The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  Books by Don Libey

  A Few Thoughts Before I Go

  Avon Lake

  Church of the Redeemable Yoohoo

  Wound Down Days

  Spare

  Islands

  Religion and Gods

  God: Hit or Myth

  On Gold

  Libey On Customers

  Libey On Change:

  Marketing Trends and Supercycles

  Libey on Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value

  Libey and Pickering On RFM

  Libey and Pickering on RFM and Beyond

  Copyright 1929 by Sherlock Holmes.

  Copyright 2012 by Don Libey, Editor.

  All rights reserved.

  Designed using fonts entirely of Baskerville Old Face

  First Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-1477479155

  ISBN-10: 1477479155

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62110-661-6

  Acknowledgement

  Great appreciation is extended to Professor Donald Pollock, University at Buffalo (SUNY), the eminent anthropologist, Sherlockian scholar and author, who graciously read the manuscript and offered valued guidance and encouragement to the editor.

  Campbell & Lewis Publishers

  San Francisco and London

  For Andrea

  and with memories of my parents,

  Weir and Mildred Libey,

  who began it all in 1952

  with an eight year-old’s

  all-time favorite Christmas gift:

  The Complete Sherlock Holmes

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Preface

  The circumstances surrounding this remarkable and heretofore unknown autobiography by Sherlock Holmes require careful explanation.

  I am an antiquarian: a dealer in rare books and, more specifically, those of four nineteenth century British authors, being Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Kenneth Grahame and, especially, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I live in Sonoma County, California, at Bodega Bay, the enchanting seaside hamlet made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds. My books are sold almost entirely online at my modest website www.libeybooks.com. Also, they are found on the largest online antiquarian network in the world: www.abebooks.com. Mine is a small business and attracts little notice, being favored by a few, random collectors and lovers of rare first editions. We bibliophiles exist mostly for enjoying our books, and setting up in business as an antiquarian dealer is simply a justification for purchasing more books.

  My education was in English Literature and ancient Japanese and Chinese poetry. A small volume of my collected poetry over thirty-five years was published in 2010, a second collection in 2012, and my first two books of fiction were also published in 2011. Another twelve or so of my books have been published on business topics.

  Since childhood, my reading interests have included the four authors mentioned. At age eight, I received The Complete Sherlock Holmes for Christmas and spent the next fortnight devouring the book. This year will mark my sixtieth reading of the sacred canon.

  My memberships include The International English Honor Society, The Dickens Fellowship, the Thomas Hardy Society, the Kenneth Grahame Society, and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. I am essentially unknown in all of these prestigious literary societies, but study the scholarship in quiet anonymity with great appreciation for the intellectual insights of others. My particular interests are the first editions and variants of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  Prior to my antiquarian life, I was an international marketing advisor to the chief executives and boards of directors of numerous U.S. and British corporations and for a number of years lived half-time in England, residing in the Cotswolds and in London. I retired from business in 2010.

  Over the more than thirty-five years spent visiting the U.K., I explored all of the great rare bookshops looking for treasures. I met a number of book scouts who unearth valuable first editions for collectors and ship them to their clients all over the world. These individuals attend the book auctions, book fairs, and exhibitions in England, Scotland and Wales, find unrecognized first editions of Dickens and other authors potentially valued at hundreds or thousands of dollars, quietly buy them for maybe the equivalent of fifty or a hundred dollars or so, and re-sell them to their eager customers for one or two hundred dollars. The book scouts are a valuable source of first editions for the antiquarian market and their identities are both coveted and carefully guarded.

  One of my sharp-eyed book scouts—I will call him “Ian”—is an expert at finding Arthur Conan Doyle material. He has brought me such books as a first-edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in fine condition that he found in the bottom of a box in a used book stall in Bourton-on-Water and bought for five quid, offered to me for twenty pounds (for which I paid him one hundred pounds), and which I subsequently re-sold to a collector for one thousand dollars, the nominal value being at least fifty percent above that modest retail price. That’s how it works in the old book business. You take care of your scouts and they take care of you.

  One year, it may have been 2008, after a long three-month stay in England in my role as the non-executive director of a large British multi-unit corporation, I returned to the U.S. where awaiting me was a slightly scruffy box of books from Ian. As I remember, there was a first edition of Grahame’s Pagan Days, several firsts of Doyle’s Professor Challenger books, three firsts by Dickens, and an assortment of ephemera and other oddments he had picked up somewhere. One of the spin-drift pieces was an old holograph manuscript covered by a stained and soiled blue paper wrapper with the title Montague Notations written in ink across the front. I put it on a shelf of a bookcase for future research and forgot it for nearly a year.

  In 2009, I had a heart-attack and, during the recuperative months following, spent time cataloging and organizing my books. Re-discovering Montague Notations, I sat down to explore what this curious blue-wrapper manuscript might contain.

