Sherlock Holmes, The Missing Years: Timbuktu Read online

  Sherlock Holmes, The Missing Years: Timbuktu

  Vasudev Murthy

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Vasudev Murthy

  First E-book Edition 2016

  ISBN: 9781464204555 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

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  Contents

  Sherlock Holmes, The Missing Years: Timbuktu

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  By way of introduction…

  A Visitor from Italy

  The Museum

  A letter from Haji Ibn Batuta to his son

  Journey to Venice and the Vatican

  Tangier

  The writings of the descendant of Ibn Batuta

  Tangier and Holmes

  Holmes and the Tuaregs

  The Sahara

  Timbuktu—The Sankore Mosque

  Timbuktu—The Manuscript

  Travelling on the Niger

  From Timbuktu to Tamanrasset

  The Grave of Tin Hanan

  To Khartoum

  The khalifa and the Valley

  The Valley

  Mecca

  Epilogue

  Poems in Sand

  Acknowledgments

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  Remembering Ruby

  A little child who went away too soon

  Epigraph

  “O thou who goest to Gao, turn aside from thy path to breathe my name in Timbuctoo. Bear thither the greeting of an exile who sighs for the soil on which his friends and family reside. Console my near and dear ones for the deaths of their lords, who have been entombed.”

  —Ahmed Baba

  Foreword

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty stories about Sherlock Holmes.

  Actually that isn’t quite true. There are also the two neat, subtle little self-parodies: “The Field Bazaar,” written to help raise funds for the Edinburgh University Cricket Club, and “How Watson Learned the Trick,” Conan Doyle’s contribution to the Library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House—but the accepted canon consists of just the sixty tales.

  For many admirers sixty is not enough. Long before the last stories appeared in The Strand Magazine, devotees had begun to extrapolate and expand upon the life and career of the great detective.

  Today, thanks to the expiry of the original copyright in almost every country and a concatenation of circumstances and events that could hardly have been predicted in the author’s lifetime—varied and immensely popular dramatic presentations of Holmes and Watson, technological progress that’s made publication of almost anything not only possible but easy, the scientific miracle that enables a document to be composed and read anywhere in the world without ever having been written on paper—Conan Doyle’s sixty stories are vastly outnumbered by the ones from other hands.

  Those are what we call pastiche, a word defined in part by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “literary or other work of art composed in the style of a known author.” And there is an awful lot of Holmesian pastiche.

  It would also be true to say that there is a lot of awful Holmesian pastiche. Quantity tends to obscure quality, which is unfortunate, because over the years some excellent new adventures have appeared. Novels worth seeking out include The Seven-per-cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye, The Quallsford Inheritance by Lloyd Biggle Jr., A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin, The Case of the Raleigh Legacy by L B Greenwood, Art in the Blood by Bonnie MacBird, and Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years—Japan by Vasudev Murthy.

  Those “missing years,” of course, are the ones between the unobserved duel on the ledge at Reichenbach in 1891 and the detective’s return to London in 1894. In Doyle’s “The Empty House,” Dr. Watson gives us Holmes’ own account of his activities during that time—or, at least, what purports to be Holmes’ own account.

  “I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.”

  There are those who doubt that that’s what really happened. There are those who doubt the official story of the fight at Reichenbach Falls, and such suspicions may be valid, given the number of errors, contradictions and obfuscations in Watson’s published chronicles. Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years—Japan is a witty, learned and desperately exciting alternative.

  The book you’re now about to read, Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years—Timbuktu, is neither a sequel nor a prequel, but an alternative to the alternative. Inspired by that mention of a visit to Khartoum, Mr. Murthy has imagined* the meeting with the Khalifa, the extraordinary events and perilous journeys that preceded it, and the amazing events that followed.

  Come with us—Holmes, Watson and their little party—to Rome, to Tangier, south through the Sahara to Timbuktu, and then across the desert to Khartoum. It’s a dangerous venture, but I think you’ll enjoy it!

  Roger Johnson, BSI

  Editor: The Sherlock Holmes Journal

  July 2015

  * Sherlock Holmes considered the faculty of imagination to be essential in his own work. In the Silver Blaze case he told Dr. Watson: “Inspector Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession.”

  By way of introduction…

  In perusing my extensive notes, I find that the adventures in Timbuktu of my friend, the eminent consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, stand out for their extraordinary complexity and cultural richness. And yet, it has been necessary to keep the matter utterly secret all this time, though for reasons outside some associated diplomatic sensitivities. The reader will soon understand why.

