The Collected Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Volume 5, page 1
The Collected Papers of Sherlock Holmes – Volume 5
A Florilegium of Sherlockian Adventures in Multiple Volumes
David Marcum
Published in 2022 by
MX Publishing
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2022 David Marcum
Cover design by Brian Belanger
The right of David Marcum to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
As always, this is for Rebecca and Dan, with all my love
“It’s all one case.”
by David Marcum
It’s all about playing The Game.
That’s the bottom-line reason behind these stories. And what is The Game? For those who don’t know, it’s reading the Sherlock Holmes stories with the firm belief that he and Watson were real historical figures. That Dr. Watson wrote the stories, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was his Literary Agent. That Our Heroes actually lived in Baker Street (for a couple of decades, off and on, and not forever) and solved real cases for real people, even if names and places and dates were changed and obfuscated to protect the innocent, or maybe because Watson’s handwriting was bad, or because of some hidden agenda that the Literary Agent needed to fulfill.
By acknowledging that Holmes and Watson were real, living, breathing, functioning people, then it’s a given that were born, lived, and died. (No magic immortal detectives need apply!) And if they were born and lived and died, then these lives occurred across a fixed period. These men aren’t Time Lords who can be picked up and dropped into other eras, or supernaturally gifted monster hunters in a world where such things exist, and they cannot be remade into a plethora of completely different people to fit whatever agenda some current reader needs to project upon them.
No, the stories in these books are about the same Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson that one finds in the original Canon – those pitifully few sixty stories that were published from 1887 to 1927.
I’ve enjoyed the notion that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was real from nearly the same time that I discovered him – as a boy of ten in 1975. Before I’d even read many of the Canonical adventures, I found two other books that reinforced this idea: William S. Baring-Gould’s biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962), with its chronology of the events in Holmes’s long and amazing life (1854-1957), and also Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), in which Holmes meets historical figures such as Sigmund Freud. How could one read those books, especially at that age, and not be convinced that Holmes was real?
***
In the decades that have passed since then, my interest in Mr. Holmes has only grown. While I read and collect a great many volumes about my other “book friends”, as my son called them when he was small – and there are a great lot of them besides Holmes – I’ve always had a special interest in the consulting detective in Baker Street and his Boswell. Since obtaining my first Holmes book in 1975, I’ve managed to collect and read (and create a massively dense chronology for) literally thousands of traditional Canonical adventures. I’ve worn a deerstalker as my only hat, all year long and everywhere since age nineteen. I’ve been able to make three extensive Holmes Pilgrimages to England and Scotland (so far), wherein I pretty much visited only Holmes-related sites. So it was probably inevitable that, in 2008, I started writing Holmes adventures.
I’d always wanted to write, all the way back to when I was eight years old and intensely reading about The Three Investigators and The Hardy Boys. Not satisfied with just the official publications, I wanted more new stories too. I spent quite a few Saturdays of my young boyhood tapping away on my dad’s typewriter to create new “books”.
As I grew, I dabbled with writing little short pieces, mostly humorous, just intended to make family members laugh, because I loved to write, and it always came easily to me. By the late 1980’s, I was a U.S. Federal Investigator employed by an obscure government agency, often sent away from home for long periods, conducting investigations that lasted anywhere from five weeks to three months. Once, when I was sent to Albuquerque for several months to conduct extensive field investigations, I impulsively stopped at a local Walmart and bought a hundred-dollar typewriter and a big pack of paper with some of my per diem money. (This was the early 1990’s – a long time before personal computers or laptops.)
It was there that I sat down for my first real effort at being a writer – and before I departed I’d finished most of a 600-plus page Ludlumesque novel. (One can get a lot of writing done night after night in a bleak hotel room.) The book was coincidentally about a heroic federal investigator – not unlike myself – who stumbled into a vast Russian-led conspiracy in the American southeast where I’m from. I still have that book – Civil Servants – stored in my old federal investigator briefcase, pushed underneath my bed. Its plot is mired in the early 1990’s when it was written, locked to the aftermath of the Cold War, but it isn’t half bad, and it taught me the valuable lesson that other writers also know: The secret to writing is to put your butt in the chair and do it.
After that particular trip, I went back home, finished up what was left of my epic adventure novel, and then settled back into writing the occasional short piece for our private amusement – but it was inevitable that at some point I would write a Holmes adventure.
