Snuggle up with a new Sherlock Holmes story for the holidays... amazon/Haunting-Sherlock-Holmes-Other-Adventure-ebook/dp/B004SHNRPQ/ref=asap_B002DPA61S?ie=UTF8 I have been so often and urgently implored of late to set down yet more accounts of my friend Sherlock Holmes’s exploits that I find it impossible to ignore an interest that, after so many years since my friend’s departure, I presumed had become exclusive to myself. As the reader no doubt recalls, I have striven to be rather selective in my presentation of the mysteries to which Sherlock Holmes bent his remarkable energies. However, upon reviewing my copious notes in the overlooked or passed-over files of our adventures, I see that I was too scrupled or spoiled by the wealth of dramatically rich stories to fulfill my honest intention to select only those episodes that demonstrated Holmes’s method of deduction over those that had purely sensational appeal. Having had time to examine the many disqualified baubles for years, I see gems that I had taken for glass with my mind’s eye—the only eye that may grow clearer with age, it seems. In some cases, I overlooked anecdotes for their raw excitement, discovering only on a second or third look the loom of Holmes’s reason as it gathered the skeins of causality too quickly for the human eye, at times so intimate with action as to be indistinguishable from reflex, a dazzling display of logic that had the misleading appearance of blind luck. In other instances, I passed over a case for its academic varnish—too dull, I concluded, for public consumption—only to discover the high drama concealed in Holmes’s cerebral swordplay these many years later as an old man looking back on faded notes and still-vivid memories. The case I shall here recount was decidedly of the former variety, though its roots reached farther into the other variety than I believe I shall ever be able to penetrate. What further stayed my hand from rendering an account of this extraordinary case was that not until recently has the tide of medical knowledge risen to validate certain events, thus rendering them less incredible than they would have been had they been published at the time of their occurrence. So unprecedented was their nature that I feared for the reputation of my friend, let alone my own, should I publish any account of them. In hindsight, Holmes must have realized this, too. What had seemed a strange and deeply disturbing journey into the supernatural, a world in which Sherlock Holmes was as impossible as the supernatural was in Holmes’s world, would only later be explained, causally, by the advance of science. Holmes would have been gratified. I can see him bringing his hands together in that one congratulatory clap he gave to Mankind whenever it caught up with some frontier of insight his mind had already mapped. So unsettling is the thought even to this day, however, that nature could contain within its sunlit sphere such unnatural nightmares as I witnessed that night that I have found myself wishing there were a mystical origin that explained them, instead. Alas, as an old man not wishing to take them to my grave, I now happily bequeath these memories to this world so that I may leave them peacefully behind. It was one of those intensely cold and clear London evenings of spring in the year 1898. A somewhat industrial sunset layered the sky in volcanic hues over Baker Street in the window... (Only 99 cents on Kindle!)
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:19:30 +0000
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