Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman (15 page)

Had we once more lived a charmed life? Or were we allowed to live because Holmes was Mycroft's younger sibling?

Postscript

Several readers kindly asked after Philip Jacobus Pretorius. They recalled how the summons from Holmes to meet Edward Grey led to the abandonment of my planned visit to the great jungles of central Africa. Subsequent obligations led to further postponements until, as happens, the entire enterprise fell away, to be dreamed about on cold winters' evenings. Soon after the outbreak of the Great War a letter arrived from Pretorius, by then an officer in the British Imperial Government attached to Admiral King-Hall. To enlist in the service Pretorius had had to escape from German-occupied territory in East Africa, undergoing an ordeal in the vast jungles quite unparalleled in my own experience, despite my warring years in the deadly Frontier Tribal Areas of British India. His exceptional scouting skills were to lead to the hunt for the German raider
SMS Königsberg
, a light cruiser of the Kaiser's Imperial Navy named after the Capital of Prussia. On 20 September 1914 she surprised and sank the British protected cruiser
HMS Pegasus
in the Battle of Zanzibar. With Pretorius's involvement, revenge was soon to hand.

The End

Notes From The Author

My Endpieces seem to grow in length with each succeeding Sherlock Holmes adventure I write. Kindly readers tell me they enjoy reading this section but of course you do not need to bother. I add them simply for interest and colour. I list the books I have read as background including memoirs of the Edwardian age in England and Turkey. Some of the writing is so atmospheric I incorporate small bits into Holmes's and Watson's Stamboul adventure. I have also tended to use the spelling current in the Edwardian period, so for example Mombasa was often Mombassa, diplomats spelt Baghdad without the ‘h', hence Bagdad, and Kiev as Kieff, and the ‘s' many British now prefer to use in words like ‘civilisation' was then a ‘z', like the USA today.

Readers of my other ‘sherlocks' will have realised I have very considerable admiration for Dr. John H. Watson. There's no doubt the Sultan was correct. If Watson had not taken on the task of chronicling Holmes's cases, the latter's career as a Great Detective may never have taken off. It was sheer kismet the former Army doctor on a wound-pension needed to find and share the cost of digs in London in 1881 at the precise time the peripatetic young Sherlock Holmes did too. I have little time for the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce depiction as a well-intentioned bumbler, loyal but clueless. Watson said of himself, ‘If I have one quality upon earth it is common sense'. He was also eager, chivalrous and courageous. Much more than Holmes he was like his creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Like Doyle, Watson had the qualities of a good doctor - kindliness, optimism and a healthy scepticism. Watson had another value to Holmes. Medicine is said to be as much the ability to gain the confidence of the patient as it is an abstract science.

‘Your best friends would hardly call you a schemer, Watson,' Holmes told him, adding later, ‘I never get to your limits. There are unexplored possibilities about you.'

It's not possible to trace the various paths by which Conan Doyle himself created Watson. While writing these notes I was on the train to London Charing Cross from deepest East Sussex reading
The Crooked Scythe
by George Ewart Evans, an anthology of memories of men and women of a past era - farm labourers, shepherds, horsemen, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, sailors, fisherman, miners, maltsters, domestic servants. The introduction by a David Gentleman described the author Evans as follows:

‘George was in his mid-fifties when I first saw him...upright and vigorous, with an open and friendly manner and a clear, piercing gaze. He looked the part of a countryman, in a tweed jacket, a hat also of tweed, drill trousers, and stout brown shoes. As I grew to know him, I discovered that he was sympathetic and generous with help and encouragement. He was intelligent and shrewd; his judgements, though seldom sharply expressed, were acute and rational. In conversation he was tolerant and unassertive, but it was soon clear he held independent views with firmness and conviction.'

I'm certain this is how Watson's many friends at the Junior United Services club and at the Gatwick races would have viewed him too, a man of gentility though of limited means and no property. We should all have friends who wear stout brown shoes.

At several points in this new adventure I mention Watson's unfulfilled plans to go to Africa (‘the Dark Continent with its great herds of elephants, odd-toed ungulates on the Luangwa, hippo on the Shire River, the Tsavo man-eating lions, dust, blood, sleeping sickness, malaria, alcoholism, the smell of camp-fires long extinguished...'). Writing about his plans took me back nostalgically to my own late-teenage years in East and Central Africa. One day I shall get Watson there too.

Miscellany

Abd-ul-Hamid 11 (22 September 1842 - 10 February 1918). Variously spelt Abdul Hamid and Abdülhamid. 34
th
Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. An article in the Manchester Guardian on July 24 1905 reported an attempt on the Sultan's life when he attended the Mosque. Titled ‘The Sultan's Escape', the Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Judging by the number killed (the majority of them soldiers lining the road near the Mosque) and by the material damage, the bomb used must have been a formidable engine... the Sultan preserved the most remarkable sang froid, although a wild panic ensued among the onlookers...'

