Sherlock Holmes Never Dies - Collection Three: New Sherlock Holmes Mysteries - Second Edition (Boxed Sets Book 3) by Craig Stephen Copland

Author:Craig Stephen Copland [Copland, Craig Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2018-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

How Very Noble

IT IS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN to those of you who are reading this later edition of my stories just how great of a sea-change took place in London, and indeed in the entire world, between the time when I first met Sherlock Holmes in the early years of the 1880s and the second decade of the twentieth century. The world changed. Every week it seemed another invention was foisted upon mankind. Holmes and I used to write a dozen or more notes and telegrams a day and send them all over London with the help of an army of boys on bicycles or on foot. Now we picked up the telephone, called into the central switchboard, and within a matter of minutes were speaking to someone on the other side of the city. The familiar telegraph wires that sent Morse code humming around the world had been replaced by wireless telegraphy. A full decade had passed since Mr. Marconi had sent a radio signal clear across the Atlantic Ocean. Now all of the new steamships were equipped with wireless telegraphy, although that did not help to save the thousand souls who perished with the sinking of the Titanic in April of the year in which this story took place.

But bad news was blessedly rare, and all of the western world looked forward to continued progress, to the spread of civilization, to the triumph of science, to the free exchange of capital, goods, services, and labor throughout the globe. Even our dour churchmen were no longer predicting the end times and the near approach of Armageddon. Their divine revelations now came with visions of the dawn of the new millennium, ushered in not by Conquest, War, Famine, and Death but by the upward evolution of the human race, supported by knowledge and enlightenment.

Change was everywhere. Throughout London, service vehicles bringing milk, bread, and ice were still drawn by faithful horses, but the stalwart animal had otherwise been replaced by motorized transport – horseless carriages we called them – that roared and sputtered their way through the city, and increasingly across the countryside. A corresponding change took place in the enthusiasms of young men and women for greater speed and power than could ever be achieved by pedaling a bicycle. The most progressive of them abandoned the bicycle craze as quickly as they had adopted it just twenty years ago and embraced the motorcycle. At first, these machines were no more than a modified bicycle with a small engine that could move the rider along a flat road. By 1912 they had become powerful vehicles that surged and soared and roared up and down the peaceful residential streets of the city, across hill and dale of the English countryside, and, with each passing year, up and down race courses that we thought only a mountain goat could traverse.

Most of the drivers were young men, accompanied by their female trophies who, perched behind the drivers, clutched onto the male bodies

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