  I have faithfully—and, I believe, accurately—documented over three hundred situations where Holmes’ dexterity made all the difference, often in matters involving life and death. That is an interesting turn of phrase I have stumbled upon while writing, because this particular chronicle addresses that aspect of the human experience. Concepts like God, reincarnation, souls, and so on present difficulties to the logical mind. Yet religion thrives, with the mass of humanity believing that the universe is under the control of a benign power, who demands obedience, placation, and worship in many odd and sophisticated ways.

  It is admirable that modern education fro
wns on what cannot be tested and verified. This is necessary for the vast majority of our sciences. I can hardly imagine my patients being satisfied with vague and dramatic pronunciations of appeals to spirits for healing if they were to seek the alleviating of a stomachache, for example. And yet such is the case in many parts of the world untouched by modern medicine and its principles. Men and women would rather pray to unseen temperamental spirits, who must be addressed just so, rather than accept the products of scrupulous scientific inquiry that are repeatable and validated by peer review.

  No, this story1 is not about magic. Sherlock Holmes was always contemptuous of the black arts, demonstrating to me more than once, with chemicals and logic, how a clever man could take advantage of the credulity of thousands. It can also be argued that what we know today may be a fraction of all that really exists, and therefore, when confronted with entirely new situations, we may not have a ready explanation that science accepts. The use of the telephone in large parts of the civilized world is endemic; we may lift the phone and ask an operator to place a call to someone many hundreds of miles away and have a conversation. While the entire principle of telephony is based on scientific logic involving magnetism and electricity, perhaps a hundred years ago we might have summarily dismissed the possibility of speaking to another person in such a manner through copper wires. In fact, had someone even suggested this, execution might have followed in certain countries where allegations of witchcraft invariably end badly for the dilettante inventor. The world is indeed moving forward. Who can say how we shall be communicating a hundred years from now? Perhaps we will not need wires or even operators.

  But I digress.

  What followed after the events at Reichenbach Falls has been debated extensively. Many theories were propounded by members of an excitable public seeking satisfactory closure. Some said Sherlock Holmes had spent the period in Japan assisting the Emperor Meiji. Others insisted that he had spent time in a monastery in Tibet as some kind of advisor to the Dalai Lama. Many swore that Holmes had been sighted in the United States, providing confidential counsel to the President. I listened to these fanciful theories and refused to be provoked to comment. I held back even when charlatans claiming to have conclusive information about Holmes’ secret life as an undertaker in Edinburgh—which they would part with for a fee—tried to swindle members of the public with the guarantee of a personal meeting. It is painful for me to state how remarkably gullible the average citizen is. So convinced is he of a particular viewpoint that he reacts with righteous indignation if any other theory—nay, even the truth!—is advanced. This is true of religion, too, the reader will agree, in which indoctrination from an early age renders the mind incapable of even considering an alternative viewpoint. Indeed, it once happened that a devout reader almost assaulted me in London, claiming that my entire body of work could be considered heretical because I had had the temerity to state that one or more stories were, in hindsight, entirely false. He spoke of “The Canon,” and made much of it, and called me an imposter. Yes, me, Dr. John Watson.

  But the passage of time and the need to clarify certain matters has now made it necessary for me to place before you the truth. Our unusual journey through the Sahara Desert to the ancient city of Timbuktu and then to the lower Nile Valley needs to be brought forward so that the uncomfortable questions raised in Parliament recently are put to rest, specifically with regard to the meeting we had with the khalifa in Khartoum, the details of which Holmes conveyed in a confidential note to the Foreign Office. Unfortunately, the Vatican has refused to confirm or deny the related events and claims, leaving us with no alternative but to put the matter before the public and appeal to its sense of discernment. My solicitors are prepared to respond to any legal challenge from allegedly affected parties, but we suspect that eventuality is extremely unlikely, given the embarrassment that may result.

  I have, as you might expect, carefully masked some names and changed dates and locations in order to prevent the eruption of an unintentional international crisis. I am pleased to say that Mycroft Holmes, very likely the most profound thinker of our times and deeply influential at the Home Office, returned my manuscript with only an exclamation mark noted on the first page, which I took as a compliment for my diligent work. Sherlock Holmes, too, gave me his tacit approval, albeit with a sardonic smile. He has lately been consumed by the energies required to produce a series of monographs that were a direct consequence of our remarkable experiences. I am not assisting him in this exercise, as I have never been enamoured of monographs.

