holmes was the perfect Victorian; not as we today imagine Victorians: uptight, prudish, repressed, overly mannered, and ridiculously dressed prigs, but as the Victorians thought of themselves: logical, clearheaded, scientific, thoroughly modern leaders of the civilized world. Perhaps Holmes was a little too logical, a bit too cold and emotionless; but this merely permitted his readers to admire him without wishing to be him. And, like Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell, Bell, Edison, and the other scientific geniuses of the period, he solved mysteries that baffled other men. And you could watch him do it! You could see the results as that mighty brain attacked the problem of Thor Bridge, or The Second Stain, or The Dancing Men.

  “It is my business to know things,” Holmes explains in A Case of Identity. “Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook.”

  And today? We have all of that, with the added delight of visiting what is, for us, the alien wonderland, of tantalus and gasogene, of hansom cabs and four wheelers—“Never take the first cab in the rank”—of spending an hour or a day in a London where, as Vincent Starrett put it, “it is always 1895.”

  It was perhaps inevitable that, when Conan Doyle gave up writing the continuing saga of Sherlock Holmes, others would take up the pen. Even before Holmes retired to take up beekeeping, the parodies and pastiches had begun. Vincent Starrett, Mark Twain, John Kendrick Bangs; all couldn’t resist the impulse to pastiche or parody the creation of Dr. Doyle. In a 1973 German magazine article, Pierre Lachat notes that over 300 Holmes rip-offs appeared between 1907 and 1930. And that’s only in English, and doesn’t count the Spanish, or Portuguese, or the extensive German series, Aus den Geheimakten des Weltdetektivs (From the Mystery Files of the World Detective), which features Sherlock Holmes, but does away with Watson, replacing him with a youth named Harry Taxon.

  But they were, at best, weak evocations of the Master. And most of them were not at anything approaching best. Perhaps the most successful of those authors who drew from the canon not merely their inspiration, but their mise-en-scène, were those who chose not to find another ancient notebook of Watson’s in the lockbox at Cox, but who tell their stories in another voice than that of the long-suffering doctor, although the tales are set in the world of Sherlock Holmes. In some of them Holmes is still a major character, as in my own Professor Moriarty novels, and in others Holmes appears briefly, if at all.

  The continued existence of a fictional character, not only in the steadily reprinted works of the author, but in new works created by other authors, is one of the signs of literary immortality. If this is so, then Holmes and Watson are more immortal (yeah, I know, being “more immortal” is like being “less dead,” but it’s only an expression fer crissakes) than most and we’re adding to his longevity here in a big way, with some great writers.

  Sherlock Holmes appears in all the stories in this collection. His “Watson” in each story is not the good doctor himself, but one of the legion of memorable secondary characters that Conan Doyle created with such ease. What reader can forget—to cite a few examples not appearing in this volume—Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., principal of the Priory School and author of Huxtable’s Sidelights on Horace? Or Jabez Wilson, pawnbroker of Coburg Square, with his blazing red hair? Or Hosmer Angel, the fiancé of the myopic Mary Sutherland, who found it easy to vanish on his wedding day because he never really existed?

  And so onward, for one more look at Sherlock Holmes through the eyes of some of those who knew him best, but who haven’t, until now, had the chance to tell their stories.

  This book is a compilation of new stories about Sherlock Holmes, told from the point of view of various people mentioned in the original stories except Dr. Watson or Sherlock Holmes. The authors of these stories, freed from the limitation of having to speak in Watson’s voice, have taken their tales in several interesting directions. How did Mrs. Hudson, Holmes’s long-suffering landlady, acquire such an illustrious tenant? And just who was Mr. Hudson. and what became of him? Find out in Linda Robertson’s “Mrs. Hudson Reminisces.” “A Study in Orange,” by Peter Tremayne, will give some idea of what Colonel Sebastian Moran thought of his adversary and nemesis. In George Alec Effinger’s “The Adventure of the Celestial Snows,” Reginald Musgrave witnesses Sherlock Holmes’s encounter with the infamous Dr. Fu Manchu.

  Cara Black shows us Irene Adler’s later relationship with Sherlock Holmes, a tale that, even if Watson had known about it, would have remained locked up in his battered tin dispatch box in the vaults of Cox & Co. We will learn of the early relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his maths instructor, James Moriarty. Richard Lupoff describes an unsuspected relationship between a young Sherlock Holmes and the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin.

  I should mention that, as we know, the passage of time creates lapses of memory, and, as Ryunosuke Akutagawa pointed out in his story “Rashomon,” different people will see the same event from vastly different perspectives, and may relate versions of the event that seem to have no relation to each other. So it is with some of these stories. Ask not which ones are true: they all are, and they are all lies.

  THE CHEVALIER C. AUGUSTE DUPIN

  “It is simple enough as you explain it,” I said, smiling. “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”

  Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropros remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

  —A Study in Scarlet

  by RICHARD A. LUPOFF

  The Incident of the Impecunious Chevalier

  It was not by choice but by necessity that I continued to read by oil lamp rather than arranging for the installation of the new gas lighting. In my wanderings throughout the metropolis I had been present at demonstrations of M. Lebon’s wondrous invention and especially of the improved thorium and cerium mantle devised by Herr von Welsbach, and thought at length of the pleasure of this brilliant mode of illumination, but the under nourished condition of my purse forbad me to pursue such an alteration in the condition of my lodgings.

  Even so, I took comfort of an evening in crouching beside the hearth in my lodgings, a small flame of dried driftwood flickering on the stones, a lamp at my elbow, and a volume in my lap. The pleasures of old age are few and small, nor did I anticipate to experience them for many more months before departing this planet and its lif
e of travail. What fate my Maker might plan for me, once my eyes should close for the last time, I could only wonder and await. The priests might assert that a Day of Judgment awaited. The Theosophists might maintain that the doctrine of Karma would apply to all beings. As for me, the Parisian metropolis and its varied denizens were world enough indeed.

  My attention had drifted from the printed page before me and my mind had wandered in the byways of philosophical musings to such an extent that the loud rapping upon my door induced a violent start within my nervous system. My fingers relaxed their grasp upon the book which they held, my eyes opened widely and a loud moan escaped my lips.

  With an effort I rose to my feet and made my way through my chill and darkened apartment to answer the summons at the door. I placed myself beside the portal, pulling at the draperies that I kept drawn by day against the inquiring gaze of strangers and by night against the moist chill of the Pa risian winter. Outside my door I perceived an urchin, cap set at an uncouth angle upon his unshorn head, an object or scrap of material clutched in the hand which he was not using to set up his racket on my door.

  Lifting an iron bar which I kept beside the door in case of need to defend myself from the invasion of ruffians and setting the latch chain to prevent the door from opening more than a hand’s width, I turned the latch and drew the door open far enough to peer out.

  The boy who stood upon my stoop could not have been more than ten years of age, ragged of clothing and filthy of visage. The meager light of the passage outside my apartment reflected from his eye, giving an impression of wary suspicion. We studied each other through the narrow opening for long seconds before either spoke. At length I demanded to know his reason for disturbing my musings. He ignored my question, responding to it by speaking my name.