The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part XVII, page 1
The MX Book
of
New Sherlock Holmes Stories
Part XVII:
Whatever Remains . . . Must Be the Truth
(1891–1898)
First edition published in 2019 by
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital version converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© 2019 MX Publishing
The right of the individuals listed in the Copyright Information section to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy, or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously. Except for certain historical personages, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing or any other party.
David Marcum can be reached at:
thepapersofsherlockholmes@gmail.com
Cover design by Brian Belanger
www.belangerbooks.com and www.redbubble.com/people/zhahadun
Stories in Companion Volumes
The following can be found in the companion volumes
The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories
Whatever Remains . . . Must Be the Truth
Part XVI and Part XVIII
Part XVI — (1881-1890)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Retold) – A Poem – Josh Pachter
The Wylington Lake Monster – Derrick Belanger
The Juju Men of Richmond – Mark Sohn
The Adventure of the Headless Lady – Tracy J. Revels
Angelus Domini Nuntiavit – Kevin Thornton
The Blue Lady of Dunraven – Andrew Bryant
The Adventure of the Ghoulish Grenadier – Josh Anderson and David Friend
The Curse of Barcombe Keep – Brenda Seabrooke
The Affair of the Regressive Man – David Marcum
The Adventure of the Giant’s Wife – I.A. Watson
The Adventure of Miss Anna Truegrace – Arthur Hall
The Haunting of Bottomly’s Grandmother – Tim Gambrell
The Adventure of the Intrusive Spirit – Shane Simmons
The Paddington Poltergeist – Bob Bishop
The Spectral Pterosaur – Mark Mower
The Weird of Caxton – Kelvin Jones
The Adventure of the Obsessive Ghost – Jayantika Ganguly
Part XVIII — (1899-1925)
The Adventure of the Lighthouse on the Moor – A Poem – Christopher James
The Witch of Ellenby – Thomas A. Burns, Jr.
The Tollington Ghost – Roger Silverwood
You Only Live Thrice – Robert Stapleton
The Adventure of the Fair Lad – Craig Janacek
The Adventure of the Voodoo Curse – Gareth Tilley
The Cassandra of Providence Place – Paul Hiscock
The Adventure of the House Abandoned – Arthur Hall
The Winterbourne Phantom – M.J. Elliott
The Murderous Mercedes – Harry DeMaio
The Solitary Violinist – Tom Turley
The Cunning Man – Kelvin I. Jones
The Adventure of Khamaat’s Curse – Tracy J. Revels
The Adventure of the Weeping Mary – Matthew White
The Unnerved Estate Agent – David Marcum
Death in The House of the Black Madonna – Nick Cardillo
The Case of the Ivy-Covered Tomb – S.F. Bennett
Copyright information
Unless otherwise indicated, the following contributions are the first publication, original to this collection.
“Sherlock, Mycroft, and Me” © 2019 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
“The Holloway Ghosts” © 2019 Hugh Ashton and j-views Publishing. Hugh Ashton appears by kind permission of j-views Publishing.
“The Diogenes Club Poltergeist” © 2019 Chris Chan.
“The Madness of Colonel Warburton” © 2002, 2019 Bert Coules. First publication of text script in this collection. Originally broadcast on radio on January 30, 2002, Series 1, Episode 1 of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“Stories, Stepping Stones, and the Conan Doyle Legacy” © 2019 Steve Emecz.
“The Adventure of the Danse Macabre” © 2019 Paul D. Gilbert.
“The Hand of Mesmer” © 2019 Dick Gillman.
“The Adventure of the Returning Spirit” © 2019 Arthur Hall.
“The Adventure of the Sugar Merchant” © 2019 Stephen Herczeg.
“The Violin Thief” (A Poem) © 2019 Christopher James.
“All Supernatural or Preternatural Agencies are Ruled Out as a Matter of Course” © 2019 Roger Johnson.
“The Case for Which the World is Not Yet Prepared” © 2019 Steven Philip Jones.
“Whatever Remains . . . .” and “The Reappearance of Mr. James Phillimore” © 2019 David Marcum.
“The Adventure of the Bewitched Tenant” © 2019 Michael Mallory.
“The Misadventure of the Bonnie Boy” © 2018 Will Murray.
“The Adventure of the Undertaker’s Fetch” © 2019 Tracy J. Revels.
