Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

Publications

In addition to The Charm of Birds, Edward Grey several published books far removed from his official works, such as Cottage Book and The Undiscovered Country Diary of an Edwardian Statesman (Sir Edward and Lady Dorothy Grey), dedicated to the birds, flowers and trees which enhanced and gave joy to the spring and summers spent in Hampshire.

She, by H. Rider Haggard. First Published 1886. Haggard would have been well-known to every adventurous young man of the Victorian period. He was a founder of the Lost World literary genre. Adventure novels such as King Solomon’s Mines were set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa. She, with 83 million copies sold by 1965, is one of the best-selling books of all time.

Well worth reading is a biography of Rider Haggard titled The Cloak That I Left, by his daughter Lilias. Boydell Press.

The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul, by Demetra Vaka. Gorgias Press 2005. First published in 1923. The author was born on the island of Prinkipo, off the coast of Constantinople, and emigrated to America at the age of 17. She returned often to Turkey as a foreign correspondent.

The Rise And Decay Of The Rule Of Islam by Archibald J. Dunn. British Library Historical Print Editions. Like Holmes’s brother Mycroft, Sir Edward Grey must have read Dunn’s polemic on the Eastern Question expressed in the 1877 edition because he quotes him nearly verbatim when explaining the matter to Holmes and Watson.

The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany, by Roger Johnson & Jean Upton. Foreword by Gyles Brandreth. The History Press. 2012. A beautifully produced book of pocket size, a must for all Sherlockians. www.thehistorypress.co.uk/index.php/the-sherlock-holmes-miscellany.html

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Life In Letters. Harper Perennial 2008. Ed. Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, Charles Folley. 710pp. Valuable background expressed through Doyle’s profuse correspondence, much to his mother Mary.

My Dear Holmes, A Study In Sherlock. Gavin Brend. Allen & Dunwin 1951.

His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1917, a collection of seven previously-published Sherlock Holmes. Five of the stories were published in The Strand Magazine between September 1908 and December 1913. The final story, an epilogue about Holmes’s war service, was first published in Collier’s on 22 September 1917 - one month before the book’s premier on 22 October. Some later editions of the collection include The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, which was also collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). The Strand published The Adventure of Wistaria Lodge as A Reminiscence of Sherlock Holmes, and divided it into two parts, called The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles and The Tiger of San Pedro. Later printings of His Last Bow corrected Wistaria to Wisteria. The first US edition adjusted the subtitle to Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes.

The Adventure of the Naval Treaty. One of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories. Conan Doyle ranked it 19th in a list of his 19 favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. Watson receives a letter from an old schoolmate, now a Foreign Office employee, who has had an important naval treaty stolen from his office. Has the theft been made on behalf of Czarist Russia or France (both perceived at the time to be potential enemies)? The Naval Treaty is one of the first in the emerging genre of spy story.

Fly Fishing. On trout, sea trout and salmon. Written by Edward Grey when he was thirty years of age, before his eyesight began to deteriorate sharply. Considered the equal of Walton’s much-better-known Compleat Angler.

The Charm of Birds. First published in 1927 with woodcuts, it was an immediate popular success. Full of sensitive observation and beautifully written.

Twenty-Five Years 1892-1916, by Viscount Grey of Falloden. Hodder And Stoughton. 1925. Wonderfully written memoires by one of the most famous British Foreign Secretaries. I have used some of his descriptions in The Sword of Osman. A must for anyone interested in the period leading to the First World War.

The Sultan, by Joan Haslip. Reissued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1973. Excellent list of illustrations, written in lively style.

The Harem, by N.M.Penzer. Subtitled ‘an account of the institution as it existed in the Palace of the Turkish Sultans with a history of the Grand Seraglio from its foundation to modern times’. First published by George G. Harrap & Co. 1936.

Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey, by Raphaela Lewis. B.T. Batsford Ltd. 1971. Really excellent 206 pages. The part titled ‘Portrait of a City’ is especially worth reading.

The Best Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Edited by Octave Thanet. A. C. McClurg & Co. Second Edition 1901. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey. In 1715 she had survived but been terribly scarred by smallpox while her brother had died from the disease. She was fascinated by the culture of the Ottoman Empire and in 1717 described the Turkish practice of inoculating healthy children with a weakened strain of smallpox to confer immunity from the more virulent strains of the disease. She immediately had her seven-year old son inoculated in Turkey and on her return to England, she had her daughter publicly inoculated at the royal court of George I to popularize the technique. In this she was only partially successful as inoculation continued to be dangerous and often resulted in death and scarring of infected children.

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu. The Second Constitutional Period, 1908–1918 Volume 4: Turkey in the Modern World. Cambridge Histories Online. Nov. 2009.

