Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle

Acknowledgements

To achieve as much as possible the tone of the iconic Sherlock Holmes stories I have taken some of the atmospheric wording of the canon and scattered it here and there. For historical background to the period I much recommend the following:

East End Chronicles by Ed Glinert.

Sherlock Holmes in London, a photographic record of Conan Doyle’s stories, by Charles Viney.

Victorian England as seen by Punch by Frank E. Huggett.

The London of Sherlock Holmes, by Michael Harrison

Lives Of The Indian Princes by Charles Allen. Century Publishing

The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook, edited by Peter Haining, foreword by Peter Cushing.

Sherlock Holmes, by Mark Campbell, Pocket Essentials Literature.

A Victorian Son by Stuart Cloete.

The Sherlock Holmes Journal, published twice a year, usually in July and December.

The Baker Street Journal, a leading Sherlockian publication with both serious scholarship and articles that ‘play the game’.

My gratitude to -

The Whapham and Wrenn Sussex farming families at the edge of whose fields near Burwash I sat on fallen oaks writing this novel over three glorious summers.

Robert Ribeiro for going through the final text with such a knowledgeable eye (as befits the owner of the house built by famous Holmes and Watson illustrator Walter Paget).

Paul Spiring for his enthusiasm and early edit.

Historian Judith Rowbotham whose books on Victorian and Edwardian crime form a fine backdrop to the Dead Boer.

The friendly staff at National Trust properties Bateman’s in Sussex and Scotney Castle in Kent whose buildings, ruins and grounds inspired the plot. This particularly includes Mike Lacey and his atmospheric and informative talks on Kipling and his times. Don’t miss them of a summer’s day at Bateman’s.

English Heritage for background on Charles Darwin and Down House.

Google and Wikipedia and the worldwide web for the speed and depth of research they make available.

Amazon, Alibris and AbeBooks where I found even the most obscure books to add value and interest to the plot.

Dave Berry’s hidden treasure of a bookshop at Heathfield, East Sussex.

Above all to my partner Lesley Abdela for her warm encouragement, who took on work assignments at great risk to her life in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan and Africa to bring in an income while I sat with quill and paper cocooned in the beautiful English countryside sketching out the Dead Boer, my first novel.

Final note: it was only when writing this story I discovered a long-dead favourite actor-uncle of mine by the name of Stanley van Beers produced a Sherlock Holmes play some fifty or more years ago, a melodrama titled The Return of Sherlock Holmes, at the New Theatre, Bromley, in Kent. In his happy memory I named the Macchiavellian Randlord in the Dead Boer after him. In a future ‘Sherlock Holmes’ I would include another uncle, Elleston Trevor, also deceased, whose RAF service and years near my family home in Guernsey trying to become a novelist was followed by his success with such best-sellers as The Flight of The Phoenix and a series of Cold War thrillers featuring the British secret agent Quiller.