Tales of the Great Detectives by Philip Purser-Hallard

Author:Philip Purser-Hallard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Obverse Books
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate

Andrew Hickey

Of the many events which have occurred since I awoke in the City, starting my life afresh in a world in which I was merely a fictional character, and not the flesh-and-blood man I had believed myself to be thitherto, none have been more astounding, nor affected me more deeply, than the case I am about to relate.

I had been at a loose end for some time, having resigned my position at the Great Detective Agency some months previously. While I retained the greatest affection and admiration for my old friend Sherlock Holmes, in all his various guises, I could no longer be associated with him in the public eye.

I had always been a man of some pride, and had believed myself to be respected by my peers, both for my medical abilities and for the small literary talent I possess, which had meant that my tales of Holmes’s investigations had become popular with the magazine-reading public in my own time.

I was therefore gratified, at first, to be awoken into a world where my stories had been so popular that even though in this world I, too, was a fictional creation (my stories in this reality having been written by my good friend Arthur), I was considered worthy of being recreated in the flesh.

This gratification, however, would not last long. I discovered that my stories had been too popular, and that they had been the subject of plays, wireless performances, gramophone records, pictorial stories in children’s’ comical papers, moving-picture displays, and many more versions in media which, to me at least, were as incomprehensible as the plays of Mr George Bernard Shaw would have been to the Piltdown man.

And in almost all of these adaptations of my stories, Holmes was portrayed as he actually was – the high forehead, the aquiline nose, the fierce intellect, the inhuman courage, all of these were evident in all the Holmeses who had been brought to life here in this strange halfway house to heaven.

Yet the Watsons... the Watsons, I am ashamed to say, embarrassed me. They were, for the most part, dullards, capable of little more than saying ‘’pon my soul!’ in astonishment. Those that weren’t were men of action, who while more admirable as men were still, to my mind, a poor imitation at best of myself. All lacked the introspective qualities that characterise both the author and the man of science, qualities that I flatter myself I possess.

As the poet put it, ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us’. In my own case, it had become apparent that the populace saw me as a Sancho Panza figure at best – but worse, a Panza who served a Quixote who had the clearer vision of the two. What use has Quixote for Sancho, if Quixote can see the windmills for what they are?

And so I had withdrawn from the public sphere, and devoted myself in earnest to the study of medicine.

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