Writing Plans For The Coming Year
This is partly here so people know what will be coming up on this blog, but mostly so I have an aide memoire I can refer to myself. These are the projects I’m working on at the moment or planning to do this year:
Finish proposal for a traditionally-published novel in a series in someone else’s world. May or may not ever get past the proposal stage. If it doesn’t, I’m going to rework the ideas into a new novel of my own.
Get PEP! 3 out the door – possibly as early as next week, if all goes to plan. (I know I’ve said that before)
Finish the Kinks book. Probably by March
Finish How We Know What We Know – hopefully by the end of next month
Finish Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – before Xmas.
Finish Bigger On The Outside – some time in the next few months.
Finish Time Detective to novella length
Write books two and three of the Beach Boys series, and if necessary a second edition of book one – waiting for details on the reissues and new albim before I do anything definite.
Book on Cerebus. I’m scrapping what I did last year, and restarting this in the style of my Seven Soldiers book.
A second and third Doctor Watson Investigates, to make enough of them to fill an omnibus paperback.
Possibly a second Time Detective novella if people like the first one enough.
More short stories.
I also want to write more political stuff, but I don’t think I could do a book on that. Politics is too depressing right now, all things considered. I’m actually more politically active now than in a long time, but have very little to say…
On Ebook Pricing And Promotion
This post will really only be of interest to other people who self-publish or plan to. The rest of you can ignore it. It’s a little addendum to the post I made last week.
There is nothing more likely to get arguments raging on self-publishing discussion boards than the question of pricing one’s book (and it’s almost always ‘book’ singular. Very few of the people involved have written more than one). One group insist that the right thing to do is to publish books at 99 cents – or give them away for free – for ‘exposure’. The other group think their work is too valuable to give away at such a low price – “my book is worth more than a chocolate bar.”
Both sides are, ultimately, arguing from a lack of evidence. The first side can point to the occasional success story – writer X whose first novel sold 100,000 copies, and she sold it for only 99 cents – while the other side can say “the major publishers don’t sell anything for under $10. If I sell mine for $5 that’s still only half their price.” But basically they’re going from instinct.
My case is a little different from many of these people. I write entirely for pleasure. But I publish for business. This is why I post almost all my writing to my blog first and let people read it for free if they want to. But if they want to have a physical copy or an ebook of it, then they need to pay me for the time and effort I put in for cover design, typesetting, formatting, uploading and so on, because unlike the actual writing that stuff is hard, tedious work that I don’t enjoy and am not very good at. So I’m looking at pricing entirely from the point of view of what will maximise revenue.
The tactic most often endorsed by self-publishers is to write a book, put it out cheap, for ninety-nine cents, and promote the hell out of it on all the social networks for as long as you can, and only then start writing your next book.
Now, this tactic would be painful for me, because I find it almost impossible *not* to write. I can’t always write the thing I intend to write (I’ve got my half-finished MindlessWho post that should have been up a week ago as proof of that), but the only time I’m not writing something is when I’m physically incapable of doing so. But imagine that I could.
So you have your ninety-nine cent book and you spam everyone about it. Let’s imagine a best case scenario here, and say that you don’t get blocked by everyone on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll further imagine that pricing at ninety-nine cents is actually an effective way of getting noticed at this point (it isn’t, because literally millions of people are doing the same thing now). So let’s be optimistic and say that your book sells a thousand copies a month for the year you’re promoting it.
Many of those sales will be to people who won’t particularly enjoy it, and will give it bad reviews. The sales are mostly coming from social networking, so once you stop that to write the next book (if you ever do), sales drop to zero or close. So we can take the first year’s income from that single book as being a year’s income from writing. 12,000 ebooks at ninety-nine cents, at a 35% royalty, comes to $4200.
So write a single book a year, sell it for ninety-nine cents, spend the rest of the year promoting it, you can get $4200 a year, in an ideal world.
Now let’s look at what I do.
I wrote five full-length books last year, for which I’ve priced the ebooks at $5. I did essentially no promotion for any of these – one blog post, a tweet and a facebook post is about it. I did do a couple of guest blogs promoting my fourth book, but that’s all. I spent the time writing instead.
Now, none of them are selling anything like a thousand copies a month. But this month, between them they sold 87 books as ebooks alone (not counting for the moment either paper copies or revenues from stores like Apple which haven’t reported for this month yet). Admittedly, this is one of my better months, but also I write stuff for *incredibly* niche audiences in most part. And those books sold that much without any additional promotion on my part. I used that time to write instead.
Eighty-seven books at five dollars a pop, at a seventy percent royalty (actually some are at a higher royalty because Smashwords pays better, but let’s keep this simple and stick to Kindle royalty figures) is $304.50 . The single-book author who’s promoting rather than writing makes $350 from her single book.
I’ll actually surpass what she makes with her thousand downloads, because I’ve also got a couple of short stories up for ninety-nine cents and a longer story up for three dollars (I’m not saying never to price something at ninety-nine cents – I use the price if the ‘book’ I’m selling is under ten thousand words or so, because it would be cheating the readers to charge more), and I’m selling paper books (most of the ninety-nine centers don’t) but even if we take that figure as all I’ll make, I know I can write at least five more books this year. (In fact I’ve got at least eight that are either in the planning stage or partly written, most of which should come out this year, along with a few more short stories and novellas. I’m aiming to get *something* at least e-published every fortnight this year).
