Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Case of the Lost Folio
    The Case of the Lost Folio
    The Case of the Lost Folio
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    The Case of the Lost Folio

    By Bruce Briley

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The first of a series of Sherlock Holmes forbidden-to-be-published adventures, presented under the Imprimatur of the Conan-Doyle Estate. After relating the discovery of a cache of unpublished Holmes tales recorded by Watson, and discovered more than 50 years after his death by his grand-nephew, the first “deciphered” tale begins:
    Holmes and Watson are engaged by the very-attractive wife of an Oxford Don Expert on Shakespeare who has disappeared. It transpires that the Don had become connected with the marketing of an arbitrarily rare set of documents comprising the Bard’s legendary Lost Folio. These documents were alleged to be a set of lost plays which, because of their antiquity, were worth millions irrespective of their quality. (Some of these had actually been played before limited audiences before being misplaced or destroyed, leaving only a lingering hint as to their titles and plots, one of them ostensibly connected to Cervantes’ Don Quixote.)

    A note abruptly appears, demanding a staggering and numerically peculiar price for the Lost Folio and the return of her husband, along with a riddle that appears meaningless. Holmes and Watson are put through a multiplicity of trials, taking them all over England:
    Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, No. 10 Downing Street, Southampton, and, of course, Stratford upon Avon, etc., all triggered by some aspect of the ransom note, e.g., the Southampton trip is to check on the nature of the paper used for the note, which proves to be of a special “Diplomatic Grade” that includes erasure sensitivity, and is doled out only to people high in government circles. Each sheet holds a concealed series number that can be used to determine to whom it had been allotted.

    Mathematical overtones of the Lost Folio price implicate someone in either the Queen’s Artillery, versed in calculating ballistic tables, or in the Admiralty, concerned with navigational calculations.

    Holmes and Watson engage in burglary of the home of a n’er do well suspect, son of a royal personage with disquieting results.

    Word comes that the Don’s wife has been brutally murdered, crushed by a falling stone at Stonehenge, causing much consternation.

    Holmes requests an audience with the Prime Minister in order to secure records needed for the investigation, and engages in a verbal sparring match with the gentleman. Holmes prevails, and secures almost ministerial powers over the records office, to the awe of the functionaries there.

    They trace the Don’s wife’s path prior to her death ( which she took in response to a threatening letter) to Piccadilly Circus, where, amongst ladies of the afternoon/evening, she would have been noticeable. Holmes, who turns out to be well known to the ladies (not as a customer, but as someone sensitive to their station in life, and willing, without charge, to help right wrongs inflicted upon them). They learn that she met with a man who forced her into a hansom cab, then the identity of the driver, who is later found dead.

    In the meantime, the Don is found drowned in the Thames, bound with nautical knots. An autopsy, performed by one of Watson’s old school chums, the Don proves to be (mechanically) impotent, suggesting that his ravishing wife may have taken a lover, who might have been involved in the machinations of the Lost Folio. He proves, in fact, to be a Duke, an officious snob until Holmes braces him with the incontrovertible reasoning leading to him. It is learned that it was indeed he, at the behest of the Don’s wife, who chose to underwrite the purchase of the Lost Folio, and that he was being blackmailed because of it.

    Holmes begins to consider the Don and his wife as having been more involved in the nefarious scheme surrounding the Folio, and the fine hand of Moriarty becomes evident.

    A trap is laid, then sprung.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBruce Briley
    Release dateAug 9, 2012
    ISBN9781938701153
    The Case of the Lost Folio
    Author

