The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes by Sherlock Holmes & Don Libey

Author:Sherlock Holmes & Don Libey [Holmes, Sherlock & Libey, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Traditional British
ISBN: 9781477479155
Google: k-F-MAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1477479155
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

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Langdale Pike. A most extraordinary person. No one in London knew more about the gentry, the aristocracy or the Royals than Langdale Pike. He studied society as intensely as I studied crime. He organised and filed relationships, indiscretions, infidelities, affairs of the heart, addictions, bankruptcies—all the flotsam and jetsam of the upper class and the individual foibles of the most and least prominent of its members. This encyclopaedic knowledge was contained wholly within his formidable brain equipped with its photographic memory. The workings of his mind were those of an automaton. A new fact stimulated a file of older facts and aligned them into new relevancies with other facts about other people pigeon-holed in perfect reason and deduction. Pike and I were equals operating in different disciplines, but using the same powers of observation, knowledge and synthesis.

Pike was born in London in 1855 to a wealthy family of long establishment in the law of admiralty, the insuring of vessels, and sole owners of a large shipping fleet. Through being the lawyers and the insurers, as well as the ships owners, their cases never went against themselves and, regardless of the verdict, the Pikes claimed either the reward or the fee. In consequence, the family amassed a fortune and ranked in the upper strata of London society.

Young Langdale went up to Cambridge where he studied the arts of the dilettante. His knowledge of fine art, porcelain, literature, music and theatre was sufficiently broad to equip him as a highly accomplished raconteur and favoured dinner quest. After coming down with an Ordinary in Humanities, Langdale took to spending his days at Swithin’s, his club in St. James Street, lunching at the St. James Hotel where he daily sampled liberally the prize French wines in the hotel’s extensive underground vaults, and returning to sit in Swithin’s bow window to observe the to and fro movements of his specimens and be available to all who curried his favour by informing him of the latest gossip above and below stairs in the great homes of London society. Pike was created to be precisely what he was: a handsome mannequin, an arbiter of taste, and the repository of all of society’s most intimate secrets. He was invaluable to me as a source of information, and I was invaluable to him as a source of hints and directions as to where to turn his energies.

Now, three years since his death, it is possible to accord Langdale Pike his proper place in history. London’s most accomplished dilettante and gadfly was, in reality, Great Britain’s most important intelligence officer from 1875 through his last years in the early 1920s. For nearly forty-five years, Pike filtered the endless river of gossip and innuendo that came his way daily and sieved from it those national and international bits and bobs that signalled threats to the monarchy, the government, and the people of Great Britain, passing them on to his one contact in Whitehall: Mycroft.

During the Great War, Pike was the human dial upon the surface of war.

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