The Adventure of the Imaginary Detective

Sherlock Holmes: The man who never lived and will never die. The poster boy of Victorian fiction, doyen of the great detectives. But who was he? Who is he, besides a Hollywood star and fixture of Christmas Day TV schedules? Why does he command such a loyal following even now, a hundred and thirty years on since he first appeared in A Study in Scarlett?

I present here, a fresh new case: The Adventure of the Imaginary Detective. Together, will be looking for clues and carefully sifting through the facts. By the end I hope we will have reached a satisfactory conclusion. But for now, I would ask that you all remain within this room until the case is resolved.

Film poster for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Now it is impossible to imagine the outcry that followed the death of Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem. The Victorians wore black arm bands in the street. The national newspapers ran obituaries. 20,000 people cancelled their subscription to the Strand magazine. Except perhaps for the break up of The Beatles, there is no modern equivalent. To his fans, he was fully alive, leaping off the page, and glowing as brightly as the tobacco in his famous pipe bowl.  This insatiable public appetite for Holmes perhaps was ultimately the reason why he eventually returned, never to leave us again.

But there is so much more to Holmes that the two-dimensional sleuth of popular culture. The Holmes of the original canon, the fifty six stories and four novellas, which we will confine ourselves to here, is a surprising, complicated and flawed character, foibles that only serve to make him more attractive.   

‘I’ve found it. I’ve found it!’ These were the first words we hear Holmes utter in that memorable first adventure from 1887, and they echo down the years. They also serve as a manifesto. Holmes finds the solution time and again.

I stumbled into writing Sherlock Holmes fiction almost entirely by accident. My brother rang me up one day asking for a suggestion or a name for his online jewellery shop. I asked him what sort of pieces he had and he told me a about a strange ruby elephant he had acquired from an American collector. I thought for a moment and suggested the name ‘The House of the Ruby Elephant.’ Immediately this sounded to me like the name of Holmes adventure.

A quick internet search however, revealed that Anthony Horowitz had just published his Sherlock Holmes adventure: The House of Silk. I changed mine to The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants, and without so much as a plot, I began my first novel in earnest.

It begins with the escape of an elephant from London Zoo and leads Watson and Holmes on an unlikely search for lost Indian diamonds that leads them to Queen Victoria and the last Maharaja of India via rural Suffolk and Lord’s Cricket Ground.  

Along the way, they encounter four sinister characters called the archangels – assassins in top hats and sharpened canes hell-bent on the destruction of Holmes and the acquisition of the diamonds. I’ve since written two more: The Jeweller of Florence, and published just last month The Adventure of the Beer Barons.

The Adventure of the Beer Barons

In this blog, we will learn only about the man. We will find out where he came from. We will meet his friends and his enemies. We will study his methods and try and think like him. But before we begin our investigations, a word of warning, from Holmes himself:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.“

So let us not speculate, but acquire our data first, and by the only means Holmes would approve: by scrupulous observation.

The precursor to Holmes

Let us first consider his origins. Sherlock Holmes did not of course simply pop out of thin air, fully formed.

Now there are many who believe, or choose to believe, that Holmes was in fact quite real. And who am I to say they’re wrong? Was he just a figment of Dr Watson’s imagination? However most agree that Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was his creator.  

Born in 1859, Conan Doyle (No hyphen) was 38 when the first Holmes story was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. As well as a writer of prose fiction, he was a poet, a playwright, a spiritualist and trained doctor, suggestive of course, of Dr Watson’s occupation. He was well travelled having been ship’s doctor on a whaling ship, but in the early 1880s settled down, like Watson to start a general medical practice, first with his friend, and later on his own.

However, and fortunately for us, Conan Doyle’s practice was not a success. With few patients, he filled in time by writing his stories. It is tempting to think that many of the characters that populate the adventures drew their inspiration from his list of patients. We also know he had a rival working around the corner called Dr James Watson.  

Now while Conan Doyle proved a writer of great invention, and perhaps genius, he cannot however take credit for inventing the detective fiction genre.

Holmes may be the best remembered, but there were several who came before him and who are now considered the precursors to Sherlock Holmes. There was Inspector Bucket from Dicken’ Bleak House, but the most relevant to our enquiries perhaps was a character called Auguste Dupin, conceived by that master of the gothic, Edgar Allen Poe.

