Showing results by author "Orlando Pearson" in All Categories

Dr. Watson is in his surgery when there is an unexpected knock at the door. It is Sherlock Holmes, who explains that he has arranged a meeting with an Italian musicologist, Alberto Gentili, who has found some long-lost autograph manuscripts of the almost unknown 18th century Venetian composer, Antonio Vivaldi. Gentili explains how the manuscripts represent only half of a larger collection. He wants to find the other half before someone else finds it and disperses the collection.

Holmes meets Joseph Haydn in London and the two form an instant bond. This encounter and a later one with Haydn's young acquaintance, Beethoven, assume a new importance when Holmes and Watson travel to Vienna on a diplomatic mission and are consulted by Constanze Mozart, widow of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The British Government commissions Holmes and Watson to travel to Germany in the company of leading German interpreter Paul-Otto Schmidt, to help the authorities find the man who shot Horst Wessel, the leader of the Storm Troopers. Holmes soon identifies Wessel's attacker and takes part in a politically charged interrogation of him attended by the Gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Gӧbbels.

Soon after Holmes's return from apparent death, Holmes and Watson return from a walk through London and find a preacher waiting for them. He wants their help in writing his account of the life of a religious leader in an Eastern Mediterranean country whose death has caused unparalleled speculation.

Holmes and Watson are seized by Edward Albert, the Prince of Wales, who wants them to find evidence that his mother is unfit to serve as queen. At Balmoral, Holmes and Watson witness the aged Queen Victoria engage in some highly questionable behavior.

Louis Westhouse, Windibank's employer, commissions Holmes to investigate Windibank's peculiar behavior in the office. The day after Holmes completes his investigation, Inspector Gregson brings news of three deaths at Windibank's house. Gregson and Holmes investigate but cannot explain the deaths. It is only when the corpses are taken away and the blinds are drawn that Holmes elucidates some truly grotesque events.

Why does Irene Adler, mistress of newspaper tycoon, Robert Munroe, lock herself into a cupboard several times a day? The antipodean magnate wants to know. And why is former Prime Minister, Charles Sedgefield, causing delays to the publication of a report on a recent Middle East war? As a representative of the British government, Mycroft wants to know.

Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and Inspector Gregson, long out of touch with Sherlock Holmes, meet the great detective on 28 June 1914, the day of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The Germans have introduced a new code and it has baffled the British secret service. As international tensions increase and more messages in the new code are intercepted, the urgency to decrypt mounts, but Holmes is preoccupied with the events that form the narrative of His Last Bow.

Holmes and Watson at the darkest place on earth in April 1945.

In the early days of their collaboration, Dr Watson assessed Sherlock Holmes’s knowledge of chemistry as profound. It is thus hardly surprising that German chemist and future noble prize winner, Fritz Haber, should approach the Great Baker Street detective, for help on a new and transformative industrial process that he is trying to make viable. But, as the first World War breaks out, was there more to the process than met the eye?

Why is Ignatius Foley, member of parliament for Perth, so anxious to retrieve some administrative documents that have fallen out of his pocket at his fiancée’s house? His betrothed, Jean Leckie, wants to find out. And what has happened in Bulgaria that makes Mycroft so anxious to dispatch his brother there with promises of major honors for successful prosecution of the investigation? A case set in 1907 and with no parallels whatsoever to more recent events.

Unearthed after being lost for nearly a century, at last the memoirs of Mycroft Holmes are available to the general public. In this volume we see what it is when one extraordinarily talented person is the British Government as Mycroft Holmes applies his skills in statecraft to tax evasion, royal honors, Partygate, the 1918 Armistice, and the Abdication crisis of 1936.