Showing results by author "Orlando Pearson" in All Categories

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.

As young men go to the trenches in their millions, they take with them A. E. Housman’s collection of poetry, A Shropshire Lad. “Easy to read in the most difficult circumstances and full of happy memories of home,” opines Mycroft Holmes. But has Housman succumbed to German influence? Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are sent to investigate and come up with a finding unexpected to them. Mycroft lets their finding pass, but Watson is then witness to some Machiavellian political machinations from Mycroft as he deals with Irish rebel Roger Casement.

Two kings, a model, a traitor, two wombats, two poets, an accountant, more lobbyists than you can count, three titans of business, two artists, a pawnbroker…and Sherlock Holmes.

How do you make a government change its mind? And how do you recover your financial equilibrium after a bereavement? And, come to that, how do you recover your financial equilibrium after you return from the apparent dead when you have asked for no mention of your return be made in the press and so no one knows that your detective agency is back in business?

Watson spends half his wound pension on the turf and his gambling addiction renders him unable even to pay his half share of the rent of the rooms at Baker Street. But when one of his rare bursts of prosperity enables him to buy two strikingly good pictures from a pawnbroker, Mycroft Holmes takes a remarkable interest. And what is the meaning of the little rhyme that runs round the canvas of the painting.

After the close of The Noble Batchelor, Holmes lets his emotionless façade slip by the Baker Street fireside as he tells Watson of his very first case. Dating back to 1869, the case takes in the Thames, London Zoo, Highgate Cemetery, a poet, and a beautiful and tragic female figure.

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.