In the mid-1990’s, the federal agency where I’d been employed was abruptly eliminated, a victim of the end of the Cold War and a move to reduce the size of government. (After all, the higher-up wise men thought, who needs security now? We won!) Over the next few years, I went back to school and obtained a second degree in Civil Engineering. Then, in 2008 at the start of the Great Recession, I was unexpectedly laid off from my engineering job. With time on my hands, and a desire to try my hand at Sherlockian pastichery, I began writing each morning after the daily job searching was finished.
I ended up with nine of Holmes pastiches, written over several weeks, and then… I did nothing with them. That’s right. Simply satisfied that I’d written them and that they existed, I put them in a binder labeled The Papers of Sherlock Holmes and shelved them with the rest of my Holmes Collection, happy with my secret collector’s item.
But eventually I began to wish for other Sherlockians to see them. I shared one with a Sherlockian friend here and another one there, and the response was very positive. Finally I became bolder and wanted more people to see them, asking myself: Why not put them in a real book of my own?
I communicated about it with a Sherlockian publisher from whom I’d bought books in the past. He immediately offered to publish The Papers, and after a great deal of back-and-forth, my first book eventually appeared. For those who have had that experience – Opening the newly delivered carton to see your book! – there is nothing like it. It’s a satisfaction that cannot easily be described.
That was in 2011. Over the next couple of years, I became aware of MX Publishing. I saw that an acquaintance of mine who’d also had his first book published with the same original publisher as mine had switched to MX, and I reached out to him. He informed me that he was happy to have switched to MX. With that in mind, I sent an email to Steve Emecz, Sherlockian Publisher Extraordinaire – and that was truly life-changing and improving decision.
In 2013, Steve republished my first book, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, and he made the whole experience so painless that I set about writing a Holmes novel, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt. That same fall, I was making my long-planned first Holmes Pilgrimage to London, and Steve arranged for me to have a book-signing in The Sherlock Holmes Hotel in Baker Street, where I was staying (when not traveling about to Dartmoor, the Sussex Coast, Edinburgh, and other locations). I was able to meet Steve for the first time on that trip, and found him to be one of the nicest, most supportive, and most thoughtful people around – and that hasn’t changed a bit.
Jump ahead a little bit: In early 2015, I woke up early from a dream in which I’d edited a Holmes anthology. Instead of rolling over and forgetting the idea, I arose and started thinking about authors whom I admired and that I might want to invite to write stories. I ran the idea by Steve, and he was willing to publish it, so I began sending invitations. I hoped that I might get a dozen stories (at best) for a modest paperback volume. Fearing a lack of response, I kept sending invitations to everyone that I could think of – and then, amazingly, people started signing up. New Sherlock Holmes stories started to arrive in my email in-box – which quickly becomes addictive. More and more authors heard about it – some that I didn’t even know about yet – a
Early on, Steve and I had decided that the royalties from the project would go to support the Stepping Stones School for special needs children, located at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes. The books were a smashing success and received a lot of attention, and I was able to go to London in the fall of 2015 for the release party – what turned out to be Holmes Pilgrimage No. 2. There I was able to meet a number of the contributing authors in person – and to my everlasting regret, I was so thrilled that I barely remembered to take any photos!
After I returned home, I began to receive more emails, now asking when the next book was planned – Good grief! A next book?!? – and also stating that many authors (both returning and new) wanted to contribute.
I’d had no plans to do any more books, thinking that the first three were lightning in a bottle that couldn’t be recaptured… but then I realized that the heavy-lifting in terms of decision-making and set-up and formatting and process-building had already occurred, so Steve and I decided to keep going. (I think I said to him “Let’s do one more… .”)
Part IV came out in the spring of 2016 – and after that, more people kept sending stories for the next books and wanting to join the party. We came up with the plan to have yearly books. But we received so many stories that it grew to twice a year. We now have an un-themed spring collection – the yearly Annual – and also a fall collection with a specific theme, such as Christmas adventures, seemingly impossible crimes, Untold Cases, etc. As more and more stories kept rolling in, it became necessary for each season’s particular set to grow to multiple simultaneously published volumes. That’s how, in just a few short years, we’re now up to Parts XXVIII, XXIX, and XXX (to be published in Fall 2021), and as I write this, I’m already receiving stories for the Spring 2022 Annual, Part XXXI (and XXXII and XXXIII too… ?)
So far the books have raised over $85,000 for the school, and it’s my hope and expectation that they’ll go over $100,000 within the next few months of writing this foreword.
