Snake Bite

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Five books. I never thought I’d make it to five books about Sherlock Holmes as a teenager, but I have, and there are more to go. At least one more and (Macmillan Children’s Books willing) possibly another three or more on top of that. I’ve got to get Sherlock back from China in one piece, which might take some time, and then I’ve got to somehow resolve the issue of the Paradol Chamber. And, of course, there’s what’s happened with Virginia — how will that affect Sherlock’s character? (Those of you who have read some or all of the Conan Doyle stories will, of course, know the answer to that one.)

Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the original Sherlock Holmes stories, told us that Sherlock was (by his mid-twenties) an expert swordsman, boxer, martial arts fighter, chemist, actor and violinist. I’ve managed, in the five books I’ve written about Sherlock’s early life so far, to lay the groundwork for his boxing, his acting, his martial arts and his violin playing. I still have to do some work on his swordsmanship and his love of chemistry, and that’s two different books right there.

As usual, I’ve tried to make the book as accurate as possible, so rather than rely on what I thought China in the 1860s was like (based largely on an old Japanese TV series set in China and called The Water Margin that was shown, badly dubbed, in the UK when I was growing up) I have read an awful lot of books about the subject in an attempt to get the feeling right. Some of these are modern books looking back at China over a hundred years ago, while others were written by people who travelled in the Far East at about the right time.

The most useful of the modern-day books were, just for your interest:

The most useful period book was:

Believe it or not, the disfiguring disease suffered by Mr Arrhenius is real. I wouldn’t dare make up something that bizarre. It’s called argyria, and you can look it up on the internet and even see pictures of people who suffer from it. More and more people nowadays are taking silver to try and ward off diseases, so argyria might well be something that’s on the increase.

The USS Monocacy was a real American warship that was stationed in the Far East in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It did travel up the Yangtze River on a mapping expedition at around the time that I’ve set this book (actually, I may have fudged it by a year or two, for the sake of the plot). The ship was built in 1864, and remained in service until 1903, when she was sold to a Japanese businessman. Henry Francis Bryan was her captain for a few years. He went on to become the Governor of Samoa.

What else? The animals that Sherlock comes across during his adventures on the Yangtze River are real ones — the Yangtze River Dolphin (or Baiji) and the Yangtze River Alligator. The Baiji is in terminal decline at the moment, thanks to fishing and to pollution in the river. It may even be extinct. Oh, and a note for true Sherlockians here — the Gloria Scott in this story is not the same one as mentioned in the Arthur Conan Doyle story ‘The Adventure of the Gloria Scott’. That boat was sunk in 1855 on its way to Australia. No, this is a different Gloria Scott. Why is it a different Gloria Scott? The simple answer is because I wanted to call it by the name of another ship mentioned in Conan Doyle’s stories — the Matilda Briggs — but I remembered the wrong name, and by the time I noticed that I had remembered the wrong name it was too late to change it. It’s as simple (and as stupid) as that.

A note on Chinese pronunciation, while I’m here. And Chinese names as well. In Sherlock’s time, the way that Chinese sounds were converted to English was known as the Wade-Giles system (the Chinese language has sounds in it which don’t occur in English). It was developed by Thomas Francis Wade, a British ambassador to China who published the first Chinese textbook in English in 1867. The system was refined in 1912 by Herbert Allen Giles (hence Wade-Giles). The Wade-Giles system was replaced with the Pinyin system in the 1950s. The problem is that the two systems can give quite different results from the same Chinese word. For instance, the city known as Peking in the Wade-Giles system suddenly became Beijing in the Pinyin system (you can see that they sound similar, but they aren’t the same). Similarly, Mao Tse-tung, who controlled China between 1949 and 1976, suddenly became Mao Zedong. I’ve largely used the Wade-Giles system in this book, rather than the Pinyin system, because it’s the one Sherlock and Cameron Mackenzie would have been familiar with. This does, unfortunately, give some of the names of the Chinese characters (Wu Chung, Wu Fung-Yi) an old-fashioned sound (Wu Chung would be Wu Zhong in the Pinyin system, while Wu Fung-Yi would have been the rather similar Wu Feng-Yi). Chinese names have the surname first, by the way, so while Sherlock Holmes is the son of Siger Holmes, Wu Fung-Yi is the son of Wu Chung. (Chinese women of the time typically kept their own names, which is why Tsi Huen doesn’t have a Wu anywhere.) All clear? (You might be tested on this later.) In an earlier book I talked a little bit about money in Victorian England. In China of the late Imperial period (which is when this book is set) the Emperor maintained a silver and a copper currency system. The copper coins were called cash (although funnily enough that probably isn’t where we get the word ‘cash’ from). The silver system had several coins: the tael, the mace, the candareen and the li. (If you ever find yourself in late Imperial China, remember that 1 tael = 10 mace = 100 candareens = 1,000 li — a decimal system.)

So, where does all this leave us? Well, Sherlock has to get home, of course. He will undoubtedly have all kinds of adventures on the way (I think he will probably end up in Japan for several months, and maybe India), but those stories may never be told — or not told by me, at any rate. I think that the next book — the sixth one — will take place back in England, and I think it will involve the Paradol Chamber again (and perhaps mark the reappearance of a particular villain from previous stories). One thing is for sure, though — when Sherlock gets home he will be older and wiser, and a lot sadder.