Susan Knight's Blog, page 6

The Great Suitcase Mystery

In the last three blogs I have looked at some true-life cases in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle involved himself. Interestingly, he never based any of his Sherlock Holmes stories on real crimes. That didn’t stop his imitators, however.

[image error]

In 1905 an American journalist called Jacques Futrelle wrote, with due apologies to Sir Arthur, a story entitled ‘The Great Suitcase Mystery’ featuring as he says ‘the greatest detective in fiction’. Sherlock Holmes, on holiday in Boston, decides to investigate a case which was all over the newspapers at the time, and described in The Washington Times as ‘the most horrible crime in the history of Massachusetts’. The headless, limbless torso of a young woman had been found in a suitcase, floating near a yacht club outside Boston.

In Futrelle’s version, Holmes, through a process of logical deduction following careful investigation of the very few clues available, and aided by frequent hits of cocaine and sessions of violin playing, tracks down both the murderer and the surgeon responsible for the dismemberment. He refrains however from passing his conclusions on to the police, telling Watson, ‘I was interested in this case purely and simply as a problem. I shall sail to Liverpool tomorrow.’ ‘And the case will never be solved?’ asks Watson. ‘Not publicly’ is the reply, as ‘Holmes reached his slender hand for the hypodermic.’

[image error]

In fact, the police did solve the case and, as Futrelle’s Holmes had concluded, it involved the cover-up of a botched abortion, though out of delicacy this is not stated in so many words in the story, just that the girl in question ‘erred’ and was desperate to save her name.

The Boston Globe, for its part, merely reported that there was evidence a ‘criminal operation’ had been performed. Holmes reckoned the victim was high-born from the ‘velvety skin, pink and firm’ of the torso, which he was somewhat inexplicably allowed to examine. As it turned out in the real world, she was a dancer called Susanna Geary and her identification, through rings on the fingers of her recovered limbs, soon led to the arrest of most of those involved.

Yet even if the precise nature of the criminal operation could not be put into words, everyone knew what was meant, and there was an immediate outcry against the proliferation of back street abortion clinics. Thousands gathered to watch the police raids, as reported in the Boston Globe of November 1905. ‘Not since the finding of the torso of the unfortunate Susanna Geary has public interest been aroused to such a high pitch as it was yesterday afternoon when the police, armed with five search warrants, raided the offices of alleged malpractitioners on Tremont Street.’

[image error]

None of that further detail makes its way into Futrelle’s story, which, I have to say, is a rather feeble pastiche of Conan Doyle’s originals. It is a curiosity, nonetheless. Futrelle [right] had aspirations to create an American Sherlock Holmes and attempted it in his many stories concerning the ‘Thinking Machine’, Professor Augustus S.F.X Van Dusen. However, Futrelle perished on the Titanic aged just 37. He forced his wife to take to a lifeboat but gave up his own place to another woman. His wife’s last view of him was on deck, smoking a cigarette, standing next to John Jacob Astor IV.

I am indebted to Bill Peschel, whose book The Best Sherlock Holmes Parodies and Pastiches 1888-1930, includes ‘The Great Suitcase Mystery’.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

The Casebook of Conan Doyle: Agatha Christie

Following the much publicised success of his interventions in criminal cases such as the wrongful convictions of George Edalji and Oscar Slater, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sometimes called on to solve other mysteries. Presumably it was assumed that he shared the deductive powers of his literary creation.

However, when the Chief Constable of Surrey approached him in December 1926 regarding the unexplained disappearance of thirty-six year-old author, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle resorted instead to a psychic. Over the years, he had become ever more obsessed with spiritualism, even becoming something of laughing-stock over his credulity, for instance regarding the fairies at the bottom of the Cottingley gardens.

[image error]

Depressed following a row with her husband, who wanted a divorce, Agatha Christie had apparently driven off into the night of December 3. Her car was later found abandoned – headlights blazing, fur coat and driver’s licence inside – in Surrey, quite a distance from her Berkshire home. An intensive search over a week revealed nothing and it was assumed that she was dead, whether by accident, suicide or even murder, her husband Colonel Archibald Christie, becoming the chief suspect.