  What follows is what I discovered. After reading and re-reading the manuscript, I spent a month reflecting on what to do next. I realized that the manuscript was either a great hoax or one of the most singular literary events of all time. An autobiography of Sherlock Holmes, if authentic, would be equivalent to finding the actual autobiography of Christ, a fictional character given eternal life by devoted but delusional followers. In either case, the believers would be proven true and the nonbelievers proven false. It is a weighty responsibility.

  My decision after a month was to quietly ask several eminent Sherlockian scholars for their guidance. By agreement, they shall remain unidentified, but it makes little difference as they were unanimous in their conclusions. After reviewing sample pages, and being provided the provenance of the discovery by Ian, their counsel was straightforward: publish the manuscript as is, including Holmes’s penciled publishing directions, an
d allow the world’s Holmesians and Sherlockians to decide.

  So be it.

  Don Libey

  Bodega Bay, California

  May 28, 2012

  Montague Notations

  Copyright 1929 by Sherlock Holmes.

  All rights reserved by Sherlock Holmes.

  To John H. Watson and Mycroft Holmes:

  Brothers in Loyalty, Spirit and Intellect.

  Introduction

  My old friend and chronicler, John H. Watson, in setting down so many of the adventures we shared over the years, had the remarkable ability to conduct the written flow of events to create sensational interest in the many cases, but only a limited ability to focus the pure light of accuracy on the essential deductive facts.

  Since Watson’s death this year, it falls to me to relate some of his masquerades and lapses—intentional and unintentional—made in writing up the various cases over the past nearly fifty-five years of our association and to expand upon my case history.

  Having reviewed his published and unpublished accounts from his original notes and manuscripts, preserved in an old tin dispatch box willed to me by Watson and conveyed to me by his lawyers after his funeral, I concluded that a mere erratum of our entwined lives and careers would be massively incomplete and, therefore, have set down a true and accurate summary of our experiences within the broader discussion of my unique life and career; in effect, an autobiography.

  While many of those who grasp the elegance of pure reason and deduction prefer to keep Watson’s writings in situ, others share my obsession for accuracy and intellectual purity. The clearest path to that elegance is to leave the published works of Watson unchanged, but to shine the brilliant illumination of the comparative beacon upon them for all who prefer to possess absolutes rather than the shadows of vagaries.

  The cases as described by Watson embody his interpretations constrained by his good and honest emotions, whereas at the center of the work lies my developed intellect and rarified reason within the cold clarity of scientific detachment. The result, after all else has been discarded, is truth. And, as this pure truth was produced by me and brought to bear on so many important events over so many years by my tenacity against the evils of crime, it is my responsibility to those individuals in Great Britain, Europe and the United States who have, in recent years, begun to show interest in the science of criminal detection through their study and analyses of Watson’s writings to provide an accurate factual foundation upon which to limit emotion while resolving problems and combatting the ever-expanding evils of mankind.

  To these ends, I have devoted myself this past year. Now, at age seventy-seven, long since retired to my rooms in Montague Street, time has decreased my energies and output, but my routine of five hours of writing a day over sixty-two consecutive days has produced this account of my life and career providing those who have interest with the full and accurate history of the world’s first consulting private detective.

  Sherlock Holmes

  London, 2 July 1929

  1

  I came into the world as Sherlock Holmes on Tuesday, 27 January 1852 at half-four in the afternoon—tea time. My mother, Virginie Verénet Holmes, bore me in her canopied bed at our ancestral home, Church Court, in Maiden Wood, Isle of Thanet, Kent, where she had born, in order, my older brothers Mycroft and Wittrell and our sister Juliette. I was last in birthing order. My father, Parkford St. John Holmes was absent.

  My earliest memory is of my brother Mycroft placing different lengths of string on the floor of the nursery when I was one-year old. Two years later he explained to me that it was an exercise in learning to judge the lengths of things without needing a measure. To this day, I can determine the length of an object from across a room to within a half-inch.

  Wittrell, who became a mathematician with the Bank of England upon his graduation from Peterhouse, Cambridge, taught me to manipulate numbers relative to space and organization when I was four. Like him, my ability to deduce the exact speed of a train by counting the number of telegraph poles passed in a one-minute period of time was a simple calculation of distance and time to arrive at the precise, accurate speed of the train. Wittrell would later serve in the highest ranks of government as an unimpeachable auditor of Crown assets.

  Similarly, Mycroft developed his mind to ‘see’ answers to questions that were impenetrable to others, and rose to be not only unimpeachable, but also indispensable to the monarchy, the government, and its ministers; indeed, he was the government. His wide network of upper-class contacts was forged during his years at Trinity College, Cambridge where he took his Master’s in Classics.

