This book, the seventh in the Young Sherlock Holmes series, is an odd hybrid. At least, that’s the way it’s turned out in my mind. On the one hand it marks a break with the past: moving Sherlock away from the comforts of having his aunt and uncle’s house as a base (even though he hadn’t actually been there for the past two books) and towards a future that involves starting a course at university, and also away from his comforting support network of friends like Rufus Stone, Virginia Crowe and Amyus Crowe, and towards a future when he is on his own. On the other hand it’s a return to the kind of stripped-down, pure version of the books that I managed to hit in Death Cloud – Sherlock and Matty working alone together to solve a crime. What the future holds is anyone’s guess – although I do have a file of notes.
As usual I’ve done a fair amount of research to make sure that the history and the people are more or less accurate. I managed to pull descriptions of the Oxford town and Oxford University of the time from Victorian Oxford by W. R. Ward (Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1965), while Charles Dodgson’s eccentric character and history I took from three books: Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life by Robin Wilson (Allen Lane, 2008), Lewis Carroll and Alice by Stephanie Lovett Stoffel (Thames and Hudson, 1997) and In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll by Karoline Leach (Peter Owen Ltd, 1999). The Victorian attitude towards death and dead bodies was taken from the excellent Necropolis: London and Its Dead by Catharine Arnold (Simon and Schuster, 2006), which I have used before in Fire Storm. Wikipedia has, of course, been used to fill in the gaps and answer sudden questions, such as, ‘When were ice-cream cones invented?’ (The answer is that they were first mentioned in the year 1825, where they were said to have been made from ‘little waffles’, so, when Sherlock and Mycroft have their ice creams in the park in the epilogue, it’s all historically accurate.)
The bit when Sherlock has just met his landlady, Mrs McCrery, for the first time, and is introduced to her stuffed cat, Macallistair, really happened to me, by the way. I was in Wigtown, which is a small town out in Dumfries and Galloway, in Scotland. I was there for a literary festival and I arrived late one night after a long journey up by plane, by train and by car. It was dark, I was tired and I was hungry. The festival organizers had, very nicely, put me up in a local farmhouse that also did a good line in bed and breakfast. The lovely lady who ran the place ushered me into her small sitting room and said she’d go and make me a pot of tea and some warm scones. I settled down to relax. There was a cat, curled up by the fire. I went over to stroke it, because I love cats and I wanted to make friends with it. You can guess the rest. It was, and still is, one of the more bizarre events that has ever happened to me. Perhaps I just lead a sheltered life.
With luck, and a good headwind, I will be starting work on the next book in the series soon. It might be called Wind Chill, or it might be called Night Break – I’m not yet sure. I’m pretty sure, however, that Charles Dodgson will play a part, and that it might involve Sherlock returning to his family home to see his mother and his sister. It might also involve the case of Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.
Until then, take care.