In an Editorial Article the same day, the Manchester Guardian opined, ‘There is hardly a race in Turkey but has its grounds for vengeance, and few living creatures in all the Empire who would not rejoice in the Sultan's death, unless, perhaps, the dogs in the Stamboul streets that owe their lives to his capricious and incalculable mercies...The whole Osmanli brood is tainted by its prison-palace life, degenerate, uneducated, and incapable of resisting the influence of the counter-spies who manage it.'

In the summer of 1908, the Young Turk Revolution broke out. On being told troops in Salonika were advancing on him, Abd-ul-Hamid capitulated. The last Sultan to exert autocratic control over the Ottoman Empire, he was deposed by the parliament on April 26 1909 and conveyed into captivity at Salonika (‘that city of vipery', he had called it). In 1912, when Salonika fell to Greece, he was returned to captivity in Constantinople. Just as he (and Shelmerdine) had predicted, in World War One the Young Turks threw their lot in with Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany. The 34
th
Sultan spent his last days studying, carpentering and writing his memoirs in custody at Beylerbeyi Palace in the Bosphorus, where he died on 10 February 1918, the year the Ottoman Empire collapsed. He was buried in a mausoleum along with Sultans Mahmud II and Abdülaziz near Sultanahmet Square. His obituary appeared in
The Times
.

Rahime Perestu Sultan (1830–1904) was the Circassian wife of Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I and Valide Sultan during the reign of Abd-ul-Hamid II. She was the last Valide Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Her burial place is located at the tomb of Mihrişah Valide Sultan in Eyüp, a part of Istanbul. The name Perestu means peacock in Persian. She became the spiritual mother of Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid 11.

Valide Sultan, literally ‘mother sultan', was the title held by the queen mother of a ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, first used in the 16
th
century for Ayşe Hafsa Sultan, consort of Selim I and mother of Suleiman the Magnificent. As the mother to the sultan the Valide Sultan had a significant influence on the affairs of the empire.

Saliha Naciye (born circa 1882), a Georgian, thirteenth and last wife of Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid 11. He married her on 4 November 1904 at Yıldız Palace. Saliha Naciye accompanied Abd-ul-Hamid into exile and returned to Istanbul with him in 1912. She died on 4 December 1923 in a mansion located at Erenköy and was buried near the mausoleum of Sultan Mahmud II, located at Divan Yolu Street. She was about the age of forty-one.

Crown Prince Mehmed Abid Efendi, Abd-ul-Hamid's son by Saliha Naciye, died in Beirut in 1973 and was buried in Damascus.

Sir Edward Grey. He continued to serve as Foreign Secretary until 1916, up to then the longest continuous tenure of any person in that office. Best remembered for his remark at the outbreak of the First World War: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time'. History knows the lamps flickered back on for a brief period after 1918, to be extinguished in 1939 by the murderous Adolph Hitler.

Sir Edward was ennobled as Viscount Grey of Fallodon in 1916. In 1919 he became Ambassador to the United States, and later Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. His interest in nature began early, on his father's estate at Falloden. Probably inspired by his first wife Dorothy's knowledge of bird-song, he joined the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in 1893 and became a Vice-President in 1909.

In 1927, Hodder and Stoughton published Grey's
The Charm of Birds
. It was an immediate popular success and still widely read and admired. Grey's second wife Pamela's contribution to
The Charm of Birds
can be seen in her description of the dawn chorus and of a goldfinch nesting among apple blossom.

In 1928 Grey was made Chancellor of Oxford University although his own academic background had been slight - ‘rusticated' from Baliol though he returned to take a lowly Third in Jurisprudence.

He died in 1933.

Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell CBE FRS DSc LLD (23 November 1864–2 July 1945), zoologist, was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1903 to 1935. He directed the policy of the London Zoo, and created Whipsnade, the world's first open zoological park. He died in July 1945 after being knocked down outside the north gate of London Zoo.

Henry Morton Stanley (28 January 1841-May 1904). Born John Rowlands, he was a Welsh journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Upon finding Livingstone, Stanley later claimed he uttered the now-famous greeting, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?'. Stanley is also known for his discoveries and development of the Congo region.

Major Percy Horace Gordan Powell-Cotton (1866-1940). Elephant hunter. The largest African elephant he shot carried tusks weighing 372lbs, one tusk being over 9 feet in length and more than two feet in circumference. The world may never see the like of such an elephant again, the more's the pity, though most likely poachers would seek it out and kill it.

