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.”
New Faction Paradox!
It’s really starting to look like this Christmas is some kind of great dream for me. Not only have the Beach Boys reformed, and I’ve seen a great Paul McCartney gig, but the disability benefits we’ve been fighting for for my wife for two years have finally come through (and been backdated). And now this announcement from Obverse Books on the JadePagoda Doctor Who Books mailing list:
Following not terribly protracted negotiations with Lawrence Miles, Obverse will be taking over the Faction Paradox prose license in its entirety from 2012, as a result of which we’ll be publishing this lot next year…
*Novels*
Against Nature – Lawrence Burton
“*Goralschai, a first wave veteran of the House Military, returns from the front bearing a death wish the size of creation. The spiral politic, he decides, cannot continue, and on Earth, in the Mexico of 1506, he finds a means to his twisted end; and so, egged on by the Celestis (who find this sort of thing amusing), he lays plans to turn one small corner of history into a weapon*.”The Brakespeare Voyage – Simon Bucher-Jones and Jon Dennis
“*The Maw, a wound in the fabric of the universe, forms. House Lineacrux claims to have constructed it, but this may be a lie. To exploit it House Lineacrux creates two ships with the intention of harvesting Leviathan biodata from outside the totality of the Spiral politic. The first the San Grael is a scout the second, the Brakespeare…*”*Novellas*
The Moontree Women – Kelly Hale
“*Some people have timelines in their palms instead of lifelines..*.”Opus Majus – Jim Mortimore
*”In 1267 the Fransiscan monk Roger Bacon made such a fuss about the
innacuracies of the calendar that Pope Clement IV ordered he be sent on a quest to find the missing time. This ridiculous but hardly refusable mission is something of a problem for Bacon – but an even greater problem for Faction Paradox.*”*Short Stories*
Faction Paradox 2: The As Yet Untitled Collection – editor, Jay Eales…
Available either as hardbacks individually or a subscription or something
else entirely…
And that’s on top of the previously-announced City Of The Saved short-story collection. I will, of course, be buying every one of these. Simon Bucher-Jones and Lawrence Burton are both friends of mine, but they’re also both extremely good writers, and the rest are all good too. This is very, very exciting. Obverse are an excellent publishing house anyway, putting out good-quality hardbacks and DRM-free epubs of their books.
(Proper update later – spent the last couple of days travelling, and am now staying with my in-laws).
Doctor Watson Investigates: The Case Of The Scarlet Neckerchief part VI
(For parts one to five 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 was utterly confounded!
“Miss Travers,” I responded, trying to control the tremor in my voice, “surely you must remember our meeting only this morning?”
“You must be mistaken, sir,” she replied, in a voice that was noticeably colder, “I have been here all day, and have been too grief-stricken to take any visitors.”
“But…”
“But nothing!” Her father interrupted. “Sir, I don’t know what kind of scoundrel you are, or why you should come to my house in a time of grief for my family and bother us with such a pack of obvious falsehoods, but I shall tolerate your presence no further.” He rang the bell, and the footman appeared again. “Chalmers, please escort this… gentleman… to the door.”
I attempted to protest, but in vain. Neither Lord Hernshire nor his daughter would listen to a word I said, and I had to leave.
As the servant was handing me my hat and cloak, with what seemed somewhat indecent haste, a thought struck.
“Would you mind telling me where Mr. Courtenay lives?”
“And why would you be wanting to know that?”
“I have some small business with him before I return to London.”
“He’s staying at the inn, sir. The Black Hen, mile and a half down the road.”
“At the inn? I thought he was local.”
“Oh no, sir. He travels a lot – he has a house in London, but he spends a lot of time in foreign parts. I hear he was born in the colonies, and still travels there on business. So he stays at the inn when he’s around Hernshire.”
“So what brought him to Hernshire in the first place?”
“That wouldn’t be any of my business, sir. And nor, if you don’t mind me saying so, would it be yours. Now his Lordship has asked me to escort you off the premises, and I would be obliged if you would leave quietly and allow me to be about my work.”