  Juliette was taught by Mycroft and Wittrell at age six to observe the changes that occur to metals when the acid to alkaline balance shifts. In her early twenties, after taking her Upper First in chemistry at St. Andrew’s, she became the sole and final arbiter of authenticity for the precious metals bourses of Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands and France. During the Great War, Juliette alone was trusted by the governments of the Allies to maintain the authenticity of gold and silver bullion flowing between Britain and Europe to finance the war against Germany.

  The Holmes children were born in 1840, 1844, 1848, and 1852. At my birth, our mother was thirty-nine years old and our father was forty-two. Mother died in 1895. Father died in 1891. Mycroft died in 1926. Wittrell died in 1928. Juliette died in 1924. None of my siblings married or had children. I am the relict of the family. All of us resided in London, that great machine of human excess, depravity, creativity and—rarely—beauty.

  Parkford St. John Holmes was a successful international factor. He financed various enterprises and, owing to a Holmes family trait of making accurate deductions through logic and reason, experienced virtually no financial losses over his career. As a prominent Anglo-European factor, he became a wealthy man and, signifying more, he retained and grew his wealth.

  Father was imposing. Tall at over six feet and muscular at seventeen stone, he created a powerful impression; yet, he was soft-spoken and reserved. His eyes were an unusual light-hued gray-blue that gazed through anything he looked at, whether a person, an object, or a distant landscape, making him seem detached and almost other-worldly. Mycroft alone inherited his eyes and his formidable size, as well as his detached and reserved nature. In both, however, the outer veneer of detachment masked the roaring minds working within their large cranial vaults. Father could calculate the cost, weight, and profit of a ship’s hold full of coal to the penny instantaneously without setting pen to paper; whereas Mycroft could calculate the entire catalogue of diplomatic chess moves between two political opponents or two feuding nations in the same blink of those familial eyes.

  Father belonged to the Diogenes Club in London where Mycroft would succeed him in later years. When he was in the City on business, he used the club’s visitors’ room for occasional firm matters, but was most often found at his accustomed place at the Exchange where he was regarded for his high integrity, his firm negotiations and his flawless financial transactions. His definition of integrity extended equally to his personal life. He neither smoked nor drank, the only exception being a glass of Burgundy or Bordeaux wine during Mother’s formal dinners at Church Court.

  At home in Maiden Wood, Father was supportive of his tenant farmers and often extended to them sums of money to better their holdings and increase their production. While recorded in the ledgers as loans, many were either forgotten or payments were never requested. No farmer, however, ever received Father’s favours if he was a drunkard, a lay-about, or mistreated his wife or children.

  Virginie Verénet Holmes was Belgian, the daughter of Walloon aristocracy. Schooled in Brussels and Paris, she was, in later years, a philanthropist using her inherited family wealth, gained from European private banking, to benefit and strengthen Belgium’s equality for women and to further the early suffrage movements of Europe. An intelligent, capable and strong woman, she continued to successfully manage the famil
y business for four years after our father died, selling it for a princely sum to a large French factoring firm only a month before her own death.

  Mother was above mid-height, slim and possessed her superb figure throughout her life. Her shoulder-length hair was dark, thick and rich, of shades of mahogany and oak, lustrous from many brushstrokes each morning and night. Her features were elegant, with a thin, sculptured nose perfectly placed among aristocratic facial bones and dark eyes of smoky, languid teak. Graceful and elegant, she moved like a swan: efficient, gliding, never disruptive and making no wake. Her voice was gentle, low-pitched and always quiet, demanding one listen attentively to hear what she said.

  Juliette received the full measure of Mother’s beauty and graciousness; indeed, they looked nearly twins as they straddled their respective years of early and middle womanhood. Wittrell was a blend of both Mother and Father, the only such blend of us all. I was the male version of Mother externally and the detached calculating machine of my Father internally. A number of my cases resulted in my assuring reasoned justice for the criminal, my Father’s influence; a number resulted in my assuring reasoned compassion for the criminal, my Mother’s influence.

  Mother was an accomplished harpist, having studied under the great maestro Parish Alvars during his 1883-1884 hiatus in Paris from his position as First Harpist of the Imperial and Royal Opera of Vienna. As a child, I would stand next her gilded concert grand harp, idly plucking melancholy scraps of sound from the strings, a fascination that would follow me during my years of violin-accompanied intense concentration on criminal problems.

  As children, we all had more attention from our mother than from our father, given his frequent absences due to business, as well as his reserved nature which, to a degree, extended to his children. Father was an influence, but we received affection or what was perhaps love from our mother. And, Nanny Dobney.

  Nanny Dobney arrived prior to Mycroft’s birth and remained with our family until her semi-retirement when I went to university. She then became nanny to a prominent Surrey family for another twenty years, a career of over forty years with only two families. She retired to Camberwell where she delighted in periodic visits from her then adult charges. Juliette was particularly good about visiting Nanny; they were very close as Juliette was the only female out of the eight children Nanny raised during her career.