Foreword

 

‘I hear of Sherlock everywhere’.

 

Welcome to this collection of jottings, vignettes and tales from erstwhile members of the web forum ‘Holmesian.net’. It has been said that any real Holmes enthusiast worth his salt will endeavour to add to the literature of Sherlock Holmes and it is as true today as it has ever been, thankfully so. The pieces gathered together in this collection all have their origins amongst the pages of that esteemed forum. A diverse collection of tales and jottings from a diverse collection of folk, but all single minded when it comes to the study of our favourite sleuth.

There is melancholy here; there are laughs, tears and numerous flights of fancy. Did I mention weirdness? The overall content of the forum is varied in the extreme, covering every aspect of Holmes and Watson’s lives and careers and along the way we have set ourselves various challenges such as writing pieces on a Holmesian theme for Christmas and Easter. Many of the pieces in this collection sprang from such challenges and there were many more that could have been included, but had to be omitted for reasons of space etc. (Volume Two anyone?)

I first cut my Holmesian writing teeth through these challenges and one or two others have certainly been inspired by our friendly community to begin committing Holmes pieces to paper too.

It might be said that we are indeed guilty of degrading a course of lectures into a series of tales and ruined what might have been an instructive and even a classical series of demonstrations by looking at everything from the point of view of a story, but we make no apologies, we enjoyed every moment of it!

 I hope, like Watson, that I have achieved some power of selection in my choices for this volume. And as you read, please remember ‘Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms’ and some of these forms within these pages may be strange indeed!

But, for now…once more, the game is afoot.

 

The above was the foreword to the original Kindle collection published in June 2011; this revised addition has one or two omissions from that first collection and several new pieces added to the mix.

Enjoy!

 

David Ruffle

January 2012