The Illustrious Clients of Sherlock Holmes (Paperback)

Paperback. Eight Apocryphal AdventuresSome clients cannot go to the police. Their names are too famous.In the spring of 1889 a French novelist crosses the Channel to Baker Street. Someone has been quoting, word for word, from a manuscript he has shown to nobody - a manuscript describing a weapon that does not yet exist.He is the first of eight.Over the next twenty years, Sherlock Holmes will receive the strangest client list of his career: a composer whose unfinished masterpiece is being used to blackmail him; a Spanish countess carrying a lace handkerchief that turns out to be a coded message; a painter whose obsession with a single hour of light can hang a murderer; a French conjuror accused by a moving picture that shows him committing a crime he did not commit; a jeweller whose gift to a queen will destroy itself if opened wrongly; and an old statesman who crosses Europe in disguise, because the secret he has lost could set the continent on fire.None of them can call in Scotland Yard. The scandal would do more damage than the crime.Dr. Watson kept these eight narratives back for a lifetime, and for good reason. They are published here for the first time.Mystery, adventure, and great deductions in the traditional manner. These are not ironic reinventions or revisionist takes on the legend. They are written the way the cases were written in the Strand: a client with an impossible problem, a detail nobody else has seen, and a chain of reasoning that holds to the final line. The fog, the hansom cabs, the tobacco ash, the lens - and a Holmes who, more than once, meets a mind the equal of his own. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…