So next year, assuming the average sales stay the same and I do another five full-length ebooks, I’ll be on $609 a month from ebook sales. The year after, $913.50 . Meanwhile, the natural audience for the ninety-nine cent book by the one-book-a-year (or less) author has already been exhausted, and that author is essentially starting from scratch with the next one.
Now, not everyone can write as fast as me – I’m lucky in that I write extremely clean copy, and I’m very good at structure, so I don’t need to rewrite much, and I think very, very fast. My books are also mostly on the short side (my natural medium is the essay or the short story, rather than the novel or series, though I think my two best books are the ones where the essays build and reflect on each other in a novelistic structure). And these numbers obviously don’t apply to everyone. But I think this shows that there is certainly a *very good case* for the best strategy for self-publishers to pursue being to charge a relatively high amount, but to write a lot, and let the promotion take care of itself.
Opinions?
How To Get Your Books On Sale
I’ve been talking with a few people recently about self-publishing, and some of them are vaguely confused about what you need to do in order to get a book out if you’ve written it and want to publish yourself, so I thought I’d do a semi-comprehensive guide. This is for full-length books of 40,000 words or more – short stories are a slightly different beast.
First, you need a word processor that will output in both .doc and .pdf format. Microsoft Word will do both these, I think, and I know that LibreOffice, AbiWord and OpenOffice.org will. I actually use LyX, because it produces beautifully typeset work and you don’t have to fight it the way you do MS Word. If you use LyX, the book Self-Publishing With LyX (free PDF version) is a godsend.
First, we’ll look at print publishing. Export your book as a PDF, with all fonts included in your file – if you don’t do this, there may be typesetting errors with your finished book. Most typesetting advice will tell you to use a ten-to-twelve point serif font, but I use a fourteen point sans serif. This is because my wife is visually impaired, and she finds this much easier to read. I suspect this will be the case for other visually impaired people, and I don’t want to exclude anyone from reading my books. So long as you use a simple, plain font for this, not Comic Sans or anything equally horrific, your book will look professional enough.
You will want to set fairly generous margins on your pages in the PDF, to allow for the pages to be trimmed. I use the margins suggested in Self-Publishing With LyX – Top: 2.5cm, Bottom 2.5cm, Inner: 2.5cm, Outer: 2.0cm . If you’re using Microsoft Word or one of the Wordalike Free Software word processors, lulu.com have a template you can use that will make your pages the right size, but when I used this (on my first two books, before I discovered LyX) I found it extraordinarily fiddly to use with LibreOffice, and next to impossible in AbiWord. I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Word, so I have no experience with that.
Once you have your PDF, you next need your cover. If you can’t draw yourself, you have a couple of options. One that some writers take is to browse stock photo libraries, and pay a small amount (usually in the tens of pounds) for rights to use a picture. You can, however, also search Google Images for images that have been freely licensed for commercial reuse.
One thing to remember, as well, is that all images created by branches of the US government are automatically in the public domain, so lots of military, scientific or space photographs, as well as photos of various politicians and so on, are completely free to use.
Now create an account with a print-on-demand publisher. I have heard very, very good things about CreateSpace, but I use lulu.com myself. This is partly because CreateSpace are an Amazon company, and I don’t want Amazon to have a monopoly or to put my eggs in one basket, and partly because Lulu also offer very good quality hardbacks, and I like to have nice copies of my books.
Once you have an account, click ‘start a new project’ and follow the steps it tells you. You will want your book to be available as a trade paperback (this is a normal paperback of a standard size – Lulu also do larger, coffee-table style books), as a hardback, and as a PDF (don’t add DRM to your PDF – DRM doesn’t deter so-called ‘pirates’ and does deter actual readers). Lulu have an easy-to-use cover designer that will take your image, resize it to the right dimensions, and let you add the title, author name, back-cover blurb and so on. You will get a PDF copy of this completed cover – take a screenshot of the front cover and save it as a JPG, and you can use it for your ebooks.
While Lulu do publish ebooks in non-PDF format, I’ve had nothing but horrendous experience with them in that department, so don’t put your ebooks out through them, other than PDF versions.
You can either buy an ISBN for your book or get one assigned by Lulu. There is no reason I know of not to use Lulu’s. Once you have an ISBN assigned and have bought and approved a proof copy of your book, you can choose either Lulu’s ‘ExtendedReach’ service (which is free, and gets your book on Amazon and into bibliographic databases so other stores can choose to order it) or their GlobalReach service (which is expensive but gets you onto other sites like Barnes & Noble). Interestingly, they seem to be experimenting with merging these two services and making them both free, but I don’t know if that will be going ahead.
Now you’ve got your physical book sorted, it’s time to think of your ebook. For this you’ll need your book to be in Word .doc format. (If you have a choice of which .doc versions to output as, choose Office 2003. DO NOT choose either Windows 95′s version, which doesn’t have all the features you need, or docx, which the major sites don’t yet support). There are many programs that will allow you to produce your own good-quality epub and mobi files, but if you want to get on the major sites you actually want them to convert the files for you at the moment.
