Editor’s Introduction
The Compliments of the Season
by David Marcum
“I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.”
– “The Blue Carbuncle”
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
It has been said that Charles Dickens invented our modern idea of how to celebrate Christmas. In the early days of Victoria’s reign, Christmas was a subdued affair in England, a time for quiet reflection, worshiping at church, and staying around one’s hearth. But Dickens, perhaps trying to rewrite his own bleak childhood memories, almost single-handedly gave people the idea that December 25th was something more than another somber religious date on the calendar. It could be a time of festivity, of mystery and merriment and wonder.
In his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837), which so captured England’s heart, Dickens portrays scenes of a season filled with holiday festivities and good will as the members of the Pickwick Club celebrate with their friends. And there is even a Christmas ghost story, in which a bitter old man is changed on Christmas Eve by a supernatural encounter. No, it’s not the more famous A Christmas Carol (1843), the story that everyone knows about Ebenezer Scrooge and his amazing redemption. Rather, it’s “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”, a shorter tale related by Mr. Wardle to the Pickwickians, in which bitter church sexton Gabriel Grub learns that “setting all the good of the world against the evil . . . it was a very decent and respectable world after all.”
Dickens refined his ideas of a proper Christmas, with decorations and singing and wishes for snow and a fat goose, in his later more famous story, wherein Ebenezer Scrooge is taken here and there across London and elsewhere, through his past, present, and future. It’s an amazing story that has resonated from the time it was written to the present day - so much so that it’s one of the most filmed of all narratives, with dozens upon dozens of adaptations. Some of the more notable are the musical version starring Albert Finney - a personal favorite of mine: “Thank you very much!”, the much grimmer variant with a heavy-set Scrooge played by George C. Scott (who also once played a mentally ill character who erroneously believed that he was Sherlock Holmes), the old classics with Alistair Sim or Reginald Owen (who listed among his many roles a heavy-set Holmes), and more recently that of Patrick Stewart and the unique animated version starring Jim Carrey.
Whenever one of these versions is on television, I have to stop and watch - not so much at this point to see the very familiar story, which I know by heart backwards and forwards, especially as I re-read A Christmas Carol nearly every December. No, the big reason that I watch now is to see how each of these films portrays the dark, narrow, and very atmospheric streets of Victorian London.
And since this book is about Sherlock Holmes - and not Dickens (or Scrooge or even Gabriel Grub) - that seems to be a good place to begin the pivot to Our Heroes, the Detective and the Doctor. Although Dickens was writing his great works decades before Holmes and Watson first appeared in print, fittingly in the Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887, there are a great many similarities between the Dickensian London and that in which Holmes carried out his business. Can anyone doubt that the opium dens and the dangerous little streets along the Thames, so ably described in “The Man With the Twisted Lip”, weren’t directly related to the same vile alleys memorialized by Dickens? And the unique and larger-than-life people who wander through Dickens’s stories could be the very parents and grandparents of some of the clients and policemen and Irregulars who climbed the seventeen steps to Holmes and Watson’s Baker Street sitting room.
So if one such as myself sees Dickens’s London and then looks for foreshadowing of that Great Cesspool that Watson described so well, then how can one not see a connection between that same kind of Dickensian Victorian Christmas and Sherlock Holmes?
Of course, this isn’t a new idea. There have been quite a number of previously related adventures telling about what Mr. Holmes of Baker Street was up to during those various Christmases in the latter decades of the Nineteenth Century, and so on into the Twentieth. The first that come to mind must be those two well-known and highly respected volumes, Holmes for the Holidays (1996) and More Holmes for the Holidays (1999), each edited by the late Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg, and Carol-Lynn Waugh. Containing fourteen and eleven stories respectively, these were the first anthologies of their kind to feature stories specifically sharing Holmes’s Christmas-related cases. (There are even a couple of tales that feature descendants of individuals involved in A Christmas Carol.) I remember how enthusiastic I was when I first discovered Holmes for the Holidays on a book store shelf. This was in those dark days when finding new stories about The Master was almost always a surprise, a rare and difficult thing, as one couldn’t learn the release dates for upcoming Holmes books for the next year simply by looking on the internet - one had to rely on frequent trips to the bookstore and serendipity.
