Saturday, April 12, 2025

Scotland Yard's Tin Dispatch Box: Marcia Wilson's Sherlock Holmes and the Scotland Yarders

Marcia Wilson's nine amazing novels featuring Inspectors Lestrade, Bradstreet, Gregson, and Hopkins, along with Our Heroes, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, are finally now available.

Once these stories have been read, you will never see Lestrade, Gregson, Watson, Holmes, and the others the same way again.



Now on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mx-publishing/sherlock-holmes-and-the-scotland-yarders?fbclid=IwY2xjawJn1IxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHszPy-Ai8-Z3k1GmbpqjRAdsGSRuTnYuOJ48PdZvoMS_WyONpAxz-zHIJ16I_aem_p6QIs6CaOiSiZXT_MAo-pg

Having disappeared long ago, and remaining unavailable for years, this amazing story arc, told over nine volumes, is finally back, and available from MX Publishing - and here's some background.

(The following is the Editor's Foreword to the series . . . .)

Back in 2008, it was still a different Sherlockian world from today.

In those days, the quest for more excellent Holmes adventures beyond the pitifully few sixty Canonical adventures was still quite difficult. Each year, only a few slipped through the needle’s-eye clutch of the moribund major publisher model. (In fact, if one is still publishing by that route, then this fact remains true.) But there were many Holmes adventures waiting to be revealed, and they just needed an outlet. Is it any wonder that the Internet was that path?



Holmes pastiches have been around since William Gillette’s 1899 play, Sherlock Holmes, showing that Our Heroes’ adventures did not have to pass across the first Literary Agent’s desk. Some amazing and accurate adventures appeared on the radio in the 1930’s, courtesy of visionary Edith Meiser. And the door kept getting wider, with more radio shows, films, and the occasional book giving us more traditional, authentic, and Canonical Holmes.

But it was not enough.

In 1998, fanfiction.net was created, allowing another outlet for sharing Holmes’s adventures, wherein those who had discovered them could get them directly to starving readers immediately, without facing the impossible discouragement of the faceless soul-dead major publishing model. I was fortunate to discover the site a few years after that, and began to visit regularly to read and print and archive stories about the True Holmes.

There are thousands of Holmes stories located there, but many are parodies, or anachronistic, or related to modernized and offensive simulacrums, or with incorrect ghost-busting leanings. Others were clearly written by individuals who have no clue about Sherlock Holmes, or have hijacked him for their own agendas. These stories may be ignored, even if they have to be waded through – for buried in the muck of this backyard goose lot, for those who take time to look, are some true and rare jewels.



And in April 2008, the beginning of a couple of stories were posted, “An Ordinary Meeting” on the tenth, and “Truth is the Critic” the next day, both as written by an author going under the curious sobriquet of aragonite. “An Ordinary Meeting” gives details of Lestrade’s first consultation with Sherlock Holmes, and “Truth is the Critic” is written from the perspective of the Scotland Yard inspectors as they read A Study in Scarlet – and providing their reactions when see how Watson has described them. These were well written and interesting, and this approach really hadn’t been attempted before.

(To be accurate, there had been some stories about the Yarders, but they were inconsistent. For instance, M.J. Trow’s long Lestrade series veers wildly from legitimate mysteries to unreadable parodies, with particularly bogus attacks on Sherlock Holmes, and Trow inexplicably gives Inspector G. Lestrade the first name of “Sholto”.

In “Truth is the Critic”, aragonite was already painting the Yarders – Inspectors Lestrade, Gregson, Bradstreet, and Hopkins in particular – in well-rounded and respectful ways that hadn’t been seen before. They had their own life stories beyond The Canon, and weren’t just the inspector du jour appearing in this-or-that Canonical tale. Who knew then that this new author, slipping quietly onto the scene, had such an overall vision for these individuals, with fully realized details about their personal lives, their backgrounds and histories . . . and a plan for a massive overarching adventure that would span decades in their lives?



Over the next few months, more stories quickly followed – “A Cookout in Cornwall”, “Route to Madness”, and “Just Inspector Will Do” (my all-time favorite of these works, relating the events on the Paddington platform when Mary Watson awaits her husband’s return from the Continent in mid-May 1891. I re-read it every year on Reichenbach Day.) But on April 17th, 2008, aragonite raised the stakes, publishing the first chapter of a novel, A Sword for Defense, the first of a massive story arc relating what Watson and Lestrade and the other Yarders faced in the months after Holmes’s supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls.

While keeping one story going would overwhelm many authors, aragonite – whomever he or she was – had even greater ambitions. New stories and chapters began to be posted at a feverish pace. A week after Sword started, another serialized novel began, You Buy Bones, telling how Watson, in early 1882 and fresh from his first year living with Holmes in Baker Street, comes across a monstrous crime that directly and personally affects the Scotland Yard inspectors. And a few months after that, aragonite started another novel that served as a prequel leading to Sword called The MoonCursers, telling of Lestrade’s own terrifying adventures in late April and early May 1891, occurring at the same time Holmes and Watson were playing cat-and-mouse with Moriarty, on their way to a fateful encounter in Meiringen.



