Daniel D. Victor's Blog: A New Story to Help the Undershaw Preservation Trust

Tom Turley’s novella, “Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Dying Emperor” (available on Kindle and destined to be part of a larger work entitled "Sherlock Holmes and the Crowned Heads of Europe"), neatly places the reader in the midst of a brief historical period towards the end of the nineteenth century—the ninety-nine-day reign of the German emperor Frederick III.

Turley’s recounting of Frederick’s final days is haunting. Beautifully written and historically accurate (as an overabundance of footnotes makes clear), we encounter a time in German history that gets very little attention. Not only was Frederick’s reign short, but the liberal intentions he espoused were eclipsed by the autocratic rule of his son, William II.

Turley introduces us to Frederick’s dilemma by having Her Majesty’s Government send Holmes and Watson to Berlin to assess conditions in the German court. It seems that reactionary forces within the German government consider the Emperor’s wife—in fact, the daughter of Queen Victoria—too British, too democratic, too interested in prompting her husband to cultivate a British-like constitutional monarchy in the newly created German state.

In particular, Holmes and Watson must evaluate the health of the emperor. Is his life-threatening laryngeal cancer accurately diagnosed, or are there evil forces at work trying to abort the establishment of a liberal state? With the “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck opposed to Frederick’s plans and conservative German doctors at odds with the British physician caring for Frederick, the court is rife with tension and subterfuge. In fact, though the death of Frederick is not unexpected, Turley leaves it to Holmes and Watson to raise the question of murder.

While Turley artfully wraps the early political struggles of the dying emperor within the guise of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, the true strength of the story lies in the sense of wonder Turley sets in motion. How different the world might have been had Frederick lived and successfully created an open society rather than the autocracy epitomized in the rule of his son. It was William II, after all, who involved Germany in the Great War, the same Kaiser who—as Turley’s Watson puts it—“led his empire to destruction and engulfed all Europe in its ruin.”

One can only ponder the fate of Europe if Holmes and Watson had been able to reverse the chain of events. What began with Frederick’s death and his son’s ascension to the throne culminated in the rise of Hitler, the Nazis, and the Third Reich. In the end, Turley’s masterful story telling leaves the reader greatly saddened.

November 14, 2016, marks the publication of "The Outrage at the Diogenes Club," in which Sherlock Holmes sets out to investigate the mysterious Assassination Bureau, first described in an unfinished novel by American writer Jack London. As Holmes discovers, the Bureau turns out to be behind some of the most infamous assassinations of the early-20th century, and it is up to him and Dr. Watson to try to bring such terrorism to a halt.

I'm pleased to announce the April 15. 2016, publication of my latest Sherlock Holmes pastiche, "Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street." In it, Holmes and Watson encounter not only Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) but also Bret Harte as the detectives try to solve a new murder mystery involving American authors.

I'm happy to announce the kickstarter campaign to sell copies of "The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories." The goal is to raise money to preserve Undershaw, the home of Arthur Conan Doyle in England. Once the house is restored, it's going to be used as a school for kids with special needs.

The kickstarter link will fill you in on costs and other information. The series can be purchased as three volumes or individually. (You can also pre--order the book(s) from Amazon.) My story about Sherlock Holmes and Henry James appears in the first volume.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...

Although my next novel, "Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place" is scheduled to be launched by MX Publishing September 30, 2015, pre-publication copies may be gotten now from The Strand Magazine at http://www.strandmag.com/Sherlock-Hol...

[Daniel Victor has] succeeded wonderfully on all counts: premise, plot, theme, tone, etc. The greatest achievement, I think, is in his command of voice: he's done both Watson and Chandler to a T, finding a voice for the younger Chandler which nicely foreshadows his later writing, slightly-over-the-top similes and all. So cool! As is the over-arching premise, with Chandler as page in Baker Street--just marvelous. As you've no reason to recall, I taught a course (some time in the Lower Pleistocene) on Detective Fiction Between the Wars, cheating a little and starting with Doyle, as one must , and cheating a bit at the other end, as I recall, with Chandler. In any case, I know and have taught those voices, and think Danny has done a bang-up job.

See Derrick Belanger's Blog for his interview with Daniel D. Victor just before the publication of The Final Page of Baker Street.

The Final Page of Baker Street by Daniel D Victor (MX; £8.99) concerns the last ‘boy in buttons’ to serve at 221B before Sherlock Holmes’s retirement. Although like his predecessors he’s known as ‘Billy’, he is actually a rather unruly adolescent Irish-American pupil at Dulwich College. His name is Raymond Chandler, and he has literary ambitions. Add murder, suicide, Colonel Moran and Youghal of the CID, and you have an exciting, intelligent, literate mystery.

The Final Page of Baker Street will be published by MX Publishing on December 1, 2014. This "newly discovered" manuscript of Dr. Watson tells how the Chicago-born Raymond Chandler--in fact, a young student at Dulwich College at the start of the twentieth century--ends up working for Sherlock Holmes as a pageboy at 221B Baker Street where he is introduced to the world of crime-fighting and detection. Without knowing Chandler's future, Watson reveals how the young man's job as Billy the Page actually shaped Chandler’s literary career. As Watson so accurately reports, by helping Holmes solve two bloody murders, not to mention an early exposure to thievery, pornography and murder, Chandler learns the intrinsic appeal of the artistically-crafted murder mystery.