Conan Doyle took one of her gloves to a famous psychic named Horace Leaf, whose speciality was psychometry, the ability to divine psychic information from a subject’s possessions. Leaf was not told who owned the glove but immediately exclaimed ‘Agatha’. This was perhaps not as astounding as it might seem since the news of the author’s disappearance was all over the newspapers. Leaf indicated there was ‘trouble’ connected with the glove. ‘The person who owns it,’ he claimed, ‘is half-dazed and half purposeful. She is not dead as many people think. She is alive. You will hear of her, I think, next Wednesday.’

[image error]

And, lo and behold, the following Wednesday December 15, Christie was indeed tracked down to the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrowgate, Yorkshire, where she was staying under the name of Theresa Neele (Nancy Neele being the young woman with whom Archie was in love). Apparently Christie went dancing each evening there to the music of the Happy Hydro Boys, and a member of that band, one Bob Tappin, a banjo player, recognised her.

She never explained her disappearance. Various theories were put forward. Had she been suffering from loss of memory? Was it a publicity stunt? Or was it revenge, a deliberate ploy to make the police suspect her husband of doing away with her?

As for Conan Doyle, he was utterly jubilant, writing in the Morning Post that ‘The Christie case afforded an excellent example of the use of psychometry as an aid to the detective… occasionally remarkable in its efficiency’, adding that it was often used by the French and German police, ‘but if it is ever employed by our own it must be sub rosa for it is difficult for them to call upon the very powers which the law compels them to persecute.’

Horace Leaf, much respected in spiritualist circles, lived into his eighties. One of his books bears the intriguing title, ‘Death Cannot Kill’. He passed over in 1971…

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

The Casebook of Conan Doyle: Oscar Slater

A few years after Conan Doyle had successfully intervened to overturn the guilty verdict in the case of George Edalji, he was approached to set right another injustice. This time, however, the accused was a far less innocent victim and would never have been invited to Sir Arthur’s wedding as Edalji was.

[image error]

Oscar Slater was a low-life gambler found guilty of the brutal murder of a rich and elderly Glasgow spinster named Marion Gilchrist. She had been hammered to death in December 1908 but the only object removed from the scene was a brooch. Evidence seemed to point to Slater after he pawned a brooch, changed his name and embarked by ship with his girlfriend to New York. There he was arrested. He agreed to return to England, imagining he could clear the matter up, but was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death, later commuted to penal servitude for life.

The evidence against him was slight – the brooch he pawned turned out to be not the one taken from Miss Gilchrist’s apartment, but had belonged to his girlfriend. However, the clinching factor was his identification in a line-up by the victim’s maid.

After reading about Slater in a series entitled ‘Notable Scottish Trials’, Conan Doyle became convinced that the man was innocent, and wrote a sixpenny pamphlet on the subject, ‘The Case of Oscar Slater’. Despite widespread agreement that a miscarriage of justice had taken place, nothing happened for many years, presumably because the First World War provided something of a distraction.

It was not until 1919 that Conan Doyle added his name to a petition to revisit the case, headed by a dogged Glasgow journalist named William Park.  Again the pleas were ignored, and more years passed. Eventually in 1925 Slater smuggled a message begging for help out of Parkhead prison, hidden under the dentures of a fellow prisoner, William Gordon. Conan Doyle had no joy petitioning the Secretary of State for Scotland for a reprieve but this time he was not willing to give up. When Park wrote a book describing the lack of hard evidence and the injustice of the case, Conan Doyle not only provided an introduction but arranged for the book to be published by his own Psychic Press in 1927.

[image error]

As a result, the issue was raised in the House of Commons and taken up by the newspapers. The maid who had identified Slater as the man she had seen in Miss Gilchrist’s apartment, now expressed doubt. In addition, police notebooks revealed that evidence against Slater was ‘very much less strong’ than against other suspects. Opposition leader, Ramsay McDonald angrily wrote to the Scottish Secretary stating that evidence had been twisted by the police in order to incriminate Slater ‘by influencing witnesses and with-holding evidence.’

Slater was finally released in November 1927 and wrote to Conan Doyle, saying ‘You breaker of my shackles. You love of truth of justice sake, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.’