Dupin is now almost completely forgotten, eclipsed by the blinding light of Sherlock Holmes’ fame.  Yet he reflects many of the qualities we later come to associate with Holmes. He is reclusive, eccentric and follows a rigorously scientific method. He has a superior manner, divorces himself from his emotions and regularly reveals the incompetence of the police. Does that sound familiar yet? If that’s not all, he also has a side kick who becomes the narrator of his stories.

Dupin’s first appearance came in 1841 in the Murders in La Rue Morgue, a full 46 years before A Study in Scarlett in 1887. I’d like to read you a little bit to give you a taste of Dupin and his methods:

Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 1840, I there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. This young gentleman was of an excellent—indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it.

Our first meeting was at an obscure library in La Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again. I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is his theme. I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination.

Seeking in Paris the objects I then sought, I felt that the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I frankly confided to him. It was at length arranged that we should live together during my stay in the city; and as my worldly circumstances were somewhat less embarrassed than his own, I was permitted to be at the expense of renting, and furnishing in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.

Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen—although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone.

We were strolling one night down a long dirty street in the vicinity of the Palais Royal. Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke forth with these words:

“He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and would do better for the Théâtre des Variétés.”

“There can be no doubt of that,” I replied unwittingly, and not at first observing the extraordinary manner in which the speaker had chimed in with my meditations. In an instant afterward I recollected myself, and my astonishment was profound.

“Dupin,” said I, gravely, “this is beyond my comprehension. I do not hesitate to say that I am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses. How was it possible you should know what I was thinking of?’

“Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.’ 

 “I will explain,” he said, “and that you may comprehend all clearly, we will first retrace the course of your meditations, from the moment in which I spoke to you until that of the rencontre with the fruiterer in question. The larger links of the chain run thus—Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.”

You will note that Dupin has a very similar manner to Holmes, the same apparent gift for reading minds and divining the seemingly impossible. He has the same supercilious way in which he explains his method, based on the twin sciences of observation and deduction.

There is the also same dynamic between the two men as Watson and Holmes; the same balance of power – Dupin superior in intellect, the other dumbfounded by his conclusions.

The story also has a Holmesian ring of strangeness to it. The bodies of two woman are found in a locked upper room – a mother and daughter, one of whom is found in the chimney. There are deep scratches and bruises on their bodies. Shall I tell you how it ends? If not, please skip on. An orang otang belonging to a sailor living close by escapes, climbs up the lightening rod, enters the women’s room and commits the murders.

The story was later made into a film starring Bela Legosi – although as you can see from the poster, they clearly didn’t mind giving the ending away.

Film poster for Murders in The Rue Morgue

The key difference of course between Holmes and Dupin, is that he is a Frenchman and his stomping ground is Paris rather than Baker Street. Transplanting this character to London was a canny move on Conan Doyle’s part, but I think you will agree that he owes something of a debt of gratitude to Edgar Allen Poe.

Joseph Bell

There was a real-life inspiration too. Joseph Bell was a Scottish surgeon whom Conan Doyle worked for while at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

He was a pioneer in several ways, both in his habits and interests. He was one of the first experts in forensic medicine, helping the police in a number of matters including the notorious Ripper murders. But it was the fact that he based his medical work on close observation, often diagnosing patients based on tiny, almost invisible symptoms that suggests he was a model for Holmes. He would also use his powers of observation and deduction to play games where he would deduce a man’s occupation and character merely by his appearance. You can well imagine Conan Doyle as an impressionable young clerk in thrall to Bell, totally impressed and mystified by the older man’s exceptional skills and masterful manner.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who also worked for Bell wrote to Conan Doyle write to the authors after reading the first Holmes adventure. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘Holmes is based on old Joe Bell!’ 

So let’s get to know Holmes a little better. I have spent the last five years in the company of Sherlock Holmes. Not in the form of a box-set or with the benefit of the iPlayer but sitting inside 221b Baker Street in my guise of Dr Watson. I have had the opportunity to observe him a close-quarters in his lesser known stories: The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants, The Jeweller of Florence and the Adventure of the Beer Barons. He is infuriating, unpredictable and ferociously intelligent. Indeed the biggest problem writing a Sherlock Holmes adventure is writing about a character who is more intelligent than you are. There have been many instances where I have ceased typing and stopped in astonishment at some utterance or revelation. It is as if I am discovering the solution at the same time as my fictional alter ego. 

