'My Dearest Holmes' is a novel of two halves. Part I, entitled 'A Discreet Investigation',
tells the story of an unconventional client's search for her missing companion – a quest
that Sherlock Holmes embarks on with enthusiasm and solves with relative ease. The
denoument of the case, however, has less to do with the resolution of Miss Anne
D'Arcy's dilemma than with Watson's admission, forced out of him by the circumstances
of the investigation, of his feelings for the great detective and his determination to seek a
'marriage of convenience' in order to protect them both from suspicion and scandal.
Part II, entitled 'The Final Problem' and set three years later, follows the same sequence
of events as the original Conan Doyle story of that name (in which Holmes plunges to
his death over the Reichanbach Falls in Switzerland, locked in the arms of his arch-
enemy Professor Moriarty) and carries the reader forward to the events of 'The Adventure
Of The Empty House' in which Doyle, finally bowing to public pressure, 'resurrects' his
hero and returns him to 221B Baker Street and to a conveniently-widowed Watson. In
other words, my version of 'The Final Problem' is an attempt to give an alternative
explanation for the fabled 'Great Hiatus'.
Those of you familiar with the original stories will recognise the setting of this extract,
in which Holmes and Watson, having excaped Moriarty's gang in London, travel across
France and Belgium towards Switzerland. My conceit, however, is that Conan Doyle
failed to disclose the real reason for their flight: Moriarty's threat to expose Watson's
homosexual lifestyle and bring down upon him the full rigour of the 1885 Criminal Law
Amendment Act - the same law under which Oscar Wilde was to be convicted and
sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour just a few years later.