Read through the Smashwords Style Guide (free ebook in various formats here) and follow its instructions precisely, paying special attention to the section on Table Of Contents. Then create an account with Smashwords and upload your correctly-formatted .doc file. Smashwords will then convert your book into every format in which you wish to sell it. Select all formats except .mobi (the Kindle format, which we’ll deal with separately) and PDF (Smashwords’ PDF copies look horrible, sell PDFs through Lulu instead).
Smashwords will assign you a free ISBN for your ebook, and will sell DRM-free copies through their own site, but their real advantage is that they will get you onto other online bookstores. They’re the only simple way to get on iBooks, Kobo, Diesel and Sony’s bookstore. They’re also the only way for people outside the US to get on Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebookstore. (People in the US can use Barnes & Noble’s PubIt). These sites between them account for something in the region of 20% of the ebook market.
Smashwords will claim that they offer distribution to Amazon, but they don’t. Disable this option just in case this changes, because you’re going to put your book out through Amazon by yourself – no reason to give Smashwords a cut.
You will want to price your book on Smashwords at between $2.99 and $9,99 – this is not because of anything to do with Smashwords itself, but because Amazon price-matches with other sites, and that’s the price range in which you get the best royalties on Amazon.
Smashwords is a great service, but has two major disadvantages. The first is that they pay quarterly in arrears – so if they receive money from a sale on Apple’s store in February (and Apple take their time to pay Smashwords), you won’t see it until June. The second is that for non-USians they require you to jump through a lot of hoops in the US’ insanely complex tax system if you don’t want to lose 30% of your money, and this takes time. The combination of these two things mean that even though I’ve had books up on Smashwords for a year, I am yet to see any money from them. But when it does finally arrive it’ll be a substantial chunk.
Finally, you’ll want your book to be available on the Kindle. This is the simplest of all these options by this point. Take your Smashwords-formatted .doc file, remove the line about ‘published on Smashwords’ that you inserted to meet Smashwords’ requirements, add page breaks at the end of each chapter (Kindle like page-breaks, Smashwords don’t). Then create an account at kdp.amazon.com and upload your files.
Amazon will try to get you to join a program called KDP Select with your books. DO NOT JOIN THIS. It is a very bad deal for actual writers (as opposed to delusional fools who want to strike it big with a single bestseller), it limits what you can do enormously, and some of its provisions (like turning the money made from lending into a zero-sum game in which you have to compete with other authors) are actively evil.
You should price your book between $2.99 and $9.99, as outside this price range you only make a 35% royalty, but you get 70% if your book’s in that price range. Some people will advise you to sell your books for 99 cents to ‘get noticed’. This was possibly good advice two years ago, but when there are literally millions of books selling at that price (and people giving books away as part of the KDP Select programme), any advantage the low price may have had is gone, so you might as well charge an amount where you’ll see some money. (99 cents is, however, a fair price for a short story if you’re publishing those).
Do not enable DRM – all DRM does is put customers off, it doesn’t deter illegal copying. Enable text-to-speech unless you hate blind people and want them to suffer.
Finally, get an Amazon Author Central account. You will, in fact, want to set up two of these, one on the US site and one on the UK site. From a reader’s point of view, an authorcentral page allows you to see everything an author’s written in one place, as well as a bio of the author (see my page for an example of how this works) – useful if you’ve written multiple books and people want to find them all. From an author’s point of view, it gives you some extra tools to manage your books.
And that’s it. Once you’ve done this, post a link on your blog or website saying your book’s out, then forget about it until the money comes in, and write the next one, and the one after that.
Bigger On The Outside: The Book Of The War
(For those who haven’t been reading my blog before, or who’ve forgotten, I’ve been doing a series of posts (to be turned into a book, with luck) on Doctor Who spinoffery. Click the ‘bigger on the outside’ tag to read the rest of these posts.)
For those who are interested in ideas, The Book Of The War is quite probably the single best thing ever to have come out of Doctor Who.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the BBC had taken control of the ongoing series of Doctor Who books, and put out a series featuring the Eighth Doctor. Much of this series was regarded at the time as being a bit rubbish, not least because a lot of it was – The Eight Doctors and War Of The Daleks, in particular, are just bad fanfic, written to explain away or rewrite things their authors didn’t like (and the fact that one of those books is by Terrance Dicks, the single biggest contributor to Doctor Who ever, doesn’t stop it being bad fanfic. Picasso was once asked to separate a pile of paintings into real Picassos and forgeries. After putting one into the forgery pile, someone said to him “But Pablo, I was with you when you painted that one”, to which he replied “No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.”)
But some of them were extremely good. Those by Lance Parkin and Paul Magrs we’ll come back to later in this series of articles, but there was also a set of books, starting with Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which set up a fascinating plot thread – a war, at some time in the Doctor’s future, between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. There was also a third party in this war, a renegade faction of the Time Lords known as Faction Paradox, and several smaller parties.
