Baker Street Beat: An Eclectic Collection of Sherlockian Scribblings by Dan Andriacco Read Free Book Online

Introduction: In the Foosteps of a Giant
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    The only bad thing about the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories is that there aren’t enough of them. The original four novels and fifty-six short stories (leaving out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s two plays and several other small writings about Holmes) comfortably fill a single large volume.
    Since just this isn’t enough and nature abhors a vacuum, it’s no wonder that the remarkable Philip K. Jones has compiled a database of some 8,000 pastiches and parodies of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Seemingly any Sherlockian with writing genes eventually takes up the challenges to write a new Holmes story.
    And having an incentive doesn’t hurt.
    In 1988, Mysteries from the Yard Bookstore in Yellow Springs, Ohio, held a contest for the best original Sherlockian pastiche. The prize was a $100 gift certificate at the bookstore. I found that irresistible.
    To write a Sherlock Holmes pastiche is to walk in the footsteps of a giant, which is daunting. But from having read the real thing many times, and a host of both good and bad pastiches, I had some strongly held notions about how to go about the task. You can find them in an essay on “Writing the Holmes Pastiche” in my book Baker Street Beat.
    Suffice it to say that I wanted the story to feel as much like one from the pen of John H. Watson, M.D. as possible, both in terms of language and in shape of the story. An immense help in that regard was Ronald A. Knox’s seminal essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” Monsignor Knox lists eleven elements of a canonical Sherlock Holmes story. A Study in Scarlet has all eleven elements, and most stories in the Canon have at least five. Those elements are:

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    1.A homely Baker Street scene to start, with invaluable personal touches and sometimes a demonstration by the detective or reference by either Holmes or Watson to an untold tale of Sherlock Holmes;
    2.The client’s statement of the case;
    3.Energetic personal investigation by Holmes and Watson, often including the famous floor-walk on hands and knees;
    4.Refutation by Holmes of the Scotland Yard theory;
    5.A few stray hints to the police, which they never adopt;
    6.Holmes tells the true course of the case to Dr. Watson as he sees it, but is sometimes wrong;
    7.Questioning of the victim’s relatives, dependents, and others, along with visits to the Records Office, and various investigations in disguise;
    8.The criminal is caught or exposed;
    9.The criminal confesses;
    10.Holmes describes the clues and how he followed them;
    11.The conclusion, often involving a quotation from some standard author.
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    This is the skeleton of a classic Sherlock Holmes story. I only needed a plot to give it flesh and blood.
    Â Like many pastiche writers, I drew my inspiration from one of the many unwritten adventures of Sherlock Holmes referred to in the Canon. I deliberately chose one of the more obscure such references. (Who needs yet another “Giant Rat of Sumatra”?) In “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” we read of Holmes “immersed in a very abstruse and complicated problem concerning the peculiar persecution to which John Vincent Harden, the well known tobacco millionaire, had been subjected.”
    That meager mention left me a lot of room to maneuver. I started by naming almost every character, except for the Canonical ones, after fellow members of the Tankerville Club, our Cincinnati scion of the Baker Street Irregulars. Three of those individuals are no longer with us – gone beyond the Reichenbach, as Sherlockians like to say – and it is to them that this story is dedicated.
    For the title itself I couldn’t resist using the term “peculiar persecution.” Since I couldn’t fit that in with “Adventure,” I decided to leave adventure out of the title. All of the novels and many of the short stories (“A Scandal in