The Mary Russell Companion (25 page)

LRK: Oh come now, surely Robert Goodman, the “Green Man” of the woods, was not
exactly
as you present him?  He’s a creature of mythic fantasy.

MR: Ms King,
you
are the writer of fiction;
I
could never have made up such a man as Goodman. A fantastic creature he was indeed.  I shall never forget the first time I saw him—or rather, his boots—waving from the shrubbery.

LRK: You’re claiming he’s true to life?

MR: (even more coldly) I write memoirs, not fantasy.

LRK: If you say so.  Okay, so, in the book we also see a great deal about Mr Holmes and his artist son, introduced in
The Language of Bees
, who—

MR: I don’t care to speak about personal matters, if you please.

LRK: No politics, no family.  What does that leave us—religion?

MR: Reverend Thomas Brothers?  Unpleasant fellow.

LRK: Well, maybe we could talk about your online experiences.  You’re active on MySpace, and you have several thousand Twitter followers.

MR: Yes?

LRK: Not many women your—of your era, are quite so technologically savvy.

MR: It takes less mechanical acumen than changing the ink in a pen.  And the demands of brevity are amusing—Holmes was fond of telegrams.

LRK: Where you had to pay by the word, yes.

MR
: I
?  Or by “you” do you mean “one”?

LRK: I guess.  And on your blog, you’re continuing the tale of how you came to give me the stor—the memoirs.

MR: Which you post on your own “Mutterings” blog.  Clever, that.

LRK: Thank you.  Is there anything else you’d like to tell us, about the book, or—

MR: All I choose to reveal lies within my memoirs.  If you wish to know about Holmes, or Damian, or Robert Goodman, or Mycroft, I suggest you read the book.

LRK:
The God of the Hive
. 

MR: Quite.

Three:

The Mystery

                                                                                                  of the Memoirs

I could not imagine that this would end well.   (
Pirate King
)

*

This was an age of the death of gods.   (
God of the Hive
)

*

Self-criticism was my husband’s way of patting himself on the back.  
(The Game)

*

Holmes would have done the matter by telegram, I knew, but I always prefer the personal touch in my matters of mild blackmail.  (
Monstrous Regiment
)

Laurie R. King, literary agent?

or

The Mystery of the Russell Memoirs

*

Being short tales of revelation,

deduction, and befuddlement

The all-important question is this: Are the Russell tales the memoirs of an elderly woman with an implausibly thrilling life, or novels by Laurie King?  If they are in fact novels, all well and good—but if these books are actual autobiography, why is Ms King publishing them as if they were her own?

The history of the manuscripts

The problem arises in the very first volume of the memoirs, in the preface to
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
, when Ms. King describes the delivery of a large cardboard box filled with a peculiar variety of things:

… as a collection, there was neither rhyme nor reason: some articles of clothing, including a beaded velvet evening cloak (with a slit near the hem), a drab and disreputable man’s bathrobe or dressing gown….  And, right at the bottom, a layer of what proved to be manuscripts, although only one was immediately recognizable as such, the others being either English-sized foolscap covered top to bottom with tiny, difficult writing or the same hand on an unwieldy pile of mismatched scrap paper. Each was bound with narrow purple ribbon and sealed with wax, stamped R.

Ms. King describes her reluctant decision to publish these manuscripts, under her own name, adding:

I have only tidied up her atrocious spelling and smoothed out a variety of odd personal shorthand notations. Personally, I don’t know what to make of it. I can only hope that with the publication of what the author called
On the Segregation of the Queen
(such a cumbersome title—she was obviously no novelist!) will come, not lawsuits, but a few answers. If anyone out there knows who Mary Russell was, could you let me know? My curiosity is killing me.

The puzzle is revisited in
A Monstrous Regiment of Women:

As I said, I have no idea why this collection was sent to me. I believe, however, that the sender, if not the author herself, may still be alive. Among the letters generated by the publication of
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
was an odd and much-travelled postcard, mailed in Utrecht. It was an old card, with a sepia photograph of a stone bridge over a river, a long flat boat with a man standing at one end holding a pole and a woman in Edwardian dress sitting at the other, and three swans. The back was printed with the caption, Folly Bridge, Oxford. Written on it, in handwriting similar to that of the manuscripts, was my name and address, and beside that the phrase, “More to follow.”

Then came
A Letter of Mary
, with a preface that adds to the mystery with the receipt—following the publication of the second book—of an anonymously mailed clipping from the
Times of London
:

Oxford Punt Found in London

A group of Japanese businessmen on a river cruise yesterday caught and towed to Hampton Court a punt which police have determined originated at Folly Bridge in Oxford. In it were found clothing and a pair of glasses. The Thames Authority has no suggestion as yet how a punt could manoeuvre the locks and deeper stretches of river.

Punts, the Cherwell

Ms King promptly set out to uncover more information.  She was eventually told that the clothing was that of a tall, thin woman, and had been found neatly folded with the glasses on top.  The police sent her their reports where, to her consternation, she discovered that:

…fingerprints taken from the sides of the punt match those on a filthy clay pipe that was in the trunk with the manuscripts.