Unfortunately, the editor of BBC Books at the time decided to wrap this storyline up in a rather spectacularly dull way, and to write almost all of the elements that had been introduced in this story out of ‘continuity’.
But if you’ve read this far, you’ll know what I think about ‘continuity’, and Miles and several of the other authors involved evidently had the same view. Seeing no reason to waste a good idea, a series of Faction Paradox books and audio adventures was started which continues to this day, and The Book Of The War was the first, and one of the best, result.
The Book Of The War is the work of ten different authors – some, like Miles himself, or Simon Bucher-Jones, or Daniel O’Mahony, having written excellent books in the Doctor Who ranges before, while others, like Philip Purser-Hallard, were doing great work on the fringes of Who fiction without ever writing a ‘proper’ Doctor Who story. The book is structured as some combination of encyclopaedia, role-playing sourcebook and hypertext, and purports to provide background information on a war in time between the ‘Great Houses’, an ancient semi-godlike race of time travellers who kept the structure of history together, and their unnamed Enemy.
I say ‘purports’ because what this book actually is is an assault on the dull, literalist way of reading that most Doctor Who fans had.
While Doctor Who itself has at its best always attacked the idea of simple binary choices, that way of perceiving things pervades everything in our culture. Conservative or Labour, Mac or Windows, gay or straight, male or female, if you don’t pick a side, you will be assigned one anyway. Everyone knew that the Lib Dems were ‘really’ just Labour-lite, until they entered coalition and they’re now ‘really’ Tories. Bisexuals are ‘really’ gay people in denial or straight people trying to look interesting. And so on.
And so for a lot of the readers of the Eighth Doctor War stories, the single most interesting question had been ‘who is the Enemy?’ [FOOTNOTE A question which may contain its own answer...or may not.] They saw a war, and read it as having two sides, despite it originally being described as having at least four – the Time Lords/Great Houses, the Enemy, the Celestis and Faction Paradox – with many other factions such as The Remote later being described. So obviously the only thing of interest was who the Enemy ‘really’ were.
We get a lot of hints as to who the Enemy are in The Book of The War, and they do seem to point to an answer (the answer here seems to be that the Enemy are actually the Great Houses themselves, or a group within them, grown so bored and decadent that they have to invent a war with themselves in order to have a reason for existence). But it’s made clear that who the Enemy really are simply isn’t important – and indeed, the various books seem to suggest that Lawrence Miles, who edited this book and is more or less in charge of the Faction Paradox book range, has had different ideas as to who the Enemy are at different times. Indeed, it is entirely possible that each author of this book had his or her own idea who the Enemy were.
But further, the whole book goes out of its way to throw doubt upon the stories it’s telling. Attentive readers will be able to tell, for example, that the whole War itself is merely a feint for some larger plan, involving House Lolita, a single individual who is (we know from one of Miles’ short stories) the Master’s TARDIS (and the Master of course may or may not be the same person as the War King who is now in charge of the Great Houses, and his Presidency during the War may or may not be tied into Lolita’s scheme). There are at least three characters in the book who may or may not be the Doctor, all of whom are on different sides in the War.
The very text of the book itself presents itself both as fallible and as existing within the War universe – the text itself is corrupt, both in the sense of having (deliberate) mistakes in it, and in the sense that it reads as propaganda for one of the sides in the War – which one is open to question.
This corruption of the text exists from even the indicia, where we have “First printing September 2002. Almost certainly printed in Illinois” and “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or biological”. It’s not often the copyright warnings in a book forbid you to even remember it – and of course this ties in with the material on biodata later on.
Parts of the book have been censored – every entry relating to the Enemy has been deleted, although the links to them remain. Other parts, parts giving crucial bits of information, are interrupted by a ‘conceptual entity’ called The Shift who lives in the relation between the book’s words and the reader’s mind. And then there are entries like this:
“YOU” DIVERSIONS [House Military: Culture] Of increasing interest and concern to the Houses is the concept of interactive propaganda: the interweaving of propaganda messages into the receptors of a target audience’s brain, or even directly into the audience’s local culture. This is a typical tactic of the conceptual entities, but since the enemy gained some understanding of the same technologies the “trick” has become more widespread and more aggressive. YOU, YES YOU – REALLY – YOU. YOU BOUGHT THIS, THEN? THEY’RE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT THIS CAN BE HISTORY. THIS POLITE FICTION YOU’RE READING INSISTS THAT THE WAR WILL BE SOON BE OVER, THAT IT HAS A SPECIFIC “FIRST FIFTY YEARS”. WELL, IT HASN’T. IT ISN’T OVER. IT’S NEVER OVER. ONE IN EVERY THOUSAND PIECES OF INFORMATION IN THIS TEXT HAS BEEN RE-ENGINEERED. THE MATERIAL BEYOND THIS POINT IS PROGRAMMING HYPERLANGUAGE ONLY YOUR LOCAL IDENTITY IS ENDING. PAY NO ATTENTION. YOU WANTED TO KNOW WHO’D FIGHT FOR THE REBEL HOUSES? WHO’D BEAR ARMS AGAINST THE ENGINEERS OF HISTORY? YOU WOULD, would be a typical opening gambit in such cases.