    Bruce Briley

    Dr. Briley has a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D from the University of Illinois. He has 4 children and 10 grandchildren, has been employed for many years at Bell Labs, Lucent and Motorola, and is now with the Illinois Institute of Technology where he was awarded the first Alva C. Todd Professorship. He holds 21 US patents and has authored 2 textbooks as well as numerous technical papers (not unlike the "monographs" Sherlock Holmes often mentions).He has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since he was first able to read his Adventures. Of late, however, he became unhappy over the films and TV series of a "modern" Sherlock epitomized by the "Elementary" series which savages the concept: Holmes and Watson are transported forward more than a hundred years, Watson is transmographied into an Asian female, and Holmes, while still a brilliant detective, is portrayed as a social buffoon similar to Monk.Though he has found such series very entertaining, he longed for some new tales of the traditional Sherlock in the Elizebethan era, resonating with the original image while fresh in scope.And so he penned 5 novels (and is planning a 6th) that strive to accomplish that:The first, "The Lost Folio", chases Holmes and Watson all over England, involves Moriarty and Lastrade, etc., responding to a kidnapping and murders in pursuit of Shakespeare's Lost Work, while encumbered by an impenetrable cipher.The second, "The Sow's Ear", takes them on a dangerous sea voyage to rescue a young lady lost in the labyrinth of China, and stumble upon a plot to destroy the Silk trade, involving murderous rogues, and multiple assassination attempts upon them.The third, "The Vatican Murder", finds Watson jailed on the Vatican grounds, indicted for the murder of an old school chum and subject to the strict laws of the soverign Vatican State. Holmes is helpful, but a tangled web endangers Watson when he is mistaken for Holmes on two occasions. Watson, when separated from his boon companion exhibits his ability to improvise, but is convicted of murder.The fourth, "The Royal Leper", finds Holmes and Watson charged by royal warrant to convey a member of the Royal Family diagnosed with Leprosy to secretly convey him half-way around the world to what would effectively be banishment to a Leper Colony on Molokai island in the Pacific Ocean. An abundance of adventures ensue, taking them to places they would not have dreamed of visiting. No other Sherlock Holmes mystery/adventure has ever been so extensive.The fifth, "Something Rotten in Denmark", engages Holmes and Watson in an investigation of a series of murders that have taken place in Kronborg Castle, near Copenhagen. (Krongborg was selected by Shakespeare as the model for the setting of Hamlet, and has played a vital role in the history of Denmark.) The baffling nature of the murders is that they follow the order of events in Shakespeare's Hamlet. A tangled set of clues and witness narratives compel the pair to perform extraordinarily."The Fifteen Hundred Word Curse", involves a modern-day man who discovers that he is the victim of a huge (and genuine) curse levied upon the Reivers of the Walk (a large and dangerous group peopling the Scottish-English border whose descendents include Custer, President Nixon and Neil Armstrong) by the Archbishop of Glasgow. He enlists the aid of an ecclesiastical lawyer/priest, an aged, experienced expert on exocism, and a youthful priest fresh from a seminary. He learns that a large collection of evil influences have been subtly causing inbreeding amongst the descendents to strengthen the power of the curse upon his unborn child. Terrible events transpire as the result of attempts to apply logic to lifting the curse. A surprise awaits at the story's end.

    Read more from Bruce Briley

    Related to The Case of the Lost Folio

    Titles in the series (5)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Fraternity of Dreamers

      Oct 9, 2020

      The anxiety that libraries can sometimes give me is of a cosmic nature, for something ineffable affects my sense of self when I realize that the majority of human interaction, expression, and creativity shall forever be unavailable to me. The post A

      16 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker

      Dec 17, 2019

      This year, I read in twos. Maybe this is always happening and I just started noticing. I also have a brain that’s unrepentantly hungry for patterns, so who knows. The post A Year in Reading: Daniel Levin Becker appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Roots Of Horror

      Aug 5, 2021

      The Roots Of Horror
      5 min read

    • Article

      Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story

      Aug 18, 2021

      Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page. The post Who’s There?: Every Story Is a

      16 min read

    • Article

      Intriguing And Diverse

      Jun 16, 2022

      Genius of the Fern Loved Gully Amy Hale Strange Attractor Press 2020 Pb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9781907222863 Ithell Colquhoun’s star is in the ascendant. Born in India in 1906, she lived a life amongst the Surrealists in the Thirties and early Forties, ha

      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kamil Ahsan

      Dec 21, 2018

      The majority of it was probably to offset the noise around me—but a not-insignificant minority was for inspiration, and for optimism. The post A Year in Reading: Kamil Ahsan appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

      Jul 14, 2017

      I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else. The post Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Author of The Octopus Museum in Conversation with Peter Mishler

      Mar 29, 2019

      Brenda Shaughnessy has written four poetry collections, including So Much Synth, Human Dark with Sugar—winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the NBCC Award—and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2

      4 min read

    • Article

      Hard to Get: Books That Resist You

      Jan 30, 2019

      1. Recently, for the fourth or fifth time in my life, I started trying to read James Salter‘s A Sport and a Pastime. I bought my copy many years ago, after falling in love with his story collections and enjoying Light Years, probably his best-known n

      6 min read

    • Article

      Rebekah Bergman

      Jun 14, 2023

      Rebekah Bergman
      4 min read

    • Article

      Remastering The Mythos: Questions For Ruthanna Emrys

      May 4, 2017

      When Ruthanna Emrys first read H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," her sympathies were squarely with the monsters — and that sympathy was the seed of her new book, Winter Tide.