Diary of an Idle Woman in Constantinople (1892). For a prevailing, sometimes contemptuous view of Stamboul (‘ill-smelling mob’) by an itinerant English ‘Idle Woman’ travel-writer Frances Elliott, see https://archive.org/details/diaryanidlewoma03elligoog

The Sultan and His Subjects Volume 1-2 by Richard Davey. General Books, Memphis, USA.

Lords of the Horizons, A History of the Ottoman Empire, by Jason Goodwin. Chatto & Windus 1998. A lively account of the machinations of the major players in the Ottoman Empire from its origins to its collapse centuries later.

My Mission To Russia And Other Diplomatic Memories, by Sir George Buchanan. Little, Brown And Company. 1923.

With a Field Ambulance At Ypres: Being Letters Written March 7 - August 15, 1915. William Boyd. George H. Doran Company.

In Unknown Africa, by Percy Powell-Cotton, Hurst & Blackett, 1904. An account of a ‘wanderer’ and collector shooting his way through British East Africa in the Edwardian period.

The Urban Sea, Cities of the Mediterranean, by Dennis Hardy. Blue Gecko Books. 2013. Valuable and nicely-written account ranging across geography and history, with an appeal to a wide audience who visit the various cities around the coast of the world’s most famous Sea.

The Life And Times Of Sherlock Holmes, by Philip Weller with Christopher Roden. Studio Editions. 1992. Coffee-table size, packed with illustrations and informative background material.

Conan Doyle, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, by Andrew Lycett. Phoenix. 554pp. 2007. Just about the best book on Doyle himself. Filled with interesting accounts right through Doyle’s life, including that 10 horsepower blue Wolseley with red wheels.

The Sherlock Holmes Companion, by Michael and Molly Hardwick. First published 1962 by John Murray, London.

The London of Sherlock Holmes, by Michael Harrison. David & Charles, Newton Abbot. 1972.

A Study In Surmise, by Michael Harrison. Subtitled ‘The Making of Sherlock Holmes’. Introduction by Ellery Queen. Gaslight Publications. 1984.

The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook. New English Library, 1973. Introduction by Peter Cushing.

Investigating Sherlock Holmes by Hartley Nathan and Clifford Goldfarb. Mosaic Press, 2014.

The Influence of Royal Tours on the Conduct of British Diplomacy 1901-1918. Matthew Glencross. PhD Thesis. Argues the importance of royal diplomacy (e.g. Edward V11).

The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey 1906-1915. Gilbert Murray. Forgotten Books. Originally published 1915.

Sherbet & Spice, The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts, by Mary Işin. I.B. Tauris. 2013. Turkish cuisine is placed in the highest category of cuisines, alongside French, Italian, Indian and Chinese.

A British Borderland, Service And Sport in Equatoria, by Captain H. A. Wilson. John Murray, 1913. A vivid account of life in deepest East Africa between 1902 and 1906, mostly on the Anglo-German Boundary Commission sorting out where British and German East Africa lay.

Allan Quartermain. The wildly-popular protagonist of H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines and its sequels.

Heart of Darkness (1899). A short novel by Polish novelist Joseph Conrad about the character Charles Marlow’s life as an ivory transporter down the Congo River in Central Africa. It was a best-seller almost from the start, and Watson would certainly have read it, along with William Clark Russell’s sea stories, the latter author described by Swinburne as ‘the greatest master of the sea, living or dead’.

The Adventure of The Bruce-Partington Plans. Set in 1895. The monotony of smog-shrouded London is broken by a sudden visit from Holmes’s brother Mycroft. He has come about some missing, secret submarine plans. ‘You may take it from me,’ said Mr. Holmes’s brother in speaking of them, ‘that naval warfare becomes impossible when in the radius of a Bruce Partington operation.’

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service’ by Erskine Childers. Published in 1903. The book enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I and is an early example of the espionage novel, extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. Childers’s biographer Andrew Boyle noted: ‘For the next ten years Childers’s book remained the most powerful contribution of any English writer to the debate on Britain’s alleged military unpreparedness’. It was a notable influence on John Buchan and, much later, Ken Follett.

The Rifle Rangers by Captain Mayne Reid. ‘Captain’ Mayne Reid’s first boys’ story, extremely popular in Victorian times. At one point the hero is to die by hanging by the heels over a precipice in south Mexico. At another he and his companions are attacked by a pack of snarling bloodhounds.

The Final Problem. Includes the weird description of Moriarty: ‘...his face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion.’ - early stages of Shaky Palsy?

The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge. A lengthy, two-part story consisting of The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles and The Tiger of San Pedro, which on original publication in The Strand bore the collective title of A Reminiscence of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Set around 1894 and published in 1908. Of the entire collection of Holmes stories by Doyle, this is the only story in which a police inspector (specifically Inspector Baynes) is acknowledged as competent as Holmes. Contains insights into Holmes’s methods, for example, ‘There are no better instruments than discharged servants with a grievance, and I was lucky enough to find one. I call it luck, but it would not have come my way had I not been looking out for it.’