“The Dead Quiet Library” © 2019 Roger Riccard.
“The Return of the Noble Bachelor” © 2019 Jane Rubino.
“The Miracle Worker” © 2019 Geri Schear.
“The Strange Persecution of John Vincent Harden” © 2019 S. Subramanian.
“The Specter of Scarborough Castle” © 2019 Charles Veley and Anna Elliott.
Editor’s Introduction: “Whatever Remains . . . .”
by David Marcum
People like mysteries. We read books about them. We watch films and television shows about them. We look for them in real life. The daily unfolding of the news—What’s the real story? What is the truth behind these events that I’m following? What will happen next? What will tomorrow bring?—is just another form of mystery.
Some people claim that they don’t like mystery stories, instead preferring other genres. But consider for instance how often a mystery figures in a science-fiction story. I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was two or three years old in the late 1960’s and saw an Original Series episode on television, and I can say for sure that many—if not most—Star Trek television episodes or films have strong elements of mystery somewhere within the story, and in most cases the characters serve as detectives, leading us from the unknown puzzle at the beginning of the story to the solution at the end, working step-by-step and clue-by-clue to find out what happened, or to identify a hidden villain. Is that harmless old actor really Kodos the Executioner? How exactly does Edith Keeler die? Why does God need a starship?
To extend the Sci-Fi theme a bit: I don’t like Star Wars, although I guess that one way or another I’ve seen just about all of it, so I’m certainly aware of the mysterious elements throughout the story. What did the hints imply about Luke’s father, before the answer was provided? What exactly was the emperor up to before all was revealed? Who are Rey’s parents? It’s all a mystery, cloaked in space battles and pseudo-religion Force-chatter and light-sabre fights. In Dune, which I do like, mysteries abound as the story unfolds, with questions that must be answered, followed by more questions. These stories may not be a typical “mystery story”—a murder or a jewel theft, with a ratiocinating detective or a lonely private eye making his way down the mean streets, but they are mysteries none-the-less.
Look at other genres: Romance books and films? Who is the tall dark stranger, and how can his background be discovered by the heroine, layer-by-layer, using detective-like methods? The Dirk Pitt books by Clive Cussler, along with books about Pitt’s associates “co-authored” by others, are most definitely mysteries, although clothed in incredible world-shaking plots. (I’ve lost track of the Sherlockian references that continually pop up in the adventures of Pitt and his friends.) The original James Bond books, before Bond became so currently complicated and far from his origins, were each labelled as A James Bond Mystery. Stephen King, known for his supernaturally-tinged masterpieces, writes stories that are full of mysteries, and sometimes with actual detectives, showing just how much influence that the early mystery writers like John D. MacDonald had on him. Television shows like Lost or Dallas or How I Met Your Mother respectively asked questions like What is the Island? or Who shot J.R? or Who is the mother? None of these were specifically mysteries, and they are draped in all sorts of other trappings—time-shifting castaways, oil-baron shenanigans, or a typical sit-com group’s antics
And liking mysteries is just a step away from pondering greater unknowns. It’s a human trait, as shown in cultures around the world. No matter what place, and no matter what era, we find stories of ghosts, and monsters, and questions raised about the nature of death, and whether there is more going on all around us than can ever perceived. It was that way thousands of years ago, when mankind squatted in caves around fires, waiting for the dangerous night outside to pass, and it’s that way right now, as we hide in our fragile constructs of civilization and wires and thin walls and fool ourselves into believing that we’ve pushed back the night. (Look around. We haven’t. The night is here.)
The Victorian Era, with its rapid strides in scientific knowledge, brought science crashing up against superstition and religion and spiritualism. Scientists had been gaining an understanding of the workings of the universe, and our little speck of it, for decades—chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on—but the means for spreading that knowledge and educating the ignorant was very limited. Many people still lived much as their ancestors had a hundred years before, or longer, close to the land and nature, and uninterested in explanations about weather patterns or how atoms and molecules interacted. It was much easier to rely on superstitious explanations for natural phenomena, in the same way that the ancient Greeks and Romans had created their gods to explain the sun and moon and lightning. In daylight, all might be rational and modern, but when the sun went down, it was much easier to believe that there was something out there . . .
