Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street by David Marcum (warren buffett book recommendations TXT) 📕

the less I watched him continue to riffle through the bundles. In the process, an unbound collection of pages caught my eye. Unlike the other papers, which were held together by the ubiquitous red ribbon, these appeared torn from a notebook. What’s more, though written in a tiny, cribbed style not unlike that of Holmes himself: The lettering on these pages appeared shaky, and the spaces between lines much wider than in the writings of my friend.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing at the sheets in question. “They’re different from the rest.”

Holmes’s long fingers reached for the papers I had identified and lifted them out of the box.

“The very thing I was looking for,” said he. “You have excellent eyes, old fellow. Perhaps it takes a writer to spot the work of a fellow scribbler. These pages are the work of my old acquaintance, Louis Stevenson – Robert Louis Stevenson to the world at large.”

“The Scotsman who just died? The writer?”

“The very same. In memory of his passing, I wanted to review an unpublished chapter from an early volume of his. Do you know, Watson, though I don’t trumpet it about, I was instrumental in helping him write one of his most famous novels.”

“Surely not that scandalous thriller, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? You know, of course, that there are more than a few naïfs who believe that the monstrous Mr. Hyde was real and that you, in fact, played some role in ending his reign of terror.”

Holmes dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “No,” said he, shaking his head, “my contribution was to a more swashbuckling kind of tale.”

Clearly, I was about to hear a new bit of Holmesian history. In preparation, I poured us both a glass of sherry and settled into an armchair. “Do tell,” I encouraged him.

Holmes sampled his drink and then began the following account: “As you are aware, Watson, a month or so after I’d come up from Cambridge, I joined an acting company. Not long thereafter, in the summer of ‘79, I found myself performing on the stage in New York.”

I knew of Holmes’s brief acting career as well as his appearance on the New York stage. Indeed, I have always believed that the theatre lost a great actor when my friend turned his mind to criminal detection.

“As it turned out,” Holmes continued, “Stevenson arrived in New York in the middle of August. He was on his way to San Francisco to join the American divorcée with whom he had fallen in love during a trip to France. In point of fact, he planned to begin his railway journey west the day following his arrival.”

“After just one night in New York City, Holmes?”

“He had Cupid to propel him, old fellow. I should have thought that a romantic like yourself would admire his haste.”

“But a single night, Holmes, in so vibrant a metropolis!”

“True,” Sherlock Holmes nodded, “but let us not forget that the singular night in question was the occasion of our meeting. In fact, I remember the evening quite well. We were staging a pantomime of Robinson Crusoe. It had been raining heavily, and the members of the cast were wondering how many people would be willing to brave the elements for an evening’s entertainment. A small hole in the red-velvet curtain allowed us to scrutinize the audience as they arrived.

“‘Not too bad a house,’ I remember Nellie Ross observing as she backed away from the velvet to give me a look.”

“Nelly Ross?”

“The ingénue playing Robinson Crusoe.”

“Ah.”

“I peered through the aperture at the sparse group and was immediately attracted to a slight young man entering the rear of the hall. He wore his dark hair long, almost to his shoulders, and a distinctive if scraggly moustache adorned his pale, oval-shaped face. Although his hollow eyes, set widely apart, gave him a cadaverous look, it was actually his burgundy-coloured velveteen jacket that first caught my eye. I spotted it hanging on his frail form once he had removed his wet Mackintosh. Before taking his seat, he covered his mouth with a free hand, and I could tell from the shaking of his body that he was fighting a paroxysm of coughing. Only when it subsided did he settle into his chair next to the man with whom he had entered the auditorium.

“The longer I stared, the greater my realisation that there was something familiar to me about the young man’s Bohemian aspect. It was only after he had donned a gilt-embroidered Indian skullcap, however, that I finally identified him. For, you see, I had witnessed him thus distinctively apparelled at Hatchards a few months before I’d left England. He had coughed then as well. It was all quite remarkable. Before me in a New York theatre sat the little-known British writer, Robert Louis Stevenson.

“It was the man’s insightful depictions of murder that had originally attracted me to his reading. I was at the beginning of my detecting career, and criminal pursuits had always fascinated me. His selected passages to be read at Hatchards that day were to be taken from a tale of death he had written two years before – one of his first, actually – called A Lodging for the Night. It dealt with the reactions of the infamous French poet, François Villon, to a vicious murder.”

“Triggered by Stevenson’s surprising appearance at the theatre that evening, memories of Hatchards flooded my brain. But at the same time, I knew we had a show to put on, and with the curtain about to rise, I needed to assume my role. I was portraying a villainous pirate – a one-legged sea cook, no less – and I had to take my spot before the curtain rose.

Happily, in spite of the incessant rain and only partially-filled house, we put on a rousing performance that night, and