Laurie R. King - A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon

The stories in A Study in Sherlock are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A Bantam Books Trade Paperback Original

Copyright 2011 by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

B ANTAM B OOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A study in Sherlock / edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8129-8247-3
1. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American. 3. Detective and mystery stories, English. I. King, Laurie R. II. Klinger, Leslie S.
PS648.D4S78 2011
823.0108351dc22
2011015510

www.bantamdell.com

Cover design: Thomas Beck Stvan
Cover images: Ryo Konno/Amana Images/Getty
Images (pipe, left), Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images
(pipe, top), Comstock Images/Getty Images (pipe,
right), Robert Kohlhuber/Photodisc/Getty Images
(magnifying glass)

v3.1

CONTENTS

AN INTRODUCTION
Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

YOUD BETTER GO IN DISGUISE
Alan Bradley

AS TO AN EXACT KNOWLEDGE OF LONDON
Tony Broadbent

THE MEN WITH THE TWISTED LIPS
S. J. Rozan

THE ADVENTURE OF THE PURLOINED PAGET
Phillip Margolin and Jerry Margolin

THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE
Lee Child

THE STARTLING EVENTS IN THE ELECTRIFIED CITY
Thomas Perry

THE CASE OF DEATH AND HONEY
Neil Gaiman

A TRIUMPH OF LOGIC
Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon

THE LAST OF SHEILA-LOCKE HOLMES
Laura Lippman

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CONCERT PIANIST
Margaret Maron

THE SHADOW NOT CAST
Lionel Chetwynd

THE EYAK INTERPRETER
Dana Stabenow

THE CASE THAT HOLMES LOST
Charles Todd

THE IMITATOR
Jan Burke

A SPOT OF DETECTION
Jacqueline Winspear

A STUDY IN SHERLOCK: AFTERWORD
A Leslie S. Klinger/Mary Russell Twinterview (with Laurie R. King)

Only true genius can produce an invention, or a hero, that fills a gaping hole in our lives we never knewnever even suspectedwas there. For millennia, we were perfectly content with pen and paper; then e-mail was introduced and now no one can live without it. Paintings and lithographs held all the rich vocabulary of visual creationuntil photography became our native tongue. And we had a whole raft of heroes to tell stories about: why on earth would we need a self-described consulting detective with misanthropic attitudes and unsavory habits?

But one day in 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle sat down to write a tale of an odd young man with peculiar skills and changed the world. A Study in Scarlet is indeed a young mans story, packed to overflowing with Romantic Adventure and startling ideas, with thrilling lines (lines a modern editor might blue-pencil as melodramatic) such as Theres the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

In no time at all, an entire industry of homages and satires, pastiches and parodies sprang up around Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was imagined in a thousand non-Doylean manifestations: married; in exotic climes; paired with historical and literary figures; made younger, older, taller, shorter, more robotic, more emotional, nearly every variation conceivable. Conan Doyle himself wrote non-Holmes stories that were yet openly patterned on the character. That previously unsuspected gaping hole in our lives (the size and import of which Sir Arthur refused to acknowledge) proved to bear the shape of nothing short of an archetype: a modern-day knight errant; a man whose passion for righting wrongs is mistaken for a cold intellectual curiosity; a tortured hero with but a single friend; a man who never lived and so can never die, who is more alive today than any other resident of the Victorian Age, including Victoria herself.

The tales in this volume show eighteen top writers exploring the contours and boundaries of that archetype, playing with the ideas of how this Platonic ideal of a detecting hero might look in different situations, wearing a variety of faces. Some recount untold adventures of the Master Detective; others look at him from fresh perspectives; still others listen to the echoes of his passing.

All are stories inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his first study in Sherlock.

How long had he been watching me? I wondered.

I had been standing for perhaps a quarter of an hour, gazing idly at the little boys in sailor suits and their sisters in pinafores, all of whom, watched over by a small army of nannies and a handful of mothers, waded like diminutive giants among their toy sailing boats in the Serpentine.