There are a few unspoken rules when writing Sherlock Holmes’ fiction. First and foremost, you must never kill off Watson, and certainly not Holmes, for the simple reason that it would spoil the fun for everyone else.  It’s worth noting that this is not a rule Conan Doyle chose to follow himself.

There are other rules too. You mustn’t tinker with the chronology. You can’t send him off to India in 1890 when we know he was in Devon. If you do set a novel further afield, you need to set it during the great Hiatus, between his supposed death and his return in the adventure of the empty house.

There’s another important rule. In the novels, he is never Sherlock. Always Holmes, except in the company of his brother, where only Mycroft is permitted to address him by his first name. This presents problems for writers who must keep finding new ways to refer to him, without writing the word Holmes on every line. You end up writing many lines such as these: ‘I regarded my friend with a weary affection.’

Now let’s us consider the man and his habits

Holmes the hedonist

Holmes was inordinately fond of his pleasures. For a man famous for his brain work, by the same measure, he did not deny himself the pleasures of the flesh. Let’s look the beginning of The Adventure of the Illustrious Client:

Both Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else. 

This is quite typical of Holmes’ self-indulgence, and there is something of the decadent nineties that pervades all the stories. After all, this is the decade bestrode by Oscar Wilde, who memorably declared: ‘Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.’  

In the Adventure of the Twisted Lip, Watson finds Holmes in an opium den:

‘I suppose Watson,’ said he, ‘that you imagine I have added opium smoking to cocaine injections and all the other little weaknesses on which you have favoured me with your medical views’ On this occasion, he was in fact on business rather than pleasure.  

Then there is Holmes the smoker. Pipes, cigars, cigarettes, loose tobacco. You name it, Holmes smokes it. In fact without the references to smoking, the 670,000 Conan Doyle wrote across the adventures of Sherlock Holmes would be probably be halved. Never was there a worse case of passive smoking than the one suffered by poor Dr Watson. But you see smoking is considered essential to Holmes’ brain work.

“It is quite a three pipe problem,’ he tells Watson. ‘and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”

Don’t you love the precision of that? He doesn’t know the solution to the problem yet, but he knows exactly how long it will take him to get there.

This is one of my favourite descriptions of Holmes’ habits and its inextricable link with his thought processes:

A large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure. Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over.

He put on a large, blue dressing gown and then wandered around the room collecting pillows from the bed and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Easter divan, upon which he perched himself crosses legged with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp, I saw him sitting there, an old brier pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him. 

The references are exhaustive, the most famous perhaps being the fact that he kept his tobacco in his Persian slipper and his cigars in the coal scuttle. These are two of the key references for any aspiring writer of Holmes fiction. Leave them out and you will leave the fans disappointed.

Smoking is not confined to quiet moments at Baker Street. Cigar and cigarette ash are often the key to solving cases too and we learn Holmes has written monograms about identifying different types of ash.

Now of course Sherlock Holmes is all about finding solutions. But when there is no case to absorb him, he turns to a solution of quite a different kind. I’m referring of course, to Holmes’ most notorious transgression: the 7 percent solution. Conan Doyle makes no attempt to conceal Holmes’ cocaine use, appearing as it does in in the very first line of The Sign of Four.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat Moroccon case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff.

It is hard to imagine even an Irvine Welsh novel beginning in such a brazen way. But he turns to narcotics only when there is no brainwork to be had. It helps him ‘escape from the commonplaces of existence.’

He requires constant stimulation of the mind – and when there is none, he either withdraws to his room, in a funk for days at a time, or reverts to his cocaine use. Indeed it seems quite probable evidence that Holmes was a sufferer from bipolar disorder – susceptible to unpredictable mood swings. One minute he is waking Watson in the dead of night to pursue a suspect through the rain, the next he refuses to leave his room for three days.

For the most part, brainwork dominates the stories. Holmes is not the man depicted in the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Junior version, swinging from chandeliers like Zorro. Notwithstanding several memorable episodes involving bartitsu, an obscure branch of the martial arts, which involves the use of a cane, and a spot of boxing, he is more commonly found in his mouse-coloured dressing gown, slumped in his chair until the small hours losing himself in a problem

Holmes is not merely a brain on a stick. Nor is he some sort of 19^th century superhero. He is an unusual combination of both mental and physical prowess.