In addition to these fine additions to any Holmes library, there have been a number of other stories spread throughout different collections. Probably the best of them all is Denis O. Smith’s “The Christmas Visitor”. Val Andrews brought us one of his finer efforts in Sherlock Holmes and the Yuletide Mystery. A lesser known novel is Sherlock Holmes’s Christmas by David Upton. John Hall produced “The Christmas Bauble”, featured both as a short story in the new Strand Magazine, and then adapted for broadcast on radio’s Imagination Theatre.
Elsewhere on radio was “The Night Before Christmas” (1945, with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce), and “The Christmas Bride” (1947, with John Stanley and Alfred Shirley). And then there was the film Young Sherlock Holmes, released in early December 1985, and also set around Christmas-time - although it wasn’t explicitly a Christmas story - and that wasn’t Watson featured in the story, but someone else entirely. (Ah, but that’s an essay for a different book.)
There isn’t space here to tell of all the other impressive stories relating what Holmes and Watson did during this-or-that Christmas. And what has appeared in print doesn’t even begin to match the level of excellent writing about Holmes and Christmas that one can find at fan-fiction sites on the web. In fact, for the last several years there has been a writing activity at fanfiction.net in which a group of authors each compose and post something for the entire month of December, for every turn of the calendar, either a complete story, ranging from very short to full-length, to something serialized across the whole month.
So, if there are already so many of them out there, why another book of Holmes Christmas adventures? Well, that requires a two-part answer. The first and shortest is that, for someone like me - and hopefully you too! - there can never be enough traditional tales about Holmes and Watson, two of the best and wisest men whom I have ever known. (And after reading and collecting literally thousands of stories about them for over forty-one years, I do feel like I know them.)
The other reason relates to the ever-increasing popularity of these MX Anthologies.
When I first had the idea for a new Holmes anthology in early 2015, the plan was to contact possibly a dozen or so “editors” of Watson’s notes and see if they were interested. The idea grew and grew until the first collection was three volumes - really one big book spread out under three covers - and containing more new Holmes stories than had ever been assembled before in one place at one time. A big part of what made the project so special was that the authors donated their royalties to the Stepping Stones School for special needs students, then planning to move into one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former homes, Undershaw. By the time the first three books were released in October 2015, renovations were well under way at the school’s future home, and it also quickly became apparent that the need for future volumes of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories was very strong. The process for producing more anthology volumes was in place, a desire for more traditional Holmes stories is always there, the school can always use more funding as provided by the sale of the books - and more and more authors wanted to participate.
Therefore, it was announced that there would be another anthology, the next in what would now be an ongoing series. But there was so much interest that it was quickly determined that two volumes would be necessary in 2016. Consequently, Part IV - 2016 Annual came out in the spring of 2016, and a second book, this book, was planned for the fall. But it couldn’t simply be the Part V - 2016 Annual - Part II. It needed something to set it apart. And then it hit me - by releasing it in the fall, in time for the holidays, this book could be a new Christmas collection. After all, it has been twenty years since Holmes for the Holidays and its sequel. It was time.
And many authors and friends of the project answered the call, as seen by the thirty stories contained in this volume. As always, I’ve arrange them chronologically, as that seems to work best. In almost every case, the stories are completely new for this volume. (In typical Watsonian Obfuscation, there are a couple that have previously appeared, but in substantially different or shorter versions on the internet, and the scripts by Bert Coules and Jim French have been broadcast on radio, but they have never appeared in print as text versions. And it’s very interesting to see the styles of how each script is presented.)
Some of the stories are inextricably plotted with the trappings of Christmas. Others are set during late December, and even though they could have occurred at any time of the year, they are certainly influenced by the season that surrounds them. In some tales there is festivity, and in others tragedy. Watson might be having a bad year in this one, and Holmes in that one - the same as each of us have high and low Yuletide seasons.