However, fine words, as they say, butter no parsnips. Slater was awarded a somewhat measly compensation of £6,000, but when Conan Doyle suggested the man might reimburse him for the £300 he himself had spent on the case, he had to take ‘the ungrateful dog and liar’ to court in order to get the money.

Slater settled in Ayr, marrying a much younger woman of German descent. He and his wife were briefly interned as enemy aliens during the Second War World, even though he himself was of German Jewish extraction. Most of his family died in the Holocaust. He himself passed away in 1948 at the age of 76.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

The Casebook of Conan Doyle

Not only did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle create the most famous private detective of all time, he, perhaps inevitably, involved himself in several real-life crimes, mostly those in which a miscarriage of justice had taken place.

[image error]

The most infamous of these was the case of George Edalji, the son of a Parsi father and Scottish mother. His father had converted to Christianity to the extent of becoming the vicar of Great Wyrley, a village in Staffordshire. Later, Conan Doyle was to reveal his own prejudices when writing of the case, stating that ‘the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situations.’

 During George’s childhood, a spate of crudely written poison pen letters had been directed at the vicar and his family. The Edalji’s maid, Florence Foster admitted writing them but then retracted her confession. Some years later, more obscene letters followed, and now it was thought that George was responsible, even though many of them were directed against himself, ‘the blackman’. The furore over the letters eventually died down and all went quiet for years.

Then, in 1903, when George was twenty-seven, a series of animal mutilations took place around the village. Although he had trained as a solicitor and had set up independently in Birmingham, he was still living at home, even sleeping, strangely enough, in the same room as his father. Suspicion for the maimings soon fell upon George. He was, after all, different, with his brown skin, bulging eyes (he suffered from acute astigmatism) and solitary personality – being given to taking long evening walks. The local police were so convinced of his guilt, indeed, that they happily twisted the evidence to incriminate him. He was found guilty – of the letter writing as well as the mutilations – and was sentenced to seven years hard labour.

There was an immediate outcry among certain eminent members of the legal profession and other well-known figures, and they set up a Support Committee. The evidence, they argued, was dubious, the sentence far too harsh for the crime. Edalji served three years and then, inexplicably, was released but not pardoned. The case then came to the attention of Conan Doyle – in Julian Barnes’s engrossing novel on the subject, Arthur and George, it provided a welcome distraction from the agonies of his secret love affair with Jean Leckie, later his second wife. He met up with George, and having covertly watched him trying to read a newspaper, concluded, as a trained ophthalmologist, that the man’s poor eyesight would have rendered him physically incapable of clambering through fields at night to maim livestock. ‘I do not think you are innocent,’ as he tells him in the novel. ‘I do not believe you are innocent. I know you are innocent.’

[image error]

Eventually, in 1907, thanks in part to Conan Doyle’s efforts publicising evidence against the conviction in the press, George Edalji was found innocent of the maimings and exonerated. However, no compensation was paid because he was still reckoned to be guilty of writing the letters, thereby bringing suspicion upon himself for the other crimes. Innocent but guilty: it was a bitter victory, but at least George was able to resume practicing as a solicitor, which he did for the rest of his quiet life.

That wasn’t the end of it, however. Conan Doyle and the other worthies, incensed at the inadequacies of the appeals system – the requirement that all appeals be made to the Home Secretary – had long been agitating for the setting up of a Court of Criminal Appeal. This was finally achieved in August 1907, thanks in part to the perceived injustice meted out to George Edalji.  

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

 

The Sherlock Holmes Journal

[image error]

It is always a pleasure to receive the Sherlock Holmes Journal, and even more so just now when largely housebound. The summer 2020 edition is as usual packed full of interesting and sometimes quite esoteric articles. For example, who would have thought a disquisition on the tantalus could be quite so… tantalising. (This object, for those who don’t know, is a small liquor cabinet that secures flasks by means of a locking mechanism, thereby preventing servants illicitly quenching their thirst). A tantalus features as a strong clue to the murderer in the story The Adventure of Black Peter, as recounted here by Sonia Featherston.