To anyone thinking of writing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. There is one simple piece of advice. Read all of Conan Doyle’s stories first. Yet it transpires that this is not something Conan Doyle chose to do himself. Despite his obvious mastery of plot and character, the books are full of continuity errors.

The mystery of the three dressing gowns.

Holmes dressing gown is described first as blue, then as purple, then mouse coloured. Conan Doyle clearly had better things to do that go rummaging through his old stories to keep things consistent.

Then there’s Dr Watson. Considering he is one of the two main characters, one would have thought that the author would keep a few notes as an aide memoir. But again, Conan Doyle is hilariously inconsistent. In one story the bullet wound he receives in Afghanistan is in the shoulder. In another it is in the leg. This gives the modern writer a dilemma as to which version he is going to use.

In the Man with the Twisted Lip, Conan Doyle even get his name wrong, with Mary referring to him as James, rather than John. (By the way, did you know that Holmes’ sidekick was originally called Ormond Sacker, before settling on John Watson?) And to keep up with Watson’s marriages is beyond the abilities of most.

There is even a Conan Doyle adventure that is set in the years after Holmes death in his tussle with Moriarty but before his resurrection in the Adventure of the Empty House. But if anything, these errors only add to the charm. And as I have found out myself, there is nothing a true Sherlockian enjoys more than pointing out an error. Indeed some have speculated that this was Conan Doyle’s intention – laying mysteries within mysteries. More likely he was churning out the stories at such a rate he didn’t have time to check them properly.

But what is that really appeals about the stories? Undoubtable, there is something in Holmes’ magnetic charisma and he dynamic between Holmes and Watson. Then there is the remarkably stylish prose, the quick as a whip plotting and Conan Doyle’s unique ability to create a vivid sketch of a character in just a couple of lines. Listen to this description of Inspector Bardle of the Sussex Constabulary — he was ‘a steady, solid, bovine man with thoughtful eyes, which looked at me now with a very troubled expression.’ Just a sentence but you get a very complete sense of his character and appearance. This is a remarkable skill, but an essential one for a writer of short stories.

But it is the alchemy of it all working together that makes it such a success. Yes, the adventures are formulaic, but there is wit and invention in abundance. Above all, there is an unusual facility of the language that elevates these stories above the commonplace. Shakespeare used approximately 28,000 unique words. Conan Doyle uses 35,000. He may have been writing popular fiction, but he saw no reason to compromise the quality of the writing.

So what have we learned about Holmes?

He’s a hedonist and man of action, but whose greatest pleasure is brain work. He’s an eccentric who owns three different coloured dressing gowns. He values friendship but has very few. He is detached from his emotions but is capable of feeling great pride and envy. He is blessed with an unusually brave and loyal friend in Dr Watson.

The stories have endured because of the quality of their writing and ingenious plotting. They are full of glamour and decadence – the Victorians and Edwardians enjoyed them in the same way we enjoy watching a James Bond film. But I think it is for the unique dynamic between Watson and Holmes and the quality of darkness and strangeness that the stories continue to appeal.    

So, after 130 years, the Holmes phenomenon show no signs of abating. To spend time in the man’s company is to be constantly delighted and confounded.

But have we proved that Sherlock Holmes was imaginary? I’m not so sure.  How often has Holmes told us that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Christopher James is the author of three Holmes novels, most recently Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Beer Barons.

Fragment of lost play by William Shakespeare discovered in Tuscany

Four hundred years on from Shakespeare’s death, the discovery of a fragment of a new play, The Jeweller of Florence, is dividing academic opinion. Could there really be an undiscovered work in the Bard’s canon?

There are two plays generally accepted to be written, at least in part, by William Shakespeare, which are now considered ‘lost.’ The first, ironically, is titled, Love’s Labour’s Won and is mentioned on a contemporaneous 16th century bookseller’s list. It is also referred to by the late 16^th century writer Francis Meres, although no text is extent. This has led some scholars to believe that it was merely an alternative title for All’s Well That Ends Well or Much Ado About Nothing.

