Dead Ringers - Sherlock Holmes Stories

Robert Perret

Description

Join Holmes and Watson on eleven original adventures, spanning their earliest collaboration to their service to the Crown in the Great War. Revisit A Study in Scarlet, return to The Copper Beeches, and learn the shocking truth behind the Bogus Laundry Affair. There will be murder under the big top, ancient prophecies come true, and a mysterious new queen of crime all putting the Great Detective to the test in these action-packed stories. This volume collects the best traditional pastiches by Robert Perret, Sherlockian author and scholar, and member of the John H. Watson Society and Doyle's Rotary Coffin.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 10 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781787055193
• Langue: English

Extrait

Dead Ringers
Sherlock Holmes Stories
By
Robert Perret




First edition published in 2019
© Copyright 2019 Robert Perret
The right of Robert Perret to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him 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. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and not of MX Publishing.
Published by MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
2020 digital version converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Cover design by Brian Belanger




To
Jennifer,
my only motive



Foreword
Lost and Found
This is a story about a Great Detective and a hiatus and Bohemian outsiders and things once forgotten coming to light. It is a tale that doesn’t get told often and it just may be that you haven’t heard it at all. It is apocrypha, taking place between the chapters of the stories we tell about Sherlockiana. Let us take a step back in time, not to the 1890’s but rather to the 1990’s. The much beloved Granada series had ended in 1994, and had arguably petered out in cultural currency earlier than that. The most recent Sherlock Holmes craze would begin with the Robert Downey Jr. film in 2009. Some readers will likely insist upon the BBC series that began in 2010 as that flash point instead, but either way there was at least a 15 year hiatus from Sherlock Holmes in the zeitgeist (sure there were a few odds and ends in the meantime, but even avowed Sherlockians often don’t remember Matt Frewer or Jonathan Pryce as Holmes). The most impactful Holmes of this hiatus was likely the animated one who solved crimes in the 22nd century. What do these fifteen years encompass? A lost generation of Sherlockians: my generation. Too cynical and anti-establishment for scions, but existing before social media as we know it today. There were Usenet groups and listservs and zines, but for the most part we were feral and lonely.
Some of us still are.
We are the Generation X Sherlockians, and as in all areas of life, we have long since lost the cultural war. Boomers shake their fists at avocado toast and bitmoji resumes, while Millenials and Gen Z bemoan the gig economy and the dinosaurs who have long since pulled the ladder up behind themselves. Hardly anyone else has anything to say about or to Generation X, save when the Boomers mistake us for senior Millennials, or Millenials lump us in as basically-Boomers.
We are a generation without an era. We are Sherlockians without a Sherlock.
Sure, some of us have adopted Jeremy Brett or Benedict Cumberbatch, or someone else entirely (personally I find Ben Syder to be the most Generation X-worthy choice), but those Holmeses aren’t our Holmes, the way that Gilette, Rathbone, Livanov, Brett, or Cumberbatch have defined their respective eras.
I discovered Sherlock Holmes in a library, in a Doubleday edition of my grandparent’s vintage. Rathbone and Brett made irregular visits at odd hours to my local Public Broadcasting Service station. They were still out there, still sleuthing, but in the shadows and just around corners; elusive and fleeting. I read that Doubleday Edition over and over again, and myself and that book were the entirety of my Sherlockian society. It seems there was a scion in the nearest major city, but I never heard of it at the time, and I don’t know how I ever would have back then. Later I would find those early-Web oases, but this was a time when internet access was tied to a bulky desktop and a dial up modem, and not everyone even had those. The formative years of my Sherlockian vigil were in solitude: Holmes, Watson and I became a bit of a trio, and had many adventures that existed only in my head.
So it was that Sherlock Holmes made me a story teller.
I told myself stories. I told myself a lot of stories. I didn’t think of myself as an author. I could also draw, a little. Enough that I became interested in comics. Not just superheroes, and not just Eisner-winning graphic novels, but also comic strips. Calvin and Hobbes , Robotman , and The Far Side . Here was a medium in which I could see myself, and so I drew and wrote and created comic strips for both my high school and college newspapers. Of course, newspaper strips weren’t cool, and so I also picked up comics like Spawn , Scud the Disposable Assassin , and X-Force . I began to see myself there as well, in some bullpen somewhere churning out startling adventures of serial characters. My art plateaued but my writing continued to develop, and so I wrote a handful of spec scripts and sent them to independent comic studios, often never hearing anything back at all. And thus ended my career as a creator, and began my journey in home security, selling cutlery, temping in offices, a brief foray as a call center stock broker, and any number of other jobs. Not quite the gig economy my juniors complain about, but certainly not the careers my seniors enjoyed.
I didn’t write or draw anything for well over a decade. That was my hiatus, my lost generation.
And then I came across a Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes volume at Costco, and on a whim I bought it, and read it, revisiting Baker Street for the first time in a long time. By then, social media did exist, and searching online for Sherlock Holmes was an entree into the world of virtual Sherlockiana. Of course there were deep wells of scholarship, and exhaustive discussions of every Sherlock Holmes production, but what really affected me, what really reinvented me as a Sherlock Holmes fan, were the pastiches. People were writing their own Sherlock Holmes stories and my mind reeled. I had honestly never thought of putting the stories I had told myself onto paper. Now, I could think of nothing else. I found a call for submissions and I write a story tailored to it. It was accepted and the editor, A.C. Thompson, was a wonderful person to work with. So I did it again. I found a call, and I wrote and submitted. I was lucky early on – I had three or four stories accepted before I met rejection. I had already been transformed.
I was the conductor of Doctor Watson’s light now.
This collection includes the best of my traditional Sherlock Holmes stories to date. These aren’t just stories to me. They are memories. Good memories of my friends Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. We survived some lean times together, feral and lonely but also resilient and resourceful. We kept the memory green when the soil was parched. This is my Sherlock Holmes from a lost era of Sherlockiana. I’m glad you found us.