The Victorians were gradually becoming educated, but the skin of knowledge was still thin, which allowed such things as the fascination with death and the spiritualism crazes of the late 1800’s to take such a strong hold, even luring in those who wouldn’t be thought to be so gullible—Dr. Watson’s first Literary Agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example. It’s common knowledge how he ruined his reputation during his later years by going over so whole-heartedly to the spiritualists. Additionally, he was shamed for his avid and naïve support of the Cottingley Fairies hoax. It can be taken as a fact that Mr. Sherlock Holmes, indirectly associated with Sir Arthur by way of Dr. John H. Watson’s writings, was not happy that his reputation might be linked to such foolishness. Fortunately, there is ample evidence that Holmes forsook neither his beliefs nor his dignity.
Many people brought cases to Holmes throughout his career that seemed to have hints of the supernatural or the impossible about them. A few of these were published by way of the Literary Agent: “The Creeping Man” begins with the story of a girl’s father who is seemingly changing into some sort of beast. “The Sussex Vampire” finds a woman accused of sucking the blood from her own baby. “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” has voodoo intruding into the supposedly modern English countryside. And of course there is The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which a curse from centuries past seems to have reawakened, killing a respected Dartmoor resident and threatening to destroy his heir as well.
These tales are part of the pitifully few sixty adventures that make up The Canon. It contains references to many other “Untold Cases”, some of which have seemingly impossible aspects—a giant rat and a remarkable worm and a ship that vanishes into the mist. We can be sure that Holmes handled each of these with his customary excellence, and that any sort of supernatural explanation that might have been encountered along the way was debunked. For Holmes, the world was big enough, and there was no need for him to serve as a substitute Van Helsing.
Holmes’s stated his rule, with minor variations, for getting to the bottom of seemingly impossible situations several times within The Canon:
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (The Sign of the Four)
“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (“The Beryl Coronet”)
“We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (“The Bruce-Partington Plans”)
“That process . . . starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (“The Blanched Soldier”)
“That is the case as it appears to the police, and improbable as it is, all other explanations are more improbable still.” (“Silver Blaze”)
Thus, the first part of the process is actually eliminating the impossible. And to a man with a scientific and logical mind such as Sherlock Holmes, this means that the baseline is established that “No ghosts need apply.” So Holmes explains to Watson at the beginning of “The Sussex Vampire”, asking, “. . . are we to give serious attention to such things? This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us.”
If Holmes were to start every investigation with all possibilities as available options, including those beyond our human understanding, he would be finished before he even started. Imagine Holmes saying, “This man may have been murdered—or he may have been possessed by a demon, overwhelming the limits of his body and simply causing him to expire. I’ll sent you my bill.” Think of the time wasted if Holmes were an occult detective, with nothing considered impossible, all possibilities on the table, and virtually nothing that could be eliminated in order to establish whatever truth remains. The Literary Agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was willing to accept ridiculous claims about spiritualism and fairies and all sorts of nonsense. Not so for Sherlock Holmes—and thank goodness.
That’s not to say that Holmes was closed-minded. There were many intelligent men in the Victorian and Edwardian eras who mistakenly believed that all that could be discovered had been discovered—but Holmes wasn’t one of them. There is an apocryphal tale where Charles H. Duell, the Commissioner of U.S. patent office in 1899, stated that “everything that can be invented has been invented.” In A Study in Scarlet, while discussing crime, Holmes himself paraphrased Ecclesiastes 1:9 when he told Watson, “There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.” And yet, with a curious scientific mind and an exceptional intelligence, Holmes would have certainly realized that there was more to be discovered, and that things are always going on around us that are beyond what we can necessarily perceive or understand—invisible forces and patterns of interaction on a grand scale beyond our comprehension. In relation to his own work, Holmes explained:
“. . . life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outrè results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
Thus, in spite of his statements that “[t]here is nothing new under the sun” or “the world is big enough”, Sherlock Holmes would have been open-minded enough to realize that—with our limited perspectives—the impossible isn’t always easily eliminated when identifying the truthful improbable.
Sometime in late 2016, when these MX anthologies were showing signs of continued and increasing success, it was time to determine what the theme would be for the Fall 2017 collection. When I had the idea for a new Holmes anthology in early 2015, it was originally planned to be a single book of a dozen or so new Holmes adventures, probably published as a paperback. By the fall of that year, it had grown to three massive simultaneous hardcovers with sixty-three new adventures, the largest collection of its kind ever—until we surpassed that in the spring of 2019 with sixty-six stories, and a total of nearly four-hundred.