[image error]

I was also diverted by Sarah Obermuller Bennett’s beautifully illustrated article on ‘Conan Doyle and the Postcard Connection’. Sir Arthur was for twenty-one years a director of Raphael Tuck and Co, as he writes in his memoir ‘without a cloud to darken the long and pleasant memory’. Despite his involvement, it seems the company rather surprisingly issued very few Sherlock Holmes postcards, the exceptions being an image of William Gillette playing the detective, and a caricature of the same actor as a cat. However, Tuck’s archive was destroyed in 1940 during the blitz, so no one is quite sure what it contained.

I love the way so many of the contributors to the journal write as if Holmes and Watson were real people (spoiler: they are in fact fictional creations!) Thus John Sheppard examines the religion and philosophy of the pair as gleaned from the Canon. He concludes that they have fairly conventional Christian beliefs, due largely to a propensity to quote from the Bible, though he allows that Holmes also toyed with Buddhism.

In a similar vein, Vincent Delay, Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Museum Lucens and President of the Suisse-Romande Society for Holmes Studies, evaluates the extent of Holmes’ legal knowledge, and his sometimes flexible interpretation of the law in the light of common humanity. For example, in The Blue Carbuncle, having solved the case, he allows the thief to go free. It is Christmas, after all.

Lest you think the contents are all very earnest, some delightful cartoons are scattered throughout, as well as a hilarious version of The Hound of the Baskervilles brought right up to date by Roger Bird in his short piece baskerville.com, featuring references to Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, drones and location apps. Auberon Redfearn, a regular contributor, has, in turn, written a witty playlet showing Holmes and Watson coping with lockdown.

[image error]

The journal also commemorates Freda Howlett who died this year at the great age of 101. Freda was a Past President of the Sherlock Holmes Society, taking over after the death of her husband, Tony, and only retiring at the age of 91. The couple are pictured here looking splendid at Reichenbach in May 1987.

Together with a small group of enthusiasts, Freda and Tony first had the idea to set up the society on February 20 1951, a date which Tony described with perhaps only slight exaggeration as ‘the most fateful in the history of the world’. Freda, an elegant lady, features on the journal’s cover, and inside are many loving tributes to her.

With lots of other titbits as well as book and theatre reviews, the journal as ever provides a terrific read for Holmes’ fans.

http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

The Absentee Detective

Here’s an original idea: Sherlock Holmes stories in which the great detective doesn’t feature. Mark Sohn has cleverly thought up four alternatives, all very different, though perhaps rather more bloody and action-packed than Conan Doyle’s efforts tend to be.

[image error]

The first, The Detective Who Wasn’t, concerns one Mortimer Knight and his sidekick Baxter Belmont, actors fallen on hard times with the advent of cinema. It is the Second World War, and with their rough-and-ready troupe, they have taken to travelling around England playing Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in church halls.

One day a little boy, Toby, thinking Mortimer is a real detective, enlists his help to find out why his beloved dog, usually so tame and friendly, had suddenly turned savage at a certain spot on the Devon coast. Toby’s father is threatening to shoot the dog, and the boy is distraught. Mortimer decides to investigate, and uncovers a fiendish plot that threatens the very future of Great Britain…

The second story, The Detective Who Wasn’t There features Watson in the leading role under instruction from an absent Sherlock, and floundering somewhat under the great responsibility that has fallen on his shoulders to retrieve important stolen documents and solve a murder. Once again the British Empire is imperilled.

In the third story, The Unlikely Detective, it is the author, Mark Sohn himself, who is drawn into an investigation after purchasing an old leather wallet stuffed with papers. Featuring all manner of cloak and dagger stuff, as well as a femme fatale, the nifty plot reveals, as most of us know already, that far from being fictional characters, Sherlock and Watson and Mycroft really existed, or at least did so in an alternative universe.

[image error]

The final story, The Tinseltown Detective, perhaps my favourite, is set in Los Angeles and features Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, who both lived there during the war, making all those Sherlock Holmes adventures for MGM. But Rathbone finds himself in a terrible pickle, threatened with blackmail over his womanising. Again the devilish opponents of democracy are at the bottom of the plot. Rathbone calls on Bruce for support and together… Well, I won’t give any more away. You’ll have to read it yourselves.

A highly entertaining quartet of stories by the author of Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Murders.