Over the course of that summer, nearly every day brought some new chapter: Sometimes another episode in A Sword for Defense or You Buy Bones or The MoonCursers, and at other times a seemingly stand-alone story that that filled in some crucial and interesting aspect about the Scotland Yarders that only made the overall painting richer and deeper.

Imagine if Charles Dickens were writing and publishing three serialized novels at once, and adding in short stories too. And they were going straight from being written to being posted for public consumption as soon as they were complete. And clearly the overall storyline wasn’t being generated along the way – there was a plan, for little threads mentioned here and there about Lestrade’s boyhood or Bradstreet’s family had massive importance much later. Over many months during this time, aragonite was also constructing another massive work, Test of the Professionals, which related the events after You Buy Bones and served as a set-up for A Sword for Defense, telling us much more about Lestrade’s past, his unfortunate and dangerous life-long connection with Professor Moriarty’s agent, the truly evil Jethro Quimper, and the escalating and terrifying events surrounding his courtship with Clea Cheatham.



In August 2008, with all of this going on, aragonite started another brilliant novella, A Secondary Stain, the other events of “The Second Stain”, in which Lestrade was not as clueless as he appears in Watson’s manuscript, actually working behind the scenes to assist Holmes’s investigation. It was the brilliance of this story that finally prompted me to write a fan letter.

Using the fan fiction website’s messenger feature, I emailed an extensive message to aragonite in October 2008, and soon received a wonderful and informative reply.

First, I learned that aragonite was really Marcia Wilson. In subsequent communications, I learned that aragonite – which curiously I’d never looked up before then – is calcium carbonate used by marine organisms to build their shells and skeletons. Since aragonite can be found in cave formations, and since Marcy is a caver – the evidence of which can be found in some of her stories brilliantly dealing with caverns and London’s Lost Rivers – I suspect that’s why she chose the unusual pen-name.



Over many emails over many years, Marcy has explained to me that she wrote so prolifically in those early years because she had insomnia, and that was a very productive time to write. She also could see all of these scenes, and almost couldn’t write fast enough to convey them. In her very first reply to me in October 2008, she explained, how she approached telling the Yarders’ story, and why she named Inspector G. Lestrade Geoffrey:

I’ve never liked the playing down of characters. It’s a lazy way to pump up the character in your mind. I have to be very careful not to wander into the Fangirlyverse. Usually I deal with it by giving a character a name I dislike, and for some reason, I dislike Geoffrey so naturally I stuck it on the poor guy.

She also explained that:

I was so bleeding tired of writing against another person’s notions on Holmes and Watson that I just went to another character that I rather liked. (When I was younger, I hated Lestrade. He should have been kowtowing to Holmes' genius like all of us!) Later on, I realized that it took a pretty remarkable man to refuse to see Holmes in a reverent light. [The] clues about Lestrade were subtle and interesting. There had to be a reason for someone who was supposed to be such a good cop to stay a police inspector after his initial promotion. I made him a Celtic Breton out of a half-thought. I was seeing Colin Jeavons in my head, and he’s so Welsh he’s probably half-Neanderthal! Being a Breton or a Channel Islander would have made [Lestrade] an English citizen, but he would not have been accepted as an equal in race or status by many people.



Our communications continued, as did her writing. By early 2009, A Sword for Defense was complete, and the next book in the ongoing saga, The Narrow Path had commenced. Those were great days to be a Sherlockian and to be reading fanfiction.net, as there were other great authors there as well – "Westron Wynde" for instance - all with powerful and correct understandings of the True Holmes. These authors were writing for the fans, and also for each other, and I was privileged to be in contact with many of them. In a few years, Marcy and Westron Wynde – who turned out to be amazing pasticheur Sarah Bennett, whose works are slowly being made available from Belanger Books – began to take down their online works and publish them in real books. (It was at this time that I let Marcy and Sarah read my first Sherlock Holmes pastiches, written in 2008 and at that point seen by no one but my wife, and with their encouragement I started publicly publishing my stories too.)

Marcy initially published You Buy Bones, along with some related short stories, in 2010 (from Lulu Publishing. That version is now out of print.) Next came Test of the Professionals: Leap Year (2013, also from Lulu and out of print), also collecting the original online novel and working in some supplementary material.

In 2015, I came up with the idea of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, and of course Marcy was in the initial list of invitees. Since then, much of her writing has been turned to contributing stories to these anthologies, having submitted nearly two-dozen. Through these books, she became associated with MX Publishing, who issued a new edition of You Buy Bones in 2015, as well as splitting Test of the Professionals: Leap Year into three planned smaller volumes. The first two, The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon and The Peaceful Night Poisonings, were published by MX in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Unfortunately, due to a combination of events, the third part of Test – the much larger piece called Leap Year that relates the exciting conclusion to that narrative – was not published.

So for the wider public, those who were never able to read Marcy’s massive ouvré on fanfiction.net, her available works consisted of these three novels, and her well-respected stories in the MX anthologies. (Unfortunately, Marcy, Sarah Bennett, and several others were forced to pull their Sherlockian content from fanfiction.net several years ago after some of their works were stolen – copied-and-pasted and then republished under other author names by way of Amazon’s self-publishing program.)



