Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #7 - Nicholas Briggs - Страница 4

FROM WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK

Mrs Hudson is still in Yorkshire nursing her mother’s ailing sister Ruth, but though she is unable to contribute her customary column to this issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, she did manage to talk on the telephone with C E Lawrence, whose latest suspense thriller Silent Victim was excerpted in our last issue. (C E, by the way, is the pen name of our ongoing contributor, Carole Buggé). I am pleased that Mrs Hudson found the time to send us a record of their conversation.

I am less pleased, however, about what I am about to tell you. You see, in our preceding issue, I persuaded (retired) Inspector Lestrade to send us a few of his recollections, in lieu of Mrs Hudson’s usual column. In this regard, my co-editor Mr Kaye made contact with Holmes’s ongoing nemesis Professor James Moriarty, and, to my surprise and dismay, actually persuaded him to contribute a column of his own. And unlike Lestrade, who was flattered to be asked, the Professor naturally insisted on being paid! I shudder to think what use our funds may be put to!

* * * *

In this number of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Holmes and I appear in two different adventures. The first one is my own reportage of A Scandal in Bohemia. I pray that anyone who reads it here for the first time will pay attention to what I have actually written concerning Holmes and affairs of the heart. So far as I know, he never harboured feelings that could in any fashion be construed as romantic in the emotional sense of that word, and that does include the Woman—although I do admit there is a mystery that I have never fathomed concerning that stout consulting detective based in New York City.

To my astonishment, the other Holmesian narrative in this issue, The Dead House, was written up by none other than Holmes himself!

And now it is time to hear from my co-editor Mr Kaye.

—John H Watson, MD

* * * *

One might well call this our “retro” issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. Normally, we like to balance our mix with adventures from days bygone and modern, but most of the tales in this seventh issue of SHMM, are set in earlier times. The only comparatively recent story is Janice Law’s The Double, but even it depends partly on earlier Russian Communist history. Marc Bilgrey’s A House Divided tells an American Civil War incident, while both David Ellis’s A Letter from Legrand and Michael Mallory’s The Premature Murder take place in Nineteenth Century America.

Edgar Allan Poe is central to the latter pair of stories. A Letter from Legrand is an ingenious sequel to Poe’s classic The Gold-Bug. While it is not necessary to know the original story, I believe a reacquaintance with it will enhance reading enjoyment of Mr. Ellis’s sequel. The Premature Murder, though fiction, is a striking investigation into the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe in 1849 in Baltimore.

Next issue will feature a far-flung assortment of authors—an amusing tale of a stolen baseball bat by Jeff Baker, of Wichita Kansas; a new Kelly Locke story from Hal Charles in Kentucky; a delightful Sherlock Holmes pastiche by Christian Endres, of Germany; a horrifying semi-science fictional murder story by Ben Godby, of Ottowa; a clever SF pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, and an upsetting story of wrongful death (which the author says really happened) by Stefanie Stolinsky, of Los Angeles.

See you soon!

Canonically yours,

Marvin Kaye