The Bogus Laundry Affair
The Foreign Office had rewarded Holmes handsomely after a bit of diplomatic business in Woking and so it was that we had spent the better part of a month loitering around Baker Street. I have had no small part in making the public aware of the fruits of Sherlock Holmes’ prodigious industry, but he spent as much time in the valleys of exertion as he did at the peaks. He had thus languished in a blue cloud of tobacco smoke, calling for tea to be brought to the divan and toast to be brought to the settee. We were just reaching the tipping point I often feared, where his torpor would trickle into ennui and the needle would follow and so I was much heartened when a constable appeared in the doorway to fetch us to Inspector Lestrade.
Holmes waved the policeman away.
“If it were anything of interest Lestrade would have come himself.”
“He is detaining a caravan and refuses to leave it,” the constable said.
“Whyever not?” Holmes sighed. “Surely such a task is a particular specialty of patrolmen such as yourself.”
“He doesn’t trust anyone else to do it on account of there is no cause, sir.”
“Lestrade is detaining a tradesman without cause?”
“Inspector Lestrade believes there should be cause, sir, but there isn’t. That’s why he requests your presence, Mr. Holmes; in order to find it.”
“The Case of the Lost Cause, Watson. I’m afraid it is over before it begins.”
“Why not, Holmes?” I said. “If it is nothing, you get to tweak Lestrade’s nose. If it is something, all the better.”
“I suppose.”
“You’ll come then?” asked the constable.
With a melodramatic sigh, Holmes stood from his seat and systematically stretched each muscle until he was as limber as a prizefighter. While this went on I donned my own coat and hat and held Holmes’ at the ready. I had expected a carriage outside but instead we were lead on foot, the constable unerringly choosing the most sinister alley, the most forbidding passage, the most forsaken common, and soon we were deep within a London I had never seen. The buildings were ramshackle piles of bricks and boards peppered with grim faces peering from the darkness within. Refuse seemed to grow like a mold upon the place and living ghouls shuffled about, now gawking silently at the interlopers. It was as savage as the wilds of Afghanistan and it was less than a mile from where I lay blissfully next to my wife each night. My hand drifted to my pocket but I had not anticipated the need to bring my Webley. I reconsidered the constable but found little hop