Acknowledgments

My great thanks to –

Lesley Abdela, my partner, for her ever-warm encouragement and interest in these adventures. As I wrote in my first novel in 2012, she has taken on work assignments at great risk to her life in distant, war-torn places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and now turbulent places like Egypt and Ukraine, to bring in an income while I tap away on a laptop in the beautiful woods around Burwash, in the Sussex High Weald, not too far from where Holmes bought his bee-farm, or in successive Septembers on the island of Gavdos in the Aegean for the final run-through of the text.

Steve Emecz, Managing Director, MX Publishing. A hero to over 100 Sherlock Holmes authors, including me. MX is the largest publisher of Sherlock Holmes stories in the world, many of them now being translated into other languages including Russian. MX is a tremendous asset to the United Kingdom and to everyone who likes to escape from the everyday real world for a while, accompanying Holmes and Watson on their great adventures.

Ailsa Crofts in far-away Scotland for her sterling work editing ‘The Sword', cutting down on excesses and diversions which creep into the text as I build it into a full-length novel. And to Rosie Grupp whose professional skill has made the layout so aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye.

Dr. Judith Rowbotham. Yet again this exceptional historian of Victorian crime has performed her wonders for
The Sword of Osman
whenever I have needed information and background. Her expertise ranges far beyond crime alone. She put together the Foreign Secretary's outfit in one of the important scenes where he attempts to hide his identity at the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens, and provided insights into the risks taken by Holmes and Watson masquerading as naval officers while on a diplomatic mission for the British Government at the time the 1907 Hague Convention on the laws of war was being finalised.

Heather Johnson, The National Museum Library, Royal Navy, Portsmouth. Heather's and her colleagues' unstinting assistance in technical matters concerning the Royal Navy in 1906 added immensely to the sheer fun in writing a novel set in the past. For example: ‘There is about 15 fathoms depth of water in the Golden Horn, which is essentially non-tidal and is sufficient for depth purposes. The B Class submarines were new in 1906 and capable of being deployed to the Mediterranean, indeed some were in action later in Turkish waters including the Dardanelles but the battery life and submersion time was limited. As for a mock battle, this would only really be viable with any accompanying ships in the squadron. If
Dreadnought
is accompanied by escorts then something might be arranged, this could be made most impressive by rapid firing of the 12lb anti-torpedo craft guns and a limited number of shots from the big guns. Equally viable would be a practice shoot against some form of agreed upon target, bearing in mind that the blast of the main turret guns could cause damage and/or discomfort to observers such that the Sultan and entourage would need to be on the bridge.'

Eric Shelmerdine M.A.B.I. W.A.D. General Secretary of the Association of British Investigators. With his permission I have used his name and turned him into the dragoman who tried his best to bamboozle Holmes. Eric, whenever you're in Turkey don't stand for too long on the Galata Bridge.

Professor Benjamin Fortna, Historian of the Modern Middle East at SOAS, University of London. A world expert on the final years of the Ottoman Empire. His special research focus on the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic was both gripping and valuable as background to my plot.

Robert Ribeiro. Again my thanks for his eagle (and lawyerly) eye in reading through the typescript and offering valuable suggestions on terminology and matters of historical fact. And to his wife Professor Aileen Ribeiro, author of many books and articles on the history of dress, the most recent being
Fashion and Fiction. Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England
(Yale: 2005). Their house in Sussex was built and lived in by the illustrator Walter Paget, brother of Sidney Paget whose portrayals in
The Strand
formed the world's physical impression of the Great Detective - complete with deerstalker.

Jeff Sobel for his extraordinary knowledge of armaments, not least the weaponry Watson has recourse to. Jeff's father, Dean Eli Sobel, was the ever-helpful Head of Department when I was an undergrad and grad student at UCLA.

Sara Wise for her superb review in
The Lancet
of the Museum of London's Sherlock Holmes Exhibition 2014/2015
Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die
, at www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2814%2962325-4/fulltext#

Elisabeth Thurlow, Archivist, Guardian News & Media, for the historical information from the Manchester Guardian on the attempt on the Sultan's life in July 1905.

Cdr Peter White RN Ret., Britannia Association. This master of the Royal Navy's complex etiquette gave me the idea for the important scene where Holmes and Watson are revealed as counterfeit naval officers. As Commander White explained, on short journeys a naval sword is always carried and never hooked up. To get on or off a pinnace, the ‘Senior Officer's Carry' would be employed. Holmes and Watson didn't know this arcane bit of naval etiquette... with unexpected results.

