The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Table of Contents

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9781409077022

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

DREAM HOLMES, AND HEARTACHES . . .

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to read Sherlock Holmes and so the boy starts with one of the books and then he ends up reading all of the books and then, if he truly has been rightly constructed, he goes and clears out the shed at the back of his dad's garage and sets himself up among the plant pots and the onion strings as a private detective. He lets his younger brother be Watson to his Holmes but he puts a sign on the door – a sign he'll later wish he never took down – forbidding all girls from entry, unless they are plump housekeepers or distressed damsels. And then, in his office, in his shed, he waits for his first case. Missing cats and stolen apples, the Black Panther and the Yorkshire Ripper, every day, another case. He keeps copious notes, in folders and files, every clipping from the daily paper, all to test his powers of deduction. And when these fail, as they always did and they always will, he goes back inside the house and watches Basil Rathbone show him how it's really done, in black and white on a Friday night. That same evening, in his bedroom, in his dressing-gown and with an unlit pipe, he'll go back to those books and he'll read them again, read them and read them and read them again, through bigger schools, and unemployment, polytechnic, and unemployment, while teaching in Istanbul, teaching in Tokyo, when single or married, love-struck or heartbroken – especially heartbroken – without kids and with, sober or drunk, low or high, again and again he'll keep coming back to those books and he'll read them and read them and read them again, through a world of change, these stories of a world that never changes, and that he knows probably never existed anyway but, in his heart, he always wishes had and maybe even did, in that same heart, in a dressing gown with an unlit pipe in a shed in Ossett in 1977.

David Peace, 2009

To my old teacher, Joseph Bell, M.D.,&c.
of 2, Melville Crescent, Edinburgh

THE
ADVENTURES
OF
SHERLOCK
HOLMES

THE ADVENTURE OF A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

I.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but, as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention; while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker-street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries, which had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion.

One night—it was on the 20th of March, 1888—I was returning from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker-street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest, and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot upon the scent of some new problem.