A Study in Sherlock

Ronald gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I doubt I’d be much use unless the case was connected to Sherlock Holmes. If Doyle hadn’t had Colonel Sebastian Moran use an air gun in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House,’ I’d never have tumbled to Burns’s scheme.”

“Then I’ll keep an eye out for a case with a Doyle connection.”

A stiff wind slashed Ronald’s cheeks. He hunched his shoulders and looked nervously at his fog-shrouded, bog-infested surroundings.

“I’ll think about it, but don’t call me if the case involves a bloodthirsty beast and the moor.”

Jerry Margolin is the owner of the world’s largest collection of original cartoon art and illustrations dealing strictly with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Jerry lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife of forty years and a cat named Paget. He has been a member of the Baker Street Irregulars since 1977. His brother and coauthor, Phillip Margolin, introduced him to Sherlock Holmes at age ten.

Phillip Margolin has been a Peace Corps Volunteer, a schoolteacher, and is the author of fifteen New York Times bestsellers. Phil spent a quarter century as a criminal defense attorney, during which time he handled thirty homicide cases, including twelve death penalty cases, and argued before the United States Supreme Court. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is proud to be a cofounder of Chess for Success, a nonprofit that uses chess to teach elementary school children study skills. When asked to contribute to this anthology, Phil jumped at the chance to collaborate on a Holmes story with his brother.

The resemblance of any of the characters in this story to any living or dead Sherlockians is probably intentional.

THE BONE-HEADED LEAGUE

Lee Child

For once the FBI did the right thing: it sent the Anglophile to England. To London, more specifically, for a three-year posting at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Pleasures there were extensive, and duties there were light. Most agents ran background checks on visa applicants and would-be immigrants and kept their ears to the ground on international matters, but I liaised with London’s Metropolitan Police when American nationals were involved in local crimes, either as victims or witnesses or perpetrators.

I loved every minute of it, as I knew I would. I love that kind of work, I love London, I love the British way of life, I love the theater, the culture, the pubs, the pastimes, the people, the buildings, the Thames, the fog, the rain. Even the soccer. I was expecting it to be all good, and it was all good.

Until.

I had spent a damp Wednesday morning in February helping out, as I often did, by rubber-stamping immigration paperwork, and then I was saved by a call from a sergeant at Scotland Yard, asking on behalf of his inspector that I attend a crime scene north of Wigmore Street and south of Regent’s Park. On the 200 block of Baker Street, more specifically, which was enough to send a little jolt through my Anglophile heart, because every Anglophile knows that Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address was 221B Baker Street. It was quite possible I would be working right underneath the great detective’s fictional window.

And I was, as well as underneath many other windows, because the Met’s crime scenes are always fantastically elaborate. We have CSI on television, where they solve everything in forty-three minutes with DNA, and the Met has scene-of-crime officers, who spend forty-three minutes closing roads and diverting pedestrians, before spending forty-three minutes shrugging themselves into Tyvek bodysuits and Tyvek booties and Tyvek hoods, before spending forty-three minutes stringing KEEP OUT tape between lampposts and fence railings, before spending forty-three minutes erecting white tents and shrouds over anything of any interest whatsoever. The result was that I found a passable imitation of a traveling circus already in situ when I got there.

There was a cordon, of course, several layers deep, and I got through them all by showing my Department of Justice credentials and by mentioning the inspector’s name, which was Bradley Rose. I found the man himself stumping around on the damp sidewalk some yards south of the largest white tent. He was a short man, but substantial, with no tie and snappy eyeglasses and a shaved head. He was an old-fashioned London thief-taker, softly spoken but at the same time impatient with bullshit, which his own department provided in exasperating quantity.

He jerked his thumb at the tent and said, “Dead man.”

I nodded. Obviously I wasn’t surprised. Not even the Met uses tents and Tyvek for purse snatching.

He jerked his thumb again and said, “American.”