In late 2024, I was in the process of working toward assembling and editing the final volumes, Parts 49, 50, 51, and 52 of the MX anthologies, a process which would continue into early 2025. While looking around in my computer files, I found something I’d forgotten: Years earlier, I had saved and formatted the files for five of Marcy’s novels – those relating to Watson and Lestrade’s adventures during The Great Hiatus. Since the late 1990’s, I’ve printed and archived every traditional Canonical Holmes adventure that I’ve found online – thousands of them – and I have over 175 binders of pure Holmes adventures – including all of Marcy’s now-withdrawn stories. But luckily I had these novels as Word files. And I had an idea . . . .

I contacted Marcy, who hadn’t had time in several years to think about publishing more of her works, and asked if I could shepherd these five novels to publication – pro-bono, just because I was passionate about other people reading these incredible stories. Marcy was willing, and so I started editing with great enthusiasm – even as I was supposed to be editing the final MX volumes, stories for which were rolling in every day.

It soon became apparent to me that to publish these five novels without readers knowing the events of the missing Leap Year would be a confusing mess. Too much happened in these books that continued from what happened in Leap Year. Clearly, that missing volume would need to be edited and published too. And while I was at it, why not re-edit the previously published three books – You Buy Bones, The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon, and The Peaceful Night Poisonings – into an overall cohesive narrative?

MX Publisher Extraordinaire Steve Emecz, THE Sherlockian publisher and the Sherlockian Gutenberg – the man who made Sherlockian publishing accessible to real people instead of guarding a narrow doorway, or deciding that Sherlockian publishing should only be available for a very narrow cadre of self-described elites – was enthusiastic, and ready to proceed immediately. But I needed to actually finish editing the nine books first. It was a joy, and a labor of love to do so.



I had read all of these books serially as published, hopping from story to story as new chapters appeared, back in 2008-2011. But to read the story now, in one place, in order and available in its entirety, made it even more amazing – and exciting for the thought of new readers able to discover this magnificent world: Sherlock Holmes’s London, as seen through the eyes of the Scotland Yarders.

Even as I dug deeper into Marcy’s Scotland Yard adventures, I was remembering the other stories – the previously mentioned A Secondary Stain. Her Yarder’s Christmas novels, Gunnysack Goose for Christmas and A Mouth of Ivy. Short-story collections like Devilry and <i>It’s All in a Name. Other novels and novellas like The Muse of History, Ghosts in the Making, Courage Rises, The Kings and Queens of London, and the World War I narrative, The Days of Our Years. I had amazing fun editing the first nine books that are being published in 2025, and with any luck, I hope to be able to edit the rest of these, along with a collection of Marcy’s MX anthology contributions, over the next year or so, in order to fill in Marcy’s Great Scotland Yard Tapestry.

There are certain authors who “own” other Canonical characters by taking hold of them and defining them. The late Carole Nelson Douglas was Irene Adler’s chronicler. Michael Kurland gives us the best portrait of Professor Moriarty. Will Thomas has absolutely defined Barker, Holmes’s hated rival on the Surrey Side. The late Gerard Williams claimed Dr. Mortimer (even if only for two books), and Susan Knight is easily becoming the definitive voice of Mrs. Hudson.

But Marcia Wilson tells the True Story of the Scotland Yarders – and presents an amazing viewpoint of Holmes and Watson along the way.

I’ve said it many times before, and can’t say it any better now:

Marcia Wilson has found Scotland Yard’s Tin Dispatch Box.

BOOK I: You Buy Bones

In the late 1870’s, Inspector Lestrade consults an eccentric fellow named Sherlock Holmes, little realizing that this is just the beginning. A few years later, in early 1882, Dr. John H. Watson has shared rooms with Holmes for just a year, and he comes across evidence of a terrible crime concerning the family of one of Scotland Yard’s inspectors.

BOOK II: Test of the Professionals – The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon

It’s 1883, and someone is stealing lead (known as “flying blue pidgeon”) from the rooftops of London. Is it just a nuisance crime, or the first obscure clue revealing a staggering conspiracy? Meanwhile, a terrifying figure from Lestrade’s past surfaces, and he meets Miss Clea Cheatham – and her most unique family.

BOOK III: Test of the Professionals – The Peaceful Night Poisonings

Beginning immediately after the events of The Adventure of the Flying Blue Pidgeon, Lestrade recovers and his courtship takes tentative first steps while the other Scotland Yard inspectors, along with Holmes and Watson, seek to find the identity of the mysterious figure unifying London’s criminal element – and his connections with Lestrade’s lifelong tormenter.

BOOK IV: Test of the Professionals – Leap Year

In early 1884, a temporary peace has settled over London, as Lestrade’s lifelong enemy seems to be defeated, and his relationship with Clea Cheatham – never boring – is progressing satisfactorily. But it quickly becomes apparent that Lestrade is in deadly danger when he’s lured into a trap beneath London from which there is seemingly no survival.

BOOK V: The MoonCursers

Spring 1891: The case against Professor James Moriarty is almost complete, and movement has begun to destroy his organization – and while Holmes and Watson depart for the Continent and a fateful rendezvous at the Reichenbach Falls, Lestrade is kidnapped by his old enemy, the Professor’s agent, and begins a terrifying journey of his own, both above and below the surface of the earth.

