Death Cloud

Author’s Afterword

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels about Sherlock Holmes. You can still find them in most bookshops. When he first appeared, Sherlock was around thirty-three years old and was already a detective with an established set of habits and abilities. In his last appearance he was around sixty, and had retired to the Sussex coast to keep bees. Yes, bees.

My intention with the book you are holding, and with the books that will follow, is to find out what Sherlock was like before Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced him to the world. What sort of teenager was he? Where did he go to school, and who were his friends? Where and when did he learn the skills that he displayed later in life — the logical mind, the boxing and sword-fighting, the love of music and of playing the violin? What did he study at university? When (if ever) did he travel abroad? What scared him and who, if anyone, did he love?

Other people have written about Sherlock Holmes over the years, to the point where he is probably the most recognized fictional character in the world. The number of stories written about Sherlock by other writers far exceeds the number written by Arthur Conan Doyle, and yet it is Doyle’s stories that people keep returning to. There is a reason for that, and the reason is that he understood Sherlock from the inside out, while the other writers, for the most part, merely tried to copy the outside.

Arthur Conan Doyle gave little away about Sherlock’s early years, and most writers since then have avoided that period of time as well. We know little about his parents, or indeed where he lived. We know he was descended on his mother’s side from the French artist Vernet and that he had a brother called Mycroft, who appears in a few of the short stories, but that’s about it. That has given me the freedom to create a history for Sherlock that is consistent with the few hints that Conan Doyle did let slip, but also leads inevitably to the man that Conan Doyle described. In this endeavour I have been lucky to have had the approval of Jon Lellenberg, the representative of the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, and the approval of the surviving relatives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Richard Pooley, Richard Doyle and Cathy Beggs. I have been lucky too to have the approval of Andrea Plunkett, owner of several trademarks in Europe. I have also been fortunate in having an agent and an editor — Robert Kirby and Rebecca McNally respectively — who understood completely what I wanted to do.

Various writers have attempted to produce their own biographies of Sherlock Holmes, tying together what Doyle revealed with actual historical events. These works are inevitably flawed, incomplete and personal, but I confess that I have a sneaking fondness for William Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes — A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective, and have taken some details (most notably, dates) from that iconic work.

I promise that there will be more adventures of Sherlock Holmes at school and university, but in the meantime you might want to seek out the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. The short stories have been collected together in five books — The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Final Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. The novels are A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. If you want to go further, you could do worse than seek out the three more recent Holmes novels by Nicholas Meyer — The Seven Per Cent Solution, The West End Horror and The Canary Trainer — as well as Michael Hardwick’s The Revenge of the Hound and Lyndsay Faye’s Dust and Shadow. You might also like to check out Michael Kurland’s stories told from the point of view of Sherlock Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor James Moriarty, which provide a refreshing alternative look at the Great Detective — The Infernal Device, Death by Gaslight and The Great Game. Second-hand bookshops or eBay might be your best bet.

Until next time, when Sherlock faces the repulsive Red Leech...