After its appearance, the recipients of such messages would be told to await activation instructions. Often the level of paranoia induced by this would be sufficient to disrupt normal activities, the same exploitation of House anxiety also reflected in the principles of xenoprediction and mentioned in the “Probability” Doctrine. In some cases the propaganda thrust would be augmented by a secondary double-bluff, suggesting that the text did in fact originate from legitimate sources, which would then be undercut. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCES WERE A LIE, AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS would be a typically smug signing-off for such a message. It would then be followed by some vague, largely meaningless command such as WAIT, ACTIVATION LOCK ACCOMPLISHED.
The fact that almost any action could be construed as having obeyed the allegedly treasonous command is almost always sufficient to ensure that the messages aren’t even reported to the higher ranks.
Much of the book works on multiple levels, sometimes obviously like this, sometimes more subtly. There’s a description of a plot of a bad late-90s blockbuster film, for example, which reads like (and is) a parody of both Mulan and The Phantom Menace. It’s also a good description of the plot of some of Miles’ later Faction Paradox audio dramas, and itself gives another conflicting clue as to what is ‘really’ going on.
This is a book that’s full of ideas. Almost all of its several hundred entries would make the basis of fine short stories in themselves (and several of them made the background for Philip Purser-Hallard’s marvellous novel Of The City Of The Saved). There are digs at Richard Dawkins’ lack of imagination, expansions on the ideas of Teillhard de Chardin, parodies of Ally McBeal and reality TV, conspiracy theories, a subplot inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach and much more.
Possibly the closest comparison to this book is Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, but where that comic series takes ITC adventure serials, with their relatively limited scope, as its point of departure, The Book Of The War builds an entire mythology – or multiple mythologies – out of asides from Robert Holmes scripts.[FOOTNOTE - The Book Of The War is a much, much more mature work, too, far less concerned with a rather sixth-form idea of cool.] And this is definitely the Robert Holmes vision of Doctor Who, rather than any other, but fleshed out, and with the world foregrounded, rather than the character of the Doctor.
But most importantly, it’s a book that you have to approach as a critical reader. It forces its own unreliability to the foreground, and resists all attempts to fit its narrative into a simple binary, goodies vs baddies, format.
Or, at least, that’s what I think…
Doctor Watson ebook now out
Priced $2.99. The text is slightly different from what was published here, as Richard Flowers made some useful suggestions. It also has a cover and a short introduction. It will be out within a couple of hours on Amazon (US) and Amazon (UK), and is already available for all non-Kindle formats at Smashwords.
As always, this is totally DRM-free. Given the relative lack of popularity of this story, whether I do any more will depend on sales of the ebook.
No print book at the moment (the story’s too short to justify it) but if I do more I may do a collected edition.
Epilogue: Doctor Watson Investigates – The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief, the final part
(To read the rest of the story, click on the Doctor Watson Investigates tag at the bottom. A revised ebook of this story is now available – on Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and Smashwords.).
On Holmes’ return, I told him of the events that had occurred while he was away, and how I’d solved the mystery.
“The red hair was the clue, of course,” he said, “along with you finding the killer’s face familiar. It was, of course, a family resemblance to his half-sister, the woman he claimed was his fiancee.”
“So you guessed that, too?”
“It was the only plausible explanation. The resemblance between the two sisters was too close to be anything other than biological kinship. Their being actual sisters was, of course, out of the question – Lord Hernshire is known to be a man of the utmost propriety – so they must be cousins.”
“That she was left on the doorstep suggests that she was born of some improper liaison, so one must look to males of the family, and we have only one suspect – the mother’s elder brother, thought deceased. And when someone with similarly red hair appears, who spends much of his time in the African colonies – the same colonies where the elder brother disappeared, presumed dead – that would tend to confirm the supposition. Roger Courtenay and Rose Travers were half-siblings, with the same father but different mothers. The one piece that eludes me is why he did this. What kind of scoundrel could become engaged to his sister, let alone kill her?”
“Oh Holmes, and you’d done so well! He mentioned, did he not, that he had nearly been engaged to Cynthia?”
“Of course, I see now!”
“Yes. He came to England hoping to claim the fortune he should have inherited, only to find that his father had been presumed dead while away in Africa. He at first intended to propose to Cynthia Travers, hoping by marriage to her to reclaim his inheritance, but when he met Rose and heard how she had come to be part of the family, he decided she needed to share in her birthright too. They concocted a plot together, to fake a marriage and also murder the elder sister, and to return to Africa with their inheritance and go their separate ways. A most despicable plot!”
“And of course they first faked the disappearance of the younger sister. The plan was to have Rose pretend to be Cynthia and make it widely known that Rose had disappeared and was likely dead. Then when they killed Cynthia, Rose could turn up again saying she’d escaped from Cynthia’s killer.”
“The one thing I don’t understand, Holmes, is why come to ask you for help? Why risk exposure?”
“Ah, Watson, I am glad to see that your new application of my methods has not quite rendered me superfluous! They wished to make it as widely known as possible that Rose Travers had been kidnapped, so that their story would appear watertight. They also wished for Rose to be away from Hernshire temporarily, so had her travel to London. And of course, that was their downfall, and the cause of Rose’s death, for they had not reckoned on you, Watson.”