      5 min read

    • Article

      B.J. Hollars Explores the Midwest’s Strangest Corners

      Aug 27, 2019

      Mysteries aren’t something to be solved, but something to be embraced. We don’t need to conquer; we just need to be curious. For me, that’s where the revelation lives—in the not-knowing. The post B.J. Hollars Explores the Midwest’s Strangest Corners

      10 min read

    • Article

      Saul Bellow and the Human Look

      Mar 1, 2022

      Saul Bellow and the Human Look
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Mark Slouka

      Dec 16, 2021

      When times get hard—and the news, I think it’s fair to say, has sucked of late—my reading, like everyone else’s, gets reactive. The post A Year in Reading: Mark Slouka appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year In Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

      Dec 18, 2021

      Simply put, Yoon Choi is the most ambitious and accomplished practitioner of the Chekhovian short story to appear in many years. The post A Year In Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg appeared first on The Millions.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Hearing Voices and Talking Back: On Bibliomancy

      Mar 29, 2018

      I. Bibliomancy is a form of divination in which one consults a book for answers and advice. The process is simple: Stand the book up on its spine. Ask your question. Let the book fall open to a random page. With your eyes closed, place your finger on

      7 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 2, 2023

      I’m not sure if I can truly pinpoint the moment my new novel Once A Monster was born – but I can trace the history of some of its most important ingredients. As a boy, looking through an old illustrated book of Greek myths, and being at once captiva

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Case of the Lost Folio

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Case of the Lost Folio - Bruce Briley

      Special Smashwords Edition

      THE CASE OF THE LOST FOLIO

      by

      Dr. Bruce E. Briley

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

      The Case Of The Lost Folio

      Special Smashwords Edition

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

      Copyright © 2012 Dr. Bruce E. Briley. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

      The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

      Cover Designed by Amanda Marie McGovern in collaboration with Telemachus Press, LLC

      Cover Art: Licensed to this purpose

      Published by Telemachus Press, LLC at Smashwords

      http://www.smashwords.com

      http://www.telemachuspress.com

      Visit the author website:

      http://www.drbruceebriley.com

      ISBN: 978-1-938701-15-3 (eBook)

      Version 2012.08.07

      Table of Contents

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS and THANKS

      FOREWORD

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      CHAPTER 3

      CHAPTER 4

      CHAPTER 5

      CHAPTER 6

      CHAPTER 7

      CHAPTER 8

      CHAPTER 9

      CHAPTER 10

      CHAPTER 11

      CHAPTER 12

      CHAPTER 13

      CHAPTER 14

      CHAPTER 15

      CHAPTER 16

      CHAPTER 17

      CHAPTER 18

      CHAPTER 19

      CHAPTER 20

      CHAPTER 21

      CHAPTER 22

      CHAPTER 23

      CHAPTER 24

      Other Books by Briley

      About the Author

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS and THANKS

      Grateful acknowledgement to the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. for permission to use the Sherlock Holmes characters created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

      Many thanks to Amanda Marie McGovern for her very able services in creating the covers for this series of books.

      I would like to thank the Telemachus Press Team assigned to my project for their Professional handling of these books (and their author). I would recommend them to anyone.

      FOREWORD

      It gives me great pleasure to see at last published this hitherto unknown adventure of the late Sherlock Holmes and my Great-Uncle, John H. Watson, M.D., who, readers may recall, saw service with Her Majesty’s Northumberland Fusiliers in the second campaign in Afghanistan, where he was wounded and subsequently pensioned.

      I scarcely know how to express my surprise—nay—astonishment, when I found this manuscript, written and carefully secreted by my Great Uncle for reasons that I will endeavour to make clear. It was while rummaging through the attic of my ancestral home in Darvey that I came across an old trunk in a dark, dank corner under the eaves. It was of leather—a design rarely seen these days because of the expense—which had mouldered so that the portion holding the hasp crumbled like tea toast as I attempted to open it. It was bedecked with once colourful travel stickers: the Grand Hotel, Tokyo, Japan; The New Yorker, New York, USA; The Hannesplaza Inn, Innsbruck, Switzerland, etc.

      My torch’s batteries were near exhausted, so I caught only a glimpse of the top-most contents: a physician’s black bag, the lapels of a carefully folded greatcoat of Victorian design, and several notebooks. I was electrified to realize that there had been no physician (to my knowledge) in my family since my Great Uncle.

      With considerable effort (and cost to the trunk, for it began to come apart as I dragged it over the rough and encumbered floor boards of the attic) I coaxed the trunk toward the portal and somehow down the narrow spiral of stairs to the top floor, where the misty November light from the windows allowed full view of my spoils. I was quickly rewarded by confirmation of my guess of ownership on the corroded but readable brass plate still affixed to the physician’s bag.

