The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

Introduction: The Life and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

For more years than I care to remember I have been researching the life of the first and best known of all private consulting detectives, Mr Sherlock Holmes. It has not been easy. Devotees of the Sherlock Holmes cases will know that his friend and colleague Dr John Watson kept an assiduous record of many of the cases after they first met in January 1881, but he was not involved in them all.

When Holmes was reflecting over his cases in the hours before his cataclysmic struggle with Professor Moriarty in "The Final Problem", he remarked to Watson that he had investigated over a thousand cases. That was in April 1891. In "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist" Watson comments that between 1894 and 1901 Holmes had been involved in every public case of any difficulty plus many hundreds of private cases. Watson goes on to say that "I have preserved very full notes of all these cases."Yet when you look at the standard omnibus volume of Sherlock Holmes you will find only fifty-six short stories and four novels, sixty cases in all. In writing up these cases Watson makes tantalizing passing references to others, such as the repulsive story of the red leech, or the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons on the island of Uffa, but though he kept notes of these stories he did not complete all of them as finished cases. Even then he refers to just short of a hundred cases, so that in total we know of only about 160 cases, which is likely to be less than a tenth of all of the cases Holmes investigated. How wonderful it would be to know about the others. That has been my life's work.

The obvious starting point was Watson's papers. He told us in "The Problem of Thor Bridge" that they were filed away in a despatch box stored in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross. Imagine my horror when, many years ago, in attempting to gain access to these records I discovered two things. Firstly that Watson was clever and had stored only some of his records in that bank vault, and that others were hidden elsewhere. But more frustrating was that I had been pipped at the post. The Cox Bank papers had already been collected by someone else and though he provided a name and identity for the purposes of the bank, I have never been able to trace him, and suspect that the identity he gave was false. Watson was fearful that his papers might be stolen. When he published the case of "The Veiled Lodger" in January 1927 he alerted the public to the fact that attempts had already been made to gain access to his papers and he gave a warning to one individual, whom he doesn't name, that facts would be revealed about him if he didn't desist. Occasionally stories purporting to be from these files have surfaced in books and magazines. Some may well be genuine, or at least give that appearance, but most are almost certainly false, written by those seeking to gain some reflected glory from the fame of Sherlock Holmes.

Over the years I have tracked down some of the original cases from papers at Scotland Yard, old newspaper files, and documents held in private archives. On rare moments I have stumbled across papers which almost certainly came from Watson's despatch box, but I fear that most of those records are hidden in one or more private collections, possibly not even in England, purchased, I dare say, for a phenomenal price.

The trail is complicated by many false avenues and windings. Not even Watson was helpful. Frequently in his published cases he disguised the names of individuals, for obvious reasons, and falsified dates and locations, so that when he recorded that Holmes was investigating such-and-such a case it was as likely that Holmes was somewhere else at that time involved in a very private affair. Watson did his job well in masking the trail, and it will probably never be fully uncovered.

However, the time has come for me to share the product of some of my research. It is far from complete, but for fear that something may happen to me or to my own papers, I thought

it was right to place some of it in print. Perhaps the existence of this book may bring me into contact with others who have access to further papers. Who knows?

In this volume I have pieced together something of the investigations of Sherlock Holmes and have presented twenty-six new cases completed by fellow researchers who have helped me in my quest. I have endeavoured to show where these cases fit into Holmes's career and how they relate to the known cases. In an appendix at the end of this book I also provide a complete chronology of Holmes's life and known cases, including some of the other write-ups of his investigations where I believe there has been a genuine effort to get at the truth.

Let us begin our quest, therefore, and return to the early days of Sherlock Holmes.

Mike Ashley