“On me?”
“On your good and chivalrous nature. Had I been present, I should undoubtedly have told her to return to Hernshire and wire me as events developed – this is my normal practice. They would then have been able to commit their murder with no-one the wiser. But you, Watson, have a better soul than I. You could not stand to see a woman suffering, so you took her to your house and then took it upon yourself to travel down there and investigate, arriving before the planned murder.”
“This of course made the deception plain, and Hemingford did the only thing he could think of in the situation – he staged his own kidnapping, murdered the only witness to his plot, and attempted to escape back to the colonies. And he very nearly succeeded.”
“You know, Holmes, I would not have been nearly so protective had it not been…”
“Yes. I know. But on to happier matters. My trip was successful, you shall be pleased to hear.”
“What was it you were doing over there, Holmes?”
“Ah, that I cannot tell even you, Watson. But the end result, I think I can. I think I may have prevented a rather large war. Or if not prevented, at least postponed by some twenty years.”
I felt chastened. Holmes had prevented a war, while I, applying his methods, had not even been able to prevent the death of one woman (although as I now realised she would have been a murderess without my intervention, my sorrow was much lessened).
But I had also proved, to myself at least, that I was not merely Holmes’ Sancho Panza. Maybe I should set up practice again, and maybe even find a new wife.
A knock came at the door, and a man entered. He had only one arm, and was clutching a pair of bagpipes to his chest.
“Mr. Holmes, I need your help,” he began.
I decided to stay with Holmes a little longer.
The Capture (Doctor Watson Investigates: The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief part IX)
(For parts one to eight of the good doctor’s investigation, click on the Doctor Watson Investigates tag. A revised ebook of this story is now available – on Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and Smashwords.)
I stared, dumbstruck, at the hair for a length of time that felt like an eternity but must only have been a few seconds. This was the woman who had visited me the previous morning (was it merely a day hence? It felt like many months), but she was now red-haired, when she had been dark-haired when I had seen her later that day.
And then I remembered. Rose Travers, the missing woman, had looked just like her sister. Cynthia had even told me when she visited me “Were it not for the flaming red hair for which she was named, one could almost have thought her my twin.”
I had been visited not by Cynthia at all, but by her sister Rose.
But why should Rose have visited me with a story about her own disappearance? A story, what is more, that both Cynthia Travers and Earl Hernshire seemed to believe to be correct, as well as Rose’s unfortunate fiance Roger. This was becoming a most perplexing and bizarre mystery indeed.
I related the events of the last day to Lestrade, along with the story that Rose had told me. How much of that tale was fictitious I, of course, did not know, but those few events which I had been able to verify had proved trustworthy, so I believed that in its broad outlines it was true.
And in telling Lestrade the story – of the dead mother who had inherited a fortune after her brother’s disappearance, of the appearance of the baby, of the fiance who travelled a lot, of the adopted sisters who nonetheless looked like twins, and of the woman who had come to me to report her own disappearance – I had a horrifying realisation, one that I should have had much earlier.
I knew who the murderer was, and what his motive had been. The final proof came when I examined the body, and found the neckerchief which she had shown me yesterday nowhere to be seen.
“Lestrade! Quickly, we must get to the docks! And pray God we are not too late!”
I do not exaggerate when I say that that six-mile journey seemed one of the longest of my life. The cab journey to Wapping could surely have taken no more than three-quarters of an hour by the clock, but it felt like an eternity to one who knew that justice would be served or forever denied by our speed. Rose Travers had, it now appeared, been a liar and a party to terrible crimes, but her death still needed to be avenged by the law.
Upon finally arriving at the docks, we found them bustling with all the many species of humanity from all parts of the Empire, loading and unloading crates, boxes and barrels of every imaginable exotic item. After some confusion, we finally found someone who spoke something recognisably akin to English.
“Is there a boat going to Africa from here any time soon?” I asked.
“No boats here, mate.”
“A ship, then. Is there a ship going to Africa from these docks today?”
“Yep. That’un over there. Leaves in a hour.”
We raced to the ship, ran up the gangplank despite protestations from some of the sailors, and Lestrade and his two constables began their search, looking for the man whose description I had given them on the journey. However, as they were looking, I saw a figure approaching from the docks.
It was the killer! We had managed to arrive before him, and looking at him it was clear to see why. He had obviously changed his clothes, from the respectable outfit I had seen him in to the drab workman’s clothes he now wore. He had also affected a stoop, in order to fit in better with the mass of humanity around him. I, however, would have recognised him anywhere.
In retrospect, it would have been the intelligent thing to hide, allow him to board the ship, and then arrest him. In my enthusiasm and anger, though, I shouted “Hoy!” as soon as I saw him, and he turned, dropped his bag, and fled.
I sprinted down the gangplank, closely followed by Lestrade and his constables. Had the dock been less crowded I should have pulled out my service revolver and shot at the miscreant, for he was younger than I and unencumbered by a war wound. Fortunately, the policemen were faster than I, and they caught him before he could make good his escape.
They dragged him, still protesting, in front of me.
“Is this the man?” asked Lestrade.
