The Case of the Sow’s Ear

By Bruce Briley

The second of a series of Sherlock Holmes forbidden-to-be-published adventures, presented under the Imprimatur of the Conan-Doyle Estate:
There are two major, intertwined plot lines in this book:
1. A voyage to China at the sponsored behest of a wealthy and desperate father to rescue his head-strong daughter who has become incommunicado

2. The discovery while en route, of a complex and highly dangerous plot to destroy the silk trade, involving the ship and much of its crew and many others, bankrolled by the “Silk Merchant” in England who proves (eventually) to be a disgruntled relative of the Queen.

The plot lines are interdependent because of the urgency of the first (it unfolds that she and a travel companion have been kidnapped by pirates who are active in the Oriental/Arabic flesh market so they are in danger of being sent to the Middle East without a trace) and a similarly urgent need to scotch the silk plot before it is irredeemably executed (a parasite that destroys the mulberry plant essential to the silk worm is planned to be introduced to China, and once unleashed would be unstoppable.)

Holmes and Watson find themselves in double jeopardy, with the pirates and the silk plotters (independently) intent on killing them on board the ship and then in China, where life and death are cheap, and afterward as well.

Subplots include:
a) The behavior of a perfidious Chinese police Inspector assigned to aid in the search for the kidnapped young ladies, who turns out to be in league with the pirate activity

b) The unexpected behavior of the young lady’s companion, who prefers not to be rescued (and who much later proves to have become an estimable force in a Sheikdom)

c) A somewhat mysterious woman also being held by the pirates, who aides Holmes and Watson and proves to be a key (through a powerful and vengeful uncle) to inhibiting the silk plot at the Chinese end. (He also arranges for the elimination of the treacherous police Inspector)

d) The unexpected romantic escapades of the rescued young lady amongst the adult children of the multi-national diplomatic corps in Shanghai

e) The repeated, increasingly ingenious attempts by the silk plotters upon the lives of Holmes and Watson during their land route (roughly tracing Marco Polo and the Orient Express in reverse) return to England.

Holmes and Watson wrestle with many difficulties, e.g., Watson’s mal de mer, a typhoon at sea, the unusual encipherment of the missing captain’s private writings, the baffling concealment of his absence implying mutiny, and the frisky behavior of the young lady, to which their considerable life experience provides no antidote.

Upon return to England, the Queen’s relative is properly (though privately) punished, and the tentacles of the silk plot are carefully quashed. The Queen, who proves to have been an avid reader of Watson’s accounts of past adventures, prevails upon him to postpone release of this tale for generations. She also becomes a very private patient of the Doctor.

(The story itself unfolds much more smoothly than this staccato rendition.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce Briley
• Release date: Aug 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781938701320

