Eight Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Bill Crider

Author:Bill Crider [Crider, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sherlock holmes, mysteries
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Adventure in the White City

I have written little about Sherlock Holmes’s adventures in the United States, not least because Sherlock Holmes himself requested that I refrain from any attempt to tell how he occupied himself there. Both he and I agreed that it was best for me to confine myself to setting down what he did in his native England, if I had to set down anything at all. His inclination always was to believe that I exaggerated somewhat when reporting the events of his career.

Now, however, because Holmes has left London again and lives in pleasant anonymity, enjoying his view of the Channel and his bees, I believe that he would not take it amiss if I were to set on paper at least one of his adventures in the New World. He said as much at one time. The story that comes to mind happened the year after the strange events at Wisteria Lodge, and Holmes and I had special reason to remember it, as we discussed one evening as we sat in our rooms at 221B Baker Street.

I remember the night well. The moon was full, and its light shone through the windows overlooking the street. The windows were closed, and a brisk wind swept down the street, occasionally rattling a somewhat loose pane. Holmes, whose powers of concentration far exceed my own, showed no sign that the faint noise bothered him, or that he heard it at all. He sat reading the day’s news, and I said to him, “It must bother you a great deal, Holmes.”

He lowered the newspaper, looked at me over the top edge of it, and said, “Whatever do you mean by that, Watson?”

“The fact that you share a name with one of the most shockingly brutal and cruel murderers of this century.”

“You surprise me, Watson,” said Holmes, lowering the newspaper into his lap.

“Furthermore,” I said, “it must disturb you greatly that you were in the same city with him and knew nothing of his frightful depredations.”

“You are positively brilliant this morning, Watson,” said Holmes. “For those are my thoughts exactly. How, pray tell, did you come to fathom them?”

“I know your methods, Holmes,” said I, perhaps a bit too smugly. All too often in the past, Holmes had amazed my by seeming to read my mind, when in reality he had merely been observing me. Being able to turn the tables on him was a pleasant diversion.

Holmes put the newspaper aside and went to the mantel to fetch the Turkish slipper in which he kept his tobacco. Having done so, he reached into the pocket of his robe and brought out a briar pipe.

When Holmes had filled it with tobacco and lit it, he looked at me and said, “You, of course, saw the newspaper earlier and read about the trial of the notorious ‘Torture Doctor,’ also known as H. H. Holmes, and surmised the rest.”

He paused and puffed on the pipe to make sure the tobacco was burning to his satisfaction.

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