– 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”
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.
(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 (177 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
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