When a diplomat is killed outside the Diogenes Club, Mycroft summons his brother, Sherlock Holmes, to discover a possible connection between the victim and a stolen aeronautic trophy. The investigation leads to a rumored weapon of unthinkable power, and to a university where someone's been digging through Professor Moriarty's posthumous papers. Amidst this backdrop are press reports of a strange, but elusive rodent rummaging the sewers of London.
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Currently run an old book and picture frame shop. Trained as a classical composer; B.A., M.A. (Anyone want a piano concerto named after them? All I need is a sponsor!) Married; no kids. Still no time!
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PREFACE
It was unfair of Christopher Morley to allude (as he did in his delightful preface, In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes), that the passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it impossible for readers to ever have the unrecorded adventures to which Dr. Watson made frequent and sly allusion. Let me refute that at once.
With some of the more ardent enthusiasts of the Sherlock Holmes stories, I recall that Conan Doyle once accidentally left an unpublished manuscript on a train, and was unable to recover it when he returned. This unfortunate event leads us to wonder about the content of these papers, and perhaps Doyle, too, was musing upon the manuscript's fate when he speculated about the mysterious outworkings that sometimes attend human endeavor:
"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of the window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré´ results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."
Indeed! As I ponder this passage and then to the 'outré´ results' that led to my discovery of Doyle's lost manuscript in a box of old, dusty books I purchased at a South Jersey auction, I can do little but marvel at such a 'chain of events'. Yet, it was the Philadelphia area that saw the publication of 'A Study In Scarlet', when the Lippincott Company became the first publisher west of the Atlantic to issue a Sherlock Holmes story, and so this region has already demonstrated an honored affinity for the adventures of that most pensive, if sometimes melancholy, detective of Baker Street.
And so, what happy fate! But as it often happens with objects of monetary worth, I found Sir Arthur's manuscript a two-edged sword. I could not sell it without obtaining a celebrity status I considered undesirable, (and advertising myself as among the nouveau riche-not a prudent thing); yet I felt compelled that such a historic discovery was not mine to hide away. What then, to do?
The unheralded appearance of this little book, 'The Giant Rat Of Sumatra', answers this dilemma. Herein is merely one of a whole series of stories that I have come to refer to as 'The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes', a body of work I hope to gradually lay before my readers. So then, if I have denied the public the chance to authenticate the original Doyle manuscript, I have nevertheless rid myself of the potential for notoriety, which is of some comfort to me.
Perhaps the work's questionable attribution is just as well, however, since Doyle's reputation would otherwise certainly take a blow by the appearance of these narratives. For though these stories convey many Doylesque mannerisms, the quality of writing is definitely inferior to his other known works, and explains why Sir Arthur never conceded that his lost manuscript contained anything of Holmesian content. He was, no doubt, loathe to present to the Strand's loyal readership a series of early stories that he must have come to regard as plot-contrived and inane, a judgment that also accounts for certain of the tales' inconsistencies that Holmes' hounds, in their well known zeal, are now likely to point out. Did these literary deficiencies lead the kind-hearted Doyle to purposely abandon his manuscript to the fate of some chance fellow train traveler, rather than have to destroy the work with his own hands? We may never know. But the narratives, if they do not aspire to!
the literary heights of Doyle's established canon, nevertheless retain their historical curiosity, and the charm of allowing us to remove the roof once more from 221B Baker Street, and to peep in at that lean and ascetic figure upon the sofa who awaits the development of some new and marvelous case that his biographer will be faithful to record.
E.G.