BOOK VI: A Sword For Defense

In mid-1891, Dr. Watson attempts to pick up the pieces of his life following the apparent death of Sherlock Holmes. But his peace is quickly shattered when Colonel James Moriarty, Watson’s own personal foe from his time in India and Afghanistan, declares war on both Watson and the Scotland Yard inspectors who worked with Holmes – all in the name of restoring his dead brother’s reputation, and also to protect a long-standing and truly vile scheme. And Watson can’t reveal to Lestrade any of what happened all those years ago in the days leading up to the Battle of Maiwand. It’s up to Lestrade and the Yarders, working with the hints Watson can share, to take up the investigation.

BOOK VII: The Narrow Path

As Colonel Moriarty’s revenge takes shape, corruption is found within Scotland Yard. Meanwhile, the Yard’s investigation reveals ever more about the Colonel’s own crimes, and the deadly traps he’s set for his enemies.

BOOK VIII: The End of All Things

The gaps in the Yard’s investigation into Colonel Moriarty’s crimes, stretching all the way to his former service in India, begin to close – escalating the danger faced by Watson and the inspectors. Meanwhile, Watson and his friend Dr. Mortimer uncover a new aspect of the vast web of crimes on a remote Scottish island.

BOOK IX: A Fanged and Bitter Thing

In the midst of the battle with Colonel James Moriarty, a devastating event shakes Watson’s life to the very core. Having only his friends from the Yard to lean upon, he soldiers on. Then, with Watson’s life in danger, the Yarders combine forces to mount a rescue, and find themselves in a deadly war they never expected – even as Lestrade races toward the final confrontation with his own lifelong enemy.



*************************

© David Marcum 2025 – All Rights Reserved

“Marcum could be today’s greatest Sherlockian writer . . . .” – Lee Child, New York Times Bestselling Author

“David Marcum is the reigning monarch of all things Sherlockian . . . .” – John Lescroart, New York Times Bestselling Author

"Among the best I must number David Marcum, who, by this point has written more Holmes stories than Doyle himself. Characterized by unflagging imagination and ceaseless ingenuity, along with felicitous prose, these tales continue to provide what we all crave: more Sherlock." - Nicholas Meyer, New York Times Bestselling Author

"Marcum himself again demonstrates his gift for emulating the feel of The Canon . . . ." - Publishers Weekly



David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over 130 Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as Otto Penzler and Lee Child's The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 and The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins, Sherlock Holmes and The Eye of Heka, and The Collected Papers of Sherlock Holmes (117 stories in 7 volumes - so far). He has edited over 100 books, most traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 48 volumes, with more in preparation. The books have raised over $125,000 for the Undershaw school for special needs children, located at one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's former homes.

He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collections of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons and The Further Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books, and subsequently additional volumes of new Pons tales. He has done the same for The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions, as well as the Mystery Writers of America. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small). He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son, and since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015, 2016, and 2024 where you may have spotted him. (A fifth Pilgrimage is planned for May 2025.)If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

Friday, November 22, 2024

The Great War and The Great Holmes Tapestry

So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night.
Exodus 10:13

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.” “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it’s time that we were on our way. I have a check for five hundred pounds which should be cashed early, for the drawer is quite capable of stopping it if he can.”

– Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
2nd August, 1914
“His Last Bow”

In 1974, Nicholas Meyer astounded the world by finding a lost Watsonian manuscript. This wasn’t the first one of these that had been discovered, of course. In the late 1940’s, Ellery Queen received Watson’s narrative of the events that would later be filmed as A Study in Terror (1965). Ellery would publish Watson’s volume in 1966, along with additional segments relating his own latter-day investigation of the crime as described in Watson’s notes, expanding on Holmes’s solution. This was a wonderful book (and film) for both Sherlock Holmes and Ellery Queen admirers – but it was rather obscure, and it barely caused a ripple. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, on the other hand, unleashed a Sherlockian Tsunami.

Since the publication of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and the release of the film version two years later, the Sherlockian Golden Age that they brought about has only expanded with Big Bang-like intensity. This book awakened a new interest in Holmes that has never since diminished, and it paved the way for countless new volumes about The Great Detective – particularly new adventures. (I’m always highly satisfied that the Golden Age began not with a volume of esoteric scholarship, but instead with a newly discovered adventure, for Holmes’s adventures are what interest me.)

Some of the events of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution were clearly fictionalized, of course: The notion that Professor Moriarty was not The Napoleon of Crime, for instance, or that the Great Hiatus never actually occurred. (Clearly these aspects were appended onto Watson’s notes after-the-fact by someone related to the Professor – His equally nefarious brothers, perhaps? – in order to whitewash the Professor’s infinitely blackened reputation.) But other aspects of the book were true: Holmes did need to be pulled back from the clutches of cocaine, and he did meet Sigmund Freud.