Then there is the intriguing prospect of Cardenio, said to be a late collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher, also referenced in documents from Shakespeare’s time. Its source, it is said, is Cervantes’ Don Quixote , which fits Shakespeare’s pattern of drawing on existing sources as the starting point for his own works. Over a hundred years on from Shakespeare’s death, a play emerged called Double Falsehood  produced by one Lewis Theobald in 1727. He admitted that he adapted it from no less than three manuscripts of an unnamed play by Shakespeare. Critical consensus is that Double Falsehood does indeed contain authentic work by Shakespeare.

This leads to the most recent discovery, in February 2016 of a single page of a play in a private collection of papers in Lama, a remote hamlet in Tuscany. ‘The fragment is a tantalizing prospect,’ says Shakespearean expert, Professor Anna Greening, ‘made even more so by the name of Ferdinando I de’Medici inscribed in the margin, leading some to believe he was the patron of the work.

‘It is thought to be written around the same time as The Merchant of Venice, 1596, possibly earlier. A draft of the inscription, also included in the papers reads: The most excellent history of The Jeweller of Florence being the true account of the marriage between Alessandra, daughter of the Duke of Florence and Flavio, master jeweller. With the obtaining of a necklace of pearls for the wife of the Duke and the comic interludes of Filippo the clown who appears in divers jocular scenes.’ 

It was discovered in a cache of papers by a family who had recently purchased a property in the area. ‘The theory runs as follows,’ says Professor Greening. ‘Ferdinando I de’Medici, son of the infamous Cosimo I of Florence, was a cardinal and eventually the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was a ruthless and perhaps a cruel man even by the standards of the day. But at heart, he was an artist. This manifested itself in his collecting. He was a man of enormous curiosity and boundless appetites. He created an unrivalled collection of sculpture, bestowed patronage on poets and composers and commissioned mosaics, notably the intricate pietre dure created from precious stones.

‘Above all, he was obsessed by the idea of artistic genius. As a man of the court, naturally his principle entertainment was theatre. The re-enactments of battles on the Arne are legend. But he was a man of the world and his interests extended far beyond the shores of the Mediterranean. He dreamed of establishing civilizations in the new world, creating great cities in Brazil. We believe he had heard of this man William Shakespeare and had his plays translated and enacted for him. He was fascinated by the playwright’s mind; how he could conjure a man from the air and make him as real as you or I. But it was not enough simply to hear his plays; the same words that had been heard by countless others. The Medici was a family of limitless wealth and power. Nothing was impossible for them and once set on a course they could not be easily swayed. Through his brokers he sent word to England that he would commission this playwright at whatever cost. He wanted a play that would be no less dazzling in its ambitions than any other Shakespeare’s great works. For this he would pay handsomely. But there was one condition, it must be his and his alone.

‘A fee was negotiated, it is believed through Richard Burbage, the actor and one of Shakespeare’s closest associates. No one has recorded the sum, but it must have been stupendous. In 1596, he was writing four plays simultaneously. How could he write another?

‘Legend has it,’ continues Professor Greening, ‘that he wrote it in a furious burst over three days. At the end of it he drank a bottle of Spanish wine and then slept for a day and a night. A single copy was printed in conditions of the greatest secrecy.’

If the theory seems fanciful, then the fragment itself is convincing enough, even if, perhaps it does not contain some of Shakespeare’s greatest poetry.

DUKE

What music, sir, is this?

 

ANTONIO 

Tis wedding music, my lord. They practice as larks at dawn.

 

DUKE

What happy pair will join in such delight?

Hannibal’s elephants would not trumpet

With such joy as this. The trunks of England’s

Trees would shake at such a cacophony.

This fanfare of angels, this well wrought sound

of heaven, has seeped through our vault of sky

and filled the twin cathedrals of our ears.

Fetch me those who engendered this row

I shall bless their matrimony, their solemn vow.   

 

                                                                (They go)

 

SILVIO

What foul weather has blighted our fair conceit!

The servant’s flapping tongue forewarns the duke

Of a marriage. But yet he has not wind

That these nuptials are his own daughter’s,

And that she is betrothed to the only son

Of his foresworn enemy. What dark skies

would come from this unseen tempest;  

such squalls and that would wreck his heart.

