Showing results by author "Orlando Pearson" in All Categories

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?

Orlando Pearson mixes the Great Baker Street detective with history both familiar and unfamiliar to deliver his customary heady brew of Holmesiana.

Sir Joseph Porter was first lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore which was a thinly veiled parody of WH Smith, British politician extraordinaire who first held that role and then ascended to the post of first lord of the Treasury. And an astounding revelation about Sherlock Holmes as we make a discovery this is both entirely unfamiliar and entirely familiar.

Orlando Pearson, master narrator of history and Holmestry, has done it again.

It has taken over 80 years, but at long last, the British government’s embargo on reporting this slice of diplomatic history has been lifted. It was in November 1940 that a senior minister at the British foreign office in blacked-out London commissioned Holmes and Watson to go to Berlin to negotiate a prisoner of war swap with the German high command. And the price demanded by Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Göbbels, for any prisoner's release? That the two work with the Berlin police to capture a serial killer who is stalking the city’s railway network.

Volume III of The Redacted Sherlock Holmes presents six more scintillating stories from the pen of Orlando Pearson about the great Baker Street detective.

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.

Volume II of the Redacted Sherlock Holmes presents more stories manifestly too scandalous to publish in the lifetime of the great Baker Street detective.

Gottlieb von Cramm, a German tennis star of the 1930s, petitions Holmes for help. The sportsman is being blackmailed on a matter of the utmost delicacy, and when the blackmailer reveals all to the National Socialist authorities, it is Holmes who comes to the rescue by asking Reichsmarschall, Herman Göring to intervene. But is the better than expected outcome to the case a result of Holmes’ intervention, or is Cramm’s glamourous mother keeping her own role to herself? And why does Frau von Cramm’s seem so familiar to Holmes?

Orlando Pearson, Dr. Watson's successor as the assistant to Sherlock Holmes, was entrusted by the doctor with notes on cases too controversial to publish during Holmes's career. The three complete stories in this volume were withheld respectively due to the threat they posed to national security, the disclosure of a scandal in a foreign Royal family, and the exposure of excessively close links between Government ministers and industry.

It is May 1940. The British army has been routed and is awaiting its evacuation. Winston Churchill asks Holmes to stand by to provide advice on what steps to take in the face of the anticipated aerial onslaught of the Luftwaffe on British airfields. As German attacks mount, Holmes offers unpalatable advice which Churchill accepts for want of an alternative. As German attacks switch from the airfields to production facilities, Holmes provides additional detective advice on a most unexpected matter.

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

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.

How does a composer make sure his works make an impact? Composer Edward Elgar wants to know and petitions Holmes. Straight after this encounter, Elgar starts on the work that is to become his masterpiece. And to maximize public interest in it, the composer and Holmes indicate that there are mysteries about its content, inspiration, and origin. On one matter, Holmes withholds an insight of his from Elgar and -- deliberately or not -- the title Enigma Variations is the result.

Holmes is consulted by Mr Devine on an unusual matter. Mr Devine has apprehended two malefactors in a well-watered garden in the Middle East and is unsure what is an appropriate form of retribution to impose. Holmes, Watson, and Mr Devine discuss the problem at length before arriving at a solution which satisfies all of them. Orlando Pearson himself then pens an essay setting out a radical theory about Sherlock Holmes and this theory is given further substance in an extraordinary fragment of Dr Watson’s writing found in the Public Record Office long after Watson’s death.

Gottlieb von Cramm, a German tennis star of the 1930s, petitions Holmes for help. The sportsman is being blackmailed on a matter of the utmost delicacy, and when the blackmailer reveals all to the National Socialist authorities, it is Holmes who comes to the rescue by asking Reichsmarschall Herman Göring to intervene. But is the better than expected outcome to the case a result of Holmes's intervention, or is Cramm's glamourous mother keeping her own role to herself?

The King of Nova Alba approaches Sherlock Holmes. The current king’s predecessor on the Nova Alban throne, King Duncan, came to a violent end, and Holmes' petitioner is the prime suspect. He wants Sherlock Holmes to find the true killer. There is many a twist in a familiar tale, before Holmes reveals the utterly unexpected truth. Two years after Delos' publication of the story version of "A Scandal in Nova Alba", here it is at last as a stage-play.

Five more sizzlingly scandalous Sherlock Holmes stories from the pen of Orlando Pearson. Mr. Pearson mixes the canon with elite sport, business high jinks, a musical mystery, a literary mystery, Realpolitik, and in "The Hounding of Peer Baskerville" rolls the most famous of all detective stories on 20 years. A must for traditionalists, lovers of mystery, and anyone who likes a rattling good listen.

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.

Holmes is petitioned by the groom of the Bedlam lunatic asylum to investigate a couple who have appeared at his stables. And after the notorious winter of 1894-5, the politician Mr. Lawler, previously encountered in The Minister and the Moguls, gives Holmes a commission to investigate whether the climate is changing and whether industrialization is the cause.