Some Holmes scholars didn’t like that Holmes and Watson encountered Freud in this book, maintaining that The Canon should remain in some sort of isolated bubble. But why shouldn’t Our Heroes meet someone that is well known to the general public? They encountered other historical figures. It was Queen Victoria herself who presented Holmes with an emerald tie pin in late 1895. And why shouldn’t Holmes and Watson – themselves noted historical figures – meet other historical figures? Holmes and Watson moved through history, living lives and aging and interacting as people do. They were born in 1854 and 1852, respectively. They grew, learned, lived, and died as people do. They may be associated with the idea that “it is always eighteen ninety-five” (as Vincent Starrett put it), but they were actually deeply involved with many decades on either side of that magical year.

Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes Books


The release of Nicholas Meyer’s most recent Holmes adventure, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (2024), has again put forth the idea of Holmes and Watson interacting with historical figures and events. Once again editing from Watson’s notes, Meyer now relates one of Holmes and Watson’s adventures in World War I. From that, I was reminded of all the other adventures that take place during that four-year period.

I’ve written elsewhere about The Great Holmes Tapestry, that whole vast combination of Canon and pastiche wherein each provides an important thread to the whole picture. Some threads are perhaps brighter or thicker than others , but all contribute to filling in the Big Picture – the entire lives of Holmes and Watson, and not just what’s presented in the pitifully few original sixty Canonical cases. Perhaps another comparison would be to say that the union of Canon and pastiche forms a rope, with the Canonical adventures serving as the solid wire core, while all the threads and fibers of the additional pastiches bound around it provide greater substance and strength, with the two being indivisible. Or think of it as a skyscraper, with the Canon being the solid steel beams that support everything else – all the pieces and parts that fill in and decorate and make livable the empty spaces between the beams.

Since the mid-1990’s – now approaching three decades of effort – I’ve constructed and maintained a massive Chronology of both Canon and pastiche, breaking down Canonical and traditional Holmesian novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, films and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts by year, month, day, and even hour. Currently this dense document is approximately 1,200 pages, and it grows every day as new Holmes adventures are revealed and fit into this ever-growing and thoroughly complex puzzle.

It is no understatement that the years leading to and during and after The Great War were quite complex.

When looking at the overall Great Holmes Tapestry, and not focusing in too closely on just the sixty Canonical adventures, one can see the broader overall patterns. In terms of The Great War, there are cases stretching back as far as Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and beyond where Holmes, Watson, and Mycroft Holmes recognized that there was a storm brewing on the far horizon. It’s interesting to see how the threat of The Great War crops up years before its actual beginning, in the strangling entanglements of treaties and Royal relations and ever-increasing needs for raw materials and resources, and it’s amazing to observe Holmes and Watson’s heroic actions to prevent that war – or at least delay it as long as possible so that England will be on its best foot when the war finally comes.

Many think (and some adamantly insist) that the Adventures of Holmes and Watson end with “His Last Bow", which firmly takes place on August 2nd, 1914. The story occurs after Holmes has just spent two years undercover as “Altamont”, working his way into the trust of the German enemy, and at the conclusion, Watson plans to rejoin his old regiment, for war is imminent. Some Sherlockians are happy to close the book right there, forever. But as historical figures, Holmes and Watson weren’t finished. “His Last Bow” ended on Von Bork’s terrace on the night of August 2nd. After the curtain closes for us, they carried on. They got up the next day, August 3rd, and did what they had to do to defend Britain. And the same on August 4th and 5th,and the days after that too. Holmes and Watson had some truly amazing adventures after that second of August – “the most terrible August in the history of the world” as Watson puts it.

(For a more scholarly examination of "His Last Bow", see the volume Trenches (2017), including a fascimile of the original manuscript . . . .)



Fifty years after Nicholas Meyer found and published The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, he’s been given access to another adventure, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, detailing some of Holmes and Watson’s adventures in World War I, and reading it has put me in mind of what else those two Great Men were up to during that period between the events related in “His Last Bow” and the end of the war. Here is a guide to many – but not all – of these stories, stretching from 2 August, 1914, to when the guns fell silent, millions of deaths later, on 11 November, 1918 . . . .



As mentioned, here’s Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (2024). The “telegram” in question is the Zimmerman Telegram, the discovery of which helped finally propel the isolationist United States into the War. Meyer’s version gives a novel-length explanation of how this occurs, as Holmes and Watson travel from England to the United States, and then on to Mexico and back.

In the nature of tapestries, in which many threads weave together, Holmes was also instrumental in illuminating the Zimmerman Telegram in two other earlier stories. The first is “The Case of the Zimmerman Telegram”, found in Donald Thomas’s excellent collection Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil (2009).





The second is “The Adventure of the Three Telegrams”, masterfully presented by Darryl Webber in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part XV: 2019 Annual (1898-1917) . . .





The MX Anthologies will reach fifty volumes and over 1,000 traditional Canonical Holmes adventures in Spring 2025. A number of these will have been set during the War years, including tales presented by the following:

Hugh Ashton: • “The Adventure of the Deceased Doctor” in Part V – Christmas Adventures

Shane Simmons: • “The Intrigue of the Red Christmas” – Part XXX: More Christmas Adventures (1897-1928)
• “The Intrigue of the Torn Treaty” – Part XLVIII: Occupants of the Canonical Realm (1899-1924)

Martin Daley • “The Lambeth Twin” – Part XLV: 2024 Annual (1898-1917) (More about Martin in a moment . . . .)

