Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [100]
Subterranean City – Beneath the Streets of London by Antony Clayton, published by Historical Publications, 2000. Covers much the same ground (as it were) as Trench and Hillman’s book, but benefits from material more recently discovered. Or perhaps ‘unearthed’ would be a better word.
The London of Sherlock Holmes by Michael Harrison, published by David & Charles, 1972. An invaluable and immaculately researched investigation of what London would have looked like to the eyes of Sherlock Holmes.
A NOTE ABOUT MONEY
Money in England in the 1860s was not like the money we have now. These days we use the decimal system, which was introduced in 1971, and there are a hundred pence to the pound. Back then, there were 240 pence to the pound, not 100. All the way through this book I’ve used the proper terms in use at the time – farthings, sovereigns, shillings, and so on. In case you are interested, the conversion works out like this:
1 farthing
=
0.1 pence
1 halfpenny
=
0.2 pence
1 penny
=
0.4 pence
Tuppence (two pence)
=
0.8 pence
Thruppence (three pence)
=
1.2 pence
One shilling (12 pence)
=
5 pence
Half a crown
=
12.5 pence
A crown
=
25 pence
Half sovereign
=
50 pence
A sovereign
=
1 pound (£1)
A guinea (one sovereign and one shilling)
=
1 pound and
5 pence (£1.05)
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories and four novels about Sherlock Holmes. You can still find them in most bookshops. When he first appeared, Sherlock was around thirty-three years old and was already a detective with an established set of habits and abilities. In his last appearance he was around sixty, and had retired to the Sussex coast to keep bees. Yes, bees.
My intention with the book you are holding, and with the books that will follow, is to find out what Sherlock was like before Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced him to the world. What sort of teenager was he? Where did he go to school, and who were his friends? Where and when did he learn the skills that he displayed later in life – the logical mind, the boxing and sword-fighting, the love of music and of playing the violin? What did he study at university? When (if ever) did he travel abroad? What scared him and who, if anyone, did he love?
Other people have written about Sherlock Holmes over the years, to the point where he is probably the most recognized fictional character in the world. The number of stories written about Sherlock by other writers far exceeds the number written by Arthur Conan Doyle, and yet it is Doyle’s stories that people keep returning to. There is a reason for that, and the reason is that he understood Sherlock from the inside out, while the other writers, for the most part, merely tried to copy the outside.
Arthur Conan Doyle gave little away about Sherlock’s early years, and most writers since then have avoided that period of time as well. We know little about his parents, or indeed where he lived. We know he was descended on his mother’s side from the French artist Vernet and that he had a brother called Mycroft, who appears in a few of the short stories, but that’s about it. That has given me the freedom to create a history for Sherlock that is consistent with the few hints that Conan Doyle did let slip, but also leads inevitably to the man that Conan Doyle described. In this endeavour I have been lucky to have had the approval of Jon Lellenberg, the representative of the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd, and the approval of the surviving relatives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Richard Pooley, Richard Doyle and Cathy Beggs. I have been lucky too to have the approval of Andrea Plunkett, owner of several trademarks in Europe. I have also been fortunate in having an agent and an editor – Robert Kirby and Rebecca McNally respectively – who understood completely what I wanted to do.
Various writers have attempted to produce their own biographies of Sherlock Holmes, tying together what Doyle revealed with actual historical events. These works are inevitably flawed, incomplete and personal,