Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson Publishing, 1997

This revised and updated edition published by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009

Collection and editorial material Mike Ashley 1997, 2009

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN 978-1-84529-926-2

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First published in the United States in 2009 by Running Press Book Publishers All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher .

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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

US Library of Congress number: 2008942199
US ISBN 978 0 76243 626 2

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Contents

Foreword

Richard Lancelyn Green

One of the most famous opening paragraphs in a Sherlock Holmes story is that found in Thor Bridge (which was first published in the 1920s). Dr Watson says: Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox & Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine. Readers had already been offered tantalizing details of many unrecorded cases in preceding stories, but this confirmed that he had a long row of year-books which fill a shelf, and there are the dispatch cases filled with documents. He rightly called it a perfect quarry for the student, not only of crime, but of the social and official scandals of the late Victorian era. It is into these that the authors represented in the present volume have dipped.

The influence of Sherlock Holmes made itself felt within months of the publication of the first short stories in the Strand Magazine . There was plagiarism which achieved its apogee with Sexton Blake who had rooms in Baker Street, and there were rivals who knew they could succeed only by being different. The Golden Age of detective fiction was littered with a strange array of private inquiry agents who were fat, blind, Belgian or of the opposite sex. Yet for all their attempts at being different, they never entirely escaped the shadow of Sherlock Holmes. As Scotland Yard had discovered, his longest shots invariably hit their mark, and even when he was outwitted, as he was by Irene Adler, his reputation was enhanced.

It is the art of a great writer to leave the reader anxious for more, and Dr Watson was such a writer. He often erred on the side of discretion, and he intrigued the reader because of his less than perfect grasp of detail. Where his knowledge failed he resorted to imagination and was not unduly concerned when this led to contradictions and inconsistencies within the text. He introduced colour and variety and irrelevance, which added to the myth and gave the reader a picture which was sharp in its essentials, but blurred at the edges.

No reader has ever put down the stories believing that Watson had said the last word on the subject. For some there was an irresistible urge to parody the style and to play with the name of Sherlock Holmes (which lends itself well to mutations such as Shylock Bones, Sherluck Gnomes, Picklock Holes, or Sheerlecoq Omes). The parodies made fun of the contrasting characteristics of Holmes and Watson, between the infallible brain which could distinguish 144 types of cigarette ash or recognize clay and earth from the counties of England (something still denied to the most sophisticated computers of the late twentieth century) and the obtuseness of the all-admiring friend.

The greatest scope for other writers lay in the unrecorded, unfathomed and unfinished cases. When Watson made it known that Holmes had survived the struggle at the Reichenbach Falls, there were demands that he should furnish the public with details of the cases which he had already mentioned, and he proceeded to do so with The Second Stain (to which he had referred on two occasions). Even then there was an alternative literature provided by others, including major writers such as Bret Harte, and Mark Twain (who introduced Holmes into his late novel, A Double-Barrelled Detective Story ).

The early apocryphal works did not profess to be part of the original canon, for the concept only developed after Ronald Knox had elevated the study of Sherlock Holmes to new and rarefied heights in 1911 with his famous satirical essay, Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes. This gave impetus to the serious study of the stories and raised the possibility that there was not one but two authors (as had been suggested in the writing of the Odyssey ) or that Watson had described the early cases as they happened, but had invented the later ones to satisfy public demand. The new scholarship opened the way for others to take up their pens to continue the saga, while remaining faithful to their subject as had the story-tellers of old who created heroic deeds for Alexander the Great of which historians were previously unaware.