Bruce Briley

Dr. Briley has a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D from the University of Illinois. He has 4 children and 10 grandchildren, has been employed for many years at Bell Labs, Lucent and Motorola, and is now with the Illinois Institute of Technology where he was awarded the first Alva C. Todd Professorship. He holds 21 US patents and has authored 2 textbooks as well as numerous technical papers (not unlike the "monographs" Sherlock Holmes often mentions).He has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since he was first able to read his Adventures. Of late, however, he became unhappy over the films and TV series of a "modern" Sherlock epitomized by the "Elementary" series which savages the concept: Holmes and Watson are transported forward more than a hundred years, Watson is transmographied into an Asian female, and Holmes, while still a brilliant detective, is portrayed as a social buffoon similar to Monk.Though he has found such series very entertaining, he longed for some new tales of the traditional Sherlock in the Elizebethan era, resonating with the original image while fresh in scope.And so he penned 5 novels (and is planning a 6th) that strive to accomplish that:The first, "The Lost Folio", chases Holmes and Watson all over England, involves Moriarty and Lastrade, etc., responding to a kidnapping and murders in pursuit of Shakespeare's Lost Work, while encumbered by an impenetrable cipher.The second, "The Sow's Ear", takes them on a dangerous sea voyage to rescue a young lady lost in the labyrinth of China, and stumble upon a plot to destroy the Silk trade, involving murderous rogues, and multiple assassination attempts upon them.The third, "The Vatican Murder", finds Watson jailed on the Vatican grounds, indicted for the murder of an old school chum and subject to the strict laws of the soverign Vatican State. Holmes is helpful, but a tangled web endangers Watson when he is mistaken for Holmes on two occasions. Watson, when separated from his boon companion exhibits his ability to improvise, but is convicted of murder.The fourth, "The Royal Leper", finds Holmes and Watson charged by royal warrant to convey a member of the Royal Family diagnosed with Leprosy to secretly convey him half-way around the world to what would effectively be banishment to a Leper Colony on Molokai island in the Pacific Ocean. An abundance of adventures ensue, taking them to places they would not have dreamed of visiting. No other Sherlock Holmes mystery/adventure has ever been so extensive.The fifth, "Something Rotten in Denmark", engages Holmes and Watson in an investigation of a series of murders that have taken place in Kronborg Castle, near Copenhagen. (Krongborg was selected by Shakespeare as the model for the setting of Hamlet, and has played a vital role in the history of Denmark.) The baffling nature of the murders is that they follow the order of events in Shakespeare's Hamlet. A tangled set of clues and witness narratives compel the pair to perform extraordinarily."The Fifteen Hundred Word Curse", involves a modern-day man who discovers that he is the victim of a huge (and genuine) curse levied upon the Reivers of the Walk (a large and dangerous group peopling the Scottish-English border whose descendents include Custer, President Nixon and Neil Armstrong) by the Archbishop of Glasgow. He enlists the aid of an ecclesiastical lawyer/priest, an aged, experienced expert on exocism, and a youthful priest fresh from a seminary. He learns that a large collection of evil influences have been subtly causing inbreeding amongst the descendents to strengthen the power of the curse upon his unborn child. Terrible events transpire as the result of attempts to apply logic to lifting the curse. A surprise awaits at the story's end.

Book preview

Special Smashwords Edition

The Case of the Sow’s Ear

by

Dr. Bruce E. Briley

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Case of the Sow’s Ear

Special Smashwords Edition

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

Copyright © 2012 Dr. Bruce E. Briley. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Cover Designed by Amanda Marie McGovern in collaboration with Telemachus Press, LLC

Cover Art: Licensed to this purpose

Published by Telemachus Press, LLC at Smashwords

http://www.smashwords.com

http://www.telemachuspress.com

Visit the author website:

http://www.drbruceebriley.com

ISBN: 978-1-938701-32-0 (eBook)

Version 2012.08.14

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS and THANKS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

Other Books by Briley

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS and THANKS

Grateful acknowledgement to the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. for permission to use the Sherlock Holmes characters created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Many thanks to Amanda Marie McGovern for her very able services in creating the covers for this series of books.

I would like to thank the Telemachus Press Team assigned to my project for their Professional handling of these books (and their author). I would recommend them to anyone.

FOREWORD

It gives me great pleasure to see published this second hitherto unknown adventure of the late Sherlock Holmes and my Great-Uncle, John H. Watson, M.D. Those who have read The Lost Folio, the first previously unpublished tale, are no doubt aware of the manner in which I discovered the lost tales. For the uninitiated, however, I will risk being accused of repetition by recounting the event.

I scarcely know how to express my surprise—nay—astonishment, when I found this manuscript, written and carefully secreted by my Great Uncle for reasons that I will endeavour to make clear. It was while rummaging through the attic of my ancestral home in Darvey that I came across an old trunk in a dark, dank corner under the eaves. It was of leather—a design rarely seen these days because of the expense—which had mouldered so that the portion holding the hasp crumbled like tea toast as I attempted to open it. It was bedecked with once colourful travel stickers: the Grand Hotel, Tokyo, Japan; The New Yorker, New York, USA; The Hannesplaza Inn, Innsbruck, Switzerland, etc.

My torch’s batteries were near exhausted, so I caught only a glimpse of the top-most contents: a physician’s black bag, the lapels of a carefully folded greatcoat of Victorian design, and several notebooks. I was electrified to realize that there had been no physician (to my knowledge) in my family since my Great Uncle.

With considerable effort (and cost to the trunk, for it began to come apart as I dragged it over the rough and encumbered floor boards of the attic) I coaxed the trunk toward the portal and somehow down the narrow spiral of stairs to the top floor, where the misty November light from the windows allowed full view of my spoils. I was quickly rewarded by confirmation of my guess of ownership on the corroded but readable brass plate still affixed to the physician’s bag.