It was. The man in front of me, bedraggled though he was, was undoubtedly the same man I had met the day before, and who without realising I had glimpsed catching the earlier train that morning.
“That’s the man. He calls himself Roger Courtenay, but I doubt it’s his real name.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” protested the villain, “I’ve never heard of any Roger Courtenay.”
“Search his pockets.”
His pockets were searched, and in one was found the same blood-encrusted red neckerchief that Rose had shown me the day before.
“That should be enough to see him hanged,” said Lestrade.
“Indeed. But it should be under his real name. Would I be right in thinking that your real name is not Courtenay but Hemingford?”
The shock on the villain’s face told me I was correct.
“How in God’s name did you know that?”
“Oh, it was obvious. Why else would you kill your sister?”
(Tomorrow – the return of Holmes and the final explanation)
Doctor Watson Investigates: The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief part VIII
(For parts one to seven of the good doctor’s investigation, click on the Doctor Watson Investigates tag. A revised ebook of this story is now available – on Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and Smashwords.)
Not only was I being accused of murder, the betrayal of everything that as a medical man I hold sacred, but the murder of Cynthia Travers, the very young woman I had sworn to protect. And Miss Travers had, to the best of my knowledge, still been alive when I had left Hernshire Hall earlier that morning.
“Miss Travers… Cynthia… is dead?” I asked.
“We responded to reports of screaming and cries of ‘murder’ coming from this house at about noon today. Upon entering, we found the body of a young woman, carrying about her person a handkerchief monogrammed with the letters C.T., and near her a handbag containing letters addressed to Cynthia Travers. We visited your lodgings, and your landlady informed us that you had not been seen since yesterday, and that when she had last seen you you had been in the company of a woman named Travers who matched the description of the deceased.”
I was horrified. The day before, I had sworn upon my honour to protect the life of this young lady, and now she was dead.
But more, I was confused. Cynthia Travers had been in Hernshire the previous evening. Only one passenger, a man, had boarded the earlier train back to London in the morning, and nobody had boarded the one on which I had travelled. Surely she could not have travelled by coach overnight, only to be murdered upon her arrival?
But this thought of trains made me aware of something.
“Inspector, I couldn’t possibly be the murderer.”
“Why not?”
“You said the murder took place at noon?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, at noon I was in the middle of a train journey, and thankfully I still have the ticket to prove it.”
Having only had a chance to change my shirt and waistcoat before the door-knocking had commenced, I was still wearing the trousers in which I had been travelling. I pulled the ticket out and showed Lestrade.
“Well… I did think it most unlikely that you would kill someone, Doctor, but in barbarous times like these you can never tell. But do you have any idea why this young lady would have been in your house in the first place?”
So I explained the whole story to Lestrade, how Cynthia Travers had come to me for help after her sister’s disappearance, how I had allowed her to stay in my own house in order to help protect her, and how she had later appeared in Hernshire, disavowing any knowledge of me.
“A ghastly business indeed!” said Lestrade. “What does Mister Holmes think of it?”
“Holmes is unfortunately indisposed at present, with a very bad case of the influenza. We shall have to solve this problem without him, I fear.”
“A pity. Mister Holmes’ flashiness will never replace real police-work, of course, but for an amateur he’s quite good. I always think it a shame he never joined the force – we might have made a real detective of him.”
I nodded politely. My own opinion of Holmes is a great deal higher than that professed by Lestrade, but then I hold Lestrade in a rather higher esteem than does Holmes. I also suspect both men to have higher opinions of each other than they claim.
“Well, Doctor”, Lestrade continued, “since you’re here anyway, and the police surgeon hasn’t yet arrived, why don’t you examine the body?”
As we proceeded toward the bedroom, I thought back to the last time I had entered that room, several months before. That time, too, it had been to see the corpse of a young, beautiful woman who I had sworn to protect. I had been unable to save my wife, and now I had also been unable to save Miss Travers.
But while my wife’s killer had been consumption, against which all of us in the medical profession can only battle in vain, Miss Travers’ killer was a human being (loath though I am to apply the term to such an infernal wretch), and he could be arrested, tried and hanged. I determined that I should not rest until this consummation had been achieved.
I shall spare you any description of the horror I saw upon entering that room, but it remains engraved on my mind’s eye to this day. I am no stranger, of course, to violent death – as a battlefield surgeon it is a constant companion. But death on a battlefield, in honourable combat, in service of one’s country is, if not always glorious, always understood and expected. The soldier knows when he takes the Queen’s shilling that he is not taking a wage but a loan, and that the debt may be called in at any time in his own flesh and blood.
But the young girl lying there, in an indescribable state, had made no contracts and taken no money. She was the victim of a vicious, callous brute, of a ferocity I find unimaginable.
I bent down to examine the poor girl, who I noted was again wearing the apparel in which she had been clothed when she had visited my lodgings the previous day (even though I had seen her since, clad in different garb). That one who had so recently been so full of life was now an empty shell, her soul having departed, I still found hard to believe.
I loosened her clothing, looking for marks that might be of some use in identifying the killer. In order to look more closely at her neck, I loosened the veiled bonnet she was wearing, which was tied around her chin. The bonnet fell back, onto the floor.
