“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”
“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”
“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
August 2nd, 1914
“His Last Bow”
On August 4th, 1914, England declared war against Germany, after the latter’s invasion of Belgium earlier that day. Just days before that, Germany had declared war on Russia and France and Luxembourg. Soon much of the world was dragged in. Europe was a tinderbox, and the fuse was lit. To anyone living in those times, it must have seemed that the world had suddenly gone mad. But in fact, the events leading to The Great War and the deaths of millions had been in the making for decades, as the European nations scrambled to outdo one another around the world in terms of escalating military might and colonial expansion, while strangling themselves with convoluted treaties and intermarried royal families.
Although just a dozen other Canonical Holmes adventures would be published after “His Last Bow”, that story, covering just a few minutes on the evening of August 2nd, 1914 — "the most terrible August in the history of the world” — was chronologically the last Canonical adventure. But even though that narrative — included in this collection — relates what Holmes and Watson were doing at the very beginning of the War, there is much more to tell….
Contained in this collection are 35 new Sherlock Holmes adventures (and 1 Canonical classic) in three companion volumes by many of today’s best Sherlockian pasticheurs, relating some of Holmes and Watson’s wartime adventures, and then telling us what happened afterwards during those years immediately following the Armistice, and on through the 1920’s.
Join Holmes and Watson as the thunderous Guns of War begin to fire, through the nightmarish years that followed, and then through the other side when the storm has cleared…. the game is afoot!
