The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

The Confidential
Casebook of
Sherlock Holmes

N
OVELS BY
M
ARVIN
K
AYE

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

O
THER
A
NTHOLOGIES BY
M
ARVIN
K
AYE

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
. 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

Introduction

D
ELICATE
B
USINESS

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

D
ESPERATE
B
USINESS

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

M
Y
B
LUSHES
, W
ATSON
!

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
R
ECHERCHE DU
T
EMPS
P
ERDU

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

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.)

I
magine 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.

B
efore 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.”