A Study in Sherlock

Old Gao thought long and hard before he gathered up the slurry, wrapped it loosely in cloth, and put it in a pot, which he filled with water. He heated the water on the brazier, but did not let it boil. Soon enough the wax floated to the surface, leaving the dead bees and the dirt and the pollen and the propolis inside the cloth.

He let it cool.

Then he walked outside, and he stared up at the moon. It was almost full.

He wondered how many villagers knew that his son had died as a baby. He remembered his wife, but her face was distant, and he had no portraits or photographs of her. He thought that there was nothing he was so suited for on the face of the earth as to keep the black, bulletlike bees on the side of this high, high hill. There was no other man who knew their temperament as he did.

The water had cooled. He lifted the now solid block of beeswax out of the water, placed it on the boards of the bed to finish cooling. He took the cloth filled with dirt and impurities out of the pot. And then, because he too was, in his way, a detective, and once you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth, he drank the sweet water in the pot. There is a lot of honey in slurry, after all, even after the majority of it has dripped through a cloth and been purified. The water tasted of honey, but not a honey that Gao had ever tasted before. It tasted of smoke, and metal, and strange flowers, and odd perfumes. It tasted, Gao thought, a little like sex.

He drank it all down, and then he slept, with his head on the ceramic pillow.

When he woke, he thought, he would decide how to deal with his cousin, who would expect to inherit the twelve hives on the hill when Old Gao went missing.

He would be an illegitimate son, perhaps, the young man who would return in the days to come. Or perhaps a son. Young Gao. Who would remember, now? It did not matter.

He would go to the city and then he would return, and he would keep the black bees on the side of the mountain for as long as days and circumstances would allow.

Neil Gaiman is the only author to have won both the Carnegie and Newbery Medals, for his novel The Graveyard Book, and to have won a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for his Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft tale “A Study in Emerald.” He first encountered Holmes at the age of ten, in the library of Ardingly College Junior School, and immediately added the Great Detective to the list of People He Wanted to Be When He Grew Up, a list that at that point probably included P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith and Michael Moorcock’s Elric. He became a writer when he grew up, which is almost as good.

Gaiman was invested into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2005, under the name of The Devil’s Foot.

The only information in the Sherlock Holmes Canon about Holmes’s interest in bees may be found in the stories entitled “The Lion’s Mane” and “His Last Bow.” The latter, which takes place in 1914, mentions Holmes’s “magnum opus of [his] latter years”: Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.

A TRIUMPH OF LOGIC

Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon

Linwood Boothby was catching a smoke outside the Franklin County courthouse. He’d cut down to one cigarette a day, midafternoon, to revive himself during jury trials. There was no courtroom work today, but he was indulging himself anyway.

“Hi, Judge.” I stepped out onto the courthouse portico. “I heard a good one today.”

Boothby raised his red, bushy eyebrows, which contrasted with his bald head and were his most distinctive facial feature.

“What do you call a Maine lawyer who doesn’t know anything?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Artie. What do you call a Maine lawyer who doesn’t know anything?”

“Your Honor.”

He let out something between a chuckle and a growl, inhaled his cigarette, then took it out of his mouth and studied it. “Artie, what do you call a Maine law clerk who’s a wiseass?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“Unemployed.”

“Uh-uh.” I raised my index finger. “Empty threat. You already fired me last week.”

“Yeah, but it felt so good I wanted to do it again.”

“Besides, your eminence, you need a vassal, a Dr. Watson if you will, both to preserve your record for history”—I did a small genuflection—“as well as to announce your visitors, such as the one awaiting you at this very moment, in your chambers above.”

“Who?” He raised the cigarette to his lips again.

“Emmy Holcrofts.”

Boothby looked at me in mid-puff, and the eyebrows shot up again, this time in surprise. Emmy was a court reporter, and court reporters were usually seen only during trials and hearings; they spent the rest of their professional lives cloistered, transcribing their notes.

Boothby looked longingly at his Pall Mall, snubbed it out in the cigarette receptacle, and followed me into the building.

“Hi, Judge Boothby.”