      Most of the trunk contained clothing obviously originally of good quality, but quite spoilt by the mildew and rot from dampness and time.

      The reader can imagine the blush of pleasure that flooded over me as I removed the stacks of hand-written notebooks bearing headings corresponding to the titles of the various adventures, celebrated in song and story ad nauseum, of Holmes and Watson. Clearly, these were the original manuscripts, written by my Great Uncle in a handwriting that varied from the neat, almost print-quality expected of a methodical physician, to the crabbed, barely legible script of an aged, arthritic hand, perhaps further impeded by poor vision.

      Either my Great Uncle had fallen on evil times in his dotage, or the parsimony that sometimes characterises the elderly had over-taken him, because the later-dated notebooks employed cross-writing, which, when combined with the same technique on the back-side of each page, and the diffusion of the ink through the paper front-to-back and back-to-front, yielded a result not unlike hieroglyphics without the benefit of a Rosetta Stone.

      The hair began to prickle on the back of my neck as I realised that there were several notebooks with titles that had never seen print.

      These, I assumed, were doubtless diaries of less-than-interesting events (surely even Holmes came a cropper on occasion); I was soon disabused of this assumption, however, as I delved into the unpublished accounts and became so engrossed that only as the light faded to the point where I could no longer see to read did I realise that I had sat cross-legged on the floor for more than six hours, and my legs had become so cramped by the lack of circulation that I could scarcely arise to put on a lamp. I then proceeded to read till morning, when my insistent bladder compelled me to cease for a time.

      My mind was spinning: Here were tales of adventures at least as remarkable as those that had made Holmes and his Boswell the toast of Victorian England, and eventually the world. Why then had they lay fallow all these years, denying the public of the pleasure of Holmes’ exploits? I was sorely puzzled until I discovered a purple ribbon that had virtually disintegrated, but had marked the edges of the notebooks with new titles such that it was clear that they had been bundled together. Welded, as it were, to a scrap of the ribbon was a cryptic note: These not to be published until 50 years after my death.

      But why had they been set aside in this manner? What embarrassment could be caused by them, and to whom? These questions were quickly answered upon reflection over what I had just been avidly perusing: people, important in the days of Holmes and my Great Uncle, would have been hurt, perhaps even brought down by revelation of these events.

      Now, of course, these persons are long dead, and my Great Uncle’s admonition has long since been satisfied. These stories can now be published, subject to the laws concerning after-death defamation in several countries!

      There is some question remaining concerning the disposition of the royalties which may be forthcoming, but such considerations are but secondary to the long overdue exposure to the world of these tales, stranger than fiction, and so wonderfully illustrative of the reasoning power of him who may well have been the greatest detective the world will ever know.

      The reader may well wonder why only one of the adventures is published within these covers. The answer is that it was the best preserved and most easily transcribed. I am already engaged in the attempt to decipher the next-most legible of the notebooks. It is difficult and painstaking work, but a labour of love.

      I should at this time say a few words about the notebook whose contents are in the reader’s hands:

      The title, The Lost Folio, confused me at first, thinking it referred to the fact that my Great Uncle was intentionally losing it. In actuality, it refers to the famous lost folio of Shakespeare, thought to have been lost in antiquity, or destroyed by the Great Fire of London, or whatever. I nonetheless prefer to think of it as a sample of the Lost Folio of Watson, biographer, friend, confidant, foil, and admirer of the late Sherlock Holmes.

      I take full responsibility for spelling and grammatical errors, because they would surely spring from my ineptitude in interpretation of the injured document rather than John’s pristine writing.

      JPW

      THE CASE OF THE LOST FOLIO

      CHAPTER 1

      My friend, Sherlock Holmes, and I had shared accommodations, broken bread, risked our lives and reasoned together (though I must confess that I was always the student in the latter category) for so long that we were, I think, able to sense each other’s moods. On the particular (and fateful) day that I mark as the beginning of the Case of the Lost Folio, Holmes had been acting in the nervous, agitated manner I had grown accustomed to associating with the calm before the storm—the brief period that could in hindsight be recognised as the prologue to an adventure. Though I was occasionally wrong in my assessments, on this cold, dull morning, at our Baker Street apartment, I was not.

      Holmes had been pacing up and down the room, puffing on his enormous Meerschaum as though he were intending to fumigate the room with the smoke of one of his most noxious blends of tobacco, when he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, and his

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1