The Absentee Detective, Tales of Conspiracy, Connivance and Intrigue is published by MX publishing.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Horowitz and Moriarty

Anthony Horowitz is an accomplished and productive writer. A very clever writer. Perhaps a little too clever, as I thought last night when I closed his second Sherlock Holmes novel, Moriarty. Without revealing the plot twists, let’s just say it’s full of them, especially at the denouement.

[image error]

Horowitz’s writing credits include a multitude, the Alex Rider series of children’s books, many stand-alone novels, as well as episodes of ‘Poirot’ and ‘Midsomer Murders’. He is also creater and writer of the very popular Foyle’s War and quite recently wrote a James Bond novel with the engaging title, Trigger Mortis. Before that in 2011 he was approached by the Conan Doyle estate to write a new Holmes novel. The result, The House of Silk, published that same year, is an enthralling and shocking tale, very much in the spirit of the canon.

It is perhaps a misnomer to call Moriarty a Holmesian novel, since the book is set at the time of The Final Problem, when Sherlock and Moriarty have supposedly just plunged to their deaths. The main detective here is Athelney Jones (already known to Sherlock fans), assisted by a Pinkerton investigator, called Frederick Chase, the narrator. They are on the trail of a dastardly (what else) American with ambitions to become London’s new crime lord.

[image error]

I enjoyed it well enough, although found the ending a bit of a cheat. I enjoyed much more The Word is Murder, not a Holmes novel as such, but one that mirrors the characters of Conan Doyle’s creations. Horowitz has even cast a fictionalised version of himself as the Dr Watson to Daniel Hawthorne’s maverick Sherlock-influenced detective. ‘Anthony’ makes references to The House of Silk, to Foyle’s War, and other existing works of his own; he meets real people, including Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson to discuss a possible Tintin II movie. A meeting that really took place. Sadly Horowitz never heard from either of them again.

This mixing of real with fictional makes for great fun. In general, I get the feeling Horowitz enjoys writing his bloody tales, his tongue often firmly set in his cheek. Apparently there are to be more Daniel Hawthorne books (eight or nine…) and I’ll certainly look out for them. Whether more Sherlock novels are also planned remains to be seen. The author of The Magpie Murders has shown himself to be quite a magpie himself, hopping all over the place and gathering glittering trophies as he goes.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

From Japan’s Golden Age of Detective Fiction

It would seem to be an unlikely union: classic Western detective fiction with traditional Japanese culture. And yet from the nineteen twenties onwards, many Japanese writers have been inspired to pen their own inimitable contributions to the genre, even up to the present day. They call it honkaku, detection based on logic.

[image error]

Earlier this year, I first came across the phenomenon in two works by Seishi Yokomizo (1902-1981), only recently translated decades after their first publication. Yokomizo apparently wrote 77 such novels, but so far it is possible to read in English only The Honjin Murders (1946) and The Inugami Curse (1951), and highly entertaining they are. The familiar whodunit and howdidtheydoit format is engagingly transposed into an unusual setting of kimonos, folding screens, sliding doors, tatami mats, koto players, rickshaws…

According to his grandson, starting in boyhood Yokomizo devoured English-language mysteries, from Edgar Allan Poe, through Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie. His favourite was John Dickson Carr, prime exponent of locked room mysteries, The Honjin Murders falling into the same category. Yokomizo makes no secret of his debt. His scruffy detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, whose deductive methods are most certainly influenced by Sherlock Holmes, Gideon Fell and others, is delighted to find in the study of the victim’s house shelves stuffed with mystery novels: ‘The collection comprised every book of mystery or detective fiction ever published in Japan, both domestic and foreign. There was the whole collection of Conan Doyle.’ Later in the same novel reference is made to the Sherlock Holmes’ story, The Problem of Thor Bridge.

Kindaichi does not bear a strong physical resemblance to Holmes, however. He is scruffy and given to scratching his head furiously while thinking. He wears hakama trousers under a kimono, although is happy, when weather necessitates, to throw on a Norfolk jacket, as sported by Sherlock et al in so many films. Nonetheless, Kindaichi’s description of his deductive method sounds more familiar: ‘The police investigate footprints and look for fingerprints. I take the results of these investigations and by piecing together all the available information logically, I am able to reach a conclusion.’

