Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

Backdrop

Like all my plots, Sherlock Holmes And The Nine-Dragon Sigil takes place in the halcyon days when Edward VII of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was on the throne of England, the king-emperor for whom the Era was named, a time when yellow fogs drifted eerily along London’s half-lit streets, agile Hansom cabs with Holmes and Watson bumping around inside rattled away to heaven-knows-where, a ‘leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun never set on the British flag’.

Edwardian summers were reputed to be unusually warm though the Meteorological Office tells me this was not true.

By the time Edward came to the throne in 1901, Holmes and Watson had spent the best part of two decades together, solving knotty cases which baffled the best of Scotland Yard’s detectives. The great Consulting Detective’s use of observation, deductive reasoning and scientific knowledge fascinated young and old, rich and poor, New York illuminatus or London East Ender alike. It was a period when Holmes and Watson reached their height in experience and maturity, men of the world in step with the immense British Empire. Even Watson’s confidence was burgeoning despite Holmes’s occasional biting put-downs.

The real-life Criminologist Ashton-Wolfe later recorded in The Illustrated London News that many methods invented by Sherlock Holmes became commonplace in police practices. The quick arrival at the scene, the examination of the lock and key, the bed, the chairs, the carpet, the mantelpiece, the body and the rope.

‘Holmesian’ clubs were forming with names drawn from Watson’s chronicles. A club near the pair’s former lodgings called themselves ‘the Baker Street Irregulars’. At Princeton University, they titled themselves ‘The Napoleons of Crime’. In France, ‘Le Cercle Holmésien de Paris’. A women’s Holmesian club in New York took an aphorism from the Roman poet Ovid as their motto: Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo - ‘A drop carves the rock, not by force but by persistence’, although Holmes always seemed to solve the most baffling crimes in flashes of deductive brilliance, as he does (both to Watson’s and to my surprise)in The Nine-Dragon Sigil.

For no discernible reason the Great Detective retired unexpectedly to his bee-farm in Sussex in late 1903 or early 1904. It came as a great shock to the faithful Watson. He was obliged to return to private practice in London’s fashionable Parish of Marylebone. Watson had practiced medicine only intermittently and reluctantly since his army days in India’s North-West Frontier and Afghanistan a quarter century before. It comes as no surprise that the old soldier, Holmes’s amanuensis, was soon bored with his wealthy clientele.

Not for the first time in Watson’s life, Fate - Kismet - steps in. A chauffeur arrives at the Marylebone surgery with an invitation from the Foreign Office & India Office. No enterprise in which he was ever engaged would oblige Watson to undertake so arduous a journey or put him in such peril as the one he was about to be offered.