INTRODUCTION

A collection of stories concerning the Great Detective and his colleague, Dr Watson

When I was knee-high to a grasshopper and greedy for printed words I haunted the children’s library in my home town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England.

I went there as soon as I was old enough to find my way (about a mile, I seem to remember, though youngsters would certainly not be permitted to make such solitary journeys these day, more’s the shame) and I consumed Enid Blyton and her adventurous characters as if there was going to be no tomorrow. At first it was the Secret Seven, then, when I ran out of those, the Famous Five and subsequently on to various places “of Adventure”. I ran out of those too, but joy of all joys I discovered Biggles. For those who don’t know, Biggles was an air ace of the first world war and he could thread his Sopwith Camel through the eye of a needle, or so I believed.

But all things must end, and I ran out of unread Biggles even though Captain W E Johns wrote an enthrallingly large number.

And in despair I relocated to the adult library even though I was probably, by then, still only about thigh high to a grasshopper.

And I discovered Sherlock Holmes.

This was real reading! Here we had a genius who could examine a cigarette butt and tell you what the weather was like in Skegness! He could extrapolate a vast reservoir of information from a frayed cuff or a dab of ink on a white shirt.

And his was a world in which there were sinister forces, for worse than those that the Famous Five had had to battle against, or the German planes that tried to shoot Biggles out of the skies. Here was real evil … opium dens, murder, bullets flying, desperadoes, Moriarty … and the warmth of 221b Baker Street. And problems that needed to be solved.

And recently, whilst contemplating the vastness of the ages that have past since I was ten, I have wondered if there were any minor events in the times of Sherlock Holmes that Dr Watson hadn’t recorded for posterity, and decided to narrate them myself using, of course, mostly his voice. They will, of course, be less adventurous, less forensic in their approach to solving crimes and maybe a little more human if mistakes (never let it be said Holmes made any of these) are contemplated by the great man.

Because in life not everything is elementary, is it, dear what’s-your-name?

Anyway, over the last three or four weeks I’ve knocked out a few sagas, and thought it might not so bad an idea to put them all together so that if you like one you might try another. Or vice-versa, of course. So what follows is a rearranging of my Sherlock Holmes stories (it is perfectly legal for me to borrow the characters from the great Conan Doyle who created them together with Mrs Hudson, Mycroft Holmes, Lestrade of Scotland yard and Professor Moriarty, the master of crime). They are set around the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries (I’m not specific here, though once or twice I refer to “the king”, and until 1901 it was a queen.)

If any more little stories spring to mind in the future I’ll probably add them here. Who can tell? Certainly not me.

© Peter Rogerson 12.08.2017