 

MARCELLO

Soft, fair brother, he hath not the reason

Nor temperament to suspect; his season

Is always spring; serenity blossoms

In him as bitterness dwells in the spleen

Of the cynic; by the time he smells the rose

The altar will be clear, the candles snuffed.

 

SILVIO

Now where goes Flavio? These hours ‘til our

Brother’s union will I fear be fraught;

But for a stoup of wine to numb our nerves.    

 

While the possibility of a hoax remains, the pages are currently being forensically examined and dated with the results expected in January 2017. Then there is the question of the remainder of the play. Is it still waiting somewhere on a Tuscan hillside to be discovered?

There is a compelling piece of evidence that corroborates the story. In 1597 Shakespeare suddenly found the money to buy New Place, the grandest house in all of Stratford. How could a simple actor find such wealth?

The discovery has already inspired a work of fiction: Sherlock Holmes and The Jeweller of Florence, by Christopher James, which puts the famous detective on the trail of the lost play.

The Sherlock Holmes Toolkit – 10 things you’ll need to write a new Holmes adventure

So what are the ten things every aspiring Sherlock author needs to write a convincing Holmes novel or short story?

1. A splendid title, preferably with a colour in it: there are no less than ten adventures in the original canon that feature a colour in the title, from The Adventure of the Yellow Face to The Adventure of the Red Circle.
2. A reliable guide to Victorian London slang:
3. A superb, twisty plot. If you can’t come up with one of your own, why not seek help from this work of madness: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/06/plotto/
4. Some historical knowledge of the year in which your adventure is set. Your friend Wikipedia is the invaluable help.
5. All 56 Holmes short stories and four longer works. There is simply no point starting until you’ve read all of these. You will just annoy aficionados with your school boy/girl errors..
6. The MacGuffin – the object, person or idea that the protagonists seek and which drives the plot along. Think Rosebud in Citizen Kane. For your Holmes adventure this could be a suitably curious object of unknown providence. I used eight ruby elephants for my first Holmes adventure.
7. Some choice vocabulary. Holmes is an eloquent fellow. You may need to brush up your English if you are to produce a truly credible effort.
8. A brilliant villain – give him some suitably grotesque impediment, such as a missing ear or six toes on one foot. He should be a match for Holmes in strength and intellect. Don’t automatically reach for Moriarty.
9. Some light relief – there’s plenty of humour in the original canon, so bring on some light relief in the form of some helpful nitwit or ludicrous situation. In The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants, Holmes stuffs a diminutive monocle salesman (who insists on wearing two monocles at the same time) in a large Ming vase.
10. Some philosophical moments – some of the best of Conan Doyle’s writing is when Holmes muses on some aspect of the human condition from his lofty vantage point in 221B Baker Street.

Buy two new Sherlock adventures for a limited time only on eBay, including The Jeweller of Florence which is not officially available until 16 September 2016

The Thirty-Nine Steps

It was only last year that I finally got around to reading John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. I’d watched the celebrated Hitchcock film, but the book has a particularly stylish and exhilarating quality all of its own. The voice of the irrepressible, resourceful Richard Hannay, an engineer and intelligence officer recently arrived in London from Africa  is what gives its character, both cynical and scornful of authority. The pace is astonishing, with several things happening almost at once – there are chases, explosions and gun fights, but the central motif is travel.

Buchan clearly has fun with the possibilities offered by motor cars and aeroplanes and along with trains, and chases on foot across Scottish moors, Hannay is always on the move. The plot, which revolves around a plan to precipitate a European war, is almost ancillary to the odd characters (including a milkman, hung over road worker and prospective parliamentarian) Hannay meets on the way. While it owes something of a debt to Conan-Doyle, it has inspired a thousand of copy-cat blockbusters and Hollywood films, particularly those which feature the archetype of the stylish, clever, maverick outsider, wayward, but ultimately committed to King and country. Ian Fleming, you suspect had a copy on his bedside table.

Anyway, all of this inspired the inevitable song! 

10 great adversaries of Sherlock Holmes

Holmes aficionados know there’s more to life than Professor Moriarty. The Sherlock Holmes stories contained an astonishingly colourful cast of cads, crooks and show boaters (most frequently wayward colonels for some reason). Indeed Conan Doyle was often at his best when drawing pen sketches of his villains. It is of remarkable how he can conjure them into life with just a few deft strokes.

                                                   
                   

Here is a list nine memorable scoundrels from the original canon, plus a surprise at number ten from my own, new Sherlock Holmes novel: The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants. Beware of some spoiler alerts, however, as some of these are not revealed as the villains until the end of the stories. You have been warned!

1. Irene Adler, A Scandal in Bohemia

To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes, she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

‘What a woman – oh, what a woman!’ cried the King of Bohemia.

2. Colonel Lysander Stark, The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb

I saw the lean figure of Colonel Lysander Stark rushing forward with a lantern in one hand, and a weapon like a butcher’s cleaver in the other.

3. Charles Augustus Milverton, The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

He was a man of fifty, with a large intellectual head, a round, plump, hairless face, a perpetual frozen smile and two keen, grey eyes, which gleamed brightly from behind broad, golden-rimmed glasses.

‘Mr Holmes, Mr Holmes,’ he said, turning the front of his coat and exhibiting the butt of a large revolver. I have been expecting you to do something original.’

4. Professor Coram, The Adventure of the Golden Pinze-Nez

It was a gaunt, aquiline face which was turned towards us with piercing dark eyes, which lurked in deep hollows under overhung and tufted brows. His hair and beard were white, save that the latter was curiously stained with yellow around his mouth. A cigarette glowed amid the tangle of white hair. ‘Tobacco and my work – that is all that is left to me.’

5. Baron Gruner, the Adventure of the Illustrious Client

The fellow is, as you may have heard, extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner, a gentle voice and that air of romance and mystery which mean so much to a woman. He is said to have the whole sex at his mercy and to have made ample use of the fact…The Baron has little waxed tips of hair under his nose, like the short antennae of an insect.

6. Mr Culverton Smith, The Adventure of the Dying Detective

With a shrill cry of anger, a man rose from a reclining chair beside the fire. I saw a great yellow face, coarse grained and greasy, with a heavy double chin, and two sullen menacing grey eyes that glared at me from under tufted and sandy brows.

‘What is this?’ he cried in a high, screaming voice. ‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’

7. Colonel Sebastian Moran, The Adventure of the Empty House

It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. The brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil.

8. Colonel James Moriarty, The Adventure of the Final Problem

He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve and his two eyes are deeply shrunken in his head. He is clean shaven, pale and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. ‘It is a dangerous habit to finger loaded firearms in the pocket of one’s dressing gown.’

9. John Clay, The Adventure of the Red Headed League

‘John Clay, the murderer, thief, smasher and forger. He is a remarkable man, is young John Clay. His grandfather was a Royal Duke and he himself has been to Eton and Oxford. He’ll crack a crib in Scotland one week, and be raising money to build an orphanage in Cornwall the next. I’ve been on his track for years and have never set eyes on him yet.’

10. The Archangels, The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants

I awoke in a room that was perfectly dark. The floor was cold, and the air was damp, like that of a cellar.

‘Stand up, Dr Watson,’ came a voice.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Michael.’ There was a light in the form of a single flame. I heard another voice.

‘I am Raphael,’ it announced and another torch was lit.

Then behind me, another:

‘Uriel.’  And at the fourth point of the compass:

‘I am Gabriel.’ I was at the centre of the four flames.

The four of them wore identical black frock coats, top hats and strange, round spectacles with darkened glass. At the far end of the room, they gathered themselves into a knot, with blades flashing at the end of their canes, their eyes gleaming like demons.

‘You are vampires, not angels,’ I cried.

Holmes comes to Haverhill

To Haverhill’s leafy East Town Park on a balmy summer evening for The Chapterhouse Theatre Company’s splendid production of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. As far as I could make out, this is an original play and a fine one it is too. Tightly constructed with stylish, snappy dialogue, this is close to the spirit of the original. Flocks of swifts dart through the sky and soundtrack of twittering birds makes for an evocative setting.

Holmes and Watson are summoned to a nunnery to investigate the mysterious Eye of God, an ancient talisman that has been protected within the nunnery for centuries. Holmes is acted with some aplomb, both masterful and eccentric, capturing his infuriating brilliance. (The performance is another reminder of the sizable debt Dr Who owes to Holmes and Conan Doyle). Watson is equally good, unusually robust, and less deferential than he is in the original stories. Both actors are magnificent speakers – projecting out into the trees and the families playing in the park. There is terrific chemistry between the two and the long suffering Watson’s nerves (and teeth) are tested to the limit.

The supporting cast are excellent too; the formidable head of the convent has a wholesome, matronly authority while the two novices are respectively feisty and earnest. Brother Benjamin (a beekeeper Holmes fans!) has a superb energy and holds his own against the two male leads.

There is a slight uncertainty of tone. Like the books, the play is essentially a melodrama and the company has resisted the urge to play it too broad. There are moments of mild slapstick however, which threaten to take it into more comic territory but this is by no means a send up. There are touches of horror too and the drama with its various wrong -footing diversions is expertly executed.

All the usual Holmesian tropes are in place: Sherlock appears in disguise, there’s the Webley revolver and some very natty tailoring; Holmes is pencil thin in green tweeds and wing collar. The smoking has been toned down for more enlightened times and audiences, although, amusingly, some herbal cigarettes play an unusually important part in the drama.

A light shower during the second half (cue a spray of floral umbrellas) only served to add atmosphere to this compelling production and I thoroughly enjoyed myself (abetted by a couple of bottles of Badger’s Hopping Hare beer!) The evening was topped off by winning a bottle of white wine in the half time raffle and best of all, it was Watson who sold me the winning ticket! Gloriously old fashioned, outdoor entertainment for ages 12 to 112.

Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants

Some excellent news! MX Publishing will be bringing out my first Sherlock Holmes novel: The Adventure of the Ruby Elephants in late autumn 2015. The book is set in 1890 (quite early for Holmes) and involves diamonds, rubies, assassins in top hats, Penny Farthing chases and lots more! The incredibly talented Bob Gibson has designed the cover. What a treat.

How to write a Sherlock Holmes novel

My apologies to anyone who was following the blog only to find that I suddenly vanished into thin air. Well, I’m back. The reason for my disappearance? I was writing a new Sherlock Holmes novel, which I have now completed.

I began my preparations by reading all of Conan Doyle’s brilliant short stories and novels. Check out The Adventure of the Three Students – they’re not all about murder. You will be dazzled at the ingenuity of the plotting, the stylish trappings and the pungency of the wit. Essentially authentic Holmes is light comedy meets Hammer horror.

I then plugged away, rattling out 500 words a day for most of the year. It’s been a bit of a slog, but incredibly enjoyable. So what’s the secret of writing a Holmes’ pastiche?

1) If you get stuck, return Holmes and Watson to 221b Baker Street, put them in their armchairs and get them to talk about something. Anything. New inventions, things in the news and so on. Then get someone with an unusual character feature (a limp, a scar, a missing ear etc.) to walk in.

2) Make Watson incredibly loyal to Holmes and keep the friendship between them to the fore at all times. It’s basically a Bromance.

3) Invent some colourful baddies, each with an interesting Achilles Heel. Don’t automatically reach for Moriarty!

4) When things get a little slow, get Holmes to practice some of his Bartitsu, the obscure martial art that combines boxing, stick fighting and kung fu. It makes for a good break between the pipe smoking.

5) Find different words for the carriages they ride in. You will find Watson and Holmes spend an incredible amount of time travelling between places in hansoms, broughams, etc. etc.

6) Introduce a feisty female with a special power that will intimidate Holmes a little. He can respect her, but otherwise will show no interest.

7) Focus on objects and tiny details – Holmes’ art is all based on the observation of ‘trifles’ to solve the crimes. Leave lots of clues for the reader, some of which can be red herrings.

8) Give Mycroft, Holmes’ brother, a couple of stylish cameos, showing his superior intelligence and large appetite, but don’;t overuse him.

9) Introduce some strangeness; real oddity; the Victorians loved this and this is what makes the Holmes’ books so memorable. Remember to include colourful and authentic food and drink, like deviled kidneys!

10) Research as many Victorian exclamations as possible. Watson utters these with astonishing regularity as Holmes calmly reveals the next plot twist. ‘By Great Gordon’s Ghost, Holmes!’ ‘Heaven’s!’ ‘Mercy!’ etc.

Good luck!