The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes Series Book 5)

n July 1939 a travel-worn and battered tin dispatchbox with the name, ‘John H. Watson, MD, Late Indian Army’, painted on the lid, came into the possession of the famous doctor’s namesake, a certain Oxford philosophy don who had read widely in the Sherlock Holmes’ canon and became an acknowledged expert.

Subsequently left in his will by the professor to his nephew, the present co-selector of the files, the box contained records of ‘some curious problems’ which the great consulting detective investigated and which were never fully related, either because the final explanation was not forthcoming or in order to protect the secrets of certain families in ‘exalted positions’.

The collection contains an investigation into the disappearance of a head-waiter, his locked wardrobe and a baker’s van; a missing medical student and a secretary to a charitable organization who contrives simultaneously to run an Australian sheep-farm; the contents of a matchbox which provokes the defenestration of a famous Peruvian journalist; the blackmailing of the indiscreet Duchess of Welbourne; the skin trade in desirable domestics; how two glasses of 1867 port led to the apprehension of an artful burglar; a bird-watching ‘holiday’ in Cornwall which leads to the unmasking of a spy.

The discovery of these secret files, never before committed to print, will be eagerly awaited by Baker Street devotees.

Aubrey B. Watson, LDS, FDS, D. Orth., as is stated above, is the nephew of the late professor, the namesake of Dr John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’ celebrated confidant and collaborator.

June Thomson is the author of sixteen crime novels. It is hoped that her collaboration with Aubrey Watson will lead to the publication of a further selection from this most important and fascinating cache of documents which has for so long remained undiscovered.