Sherlock Holmes - The Poet and his Muse

By Orlando Pearson

Giallo - short story (20 pagine) - Holmes lets his emotionless façade slip by the Baker Street fireside...

"Draw your chair up, good Watson, and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.”

After these words bring The Noble Batchelor to a close, Holmes lets his emotionless façade slip by the Baker Street fireside, as he tells Watson of his very first case. Dating back to 1869, the case takes in the Thames, London Zoo, Highgate Cemetery, a poet, and a beautiful and tragic female figure.

A must for all lovers of the outre.

Orlando Pearson, creator of the well-known Redacted Sherlock Holmes series, commutes into London during the day and communes with the spirits of Baker Street by night.

An international businessman, his interests include classical music, history, literature, current affairs, sport and economics. All these themes find their way into his stories which are being translated into German and Italian.

Mr Pearson is married with two children and lives near Wisteria Lodge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Delos Digital
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9788825418408

Book preview

1

Draw your chair up, good Watson, and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.

And with these words from Holmes, I concluded the case of The Noble Batchelor in which Holmes located the eponymous bachelor’s missing bride and explained the reason for her disappearance immediately after her marriage to Lord St Simon in Hannover Square.

It was October 1887 and shortly before what was to be the first of my two weddings.

I confess that having seen Lord St Simon’s marriage voided before my eyes – our petitioner deprived, in Holmes’s slightly sardonic words, of a wife and a fortune in the space of the four hours between his arrival at our door at four-o-clock in the afternoon and the case’s denouement at eight o-clock the same evening, I felt, for the first time, some misgivings about my own impending nuptial. For, as I sat at the fireside, the uncomfortable thought occurred to me, not I confess for the first time, that whatever my heart was telling me, I in fact knew very little about the fair Miss Mary Morstan.

As these uneasy thoughts flitted through my head, Holmes finished tuning his violin and put it to his chin.

When he took up his fiddle, I never knew quite what would emerge from under his fingers.

Sometimes it was the most intellectually rigourous music – Bach he told me – and the counterpoint in the music seemed to reflect the logical processes of his mind. At other times, no more than the most desultory noises issued forth as though he was lost in a thought incapable of any form of articulation. And sometimes, particularly after the resolution of a difficult case, he would, perhaps in celebration, dash off the most exuberant and challenging showpieces in the instrument’s repertoire – Pablo de Sarasate, whom we subsequently heard perform at St James’s Hall, Nicolo Paganini, and Henryk Wieniawski.

But on this occasion what he played fitted into none of these categories.

The music’s technical difficulty could not be doubted for It contained double stopping, triple stopping, and notes right at the top end of the violin’s range. But