Most of the trunk contained clothing obviously originally of good quality, but quite spoilt by the mildew and rot from dampness and time.

The reader can imagine the blush of pleasure that flooded over me as I removed the stacks of hand-written notebooks bearing headings corresponding to the titles of the various adventures, celebrated in song and story ad nauseum, of Holmes and Watson. Clearly, these were the original manuscripts, written by my Great Uncle in a handwriting that varied from the neat, almost print-quality expected of a methodical physician, to the the crabbed, barely legible script of an aged, arthritic hand, perhaps further impeded by poor vision.

Either my Great Uncle had fallen on evil times in his dotage, or the parsimony that sometimes characterises the elderly had overtaken him, because the later-dated notebooks employed cross-writing, which, when combined with the same technique on the back-side of each page, and the diffusion of the ink through the paper front-to-back and back-to-front, yielded a result not unlike hieroglyphics without the benefit of a Rosetta Stone.

The hair began to prickle on the back of my neck as I realised that there were several notebooks with titles that had never seen print. These, I assumed, were doubtless diaries of less-than-interesting events (surely even Holmes came a cropper on occasion); I was soon disabused of this assumption, however, as I delved into the unpublished accounts and became so engrossed that only as the light faded to the point where I could no longer see to read did I realise that I had sat cross-legged on the floor for more than six hours, and my legs had become so cramped by the lack of circulation that I could scarcely arise to put on a lamp. I then proceeded to read till morning, when my insistent bladder compelled me to cease for a time.

My mind was spinning: Here were tales of adventures at least as remarkable as those that had made Holmes and his Boswell the toast of Victorian England, and eventually the world. Why then had they lay fallow all these years, denying the public of the pleasure of Holmes’ exploits? I was sorely puzzled until I discovered a purple ribbon that had virtually disintegrated, but had marked the edges of the notebooks with new titles such that it was clear that they had been bundled together. Welded, as it were, to a scrap of the ribbon was a cryptic note: These not to be published until 50 years after my death.

But why had they been set aside in this manner? What embarrassment could be caused by them, and to whom? These questions were quickly answered upon reflection over what I had just been avidly perusing: people, important in the days of Holmes and my Great Uncle, would have been hurt, perhaps even brought down by revelation of these events.

Now, of course, these persons are long dead, and my Great Uncle’s admonition has long since been satisfied. These stories can now be published, subject to the laws concerning after-death defamation in several countries!

There is some question remaining concerning the disposition of the royalties which may be forthcoming, but such considerations are but secondary to the long overdue exposure to the world of these tales, stranger than fiction, and so wonderfully illustrative of the reasoning power of him who may well have been the greatest detective the world will ever know.

The reader may wonder why only two of the adventures have been published. The answer is that they were the best preserved and most easily transcribed. I am already engaged in the attempt to decipher the next-most legible of the notebooks. It is difficult and painstaking work, but a labour of love.

I should at this time say a few words about the notebook whose contents are in the reader’s hands.

The title, The Adventure of the Sow’s Ear, confused me at first, thinking it referred to an appendage of a pig sty denizen. In point of fact, it turned out to refer to the well-known pejorative epithet it suggests.

I take full responsibility for spelling and grammatical errors, because they would surely spring from my ineptitude in interpretation of the injured document rather than John’s pristine writing.

JPW

THE CASE OF THE SOW’S EAR

CHAPTER 1

Holmes and I were on a ship bound for Shanghai when it happened, but I feel I owe the reader some background to place the events in proper perspective.

A Mr. Wadsworth had approached Sherlock on a delicate matter concerning his daughter. It seems that he had sent her on a trip to the Orient as a reward for her satisfactorily completing her schooling at the Lady Wittington Finishing School, and she had not returned. He was fearful that she had come to grief, and asked Sherlock if he would take up the case of locating the girl.

We were just coming off a case (what I was later to call the Adventure of the Viennese Guillotine) that had a few loose ends to be tidied up, and Holmes and I were quite exhausted from the physical demands it had placed upon us. The prospect of a long ocean voyage was therefore not unattractive to us: a chance to let the salt air blow the cobwebs out of the brain as it were, and to be free for a time of the demands of the commonplace. (The overland route was out of the question due to tensions in the Middle East.)

It was therefore agreed that we (the gentleman encouraged my accompanying Holmes—it seems that I am becoming inextricably attached