Tim Symonds: “Die Weisse Frau” Part VI – 2017 Annual • “The Mystery of the Missing Artefacts” Part X – 2018 Annual (1896-1916)
• “The Spy on the Western Front” – Part XXXVI: “However Improbable . . . .” (1897-1919)

Tim Symonds also wrote another WWI story, “The Pegasus Affair”, in Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Beyond the Canon – Volume III: 1903-1921



A short story collection that specifically focused on Holmes and Watson’s adventures during The Great War was After the East Wind Blows – Part I: The East Wind Blows (1914-1918). (The second and third volumes contained cases after the War: Part II: Aftermath (1919-1920) and Part III: When the Storm Has Cleared (1921-1928).)



The wartime stories in Part I, the volume specifically devoted to the War, are:

• The Rescue at Ypres – David Marcum
• The Silent Sepoy – John Linwood Grant
• The Odd Telegram – Kevin P. Thornton
• The Adventure of the Synchronised Pup – Wayne Anderson
• The Conundrum of the Questionable Coins – Will Murray
• The Intrigue of the Kaiser Helmet – Shane Simmons
• The Adventure of the Floating Rifles – John Davis
• The Adventure of the Singular Needle – Andrew Salmon
• The Singular Case of Dr. Butler – Paula Hammond
• The Adventure of the Incomplete Cable – Dan Rowley
• The Case of the Despicable Client – John Lawrence
• The Adventure of the Absconded Corpse – I.A. Watson
• Checkmate – Robert Stapleton

In “His Last Bow Redux”, the events of “His Last Bow” are expanded to reveal what else was going on – specifically how Solar Pons was also involved that night and what he was doing when Holmes and Watson visited Von Bork’s long, low, heavily gabled house, perched on a great chalk cliff, overlooking the sea and Harwich just down the coast. This story originally appeared in The Meeting of the Minds: The Cases of Sherlock Holmes and Solar Pons (2021), and it was later reprinted in The Further Papers of Solar Pons (2022).





The Meeting of the Minds also contains the Holmes and Solar Pons Great War story "The Adventure of the Duplicate Detective" by Thomas A. Burns, Jr.

A portion of “Some Notes on the Matter of John Douglas”, included in Beyond Watson (2016), also relates some of Holmes and Watson’s activities a couple of days after “His Last Bow” – including a discussion of how Holmes was inspired to take on the identity of “Altamont” by the work done years earlier when Birdie Edwards similarly infiltrated The Scowrers. It's no accident that Holmes was influenced by Edwards, and how one year after Holmes finished his multi-year effort to infiltrate to infiltrate the enemy (from 1912 to 1914), Watson published Birdie Edwards' Story in The Valley of Fear (1915), while the war was just beginning . . . .





Other short story collections have Great War adventures including:

“The Darkest Hour” by Peter Holmstrom in Sherlock’s Home (2012)



“The Adventure of the Fallen Stone” by Win Scott Eckert in Sherlock Holmes – The Crossovers Casebook (2012)



“The Adventure of the Night Hunter” by Ralph E. Vaughn in The Great Detective (2012)



“The Adventure of the Eyrie Cliff” contained in A Sherlockian Quartet (1999) by the late Master Pasticheur Rick Boyer.



“The Adventure of the Mooning Sentry” by Jon L. Breen in Murder, My Dear Watson (2009)



Paul E. Heusinger’s The Secret Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2006) has two tales set in The Great War: The Irish Uprising” and “The Regimental Bugle”



And Daniel Darrouzet’s Stories from the Tin Box has “The Mad Sapper” . . . .



Part I of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King occurs in early 1915, relating how Mary Russell meets Sherlock Holmes, and enters into an apprenticeship (in those years before she lost her mind and believed that she and Holmes married).



Additional information from this period can be found in Mary Russell’s War.



And for more about Russell losing her mind, see my blog entry: “Necessary Rationalizations: The Overall Chronology of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Along with the Truth About Mary Russell)" at:

https://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/2018/08/necessary-rationalizations-overall.html

In the 1970’s, after Nicholas Meyer started the Sherlockian Golden Age (with a new adventure), other stories began to surface, including Hellbirds (1976) by Nicholas Utechin and Austin Mitchelsen – shown here in both the original paperback version, and the late hardcover from Ian Henry.



In the mid-1990’s, Ian Henry produced a number of Sherlockian volumes, some reprints and some newly discovered. At that time, they and Breese Books were responsible for Sherlockian publishing, the way that MX Publishing and Belanger Books are today. Another title published by Ian Henry was the self-explanatory Sherlock Holmes and the Lusitania (1999) by Lorraine Daly:



A name very associated with Breese Books was the prolific Val Andrews. He produced several titles set specifically during the War Year, including Sherlock Holmes on the Western Front (2000 from Breese), Sherlock Holmes and the Wood Green Empire Mystery (1985, Magico Publishing, under the pen-name “W. Lane”), and a series of five small Magico chapbooks, collectively called Sherlock Holmes in Retirement ("The Carriage-Clock", "The Beekeeper", "The Fair", "The Fowlhaven Werewolf", and "The Last Reunion").