[image error]

If he is gaining acclaim now in the West, Yokomizo [right] did not achieve instant success in his native country either. As a young man in the 1930s he had edited a magazine that introduced Japanese readers to foreign detective stories, while his ambition was always to write similar works himself. Once war had broken out, however, he ran into censorship. Again according to his grandson, the government ‘considered that detective stories came from western culture and completely banned authors from writing them.’ It was only at the end of the war that Yokomizo was able to exclaim with delight, ‘I can write whatever I want.’ And he did. I look forward to reading the other 75.

The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse are published by Pushkin Vertigo.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Ruby Elephants: review

[image error]

What a magical mystery tour of a novel. A lot of the time I found myself as bemused as poor Dr Watson as what exactly was going on and who all these mad characters were, between maharajahs, femmes fatales, midget monocle manufacturers, doppelgangers, an aesthete who makes soup brewed from a mammoth’s femur… the list goes on and on.

Oh, and a couple of real people have walk-on parts, including Frederick William Burton, Irish-born artist and director of the National Gallery (dubbed William Frederick in the book – a mistake or part of the overall hall of mirrors effect?). Irish people will know him as the painter of the ineffable ‘Meeting on the Turret Stairs’, held in the National Gallery of Ireland and in 2012 voted Ireland’s favourite painting [see below]. Even Queen Victoria turns up in the book and is revealed as a good chum of our detective.  

[image error]

A maddened elephant rampages through the first chapter, setting the scene for all sorts of shenanigans. Actually, to use a Hitchcockian term, this particular elephant is something of a MacGuffin, an irrelevance, as opposed to the ruby elephants, the badge of a secret society, with dark secrets of their own that unfold with the plot.

Sherlock, a little too superciliously knowing here for my taste – although I suspect the author has his tongue firmly in his cheek when the detective explains his ‘elementary’ deductions – races through the book with a befuddled Watson trying to keep up behind him. If this were a film, the special effects would be spectacular, between villains in a hot air balloon or a perilous ascent to find a corpse on the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. And envisage, if you please, a high speed chase on Penny Farthings, our heroes trying to keep their balance, hotly pursued by four evil Archangels, men in black suits and shades bearing the names of their heavenly alter egos Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel? These gentlemen keep popping up but don’t ask me exactly what they are about or who they are working for.

I enjoyed it, I think I did.  It was particularly pleasing that Mrs Hudson features as a strong and positive character.

My advice to would-be readers: don’t try and analyse it too closely or take it too seriously. Just go along for the ride.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Ruby Elephants by Christopher James is published by MX publishing

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

‘Killing Dr. Watson’ reviewed

Here’s an idea. A serial killer is going around murdering actors who played Dr Watson in a popular TV series of the eighties and nineties. Now I know for a fact that while Edward Hardwicke sadly passed away in 2011, it was of natural causes, while David Burke is still with us at the grand old age of 85, so thankfully nothing to do with them.

[image error]

Sherlock Holmes, in the fictional series mentioned here, is played by one Bartholomew Neville, a has-been actor hoping to make a come-back. A beautiful young red-head, Lucy Ferguson, has asked him to find out who murdered her father, and the novel’s narrator, Jerry Bellamy (same initials as Jeremy Brett, surely no coincidence), who hero-worships Neville and who fancies himself as a bit of a sleuth, gets involved as well. It helps that Jerry also fancies the luscious Lucy. He soon figures out that someone has been picking off all the actors – and there are lots of them – who played Dr Watson alongside Neville’s somewhat overbearing Sherlock.

So far, so far-fetched, but it’s all very enjoyable, nonetheless. A roller-coaster of a story in which Jerry, as well as the reader, has some difficulty distinguishing between reality and deception, and with a startling denouement on a Scottish mountain.

There are editing shortcomings and the layout is all over the place, with strange gaps throughout the text. That is unfortunate and somewhat off-putting in a book that otherwise passes the time most pleasantly.

‘Killing Dr. Watson’ by Matt Ferraz, is published by MX publishing and available in paperback and Kindle through Amazon

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845  or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z