You may notice that some years seem to have more than one adventure taking place concurrently around Christmases in the same year. Don’t let that worry you - it can all be rationalized. As someone who has kept a massive and detailed Chronology of both Canon and traditional pastiche for over twenty years, I can assure you that it all fits neatly together. When Watson pulls out this or that relevant thread from the Great Holmes Tapestry to construct a self-contained narrative, he doesn’t necessarily include what else was happening at the same time. He’s also been known at times to slide the facts around a little bit, to protect an identity - or in this case to avoid confusion. Think how twisted and intertwined are the events in a normal person’s everyday life - how much more convoluted, then, were those of Our Heroes? I’m thankful that Watson has taken the time to separate these events into digestible and self-contained pieces.
I’m happy to report that the anthology series’ popularity continues to grow, and that there are already two more volumes planned for 2017, the Part VI - 2017 Annual to appear in the spring, and Part VII - Eliminate the Impossible in the fall, in which Holmes and Watson will investigate a number of seemingly supernatural tales. However, I can assure you that I insisted, as did Holmes, that “No ghosts need apply.” Time will tell if that turns out to be the case. I’m already receiving stories from literally all over the world for both volumes, all of amazing quality, and I can’t wait to share them with everyone.
And perhaps most exciting of all is that, of this writing, the Stepping Stones School has finished the long-time-coming renovation of Doyle’s Sussex home, Undershaw, and the children and teachers are there. How exciting that they will benefit in some small way from this and the other anthology volumes - because in the end, isn’t part of the wonder of Christmas about children, both those who are of the appropriate age, and also the children that are still deep down - or maybe not so deep - in all of us grown-ups?
As always, I want to thank with all my heart my patient and wonderful wife of over twenty-eight years (as of this writing,) Rebecca, and our son, Dan. They are everything to me. I love you both!
And then there is that wonderful crew of people who listen to my complaints and manic enthusiasms, read my Sherlockian thoughts and dogma, and offer support, encouragement, and friendship, sometimes on a nearly daily basis. So I offer many many thanks to (in alphabetical order): Derrick Belanger, Bob Byrne, Steve Emecz, Roger Johnson, Mark Mower, Denis Smith, Tom Turley, Dan Victor, and Marcia Wilson.
I can’t ever express enough appreciation for all of the authors who have donated their time and royalties to this project. I am so glad to have gotten to know all of you through this process. It’s an undeniable fact that Sherlock Holmes authors are the best people!
Many thanks to Jonathan Kellerman for his generous participation, which will no doubt increase the attention on these books and the cause they support, and also for providing insight on how he became a writer - as one of Mr. Kellerman’s very big fans for a long time now, I knew how he was influenced by Kenneth Millar (a.k.a. Ross Macdonald - in fact, Mr. Kellerman is the literary heir to Millar), but I had no idea that Doyle had played a part along the way as well.
I want to especially thank (again) Roger Johnson and his wife Jean Upton for so graciously hosting me during my 2015 Pilgrimage to England, and Nick Utechin for giving me the ultimate insider’s tour of Oxford. I very much recognize the setting of his story in this book and recall the amusing anecdote that he related there.
Also, my thanks go to Melissa Farnham, the Head Teacher at Stepping Stones, for joining this party once again, and for all that she and everyone else accomplishes there every day.
And last but certainly not least, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Author, doctor, adventurer, and the Founder of the Sherlockian Feast. Present in spirit, and honored by all of us here.
As always, this collection has been a labor of love by both the participants and myself. As I’ve explained before, once again everyone did their sincerest best to produce an anthology that truly represents why Holmes and Watson have been so popular for so long. These are just more tiny threads woven into the ongoing Great Holmes Tapestry, continuing to grow and grow, for there can never be enough stories about the man whom Watson described as “the best and wisest . . . whom I have ever known.”
David Marcum
August 7th, 2016
The 164th Birthday of Dr. John H. Watson
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