"...the lost narratives of Dr. Watson."
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 1, p. 55.
Which lost narratives? Somewhere in the Canon, there is a reference to papers in a box in a bank in London and one Holmes film begins with that box being carried out and opened.
Every Holmes sequel by another author can claim to be a lost narrative. They do not fit into a single timeline but the Patrol might have access to narratives from deleted timelines. Holmes fights Wells' Martians, meets Dracula, Tarzan etc.
Moriarty leads several lives. In at least three versions, he returns from Reichenbach. In Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, he becomes M of the British Secret Service, to be succeeded by Mycroft Holmes. In Anthony Horowitz's Moriarty, having been driven out of England, he sets out to take over organized crime in the US. Publication of Volume III of John Gardner's Moriarty Trilogy was delayed until after the author's death and I have yet to read it. In The Dagger Affair by David McDaniel, after the Professor's death, his lieutenants (not all having been rounded up by Scotland Yard after all) decide to aim for world power and reorganize accordingly.
Horowitz's Moriarty contains a genuine "lost narrative." After the end of the novel, an original Holmes and Watson short story by Horowitz is introduced by an internal title page designed to resemble a cover of The Strand Magazine advertising "The Three Monarchs" by Dr. John H. Watson. I took this page to be just an illustration but in fact it separates the Moriarty novel from the Holmes short story. Reading that story while rereading Time Patrol, I like to imagine that this is the lost narrative that Everard was reading when he was interrupted by the arrival of Cynthia Denison.
Addendum: Horowitz obligingly ends his short story by referring to papers in the vaults of Cox & Co. in Charing Cross and confirms that the story was deposited there.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I have myself read several of these presumably apocryphal lost narratives of Dr. Watson. And your comments reminded me of this bit near the beginning of Doyle's "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire": "Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson," said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. "It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared." A favorite example, to me, of one of these "lost" narratives about Sherlock Holmes is Sterling Lanier's story "A Father's Tale."
Ad astra! Sean
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