The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Marvin Kaye Page A

explained. “I shall publish it as such someday, in memory of him. Just because he didn’t live long enough to work out this—this
postscript
, I’ll not have it made public that he erred.”
    â€œSuit yourself.” Lestrade shrugged. “I respect your loyalty.”
    â€œBut the truth is so perfect. The lie will be incomplete, unsatisfying,”
the voice pleaded.
    â€œBe quiet!” I said firmly. “This is the end of it.”
    Lestrade frowned, hurt, thinking that I was talking to him.

Desperate
Business
    In the preceding section, Murder seldom raised its sanguine head, but the following quartet of adventures is rife with terrorism and wholesale slaughter. One tale was clearly suppressed for reasons of supreme tact and delicacy, whereas the French and Irish cases indicate reservations on the part of Holmes and Watson both. Perhaps most curious of all is “The Adventure of the Dying Ship,” which ought to have been published in
The Strand,
save for intervention from a completely unanticipated jurisdiction
.

R eaders
of The Resurrected Holmes
(St. Martin’s Press, 1996) will recall the incredible botch a certain “Beatnik” author made of the story of the French assassin Huret, which Watson first mentioned in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge.” My scholarly colleague J. Adrian Fillmore concluded that the case was too well known in the newspapers of the era for Watson to bother writing up himself, but the manuscript we found in the lower compartment of his tin dispatch-box proves there was another reason why the story did not appear in print: one that concerns an important character in the following tale, Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944). Ida Tarbell was one of America’s leading muckraking journalists. In 1904, she wrote
The History of the Standard Oil Company,
which led to the exposure of malpractice and the prosecution of that firm
.
The Adventure of the Boulevard
Assassin
    BY K ATHLEEN B RADY
    O n the third morning of October the disaster Holmes had prophesied occurred. A bomb exploded in a Paris police station with such force and brutality that part of the body of one of the unfortunate victims was found dangling from a gas fixture in the shattered room.
    Until then, most Parisians thought the danger had passed. The anarchists who terrorized the city in the late spring had been silent for months. Raw fear had faded to a general wariness that year of1894. Most inhabitants of that marvelous capital had lived so long with feelings of dread that they could no longer identify their own anxiety. It was as if they had a chronic ache that seemed to fade because they simply learned to accommodate it.
    Holmes and I came to be in Paris on that fateful day because a few weeks before, over breakfast in London, he made a decision. I was buttering the toast that the excellent Mrs. Hudson served on her little silver rack and Holmes was sitting with his right leg at an angle to the table reading the weather reports in
The Times
. He let the newspaper fall to the floor and turned his full attention to his rashers.
    â€œThe calm is about to end,” he said. “The anarchists will come out of their holes with the approach of winter, Watson. They could not handle explosives safely during the hot months of summer because even the slightest rise in temperature can provoke a sudden detonation that will explode the operator into a score of pieces.” He poured himself a second cup of tea. “We shall assist the Paris police whether they want it or not. On second thought, I shall set things in motion so that the Palais de Justice shall actually invite our help.”
    And so it came to be. Holmes’s diplomatic contacts were such that he quickly received an official invitation. French officials were fairly frantic with eagerness to have Holmes come help them.
    The task, to be fair, was impossible. Not even the esteemed Sherlock Holmes could tear out