Another Breese book dealing with the war years was Ian Charnock’s Watson’s Last Case (2000), relating the efforts to save the Romanovs.



The matter of the Romanovs was also addressed in Phil Growick’s The Secret Journal of Dr. Watson (2012, MX) and Sherlock Holmes’s Revenge (2014).



The War as it related to the Romanovs was addressed in the most interesting way possible in John Lescroart’s Rasputin’s Revenge (1987), the second of his two Auguste Lupa books. The first, Son of Holmes (1986) introduces the reader to Lupa, a heavy-set fellow in his twenties who is probably the greatest secret agent in wartime Europe. He’s a gourmet chef who loves beer and favors yellow shirts. Auguste Lupa is an alias – sometimes he takes a name that has a Roman Caesar’s first name and a variant of “Wolf” as the last. On a past occasion he was known as “Julius Adler”. Obviously, these two books are massively important in connecting up Nero Wolfe - for who else could Auguste Lupa be? - with his father, Sherlock Holmes. (It's confirmed in Rasputin's Revenge that the future Nero Wolfe is Holmes's son.) These are highly recommended.



Marcia Wilson’s brilliant stories and novels about Lestrade, Gregson, Bradstreet, and the rest of the Scotland Yarders includes the novel-length The Days of Our Years – so far privately printed . . . but here’s my archived copy:



Craig Stephen Copland set out to write sixty novellas, each with some relation to the original Canonical adventures. Many would have withered along the way, but Craig not only excellently completed what he promised to do, but he’s also contributed a number of other tales to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, and other anthologies. His World War I tale is The Adventure of Mata Hari’s Harem (2021).



Martin Daley entered the Sherlockian world with a World War I-era adventure published alternatively as Sherlock Holmes and the Carlisle Adventure of the Spanish Drums (2003) and The Adventure of the Spanish Drums (2010). (Holmes and Watson meet Sergeant Armstrong in this tale – and he later appears in a number of Daley’s Inspector Armstrong books.)



Other full-length adventures include Kieran McMullen’s Sherlock Holmes and the Irish Rebels (2011):



George Mann’s Sherlock Holmes: The Spirit Box (2011)



Simon Guerrier’s Sherlock Holmes: The Great War (2021) and Richard Barton’s similarly named Sherlock Holmes and the Great War: The Adventures of an Elderly Detective in 1916 (2023)



In addition to an e-book containing six traditional Canonical adventures (The Case of the Six Watsons), Robert Ryan has authored four massive masterpieces relating Watson’s activities during World War I:

Dead Man’s Land (2012)
The Dead Can Wait (2014)
A Study in Murder (2015)
The Sign of Fear (2016)



Charles Veley and Anna Elliott have written many in their ever-growing Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James series, and from these, Ms. Elliott has spun off the five-volume (so far) books about Becky and Flynn, two former Irregulars, in The Great War. These books are spin-offs from the ever-growing Sherlock and Lucy series, and include

Guarded Ground (2021)
Hidden Harm (2022)
Watch and Ward (2022)
Safe You Sleep (2023)
Star-Sown Sky (2023)



And Larry Millett, who has brought forth a number of Holmes novels, several of which are set in St. Paul and also include Shadwell Rafferty, has given us a stand-alone Rafferty book, The Magic Bullet (2022). Set in 1917, Rafferty has to solve a locked-room mystery – with help from his old friend, Sherlock Holmes . . . .



Then there's Tracy Cooper-Posey's The Reluctant Agent (2001) -



An interesting collection, The Affairs of Sherlock Holmes (2016), prepared by Alan Lance Andersen, converted old Sax Rohmer public domain adventures into Holmes cases, which seem from internal evidence to possibly take place in the years around World War I. Shown here are both the original one-volume Lulu edition, and the later two-volume MX books.



Of even greater curiosity than the Rohmer collection is Philp Jose Farmer’s The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (1974), set in 1916, when Holmes and Watson travel to Africa and encounter Tarzan - aka John Clayton, Lord Greystoke – in his natural habitat. Unfortunately, this book is bad and dives into parody. Fortunately, we know what Tarzan was actually doing during the War, as related in Tarzan the Untamed (1919-1920) and Tarzan the Terrible (1920).



Farmer got into trouble with the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate with this book, and it was later revised as “The Adventure of the Three Madmen”, published in The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1989), shifting the action to India and featuring Mowgli instead of Tarzan. The result was even more disappointing than the original version.



A somewhat Alternate Universe oddity is In the Dead of Winter (1994), a Myrl Adler Norton book by Abbey Pen Baker. I can’t recommend it, but I didn’t want to leave it out as I ran across it while gathering volumes to photograph for this essay.



There are stories of The Great War represented in online fan-fiction as well. John MacDonnell wrote five of them:

• “The Cryptologist’s Daughter”
• “A Nodule of Flint”
• “A Gallery of Art”
• “An Ama Diver”
• “An Exchange of Prisoners”

Terry Alan Klasek wrote “The Adventure of the Disappearing Sovereign”

And there are many fan-fics about the aforementioned Mary Russell – more than are listed here. (One might notice that the authors of these tales tend to shelter beneath their most-curious pseudonyms.)

