~ BEING SOME CASES OMITTED FROM THE PUBLISHED RECORD ~
From the Tin Dispatch-Box
New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by Irving Clark, of Baltimore

Dr. Watson tells us, near the start of one of the later adventures, that somewhere in the vaults of his bankers, Cox and Company, at Charing Cross, there sits a battered tin dispatch-box with his name painted on the lid, and that it is crammed with papers: records of cases that, for one reason or another, he never set before the public. Some were failures. Some touched on families that could not be named. Some, he says, were simply waiting.

I have spent forty-seven years wondering what is in that box.

This page is my answer, or the beginning of one. On it you will find new adventures of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, set down in the manner of Dr. Watson, and each one built on a case that Watson mentions in passing in the sixty stories and never tells. Watson called them his untold cases. I call them unfinished business.

The Stories

A Note on Pastiche, and on the Canon

A pastiche is an imitation made in admiration. It is not a burlesque, and it is not a correction. I am not trying to improve on Conan Doyle, which cannot be done, nor to bring Holmes up to date, which should not be. My Holmes takes cocaine in the canon and I leave it there, offstage, where Watson's disapproval can do its work. My Watson is the Watson of the stories: brave, decent, a better observer than Holmes allows, and a much better writer than he is given credit for.

Sherlockians speak of "the Canon," meaning the sixty stories: four novels and fifty-six short stories. Many of us play what is called the Grand Game, in which one pretends, with a perfectly straight face, that Holmes and Watson were real men and Conan Doyle merely Watson's literary agent. I play it too. So in these stories the facts of the Canon are law. Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street, with Mrs. Hudson below. His brother Mycroft keeps to the Diogenes Club and does not exert himself. Lestrade is small and sallow and dogged, and better at his job than Holmes admits. Where the Canon is silent, I have tried to invent only what Watson might have written, and nothing he would have blushed to.

Not one sentence here is copied from Conan Doyle. Every word is my own, for good or ill. If you find a phrase that sounds like him, I am flattered, and I promise it was an accident of long acquaintance.

Some of the Untold Cases, and Where Watson Mentions Them

I have chosen the crutch and the rat to begin with because they are the two that have nagged at me longest: the crutch because it is the only untold case that is plainly a matter of chemistry, and the rat because every Sherlockian alive has an opinion about it, and now I have published mine.

About the Author

I taught chemistry to the young people of Baltimore for thirty-three years, until this June, when the school gave me a clock and a very kind assembly and I went home and began typing. I first met Mr. Holmes at the age of twelve, in a library copy of The Adventures that I did not return for an unforgivable length of time, and I have reread the Canon every winter since. My students knew that a good lab report would get them a lecture on Holmes's chemical corner at Baker Street, and his famous stained fingers, whether they wanted one or not. My wife says I am the only man in Maryland who checks the weather by reading the barometer in the hall. She is probably right.

For readers who prefer their detectives Belgian, or from a village in the English countryside, a retired librarian who has read every Agatha Christie mystery keeps an excellent page called Poirot or Marple? An Agatha Christie Reading Room. I am told it argues the question fairly. I am not certain that can be done, but I admire the attempt.