Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival) (41 page)

The author’s task is even further complicated: Doyle also explored most of the more recherché avenues of forensic detection (some more than once); mis-aligned typewriter characters, obscure tobacco ashes, limps, footprints and peg-legs, perfumes and odours, handwriting – left or right-handed, dogs that remain silent when they should bark, inks and nibs, secret codes and ciphers, type-styles used uniquely by certain newspapers, handwriting that varies as the train conveying the writer travels from straight rails to irregular points and junctions... the list goes on.

And while I have fought valiantly to avoid cheap and easy plagiarism, it is well-nigh inevitable for me that when I invoke Holmes once again to cry “Come Watson, the game’s afoot!” I risk straying into well-charted territory.

So...

This first story is entirely of my own invention. However, it does feature a number of fascinating institutions and people who truly existed in the year 1889, in which the supposed events of the narrative are set. Simpson’s in The Strand still thrives; Rules Restaurant was, and still is believed to be London’s oldest eating-house. Both are favourites of mine.

And founded in 1694, The Bank of England has of course existed continuously for well over three hundred years, weathering booms, busts and battles. At the time the narrative’s supposed events occur, Mr Frank May was the Chief Cashier.

Mr Henry Petch was indeed an engraver and partner of Perkins, Bacon & Petch of Fleet Street, who operated in the business of security engraving and printing, among several other company diversi-fications, and he would have been in his seventies in 1889.

M. Louis Lépine, my putative French ally of Holmes in this first adventure (I may well reintroduce him in a future tale; I think Holmes might have held him in high regard) was, indeed, the Deputy Prefect of police in the district of Fontainebleau at the time of the story. A clever and highly intelligent lawyer, he would later become the Prefect of Police for all of Paris and further afield, and earn the soubriquet of
‘The little man with the big stick’
through his adroit handling of tense, mass street protests among other achievements.

Now for the apologia...

In order to make my most imperative and revered characters – Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson contemporaries with all these intriguing people, events and organisations, not to mention my manufacture of a fictitious and hugely audacious crime, I have taken a few small liberties with timing and precise historical fact, to which I now readily admit. (After all, I do have a few precedents – there was no King of Bohemia, for example, until he was conjured up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!)

So reader, in the interests of honesty: The Bank of England
did
actually use independent engravers and printers for the production of bank notes,
but only until 1855
, when the Bank established its own printing plant and thereafter has continued to retain control of this important high-security banking function.

However, rather inconveniently for my purposes, Sherlock Holmes was surely not yet competent to excel in the realms of criminal detection prior to 1855, when official Bank printing plates and watermarked paper were still routinely held by printers outside of The Bank! Thus I have somewhat telescoped time in the interests of the story.

Hampshire-based Portals Papermill, founded by Henri Portal, a Huguenot immigrant, manufactured the high-security watermarked paper for The Bank then, and still exists to this day.

As to the delightfully creaky and cobwebby-sounding Perkins, Bacon & Petch, they too operated in Fleet Street as previously stated. (Contemporary readers may be more familiar with the much later evolution of Perkins, in the arena of commercial diesel engines). In truth however, the nearest that the firm came to supplying The Bank of England with anything at all was to submit, in 1819, a brilliantly innovative technique devised in the United States by Jacob Perkins for hardening engraved steel printing plates, thus prolonging their life and maintaining the integrity of the complex anti-forgery details incorporated within the engraved design. Unaccountably the idea was not accepted by The Bank, and passed over in favour of a simpler, if less secure technology.

For anyone interested in the history of British currency, forgery and The Bank’s continuing battle to this day to outwit the wily counterfeiters, I could recommend no finer short overview than that published by The Bank of England – the splendidly entertaining, fascinating and beautifully printed and illustrated full colour publication entitled
‘Forgery – The Artful Crime’
, along with another,
‘The Bank of England £5 note – a brief history’
– both absorbing reading at only two or three pounds each, and well worth the money.

I am much indebted to The Bank of England for their encouragement and cooperation, invaluable historical data, approving my manuscript and tolerating my making rather free with their early history – their Museum and Public Affairs Department have been most helpful and understanding!