***
As part of editing these books, I couldn’t let them pass by without adding my own stories – editor’s prerogative. Thus, that helped to motivate me to sit my butt in the chair and write more about Mr. Holmes. By way of these books, I’ve met some really incredible people, including the incomparable Belanger Brothers, Derrick and Brian. Derrick initially contributed short stories, while Brian – a truly gifted artist – became the MX cover artist after the original artist passed away.
At one point, the two Belangers wrote a series of Holmes books for children. Eventually they formed Belanger Books – another amazing Sherlockian publishing venture. Between MX and Belanger Books – both of which cooperate beautifully with one another – the Sherlockian publishing field is amazingly well covered, providing an opportunity for so many people to be Sherlockian pasticheurs when they would otherwise be excluded by those who happily and aggressively seek to squash that aspect of the Sherlockian experience.
In 2016, the Belangers asked me to assemble and edit a Holmes story collection for them. I did, and as it also consisted of traditional and Canonical adventures, and had many of the same authors as in the MX anthologies, I formatted it the same way. After that, I edited another one for them, and another, and those also grew to simultaneously published multiple volumes. This extra editing also served to motivate me to write more Holmes stories for each of those collections as well – because I didn’t want those trains leaving without me being on them.
From there, I began to receive invitations to write still more stories for other editors’ anthologies and magazines. Along the way I published a couple more of my own books – Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins (2015) and Sherlock Holmes and The Eye of Heka (2021) – but most of my stories that I wrote over those years remained uncollected within the various anthologies and magazines in which they had originally appeared. All along, I stayed too busy with real life and family and my dream job (as a civil engineer working for my home town’s public works department), along with writing more stories and editing various books, to take the time to properly collect them all into my own books.
But within the last few months, I looked up and saw that (as of right now) I’ve now written 86 Holmes pastiches, (along with 20 pastiches about Solar Pons, “The Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street” – but that’s another story and another hero.) Thus, the idea of this collection was born.
These initial five books of The Complete Papers contain 77 of those 86 stories. The others are still in the pipeline to be published elsewhere. Right now (as of mid-September 2021), I also have five more Holmes stories promised to be written for various editors before the end of the year, and all of these, plus whatever I’m able to write in 2022 – with a plan to reach Pastiche No. 100 – will be published in Volume VI of this set in later 2022… Fingers crossed!
***
Many people have sports figures or musicians or actors or (curiously) politicians as heroes. My heroes have always been my book friends and authors – all the way back to when I was eight or nine and wondering about why I couldn’t track down satisfying biographical information concerning the brilliant and prolific and mysterious author Franklin W. Dixon. I’ve always admired writers for what they accomplish and create while spending great chunks of their lives self-imposed isolation – something which I now understand. And at least if I had to set aside all that time to put my butt in the chair, I’ve been very fortunate that all of these stories almost told themselves. I almost never outline or plan. Instead, when I write – when I find that it’s time for another story – I simply open a blank Word document on the computer and then wait for Watson to begin whispering to me. It’s scary, but I trust the process now, and when it works – and it always has so far – there’s no feeling quite like it.
Through these stories, I’ve achieved two important personal goals: In my own small way, I’ve become a writer, and I’ve also added to The Great Holmes Tapestry, a phrase I coined several years ago to describe the massive collection of narratives about the true Holmes and Watson – novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics and fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts – that tell the complete and entire course of their lives from beginning to end. The Canon serves as the supporting structure – the wire core of the rope, the heavy steel girders of the skyscraper – but the thousands of traditional post-Canonical pastiches provide essential depth and color, filling in all the spaces around The Canon, and adding important information about The Whole Lives of Our Heroes.
I’ve long described myself as a missionary for The Church of the Traditional Canonical Holmes, preaching that the bigger picture of both Canon and the traditional pastiches should be seen and supported. This means giving respect and value to additional Holmes adventures, and not just those original sixty because they were the ones that came across the first Literary Agent’s desk.
Ross MacDonald – (Real Name: Kenneth Millar, another of my authorial heroes because of his incredible private eye, Lew Archer) – said “It’s all one case.” In other words, a Great Tapestry. He meant that even though he’d written eighteen Archer novels and a number of short stories from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, they were never meant to stand alone. They were all part of one overall arching story – Lew Archer’s story – spanning across multiple narratives.
It’s the same with the Holmes adventures – all of them, Canon and traditional pastiche, mine and everyone else’s. They fit together to tell the entire story of Sherlock Holmes, and with the stories in this collection, I’m incredibly proud to have added my own contribution.
***
“Of course, I could only stammer out my thanks.”
– The unhappy John Hector McFarlane, “The Norwood Builder”