  It is a truism that men are the same everywhere. If there is a shortcut available to acquiring wealth and power, and settling scores, and if their value systems permit and they think no one is looking, they will use that shortcut with little regard for how their actions might impact others. The regrettably bloodthirsty public relishes horrendous crimes followed by the apprehending of the perpetrators. My published stories of Sherlock Holmes have been popular for that reason; they appeal to the reader’s sense of righteousness and the need for a noble closure. Yet we have kept away from the public a very large number of cases that have to do with thwarting of intent. Just under the surface of awareness lurk motivated men and women with unspeakable evil in their hearts, seeking to destroy people, institutions, and nations. Had it not been for the highly developed logical mind of Holmes, I can say with certainty, many families and nations would have been grievously—and permanently—maimed in many ways. There is, I am sorry to say, no “market” for such tales, to use the odious word employed in a letter to me by my editor in the United States of America, a country driven by endless excitement, the boundless pursuit of lucre at the cost of every civil courtesy that one man may extend to another, and an unfortunate celebration of decadence.

  This book that you have chosen to acquire, thereby demonstrating the finest of literary tastes2 and the highest of intelligence, is a chronicle of the period between the (false) story of the demise of Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls and his supposed miraculous reappearance in the enticingly titled story “The Empty House.” In this book, you will observe how the world has shrunk: China, India, Sudan, Egypt, Morocco, Italy, and Mali have all been woven together with the invisible threads of human endeavour through the passage of time. History, geography, culture, music, and—regrettably, perhaps—crime will find a place in subsequent pages. The magnificent, incandescent presence of Sherlock Holmes permeates each page of this chronicle.

  John H. Watson M.D.

  London

  26th May 1909

  1 Many have remarked that this is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing they have yet encountered.

  2A Swedish gentleman, Alfred Nobel, invited me to Paris for a private discussion on the matter in November 1895. Unfortunately, pressing matters pertaining to the confounding disappearance of the Earl of Gloucester’s wife detained Holmes and me, leading to a misunderstanding. I understand he subsequently set up a much-coveted prize for the literary arts and, I am told, referred specifically to me as one of his inspirations and the obvious winner. I may clarify that had I been nominated, I would have declined. I affirm that I never wrote the chronicles for recognition or acclaim. A newly evolving term “best-seller” typifies, I regret to say, an insecure author’s constant need to seek validation of his efforts by assuming that unthinking social behaviour (akin to the behaviour of lemmings) translates to a positive certification.

  A Visitor from Italy

  “Ah Watson! A merry affair there at Norwich! The constabulary in ferment, I see!”

  “Indeed, Holmes. Would you call it merry, though? Six murders in two months! And not a clue in sight! One wonders why the authorities have not reached out to you yet!”

  “Frankly, Watson, I would prefer they did not. The answer is so obvious that I would not wish to embarrass them. However, if it pleases you, and since the loss of life is a regrettable matter, perhaps you could
send a wire to the inspector in charge—Cowley?—to interview Lazarus Smith, the village blacksmith, who very kindly took them to the scene of the crime in the second case. Ask them to inspect the attic. They are wasting their time talking to Donahue. Being Irish and ugly is not a crime.”

  “Yes, Holmes,” I said, making a note.

  I was visiting Holmes after a long interval. Consequent to my marriage, our meetings had become infrequent but were always warm. My wife was away on a visit to Glasgow and I had taken the liberty of travelling to London to meet him and attend to sundry business.

  We had spent the better part of the day talking about past cases and discussing the eventual fates of many notables. The bitter January cold had seeped inside our room, and we moved a few inches closer to the fireplace that Mrs. Hudson had so thoughtfully prepared. Outside, the fog swirled and I could hardly imagine that anyone would be foolhardy enough to walk about, risking life and limb. It was not an evening for profitable crime. Holmes was stretched languidly across the sofa, violin resting carelessly on his left thigh and his right leg dangling on the floor. He was leafing through a copy of Debrett’s Peerage.

  “Well, well, I see that the Duke of Beaufort studied classics at Oxford in 1875. I happen to know that he was almost rusticated for suspected plagiarism. And at about the same time, the Earl of Breadalbane played cricket there and was challenged for unsportsmanlike conduct. Two very different personalities, Watson, but both with some claim to a common experience at the same moment in time. Debrett’s says nothing about their scandals! The world is filled with strange people, eh, Watson?”

  Before I could respond, he flung a wire toward me.

  “What do you make of this, Watson?”