I walked to the inn – which turned out to be closer to two miles away, most of it uphill, and led me to wish that I had worn a pair of sturdy hiking boots rather than the indoor shoes I was wearing – lost in thought.
Clearly some very grotesque business was afoot. Cynthia Travers did not remember our meeting – and her bafflement had appeared genuine enough, rather than the result of some thespian trickery – but it had only happened that morning. Not only that, but everything she had told me in that meeting appeared to be correct. Her sister, Rose, did appear to be missing, and the family did appear to be assuming her death.
After my unfortunate first impression, I could count on no help from anyone in Hernshire Hall, even though our aims must surely be as one. The only person left to turn to was Roger Courtenay. Rose’s fiance would surely be of some assistance, and his mind had not been prejudiced towards me.
By the time I got to the Black Hen, it was nearing dusk. Enquiring after Mr. Courtenay, I found him sat alone. I asked to join him, and while he seemed surprised he consented readily enough.
Over a steak-and-kidney pie and pint of ale, the first food I had been able to have since breaking my fast many hours earlier, I spoke with Mr. Courtenay, and found him as described, a charming, articulate man with a noble bearing. Behind his bright red beard, his face seemed somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t place the resemblance.
I explained the situation as I understood it, and was grateful to find that he did not seem to disbelieve me.
“Cynthia is a strange child,” he said to me when I had finished relating my tale, “and somewhat given to odd behaviour. I was almost engaged to her myself at one time, before I met poor Rose… Thankfully, Rose is much less hysterical than her sister.”
“We must try to find Rose, despite her sister’s strange behaviour. Sir, I give you my word that I shall do everything that is in my power to return your bride to you unharmed.”
“Sir, I am grateful. Why, with your help, and that of the great Sherlock Holmes, I believe I shall soon see my bride again. Perhaps even tomorrow, eh?”
“Indeed. Stout fellow! That’s just the spirit!”
“But for today, sir, it draws late, and the day has been an exhausting one. I must retire. Are you taking a room here?”
It hadn’t occured to me until then, but it was too late to get back to London that night, so I requested a room, and I too retired for the night.
My sleep was disturbed in the middle of the night by a noise, and I woke up to hear the doorknob rattling. I had, of course, locked the door, but fearing burglary or something worse I nonetheless called “Who’s there? I warn you, I have a gun!”
The reply was, however, one that amused me at my own anxiety, for it was Roger. “Only me, Doctor. Sorry. Got up for a quick breath of fresh air, because I couldn’t sleep, and tried the wrong door in the dark. Mine’s next door.”
Mollified, I lay down and went to sleep again. But I woke not long after to a smell of smoke.
Running out of the room, I noticed the smoke was coming out from under Roger’s door. I knocked on the door and enquired “Roger, are you in there?”, but I heard no reply. I knocked louder. “Roger!”
Satisfied that he was not going to answer, I started shouting “Fire!”, and roused the landlord and landlady from their bed. While the landlady got to safety outside, the landlord and I started attacking the door with our shoulders, it being locked and the handle too hot to touch.
Eventually, after several attempts, we broke the door down. We fetched water and doused the fire (one lucky aspect of the fire being in an inn was that liquids were plentiful there), but even through the smoke, we could see that Roger was no longer in the room.
Instead, near the burning mattress, was a note.
It read “I SHALL STILL HAVE WHAT IS MINE!”
Read Debi’s Book! And Draw Pictures!
My friend and sometime PEP! contributor Debi Linton has written a children’s book, a very sweet, funny short story about coping with anxiety. She’s not yet got an illustrator for it, but has posted the text as a PDF on her blog, and is looking for someone to draw the pictures (unfortunately it won’t be a paying gig, as Debi’s as skint as all my friends seem to be).
I know at least three or four very good illustrators read this blog, and a few of them would fit the style of the book perfectly. But even if you can’t draw at all, it’s well worth a read if you have any taste at all for children’s books.
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