Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street by Daniel D Victor

Author:Daniel D Victor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sherlock Holmes, mystery, crime, british crime, sherlock holmes fiction, sherlock holmes novels
ISBN: 9781780929491
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.

-Mark Twain

Pudd’nhead Wilson

In spite of all the talk of vengeance, we heard nothing more of Thomas Luck following his encounter with Bret Harte. I did send a letter to Clemens warning him of the danger he might be in on the heels of the threat to Harte, but all I received in return was a brief lament about Luck’s having failed to kill the “son of a bitch” when he’d had the chance. Wherever Thomas Luck had gone, it was to a most successful hideaway. Indeed, for all we knew, the villain might have died. Or fallen off of the planet - at least, off of England’s share of it. Though we couldn’t predict it at the time, of course, Luck’s absence would last seven years.

Regardless of the duration, Sherlock Holmes remained on the alert. But then, as I’ve already mentioned, he was always at the ready. “Watson,” he’d cautioned, “in my line of work, one has to be vigilant all the time.”

Though Luck might have vanished, as a result of the evidence turned up in our enquiry, the murder he’d committed in Hampshire continued to occupy central stage for many months. At least, it did in my mind. For I still believed that the deductive skills Holmes revealed in the investigation deserved to be made public. After all, the master detective had been at the top of his game when he deduced from the chip above the bridge’s balustrade how the murder weapon had been made to disappear in order to cast blame on the governess.

So clever did I think the inferences of my friend that I maintained they overshadowed the two facts of the investigation that bothered me the most: one, that Bates (or Luck), the true murderer, had escaped; and, two, that it was Sam Clemens, not Holmes, who had produced the fingerprints which ultimately revealed the identity of the culprit. In spite of these challenges, I still wanted to publish my account of the case, the narrative which by then I had come to title “The Problem of Thor Bridge”. I reasoned that whilst highlighting Holmes’ brilliant deductions, I could easily minimize Bates’ disappearance as well as Clemens’ fingerprint-evidence.

It was my literary agent who warned me to avoid such problematic developments entirely. Conan Doyle called them “fatal fractures in the foundation of your hero,” the trilled “r’s” in his Scottish accent giving added certitude to his pronouncements.

In spite of Conan Doyle’s strength of conviction, however, I persisted in disagreeing, and thus was born the portentous difference of opinions I described at the start of this narrative, the difference of opinions that would ignite Clemens’ rage.

To exchange more fully our ideas on the role of Samuel Clemens and the matter of Thor Bridge, Conan Doyle and I met for dinner at Simpson’s. From the start I couldn’t fathom his argument. He maintained that the slightest mention of Clemens’ insights would only serve to highlight Holmes’ deficiencies.

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