• “Hedges” - merely a whim
• “A Relative Case of Blackmail” - merely a whim
• “This Dream” - Of Holmes, whom I loved
• “Death and Resurrection” - From Canon to Kanon
• “A Matter of Faith” - An Oxford Punter
• “Untitled” - Uniformly Angela Tircuit, aka Uniformly Swarthy
• “Under the Weather” - Angela Tircuit, aka Uniformly Swarthy
• “A Retrospective of the Partnership” - Branwyn
• “A Rocky Start” - Casey21
• “The Dreaded Conversation” - Francesca
• “Eye of the Beholder” - Moira Brennan
• “Welcome Distractions” - Kay Rivera aka criminal charming
• “The Prodigal Son” - My Lady's Daughter
• “The Most Charming Case of Apoplexy” - Nineteen year old not quite a lady
• “Peculiar Pecuniary Points” - Vestige of Femininity

A most-important printed story set in this period tellshow Holmes and Watson ended The Great War on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918: L.B. Greenwood’s “The Case of the Last Battle” in The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories





Holmes and Watson’s adventures during The Great War have been mostly ignored by radio and film. In fact, only one radio show has related a wartime adventure – “In Flanders Field” (May 14, 1945, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce).



The script for this work was later rendered as a story in The Forgotten Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2005) by H. Paul Jeffers:



Only one film covers Holmes and Watson’s activities during this period, although a bit of explanation is necessary to understand it. In 1942, Universal Films began a series of twelve films in which Holmes was updated to the 1940's "modern time" - 1940's clothes, 1940's cars, and 1940's Nazis. The first three of these, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943), and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) were actually Solar Pons’s World War I adventures, wherein Holmes and Watson’s names were changed to Pons and Dr. Lyndon Parker for easier familiarity by the audience. For further information regarding these changes, see my blog entry “Basil Rathbone’s Solar Pons Films” at:

https://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/2016/11/basil-rathbones-solar-pons-films.html

Of the remaining nine Universal Holmes films, only one – Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) – takes place in World War I, although the 1940’s clothing, automobiles, etc., were still used to make the film feel as if it were taking place contemporarily within World War II.



(The following final eight Universal Holmes films were actually adapted from Holmes’s earlier turn-of-the-century non-war-related investigations, althouth they were still updated to have a modern 1940’s feel.)

And here’s a final thought: Years ago, on my first tentative dips into Sherlockian Social Media, I contributed some posts to the old Scarlet Street Sherlockian message board. One of them was to adamantly suggest that David Robb – who was then appearing as Dr. Clarkson on Downton Abbey – should be cast as a World War I-era Dr. Watson.





In fact, here's that post, from February 5th, 2013



. . . and here's the link to read it . . .

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/scarletstreet/downton-abbey-has-given-us-the-next-great-watson-t8807.html

A few years later, I made the same suggestion on Facebook . . .



. . . and a few years after that, I also suggested that Daniel Day-Lewis should play Holmes to Robb’s Watson:







In May 2018, this idea was picked up and spread by I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, to wide enthusiasm:

https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2018/05/casting-holmes-and-watson-in-his-last.html

And even though neither of these fine actors have played Holmes and Watson on screen, David Robb has portrayed Watson – and all the other characters – in the audio book versions of Nicholas Meyers’ Holmes novels The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (2019), The Return of the Pharaoh (2021) . . . and now Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell – the new Holmes World War I adventure that prompted this entire essay.



(David Robb and Nicholas Meyer)

The old wheel turns,” Holmes once told Watson, “and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.” I can’t wait to see what else we’ll find out in the coming years regarding Holmes and Watson’s adventures during The Great War . . . .



*************************

© David Marcum 2024 – All Rights Reserved

“Marcum could be today’s greatest Sherlockian writer . . . .” – Lee Child, New York Times Bestselling Author

“David Marcum is the reigning monarch of all things Sherlockian . . . .” – John Lescroart, New York Times Bestselling Author

"Among the best I must number David Marcum, who, by this point has written more Holmes stories than Doyle himself. Characterized by unflagging imagination and ceaseless ingenuity, along with felicitous prose, these tales continue to provide what we all crave: more Sherlock." - Nicholas Meyer, New York Times Bestselling Author

"Marcum himself again demonstrates his gift for emulating the feel of The Canon . . . ." - Publishers Weekly



David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over 130 Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as Otto Penzler and Lee Child's The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 and The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins, Sherlock Holmes and The Eye of Heka, and The Collected Papers of Sherlock Holmes (117 stories in 7 volumes - so far). He has edited over 100 books, most traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 48 volumes, with more in preparation. The books have raised over $125,000 for the Undershaw school for special needs children, located at one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's former homes.

He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collections of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons and The Further Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books, and subsequently additional volumes of new Pons tales. He has done the same for The Adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions, as well as the Mystery Writers of America. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small). He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son, and since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015, 2016, and 2024 where you may have spotted him. (A fifth Pilgrimage is planned for May 2025.)If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM