The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  The Confidential

  Casebook of

  Sherlock Holmes

  NOVELS BY MARVIN KAYE

  Fantastique

  Ghosts of Night and Morning

  The Possession of Immanuel Wolf

  A Cold Blue Light (with Parke Godwin)

  Bullets for Macbeth

  The Incredible Umbrella

  The Masters of Solitude (with Parke Godwin)

  Wintermind (with Parke Godwin)

  The Amorous Umbrella

  My Son, the Druggist

  My Brother, the Druggist

  The Soap Opera Slaughters

  The Country Music Murders

  The Laurel and Hardy Murders

  A Lively Game of Death

  OTHER ANTHOLOGIES BY MARVIN KAYE

  The Game Is Afoot

  Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

  The Penguin Book of Witches and Warlocks

  Lovers and Other Monsters

  Haunted America

  Ghosts

  Devils and Demons

  13 Plays of Ghosts and the Supernatural

  Weird Tales,™ the Magazine That Never Dies

  Sweet Revenge: Ten Plays of Bloody Murder

  Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown

  Frantic Comedy

  Readers Theatre, What It Is . . .

  Angels of Darkness

  From Page to Stage

  Don’t Open This Book!

  The Confidential

  Casebook of

  Sherlock Holmes

  EDITED BY

  Marvin Kaye

  THE CONFIDENTIAL CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Copyright © 1998 by Marvin Kaye. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Additional copyrights in Acknowledgments

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The confidential casebook of Sherlock Holmes / Marvin Kaye,

  editor.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-18071-3 ISBN 978-0-312-18071-3

  1. Dectective and mystery stories, American. 2. Holmes,

  Sherlock (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Private

  investigators—England—Fiction. I. Kaye, Marvin.

  PS648.D4C68 1998

  813'.087208351—dc21 97-38389

  CIP

  First Edition: February 1998

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the memory

  of a dear friend and fine writer

  William L. DeAndrea

  Contents

  Introduction

  DELICATE BUSINESS

  The Darlington Substitution Scandal

  Henry Slesar

  The Adventure of the Old Russian Woman

  H. Paul Jeffers

  The Adventure of the Noble Husband

  Peter Cannon

  The Case of the Woman in the Cellar

  Pat Mullen

  DESPERATE BUSINESS

  The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin

  Kathleen Brady

  The Case of the Ancient British Barrow

  Terry McGarry

  The Adventure of the Dying Ship

  Edward D. Hoch

  The Revenge of the Fenian Brotherhood

  Carole Buggé

  MY BLUSHES, WATSON!

  The Affair of the Counterfeit Countess

  Craig Shaw Gardner

  The Woman

  Aline Myette-Volsky

  The Little Problem of the Grosvenor Square Furniture Van

  “Patrick LoBrutto” (ascribed to Arthur Stanley Jefferson)

  À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

  A Ballad of the White Plague

  P. C. Hodgell

  The Adventure of Vanderbilt and the Yeggman

  Roberta Rogow

  The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes

  Shariann Lewitt

  The Case of Vittoria the Circus Belle

  Jay Sheckley

  Contributors Notes

  Acknowledgments

  The Confidential

  Casebook of

  Sherlock Holmes

  Introduction

  The Startling Discovery of Dr. Watson’s

  Confidential Papers

  If you love the Sherlock Holmes adventures . . . you have sorely lamented the fact that The Great Detective’s best friend, coadventurer and erstwhile roommate John H. Watson, M.D., only wrote sixty of them.

  Like me, you have . . . surely dreamed about visiting the bank vaults of Cox & Company, London, to peep into the battered tin dispatch-box that Dr. Watson stored there. This legendary container was crammed full of notes for over sixty additional Sherlock Holmes cases that, for various reasons, Watson never got around to writing. For the past half-century, this seemed to be a forlorn dream, for Cox & Company was destroyed during a World War II Nazi bombing raid.

  But now, fifty years later, the truth can at last be told—Dr. Watson’s unpublished records have survived!

  —from the Introduction to

  The Resurrected Holmes

  by Professor J. Adrian Fillmore,

  Gadshill Adjunct, Parker College (Pa.)

  Imagine the thrill when Dr. R., the wealthy Philadelphia scholar and book collector who bought the fabled dispatch-box, first opened his trove of unpublished Holmesiana. The box actually contained a variety of documents: daily memoranda and anecdota that the author did not choose to write up for The Strand, the British magazine that first reported the principal adventures of England’s remarkable consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  Careful examination of the box’s contents revealed a number of tales that Watson never afforded that final professional polish that would have qualified them for publication. Some were cases too mundane or inconclusive to work up as dramatic narrative; some were too sensitive in nature to be made public at the time.

  A selection of the latter cases—which Dr. R. arranged to have “ghost-written” from Watson’s notes by such renowned authors as H. G. Wells, Theodore Dreiser, H. P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, etc.—appeared in print for the first time last year in the St. Martin’s Press collection The Resurrected Holmes, a volume prepared in association with the distinguished Parker College teacher J. Adrian Fillmore, who helped review and choose its contents, and who wrote its introduction.

  One evening while examining the Watsonian archives, the professor reflectively stroked his chin and observed to me that the tin dispatch-box was ever so much larger than most Holmesian buffs probably realized.

  “Well, it would have to be,” I said sardonically, “considering how many ‘authentic’ manuscripts have come out of it since 1930.”*

  “Yes,” Fillmore mused, resting his hand on the lid of the box, “but isn’t it odd that no one has ever reported the precise dimensions of this fabled repository? Or do you recall any such paper?”

  “I do not.” I quickly consulted the entries under the heading “Untold Tales and Dr. Watson’s Tin Dispatch-Box,” in my copy of Ronald Burt DeWaal’s The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but their titles suggested that their authors (quite properly) were more concerned with the contents of Watson’s box than the container itself. Still, the true aficionado thirsts for all possible knowledge concerning his field of specialization.

  The professor agreed. Forthwith and posthaste, he fetched a tailor’s tape measure and with great exactitude recorded the width, breadth
and height of the tin dispatch-box. I wrote them on a slip of paper as he announced them to me. Next, the pedagogue aligned the tip of the tape with the top of the inner lid, plumbed the container’s depths with the measuring device, and read off the results.

  “No, that must be wrong,” I said, comparing the figure with the exterior height. Fillmore carefully remeasured the box’s depth, but the answer was the same: four inches shorter than seemed likely. We inspected the workmanship, looking for evidence of layered reinforcement. We lifted the heavy container. Fillmore rested a palm on the lower surface, stuck his other hand in the box and rapped smartly on what should have been the upper side of its bottom. The dull sound produced by this action mutually widened our eyes . . .

  “Eureka!” the professor exclaimed. For we had discovered the snug false bottom that partitions Watson’s dispatch-box into an upper and a secret lower compartment.

  In this nether recess we found two thick stacks of manuscripts whose existence till now has been unknown to Holmesians. Needless to say, Professor Fillmore and I set aside the fascinating contents of the box’s upper chamber, and voraciously pored over the new material.

  It was apparent to us that these manuscripts differed in character from those that rested so many years in the “B,” or upper apartment, of the dispatch-box. Most of the new discoveries appeared to have been written by Dr. Watson himself.

  Then why had they never been published? The first few that the professor and I read that evening were too sensitive for publication during Queen Victoria’s heyday, yet might have been offered to a Holmes-hungry public during Edward’s reign. But then we read further.

  I forget whose breath first hissed through clenched teeth.

  Before the abrupt and unexplained disappearance of Professor Fillmore from the academic, or for that matter, all scenes, he made preliminary notes for an introduction to the volume you hold in your hand. Here is the final paragraph of that composition:

  “As you read through these tales*,” Fillmore wrote, “you will see why Watson and Holmes kept these narratives from all eyes. The fact that they were written at all, or, having been penned, had not been subsequently consigned to some working fireplace, attests, I think, to the psychology of our favorite medical amanuensis. Watson was, after all, an author, subject to the generous vanity of that breed of being who collectively set down experience for the edification of some hypothetical future generation.”

  Fortunately, that’s us.

  —MARVIN KAYE

  New York City

  May 1997

  *The year that Watson’s literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, died.

  *Copyedited by contributors who, for legal purposes, we have “credited” with bylines.—MK

  Delicate

  Business

  Nowadays, tact and delicacy are too often patronized as anachronisms of bygone morality, but Sherlock Holmes and his faithful scribe were gentlemen who valued prudency, especially if the truth ran the risk of injuring their fellows, singly or collectively. The first three cases chronicled in this section deal with delicate business of this character. Perhaps Dr. Watson might have delivered them for publication one day, but I suspect that the fourth narrative never would have been released, inasmuch as the reputation it chiefly affects is that of Sherlock Holmes himself.

  Watson mentions “The Darlington Substitution Scandal” in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” which suggests that he might have eventually sent this manuscript to The Strand, but this is purely speculative. Still, one cannot help wondering why, in the case of such a delicate matter, he mentioned Darlington at all. Perhaps Watson was so offended by that individual’s beastly behaviour that in spite of Holmes’s high moral character, he just could not bear to let the scoundrel escape without some trace of censure attached to his name.

  The Darlington Substitution Scandal

  BY HENRY SLESAR

  On certain days, my friend Sherlock Holmes would invariably wear a scowl, which further lengthened his saturnine face. These were the days when The Strand magazine appeared, its garish cover boasting of yet another “Sherlock Holmes Adventure.” As the author of these chronicles I received the brunt of his displeasure, yet it troubled me less and less as I became aware that Holmes wasn’t entirely displeased by this celebration of his deductive powers. He would scold me about an excess of melodrama; he would carp about the syntax of the words I put into his mouth; yet by the end of the day, the scowl was erased, and a certain mellowness overtook him. To be perfectly candid, I believe he enjoyed reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes almost as much as he enjoyed living them.

  However, as I have noted before, there were cases which Holmes forbade me to dramatize for reasons that were usually quite apparent. He would not give grist to the London gossip mills. He would not have reputations ruined, families victimized, and more often than anyone knew, royal titles debased. But this last cause of reticence is not the reason why I have never published the shocking story of Lord Rufus Darlington. It is simply because no charges were ever brought against the man for his horrific actions, and Holmes forbade any accusations which had never been confirmed in a court of law.

  Whether this tale reaches the general public is questionable, since I have stipulated that if any surviving member of the Darlington family can prove slander by its publication it is to be returned to the vault where it will reside until the next century.* History has a way of making harmless fable of even the most heinous crimes, but writing as I do now, only days after the Darlington case was resolved, I can scarcely believe that such horror can ever be transformed or forgiven.

  Of course, I cannot conceive what the laws of slander may be like in that distant time. I hope they will still protect the weak and innocent. I also hope, fervently, that the laws of the coming years will afford more protection to married women against the brutality of their husbands, cruelty far too easily shrugged off in the age in which we live. In such a time, the Darlington affair might never have happened.

  One aspect of the case which made it unlike any other was the part played by Inspector Lestrade, surely one of the most misunderstood figures in the Sherlock Holmes gallery. It is astonishing how many admirers of The Great Detective have relegated poor Lestrade to the role of the hapless professional constantly forced to defer to a gifted amateur who bested him at every turn. In fact, Holmes admired and respected Lestrade, and cherished his friendship, but outside of their professional encounters these two devotees of Justice rarely spent time together. The exception was that bitterly cold day in late January, 1895, when the Inspector, hearing that Holmes was confined to our flat due to a bronchial condition, decided to pay a social call.

  As a physician, let me declare that Sherlock Holmes was the worst possible patient. The words “bed rest” were anathema to him. All medicines were “quack nostrums,” all medical advisories were “incantations.” His remedy for all ills was self-prescribed: the seven and a half percent cocaine solution which gave him a false sense of well-being. That was why Lestrade was surprised to enter our quarters that snowy evening and find Sherlock Holmes by the fireplace, sucking at his empty meerschaum (tobacco tasted foul in his present state), and giving all the appearance of a healthy man ready to enjoy the company of his peer.

  They conversed for a good hour, managing to ignore every contribution I attempted to make. I began to feel a bit nettled, and drank more brandy-and-splash than I was accustomed to having, even on a holiday occasion. I was just beginning to doze off in my chair when the Inspector revealed that he had more than one reason for his visit. He wasn’t seeking advice on a case; the crime on his mind had been swiftly and easily solved one year before.

  “One year to the day,” he sighed, lighting a cigar. “A cold night like this one. But perhaps you don’t recall it, Mr. Holmes. It wasn’t a case to challenge your skills.”

  Holmes merely nodded, watching Lestrade with narrowed eyes, waiting for him to speak the name that seemed to float between them like the smoke from his
cheroot. For some reason, I felt obliged to supply it.

  “Carlton Paige,” I said, clearing my throat. “Strange, isn’t it? Such a commotion then. Now, hardly anyone recalls the case.”

  “Except,” Holmes said pointedly, “Mrs. Paige.”

  “Yes,” Lestrade said. “I’m sure Mrs. Paige is not very happy tonight. On the anniversary of that terrible event.”

  “How can she be?” I snorted. “In Bristol Prison for Women? Confined for life?”

  “No,” Lestrade said quietly. “She is no longer there. She has been transferred.”

  But when I asked him where, the Inspector ignored my question, and looked at Holmes.

  “Do you remember the protesters?” he asked. “When she was first incarcerated? Did they really expect us to free a murderer on ‘moral’ grounds?”

  “Still, she had them,” I said, feeling perverse. “Carlton Paige was a vicious wife-beater! He drove that poor women to the limit of her endurance. And when she reached that limit—she shot him!”

  Holmes smiled thinly. “I’ve often heard you claim to be at the end of your patience with someone or other, Watson. Did you decide to shoot them through the heart?”

  “This was different,” I said stiffly. “It was impulsive. The woman had been brutalized for years, and that night, she snapped!”

  “Yes,” Holmes said, winking at Lestrade. “She snapped a trigger. Of a gun she had ‘impulsively’ purchased several days before.”

  “Well, I’ll say this much for Mrs. Paige,” the Inspector said. “She didn’t deny her crime, didn’t try to justify it. Called the police herself, and gave us a full confession on the spot. Took her punishment like—”

  “Like a man?” Holmes smiled.

  “I can’t help but feel compassion for her,” Lestrade admitted gloomily. “Especially now that she’s gone mad.”

  “Good Lord!” I said. “Do you mean she’s lost her mind?”

  “The place to which she was transferred is the Institute for the Criminal Insane. I learned of it only recently. But when her symptoms were described to me, my first thought was—wouldn’t Mr. Sherlock Holmes find that fascinating!”