And in addition:

… a key. The key, I have been told, is to a safety-deposit box. There is absolutely no way of knowing where that box is.

The curious Prefaces continue in
The Moor
, where King reiterates the receipt of the curious odds and ends of the box: clothing, a few rocks, a man’s pipe, emerald necklace, with the manuscripts at the bottom: 

I thought that they had been sent to me because the author was dead, and for some unknown reason chose to send me the memorabilia of her past. However, since the publication of the first Mary Russell book, I have received a handful of communications as ill assorted as the original contents of the trunk, and I have begun to suspect that the author herself is behind them.

And finally, in
Locked Rooms
, we read:

This is the eighth chapter in the continuing memoirs of Mary Russell, based on a set of manuscripts I received in the early 1992.  Some of the manuscripts were neatly collated and tied by ribbons; others, comprising as they did varied sizes and qualities of paper, required considerable work to decipher.  Still other were mere fragments apparently unrelated to larger bodies of the work, and thus, for lack of a better approach, are best published as short stories.

And there matters appear to stand, until a decade and a half go by, and the assorted cards and hints begin to come together at last.

Later developments I: My Story

Beginning in 2009, the fifteenth anniversary of
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
, a series of posts on Mary Russell’s blog set out to unravel the story of how the manuscripts came to Ms. King—although perhaps “unravel” is not quite the right word, since the questions her posts introduced only added to the overall mystery.

In any event, Ms Russell’s story described the events of early 1992, when that good lady finally located a person suitable to be her literary agent: the granddaughter of a childhood friend, who was not only a writer (Laurie R. King’s first novel was at the time under contract, but not actually out—Ms Russell certainly has informants all over!) but also shared Russell’s own interest in theology.

However, before she could set the manuscripts on their way, Miss Russell was interrupted by what she describes as a “pack” of Sherlockians, who hounded the two elderly detectives from Sussex to Oxford, demanding some fleet-footed work and a touch of red herring before the pack was lost. 

Those fifteen posts, collected as “My Story,” solve one portion of the King authorship question. 

Later Developments II: A Case in Correspondence

The following year, King unveiled a collection of correspondences that had been sent her, which included vintage post cards, letters and carbon copies of letters, a telegram, and two newspaper clippings.
 
Many of these pieces of correspondence appear to have been either placed in envelopes that were later lost (unlikely, given the otherwise complete nature of the collection) or else delivered by hand.  The use of couriers may be understandable, when one considers the momentous gravity of the matters at stake.

2010 was also the year King published
The God of the Hive
, a dark and convoluted story concerned in part with the British Intelligence services of the 1920s—not only the official branches of MI5 (domestic) and MI6 (foreign), but the private organization created by Sherlock Holmes’ elder brother, Mycroft.

Mycroft Holmes appears, in person or in name, in four of the Conan Doyle stories: “The Greek Interpreter”, “The Final Problem”, “The Empty House”, and “The Bruce-Partington Plans”.  He is described as a large, physically lazy man with a mind quicker than that of his younger brother, who for employment ostensibly “audits the books in some of the government departments” and for pleasure retreats to the Diogenes Club, where members are forbidden to speak.  In fact, Mycroft’s job is considerably more than that of a minor accountant.  As Holmes tells Watson, “You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he IS the British government.”

Mycroft’s immense and covert authority underlies
The God of the Hive
, a story in which Russell comes face to face with the corrupting nature of power.  Appropriately, “A Case in Correspondence” addresses the same issue.  It should be noted here that the article from
The Times
given as Document Nineteen is not some Photoshopped wonder: it is an actual piece of news from May 7, 1992.

Which means that not only does this heretofore unseen collection of letters give us the background of the King/Russell memoirs, it opens up a chapter of British history, wherein Miss Russell and Mr. Holmes forced the hand of the prime minister, pushing an entire nation into a degree of openness. 

If the British government had not made the mistake of annoying Mary Russell, it might never been forced to acknowledge the existence of MI6.

My Story

or

The Case of the Ravening Sherlockians

by Mary Russell

(This episodic tale began to unfurl in Miss Russell’s blog during the spring of 2009.  It turned out to be merely the first part of the story, which continues in “A Case in Correspondence”.  For the reader Illuminations of this tale, go to Six: The Russell Community.)

1.

Hard as it is to believe, fifteen years have passed since Laurie R. King published— under her name—the first volume of the Mary Russell memoirs. Ms King recounts (in her Editor’s Preface to that volume, which was given the title
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
) her puzzlement as to what these manuscripts were and why she was the recipient of multiple volumes of hand-written (for the most part) manuscripts recounting the life of a perfect stranger—and moreover, a stranger who claims to have been married to one Sherlock Holmes.

The time has come to answer that puzzle.

*  *

It began in the winter of 1989, when a bout with a troublesome although ultimately meaningless illness left me with an awareness that, in my ninetieth year, I was perhaps not to be granted immortality. It was time to gather my thoughts for posterity and make some arrangement for their preservation.