A Study in Sherlock

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes was overheard to mention breakfast to Dr. John Watson in a most jovial manner as they left the gaol,” said Chan to the guests gathered for one final cup of tea in his parlor. “I think he will be reflecting no further upon this matter.”

“That’s rather a shame,” said Wing, “as we might therefore be thought to be intruding if we were to express our appreciation for his help. No, Zhang, you needn’t glower, that was merely levity.”

“Indeed,” said Chan, anxious to get the issue disposed of once and for all. “In any case, I believe that will be an end to this matter of Hugh Boone, or Mr. Neville St. Clair, renting rooms at the Bar of Gold. All that remains is for the Lascar, in the most delicate but firmest of terms, to be made to understand that it was we who engineered these events. Once it is clear we are prepared to proceed with an equal measure of subtlety, but nothing approaching this level of restraint, should we be provoked again, I think we will be able to count on the Lascar’s cooperation. Yes, I believe a discretion previously unknown will suddenly begin to show itself in the behavior of our Lascar colleague. Would you all be prepared to accompany me right now to the Bar of Gold?”

“I am,” Lu responded instantly.

“I also,” Wing agreed, finishing his tea.

The three turned to Zhang, who, after a silent moment, shocked them all when he permitted his lips to twist into a smile. Answering smiles were received from the others. “I have no objection,” Zhang said, and so, still smiling, the four men of Limehouse made their way to the street.

S. J. Rozan, a lifelong New Yorker, first encountered and devoured the adventures of Sherlock Holmes at the age of twelve during the same convalescence as when she discovered Edgar Allan Poe. S.J. is the author of thirteen novels and three dozen short stories. She’s won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards, and other honors, including the Japanese Maltese Falcon. However, none of these have been enough to entice Mr. Holmes to give her a call. She will keep trying.

For Dr. Watson’s perspective on the events narrated in this story, see “The Man with the Twisted Lip” by Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in the Strand (1892) and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE PURLOINED PAGET

Phillip Margolin and Jerry Margolin

Everything about the moor made Ronald Adair uneasy. He had lived his whole life in Manhattan and he felt that there was something inherently wrong with places where you could actually see the horizon and the silence wasn’t annihilated by honking horns and pounding jackhammers. There were no Michelin-star restaurants in this wasteland, but there were bogs that could swallow a man in minutes. Ronald shivered as he imagined being sucked down into the ooze, struggling helplessly until the slime choked off his last terrified scream.

A year ago, Ronald had flown to Hollywood to talk to a studio head who wanted to buy the movie rights to Death’s Head, the video game that had made him a multimillionaire. He’d brought his girlfriend along and she had insisted that they visit the La Brea Tar Pits. The place had given him the willies. Sixteen-foot-high mammoths had disappeared into that darkness. At his last physical, Ronald had measured exactly five foot eleven inches tall. If he was sucked into one of those pits he wouldn’t stand a chance. He wondered if he would even recognize a tar pit or a bog should he wander out upon the moor. At least the manholes in Manhattan had covers you could see.

And then there was the Hound! Ronald knew The Hound of the Baskervilles was fiction but he was a fanatic Sherlockian—an investitured member of the Baker Street Irregulars with a complete set of Conan Doyle first editions in his library—so he also knew that Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale had been inspired by the legend of the seventeenth-century squire Richard Cabell, a monstrously evil man who had allegedly sold his soul to the devil. Cabell was buried on the moor and his ghost was said to lead a pack of baying phantom hounds across them on the anniversary of his death. Intellectually, Ronald knew there was no Hound prowling the “craggy cairns and tors” Conan Doyle had described in his story, but somewhere in the lizard part of his brain lurked the fear that an unearthly, slavering beast with glowing red eyes might roam a godforsaken place like this.