Foreword

by Nicholas Meyer

There’s a cartoon, known, I suspect, to all Sherlockians. It depicts a small boy in bed, staring with consternation and dismay at the last Sherlock Holmes story in the book he holds before him. What now? His expression seems to signify.

I was - and am - certainly not alone in identifying with the expression on the boy’s face in the cartoon, as well as the feelings to be inferred behind it. When newcomers to the Holmes Canon reach the end of the sixtieth Doyle story, feelings of bereavement typically predominate. None of this is new. It is said that when Doyle killed off Holmes - (apparently!) - in “The Final Problem”, young men in London went to work wearing black mourning armbands.

Just as surely, I am neither the first nor the last to have slid into the next phase of grief: Denial. The impulse to write my own Holmes story, to continue the adventures of that unique personage and of his Boswell. Fan fiction. Whether executed as straight-faced pastiche or broad parody, there are far more Holmes adventures penned by “divers hands” than the mere sixty penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, who remained oddly obtuse about the appeal of his creation and his own relations with The Great Detective.

Yet the unconscious plays strange tricks. Doyle, who kept trying to kill off Holmes, nonetheless seems to have expressed a knowing kinship with him. Holmes tells Watson he is descended from the sister of the French artist, Vernet. Being fictional, he is descended from no one. It is Doyle himself whose ancestor was Vernet’s sister. One could thus term them cousins. Further, both Doyle and his alter ego bank at the same bank. Even more suggestively - as Holmes would observe - both are offered knighthoods in the same year. Doyle’s impulse was to turn his down - he felt it would identify him as an establishment patsy. He relented at the insistence of his mother, under whose thumb he spent much time. By revealing contrast, Holmes disdains his knighthood without a second thought. And we never hear a word about Holmes’s mother - only his skittish distrust of women in general.

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, when Doyle did kill off Holmes, in the memorable struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, at the picturesque Reichenbach Falls, he conveniently failed to produce the detective’s corpse, thus opening the floodgates for... the rest of us?

All of which leaves much from for speculation, embroidery, and additional Holmesiana.

In any event, even Doyle couldn’t kill off Holmes, who, as we all know, rose from the dead, not on the third day, it may be, but still, there was a resurrection that has been going on ever since - first at Doyle’s hands, but later, at ours.

Although cynical folk have argued that these “ripoffs” of Holmes and Watson are conceived with mercenary motives, speaking for myself, I don’t think this is either fair or true. The small boy, despairing in his bed, doesn’t dream of adding to The Canon as a way of enlarging his purse. Certainly I didn’t. Writing my own Holmes story was simply an itch I had to scratch. Sixty stories are not enough! That my books went into profit surprised no one more than their author.

I hazard the guess that the stories that follow were all written out of affection and enthusiasm, not with any thought of piggy-backing on the genius of Doyle for pecuniary gratification. I could be wrong. You be the judge.

Nicholas Meyer

December 2017