4 June 1947
County of Gloucester*
*(The above preface, along with Doyle's papers, was found inside a grandfather's clock once owned by my late aunt. They were recently discovered when the clock was taken apart to fix the chimes. The preface's handwriting is thought to be that of her brother, who survived the Second World War, but was lost in a climbing accident a few years later.)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BRING ON THE LOST CASES!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Giant Rat of Sumatra; from The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes (Paperback)
This book features Mycroft quite a bit, which I like. The story's title, "The Giant Rat Of Sumatra" comes from one of the many cases that Doyle mentioned in passing. These always drove his readers nuts, because we always wanted more stories about Holmes. The adventure keeps moving toward a confrontation between Sherlock Holmes and a young nemesis that Moriarty had once wanted as a protégé. The author has also taken a cue from Doyle's mention of Sumatra and worked a volcanic fact into his story. In actual history (the 1880s), a volcano called Krakatoa, which lies a few miles off Sumatra, blew up in a massive explosion, affecting worldwide weather for about a year. There is, admittedly, a little Jules Verne science fiction here, but I personally prefer this format over having a Holmes that rings false; i.e. a Holmes convenient enough to be embroiled in the kind of sex-infused tales that some authors know drive today's fiction market, or that subject him to the kind of impossible domestic situations that Doyle (despite his occasional graphicness, or even the morality implied in "The Cardboard Box"), would hardly have imagined. I'm also glad the villain isn't overly psychologized so that I 'understand' him. Doyle never bothered a lot with overexplaning his characters, and this makes his stories appealing. With Doyle, good guys are good guys, and bad guys are bad guys. And when a good guy like Holmes has a bad fault, it isn't explained away. Holmes is an addict because he's bored, not because of some submerged lingering childhood psychosis that needs explaining so that I excuse his addition. Similarly, the best villains in Doyle are not excused, and do not excite sympathy; consequently we have a lot of fun loathing nasty guys like Charles Augustus Milverton, Baron Gruner, and Rodger Baskerville. So I'm relieved to find the characters in "The Giant Rat" (this title proves to be a double entendre for Moriarty), pigeonholed so that I can relax, and react to them faithfully. All in all, the author has made a definite attempt at keeping Doyle's Holmes intact, helped partly by the author's occasional humor, but mostly by the eerily-close imitation of cadence and phrase so identified with the original Doyle stories. If the villain is more thinly veiled than I would have liked, it's apparently because the tale is more of an adventure than a mystery. Four-and-a-half stars, then, for this fault, but given a choice between four and 5, I'll take the latter.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A bit of fun!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Giant Rat of Sumatra; from The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes (Paperback)
"The Giant Rat of Sumatra" is a delightful little book suitable for a quick dose of Holmes. Why not have some fun with the concept of Doyle's "lost" manuscripts? I found the author's treatment of this idea entertaining and thought provoking. The presentation of Holmes' brother is particularly refreshing and I was amused by his assistance to Holmes throughout the tale. It would be a mistake to approach this clever little adventure with a Holmesian purist's zeal looking to pounce on any perceived lack of faithfulness to the originals; I say relax and enjoy a timely tale of hatred of civilization with authentic renderings of some of our most beloved companions. The attractive cover matches the exotic sense of adventure suggested in the title, while the subdued "period" illustrations appropriately punctuate and supplement the text. As a gift from a friend, it was a fine companion for a short bit of post-holiday relaxation by the fire.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not quite the right voice,
By
This review is from: The Giant Rat of Sumatra; from The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes (Paperback)
If you are a dedicated follower of Holmes'adventures you will want to own this pastiche....just because. The plot is as acceptable as any; the bad guy is very bad and Holmes' manages to neutralize him with customary aplomb. The very real resonance with events throughout the world today is another strong plus. There are, however, two items disturbing enough that they are worthy of note. The first is a less than complete command of Watson's narrative voice. There are a number of sections wherein the voice has the ring of the late twentieth century rather than the late nineteenth. I noticed this trait more in this imitation than in any of the others which I have read thus far. More disturbing for this reader were some errors in proofreading/spelling which disturb the mood of urbane intellect which is a hallmark of Doyle's creation. Use of the substandard "alright" in this context in not acceptable; how could no one have caught it? Similarly, use of "taught" when "taut" is meant is hard to understand.
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