It is the year 1890, the month of November, and Sherlock Holmes is rapidly recovering from three days and nights of starvation, part of an elaborate ruse to trick a murderer, in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” Only a few weeks before that, he had solved the ingenious mystery of “The Red-Headed League.” His friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, no longer lives at 221B Baker St., having wed Mary Morstan, whom he met two years previously in “The Sign of the Four.” But, as “The House of Silk” opens, Mrs. Watson has just left for a stay with friends in the country, and her husband has, temporarily, moved back into his old rooms.
And so the stage is set for one of the greatest cases of Victorian England’s greatest detective.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
There are 56 short stories and four novels in the established canon of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. But Dr. Watson tantalizingly alludes to a number of others, “for which the world is not yet prepared.” Recall some of their titles: “The Giant Rat of Sumatra,” “The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant,” “The Amateur Mendicant Society” and “The Singular Adventures of the Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa.” Don’t they all inspire reverie and speculation? (Note, for instance, the word “in” rather than the expected “on” in that last case. Is that significant? Holmes constantly reminds us of the importance of trifles.)
Many of these unpublished cases repose in a safe-deposit box at Cox and Co. in Charing Cross Road. Among them, till recently, was “The House of Silk,” characterized by Watson as “simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print.” He adds that full knowledge of the facts “would tear apart the entire fabric of society.” Writing in what must be 1915 — when the great detective is dead and his elder brother, Mycroft, retired — Watson announces that he is leaving instructions that his account of these horrors remain sealed for 100 years.
Somehow, though, Anthony Horowitz — well known as the author of the Alex Rider novels for young people and the scriptwriter for a number of British television series (most notably “Foyle’s War”) — managed to free the manuscript a few years in advance of that century mark. All readers and Sherlock Holmes fans will be grateful that he has.
“The House of Silk” opens when a rather foppish art dealer comes to Holmes because he feels in danger from a silent, mysterious man who wears a distinctive flat cap and bears a livid scar on his face. Who could this ruffian be? Edmund Carstairs eventually relates an extraordinary story involving a train robbery in America and a shootout with a notorious gang led by a pair of Irish twins. Carstairs is convinced that a survivor from that shootout has marked him for revenge.
But is this supposition correct? On his voyage back from America a little over a year before, the traumatized Carstairs met and soon married an attractive widow named Catherine Marryat. Some of his servants regard her as bringing a needed breath of fresh air into the rather stiff and sorrowful Carstairs household. The art dealer’s mother has just recently died, his spinster sister has grown increasingly paranoid, and one Irish serving boy has even begun to behave in a sullenly provocative manner. Something is clearly amiss. Yet why does the great detective chiefly want to know if Mrs. Carstairs is able to swim?
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