AVAILABLE NOW FROM TITAN BOOKS
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES:
THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN
Daniel Stashower
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
Manley Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman
THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD
David Stuart Davies
THE STALWART COMPANIONS
H. Paul Jeffers
THE VEILED DETECTIVE
David Stuart Davies
THE MAN FROM HELL
Barrie Roberts
SEANCE FOR A VAMPIRE
Fred Saberhagen
THE SEVENTH BULLET
Daniel D. Victor
THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS
Edward B. Hanna
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES
Loren D. Estleman
THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA
Richard L. Boyer
THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA
Sam Siciliano
THE PEERLESS PEER
Philip Jose Farmer
THE STAR OF INDIA
Carole Bugge
THE WEB WEAVER
Sam Siciliano
SHERLOCK
HOLMES
THE TITANIC TRAGEDY
WILLIAM SEIL
TITAN BOOKS
This book is dedicated to my mother
and the memory of my father
THE EVENING OF TUESDAY 9 APRIL 1912
In the spring of 1912, at the age of sixty, I was leading a solitary life in rooms in Piccadilly. While continuing to see a few regular patients, I had, for the most part, ended my medical practice. My working time was now devoted almost entirely to writing historical novels. This turn in my writing career had come as quite a surprise — and I must say, disappointment — to my publisher, who would have preferred that I did nothing but record past adventures of my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes. As a favour to him, and many loyal readers, I occasionally sifted through old notes on Holmes’s cases and produced a new manuscript. But I also was respectful of Holmes’s desire for solitude and anonymity.
Holmes had long since retired from his illustrious career as a detective and was now living on a smallholding on the South Downs. He rarely came to the city, but several times a year I would travel to his country retreat and inform him of whatever news I had heard about recent criminal investigations. I often called at Scotland Yard to see young Inspector Wiggins, who provided me with detailed accounts of current cases. There were times too when Wiggins, baffled by a particularly complex case, would travel to Sussex to consult his old mentor.
My visits to Holmes seldom involved talking over old times. He had little patience with nostalgia. Whenever my conversation wandered to decades-old memories of past cases, he would rise from his chair and draw me over to one of the many scientific projects that were in progress in and around his home. I was always reluctant to visit the beehives he kept in his orchard, even when I was fully covered by protective clothing. But I was fascinated by his promising work in the scientific analysis of crime evidence. I recall one day in particular when we travelled to a local inn to purchase drinking mugs — that is, unwashed drinking mugs, taken right off the bar. After giving the landlord a generous payment, Holmes gathered up the mugs with a gloved hand and packed them into a box. At home, he applied various dry chemical mixtures to the glass, hoping to develop a method of bringing out detail in smudged fingerprints.
I thought about Holmes as I sat at my dining room table late one night, researching the early battles of the Boer War. Outside, the wind howled and heavy rains rattled against the windows. I had just put another log on the fire, and it was engulfed in crackling flames. I welcomed these sounds. My rooms had been much too quiet since the death of my wife six months earlier. I thought back to other stormy nights at Baker Street, when there would be a knock on the door, and a rain-soaked stranger, speaking to us in frightened, confused or demanding tones, would