Interspersed with these real-life events, people and places, I have populated the tale with fictitious Victorian characters of my own invention; so if, coincidentally, there ever was a real-life Jeremiah Shadwell or Aloysius Hawes, a Baroness Amanti or even a Feodor Herzog, Isaiah Pollitt, Dulcie Hobbs, Solomon Warburg or Otto Dietmar von Huntziger, then I apologise to any descendants of these fictitious characters.

Too, I have referenced the notorious Professor James Moriarty lurking somewhere in the shadowy background of the piece, although I know well that in Conan Doyle’s canon, his first appearance is in 1891 in
‘The Final Problem’
– some two years after my story is set. However, I felt it reasonable to suppose that a man with Holmes’ exceptional and intimate knowledge of the criminal sphere in which he routinely operated would, at the time of my story, already have been attentive to, and wary of, the evil whispered name of Moriarty. Oh, and readers may spot Holmes quoting a line of poetry which had not yet been written, but was too apposite to leave out! And so, with these small but necessary admissions, (and a clear conscience), I offer
“Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver”
– I trust it will not go ill for me with fellow Sherlockians, that I have taken the liberty of not allowing certain historical and temporal facts to get in the way of the story. I sincerely hope you find, as Sherlock Holmes might drily have commented, that
‘The Master Engraver
’ is a case “not entirely devoid of interest.”

I am well aware that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s boots are sizeable ones to fill, and while I do not seek to achieve that hubristic ambition, perhaps with my readers’ permission I may just briefly borrow them and walk them up and down Baker Street a few times?

Explanatory note: This tale is set in 1889, some two years before Colonel Sebastian Moran makes his first canonical appearance in ‘The Adventure of The Empty House’, in which he is arrested after murdering Ronald Adair. However, it would be presumptuous in the extreme for my story to pre-empt this, and thus I may not have Moran captured or hanged, but rather, I have elected to allow him to escape almost empty-handed, that he may make his due reappearance at the correct time of Conan Doyle’s choosing, doubly-filled with hatred for Holmes…

ROSS HUSBAND

Norfolk, England, and

San Agustin,

Gran Canaria.

Grateful acknowledgements

to the following

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE – THE CANON

THE BANK OF ENGLAND MUSEUM –

THREADNEEDLE STREET, CITY OF LONDON.

ENGLISH PAPER MONEY
–

VINCENT DUGGLEBY

CONAN DOYLE ESTATE LTD

JONATHAN CLOWES

DAVID YAPP BANKNOTES

THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS – KEW

RULES RESTAURANT – MAIDEN LANE,

COVENT GARDEN, LONDON.

WIKIPEDIA & WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

About the author

Ross Husband is a retired film director, marketing and PR consultant, scholar of the English language and etymology, member of The Society of Authors, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London and The Sherlock Holmes Social Network; he lives with Glenys, his partner, in Norfolk East Anglia and San Agustin, Gran Canaria. With some forty years’ experience of writing for technical and professional journals, newspapers and documentary films, this is his first work of fiction.

Based on a deep affection from childhood for the legendary characters of Sherlock Holmes and his loyal colleague Doctor John Watson, this debut novel is the first of six stories comprising an officially authorised continuation series – The Revival of Sherlock Holmes – offered as a tribute to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the immortal characters he created.

“These stories do not attempt to update, alter, or lampoon the original genre, which in my view requires no improvement. Conan Doyle’s format is sound.”

Unlike many other Sherlock Holmes pastiches, these stories are authorised and approved under contract in the USA by Conan Doyle Estate Ltd,
www.conandoyleestate.co.uk
and by Jonathan Clowes in the UK and European Union countries. They are respectfully offered to those many devotees of Conan Doyle’s original canon of work who perhaps yearn for some more in the same vein – unadorned, unmodernised, vintage Sherlock Holmes. I do hope you enjoy them.

You can find me – Ross Martin Husband – on Facebook, or on The Sherlock Holmes Social Network.