Knife Edge

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Usually, with these Young Sherlock Holmes books, I write a little afterword going through some of the research material that I gathered while putting them together (it’s really just a way of proving that I didn’t make it all up). The problem with Knife Edge, of course, is that it’s not set against a particular set of historical events, it doesn’t include any ‘real’ historical characters and it’s not set in a particularly foreign location (well, not if you’re British, anyway — if you’re living in the Republic of Korea then Ireland is probably as unusual as the surface of Mars). This was a deliberate decision on my part. Having written five books in a row that placed Sherlock against a backdrop of real events, realistically described journeys and (some) real people, I thought it was probably about time to set something in a more ‘invented’ location and to let him spend some time there rather than keep moving around. So although Galway is real and I spent several very pleasant days there soaking up the atmosphere, I have taken several liberties with its geography. There is no castle with the same name or the same layout as the one in this book, and I may have underestimated slightly the distance between the town and the nearest set of high cliffs. If any of you are reading this in or around Galway (hello, Dubray Books!) then I hope you will forgive me. There is, sadly, no legend of a Dark Beast in or around Galway either. That would belong more properly in my other series of books — Lost Worlds.

A great deal of this book involves spiritualism — the belief that it is possible to contact the dead. Victorian England went through quite a long and intense flirtation with spiritualism during the time that Sherlock Holmes is supposed to have been alive, probably because the period between around 1850 and 1900 marks the time at which the British started to move away from supernatural explanations for things happening and towards scientific ones. Spiritualism is, at its core, a pseudoscientific way of getting in touch with supernatural entities, so it hits both buttons at once. The trouble was that a large number of clever confidence tricksters took advantage of this flirtation, using tricks much like the ones Ambrose Albano and Sir Shadrach Quintillan use in this book, and which are described brilliantly in the book Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind by Antonio Melechi (Random House, 2009). I am not going to tread on anyone’s beliefs by saying whether or not I personally believe that the dead can be engaged in conversation, but Sherlock in this book maintains a properly sceptical attitude. In fact, in the short Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Sussex Vampire’ (which does not include real vampires), Arthur Conan Doyle had Holmes say, ‘The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.’

Having said that, Arthur Conan Doyle himself developed a strong interest in spiritualism and communication with the dead in his later life. He even published a book entitled The History of Spiritualism in 1926. This belief was probably because he lost a brother and a son in the First World War, and somehow could not let go of their memories. Despite his highly rational upbringing and training as a doctor, he somehow failed to bring his sharply logical mind to bear on some of the obvious frauds and cheats who pretended to be mediums, and who fleeced gullible and grieving members of the public of their money.

The magic tricks and techniques that Sherlock learns from Ambrose Albano in Chapter Twelve are, by the way, all real. The Magic Circle frowns on having these things revealed, but there are books out there that will take you through the basics of close-up magic. The one I have found particularly useful is The Ultimate Compendium of Magic Tricks by Nicholas Einhorn (Hermes House, 2009). Do try these tricks at home. They won’t make you into an instant magician — you’ll need countless hours of practice for that — but the book is fully illustrated with thousands of photographs and it will show you the different ways to pre-prepare your tricks and to misdirect the audience’s attention while you are performing them. After that, it’s up to you.

And that about wraps it up. I’ve had a great deal of fun writing this book — probably more than on all the previous ones. Partly that’s because, as I said earlier, it’s all set in one location, which means the characters (and the author!) can spend time getting to know the place without fear of suddenly being whisked off in a steam-train, a paddle steamer or a horse-drawn carriage to somewhere else, but partly (if I am being honest) because it reminds me of all Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five books I used to read as a kid, which were full of caves, castles and smugglers. Alas, real life isn’t.

Until next time…

Andrew Lane