Paul Smith, Thomas Cook's Archivist, for mapping out Holmes's and Watson's journey from London to Gibraltar in 1906, according to the May 1906 edition of Cook's Continental Timetable. A final journey by steamer would have brought the pair to Gibraltar. The minimum time required for this journey was 104 hours.

Michael Pritchard FRPS, Director General of the Royal Photographic Society, coming up trumps on photography of the period. It was he who brought to my attention the Sultan's Adams quarter-plate De Luxe hand camera with red-leather covered body and 18 carat gold fittings, the most expensively produced camera in the world.

Michael Palmer, Archivist & Deputy Librarian, Zoological Society of London for great help concerning the lay-out of the Regent's Park Zoo in 1906. The Birdhouse at London Zoo: although the building that is now the Bird House did exist in 1906, it was built and used as the Reptile House until 1927, when it was converted to the use of birds.

Dr Robert Elgood. SOAS Department of the History of Art and Archaeology. World expert and Research Fellow on Eastern European, Islamic and Asian Arms and Armour. Was at the Wallace Collection 2006-2012.

Menelaos Danellis. Researcher and collector of Ottoman period bladed weapons and firearms volunteering at the Middle East Department of the British Museum. His advice on
The Sword of Osman
enabled Holmes to recognise the forgery and identify the ringleader of the plot.

Robert Pooley of Pooley Sword Ltd. ‘Yes, we make special presentation Swords, particularly for Arabia. If anyone has the money (considerable), we could certainly reproduce almost exactly the Sword of Osman. What you have to bear in mind with a forgery is not only has the Swordsmith got to copy the blade exactly but so has the engraver. When it comes to the crosspiece and the grip and pommel, this is very much the work of a Silversmith or Goldsmith of some distinction. To copy something is probably harder than making an original.'

Katherine Owen, Woodland Trust Ancient Woodland Restoration Engagement Manager, and Owen Johnson who compiled the Collins tree guide for Europe, for advice on trees in Turkey.

Mrs Jane VS Wickenden, MA (Oxon), DipLib. Historic Collections Librarian, Institute of Naval Medicine, for example for the description of Dr. Watson's uniform aboard HMS Dreadnought: ‘The most distinctive part of a Surgeon RN's uniform would be (as it still is) the red distinction cloth between the gold stripes - there would have been no “curl” at that date, and no rank division such as Surgeon Commander.'

Sophie Wilcox, librarian at the Alexander Library of Ornithology, Edward Grey Institute. http://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/alexanderlibrary who recommended such valuable reference books as
Bird Wonders of the Zoo
, by Lilian Gask. 1911, and
The Avifauna of British India and its Dependencies
, by James A. Murray. 1888/1890.

Lorna Cahill, Library, Art and Archives, Stuart Cable, Herbarium, and Christopher Mills, all at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for wonderful help in tracing plants which may have found their way to the Sultan's herbarium and gardens at Yildiz.

Professor Alan Dronsfield, Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group, for his valuable knowledge of the luminous paint of yesteryear incorporated in the ghost scene.

Dr Anne B Hodgson, Department of Chemistry, University of York, suggesting the ghost's outfit (the ghillie suit) should be rubberised for the safety of the human inside it. (Scottish gamekeepers, don't try Saliha Naciye's ruse at home)

Dave Johnson, Wildlife Officer/Bird Keeper, Royal Parks for his help on bird-life in Regent's Park in the Edwardian period.

Elizabeth Loder and Kristina Fister of the British Medical Journal for valuable help in researching the Victorian approach to ‘puerperal mania'.

Prof Liz Bentley of the Royal Meteorological Society for providing weather details for May 1906 when Dr. Watson went to Regent's Park. ‘There were some rather warm days early that May, and the temperature on the 8
th
almost reached 23°C. However, thundery rain followed overnight with nearly 20mm recorded. It then became much cooler, and on the 10
th
, the maximum temperature was only 9.8°C.'

Wesley Horton of Claremore, Oklahoma, who supplied really interesting information on his collection of code books, many acquired from the Central Code Bureau.

Howard White of Hastings who continues to drop by to chew over my latest plot and scouts out the settings I've used around the Sussex Weald and South Downs.

Last (but far from least), my unending thanks to Wikipedia, Google and the Encyclopaedia Britannica for putting most of the world at the touch of a keyboard, even in the very depths of the woodland in England's High Weald where I retreat on sunny days with my laptop and canvas folding-chair. By contrast when a novelist uncle of mine, Elleston Trevor (
Flight of the Phoenix
and the
Quiller
series etc.), started writing in the 1950s, it took him up to a month just to order a book from the library in St. Peter Port for his research - assuming he knew which book he wanted.