And along with the bonnet fell a long black wig, revealing underneath, tied up to keep it out of sight, the young woman’s real hair.
It was tied into a tight bun, but they were plainly the tresses of a different woman from the one I had seen the previous evening. For they were a bright, shining, red.
Doctor Watson Investigates: The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief part VII
(For parts one to six of the good doctor’s investigation, click on the Doctor Watson Investigates tag. A revised ebook of this story is now available – on Amazon (US), Amazon (UK) and Smashwords.)
I stood there with the card in my hand for many minutes, stunned at the latest turn in this grotesque business. There was now a second kidnapping – and, I feared, a second murder – alongside the first.
I still had no means of alerting Holmes to this terrible series of events, and I was horribly afraid that the worst was already upon us. Even had Holmes been alerted, a young couple on the eve of their marriage had been snatched away to their doom already. He would undoubtedly be able to identify the miscreant responsible, but nobody could now protect Courtenay or Rose Travers from whatever grisly fate had awaited them.
I trudged back to Hernshire Hall with a heavy heart. No doubt they would be as unwelcoming as they had been the previous evening, yet I had to inform them of this latest dreadful turn of events.
My presentiments proved correct. After several entreaties, I could not persuade the butler even to grant me entrance to the hall, and so eventually told the man the barest facts of the matter, presented him with the card, singed round the edges from the fire, and departed to the railway station.
In keeping with the recent course of events, I arrived at the railway station just in time to see, from behind, a single passenger boarding the train to London and the train departing. I had to wait another three hours for the next train, with no-one for company, and nothing to do but to think over my failure.
I determined that upon my arrival I should seek out Lestrade and, no matter what the consequences, inform him of the terrible events that had been taking place in Hernshire. While Lestrade might not be of the same intellectual calibre as Holmes, it was becoming increasingly clear that nor was I.
There were mysteries within mysteries here; the elder Miss Travers’ refusal to admit to having met me, in particular, beggared comprehension. Why should someone so desperate for help be so quick to disavow all knowledge of the man to whom she had so recently turned for assistance?
These thoughts and others went through my head during that long train journey back to London, and in my short cab ride thereafter to Baker Street. I wanted to collect my thoughts and make myself presentable, as my clothing was somewhat damaged by the smoke from the previous night’s fire, before bringing the dreadful news to Inspector Lestrade.
But by a curious coincidence, or so it seemed at the time, I was not the only one desirous of such a meeting. I had barely had time to button my waistcoat when there came a banging on the door. I opened it to see a young street-urchin there, one of the lads occasionally employed by Holmes. This time, though, he was in the employ of Lestrade.
“Doctor Watson?”
“Yes?
“Inspector Lestrade sent me. ‘E says ‘e wants to see yer. Yer to meet ‘im at your ‘ouse in ‘alf an ‘our.”
“How extraordinary! I was just on my way to visit Lestrade at Scotland Yard, but I shall make my way to my house instead. Was there any other message?”
“Yer. ‘E said you was to give me a shillin’ for my trouble.”
“Oh, he did, did he? More likely he said to give you tuppence – if he didn’t give it to you himself. Am I correct?”
The young lad had the grace to look sheepish at this deduction, which had hardly taken my whole intellect to produce, and so I gave him sixpence, because he had after all been of some assistance to me.
I made my way again to my former abode, musing on the strange twists of fate that had driven me twice in two days to the home of my all-too-short-lived happiness, after I had spent so many months studiously avoiding it. First I had come here to give Cynthia Travers a safe haven in which to avoid her fate (and why had she returned to Hernshire? And why had she feigned ignorance of me? And why had Roger Courtenay, not Cynthia Travers, been the next victim? Was Cynthia still in danger?). Now I was going to inform Lestrade about what was possibly the most macabre series of events I could recall. (And why was Lestrade at my house? And why did he wish to meet with me and not Holmes?)
Even more astonishingly, when I arrived at my house, I noticed the door was already open, and a bearded police constable was standing outside! Had I been burgled? I bounded up the steps and asked the constable what was going on.
“I can’t help you, I’m afraid, sir,” the constable replied, “my duty is merely to prevent entry by members of the public.”
“Then would you mind letting me in, so I could speak to someone who can help me?”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. As I explained, my duty is to prevent entry.”
“But dash it, man, this is my house! I’m John Watson!”
At this point, a voice from inside intruded on our discussion. “Doctor Watson! I’ve been waiting for you. Let him in, Watkins.”
I entered to see, in the drawing room, Inspector Lestrade waiting with several of his colleagues.
“Lestrade! My dear sir, it is a pleasure to see you. I apologise for my delay in arriving, but I was changing my clothing when your boy arrived.”
At this, Lestrade looked significantly at one of the other policemen, who raised an eyebrow. I continued, regardless.
“I actually have some business with you myself, but perhaps you’d like to say why you sent for me, first of all?”
Lestrade looked at me, his face devoid of that human sympathy with which he was normally so endowed, and said, in a colder voice than I had ever heard from him, words which chilled me.
“Doctor John Watson, you are under arrest for the murder of Cynthia Travers.”
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