Tremayne
Peter Tremayne is the pseudonym of Celtic scholar and historian Peter Berresford Ellis. As Tremayne, he has published many novels, including the more than two dozen in his Sister Fidelma series of seventh-century historical mysteries. Tremayne's short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Emerald Magic and Dark Detectives, and has been collected in several volumes, most recently in An Ensuing Evil and Others (in which you'll find several other Holmes stories). His latest books are two Fidelma mysteries, The Council of the Cursed and The Dove of Death.
Even our closest friends are often an enigma to us, especially if we first met them as adults. It's often striking the first time you see someone you know well interacting with, for example, their parents. Suddenly so much about why that person behaves the way they do falls into place. In Conan Doyle's stories, Holmes is already a fully formed adult by the time Watson meets him, and very little of Holmes's past is ever revealed. Many readers have wondered, how does a little boy grow up to be Sherlock Holmes? What was he like as a teenager, or at university? The Disney movie Young Sherlock Holmes dealt with this subject, and the more engaging early sections of the film were less about solving mysteries and more about the simple pleasure of seeing a familiar character in a new light. Our next tale also deals with a younger version of Sherlock Holmes, and here we see a character who's very different from the Holmes we know—less confident in his deductions, more trusting of strangers—and yet we see in him hints of the man he will become, driven in no small part by the events that follow.
Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box with my name, John H. Watson MD, Late Indian Army, painted on the lid. It is filled with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine.
—"The Problem of Thor Bridge"
This is one of those papers. I must confess that there are few occasions on which I have seen my estimable friend, Sherlock Holmes, the famous consulting detective, in a state of some agitation. He is usually so detached that the word calm seems unfit to describe his general demeanor. Yet I had called upon him one evening to learn his opinion of a manuscript draft account I had made of one of his cases which I had titled "The Problem of Thor Bridge."
To my surprise, I found him seated in an attitude of tension in his armchair, his pipe unlit, his long pale fingers clutching my handwritten pages, and his brows drawn together in disapproval. "Confound it, Watson," he greeted me sharply as I came through the door. "Must you show me up to public ridicule in this fashion?"
I was, admittedly, somewhat taken aback at his uncharacteristic greeting. "I rather thought you came well out of the story," I replied defensively. "After all, you helped a remarkable woman, as you yourself observed, while, as for Mr. Gibson, I believe that he did learn an object lesson—"
He cut me short. "Tush! I do not mean the case of Grace Dunbar, which, since you refer to it, was not as glamorous as your imaginative pen elaborates on. No, Watson, no! It is here"—he waved the papers at me—"here in your cumbersome preamble. You speak of some of my unsolved cases as if they were failures. I only mentioned them to you in passing, and now you tell me, and the readers of the Strand Magazine, that you have noted them down and deposited the record in that odious little tin dispatch box placed in Cox's Bank."
"I did not think that you would have reason to object, Holmes," I replied with some vexation.
He waved a hand as if dismissing my feelings. "I object to the manner in which you reveal these cases! I read here, and I quote . . . " He peered shortsightedly at my manuscript. "'Some, and not the least interesting, were complete failures, and as such will hardly bear narrating, since no final explanation is forthcoming. A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader. Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr. James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was