The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures Read Free Page A

twenty-six new cases completed by fellow researchers who have helped me in my quest. I have endeavoured to show where these cases fit into Holmes’s career and how they relate to the known cases. In an appendix at the end of this book I also provide a complete chronology of Holmes’s life and known cases, including some of the other write-ups of his investigations where I believe there has been a genuine effort to get at the truth.
    Let us begin our quest, therefore, and return to the early days of Sherlock Holmes.
    Mike Ashley

 
    Part I
    The Early Years
    There is precious little record of Holmes’s early life. It is unusual that someone so famous could keep the details of his life so secret that it becomes necessary to think that it was deliberate. Holmes had little interest in the trivia of personal biography, so it is unlikely that he would have bothered to have disguised the trail. But others may certainly have done so in order to protect him, and thoughts turn immediately to his elder brother Mycroft Holmes who had considerable influence in government circles and could have easily pressed the right buttons in order to close whatever shutters were necessary.
    We must therefore rely on what Watson himself tells us. In “His Last Bow”, which takes place in August 1914, Watson refers to Holmes as “a tall, gaunt man of sixty”. It is the only occasion where he mentions his age. We must be careful as he was describing Holmes in disguise as the Irish-American spy Altamont. Had Holmes aged himself or made himself look younger? We don’t know. And did Watson mean precisely sixty, or was he in his sixtieth year – in other words fifty-nine? If we accept it at face value, and since no other clue is given as to Holmes’s birthday, then we must conclude that Holmes was born in either 1853 or 1854, or at the latest in 1855. I prefer the earlier date because in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” Holmes refers to himself as middle-aged which suggests forty-something. That story took place in 1889 or 1890 which would make Holmes’s year of birth earlier than 1850, but middle-aged is an indeterminate phrase and we can assume that a birth year somewhere in the early 1850s is as close as we’ll get. We may take some clue from the year in which Holmes retired, which was at the end of 1903. Did he do this on his fiftieth birthday? It would be an appropriate landmark.
    Holmes came from a line of country squires but somewhere in his veins was the blood of the French artist Claude Vernet, from whose family Holmes also claimed descent. We do not know where Holmes was born, but his general dislike of the countryside suggests that he was raised somewhere remote, and as we shall see he certainly spent some of his youth in Ireland. This coupled with his reticence to discuss his childhood suggests that it might not have been happy, and we can imagine an almost reclusive child already intent upon his studies in logical deduction. Holmes was almost certainly educated at a private school before progressing to university.
    It is at university that his abilities as a solver of puzzles came to the fore. Two of the recorded cases throw some light on Holmes’s University days. “The Gloria Scott”, Holmes tells us, was the first case in which he was engaged. He refers to the case again in “The Musgrave Ritual” saying that the Gloria Scott case “first turned my attention in the direction of the profession which has become my life’s work.” It is thus of some importance to date this investigation, but it is here that we first encounter Watson’s masking of facts. We could put a rough dating on it on the assumption that Holmes went to university when he was about eighteen or nineteen, which would place it in the period 1868 to 1872, and he talks about it occurring after two years at university, or between 1870 and 1874. In “The Veiled Lodger” Watson tells us Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years. Since he retired in