Being an unabashed fan since I bought “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” about 45 years ago, the news of an undiscovered tale makes me giggle with girlish joy.
An historian has unearthed the first unseen Sherlock Holmes story in more than 80 years that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to help save a town bridge.
Walter Elliot, 80, found the 1,300-word tale starring the famous detective in a collection of short stories written for a local bazaar.
The wooden bridge in the Scottish town of Selkirk was destroyed by the great flood of 1902 and locals organised a three-day event to raise funds for a new one in 1904.As part of the event, organisers sold a collection of short stories by locals called The Book o’ the Brig.
The famed author, who loved visiting Selkirk and the surrounding area, contributed a tale before opening the final day.
The full transcript of the short story is here. You can tell he did it in a hurry but it is Sherlockian through and through. But there is one part that is pure gold:
‘And you profess to be a journalist? Have you never heard of the telegraph, the telephone, or the phonograh? Go to London! And are you not aware that all journalists are supposed to be qualified members of the Institute of Fiction, and to be qualified to make use of the Faculty of Imagination? By the use of the latter men have been interviewed, who were hundreds of miles away; some have been “interviewed” without either knowledge or consent.
How little things change, huh?
Big Hat Tip to Bayou Renaissance Man.
Meh. He phoned it in. If he spent more than a single evening writing that one I’d be surprised, and he makes the supreme writer’s error of disrespecting his own characters. He’s sent up Holmes before, though, in some of his short fiction. Not surprising, since he “killed” Holmes off at the height of his popularity, only to resurrect him later when the sales of his other books couldn’t match the Holmes stories.