The House of Silk

4. No walk-on appearances by famous people. The American writer, Nicholas Meyer put Holmes together with Freud in his 1974 novel, The Seven Percent Solution. Billy Wilder had Queen Victoria. I’ve heard that one Doyle pastiche even has Holmes meeting Hitler! But for me the power of the books is that they largely create a world of their own with very little reference to contemporary affairs. Holmes quotes Goethe, Flaubert, Petrarch, Poe and Winwood Reade but even his most august clients — The King of Scandinavia or Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, the Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein tend to be fictitious. This seemed to me to be a good rule so I followed it too.

5. No drugs — at least, none to be taken by Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes now has a reputation for being something of a cocaine fiend, it’s only in The Sign of Four that we meet him when he is actually taking the drug. I was very nervous of doing any post-modern take on Holmes and it struck me that to have him ravaged by cocaine would only detract from the story-telling. I knew that drugs would play a part in the story — I wanted to describe an opium den because Holmes had never actually visited one — but drug addiction was out.

6. Do the research. Try to get the details right. It’s unlikely that the Doyle estate knew this — or cared — but all my life I have read and enjoyed nineteenth century literature: Dickens, George Gissing, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith and so on. This made writing the book and finding my voice a lot easier. I also received a great deal of help from other sources — you’ll find them in the acknowledgements page. That said, I’m sure there are plenty of mistakes too… and will argue (when the time comes) that this is entirely in the spirit of Doyle who was himself occasionally slapdash. Watson’s wound, for example, moves from his arm to his leg. And most famously, in The Speckled Band, snakes cannot climb ropes!

7. Use the right language. It’s quite difficult to pastiche nineteenth century English in a way that won’t put off twenty-first century readers, particularly younger ones. I have to say that I plucked quite a few words out of the original stories to act as guideposts, to give the text a sense of authenticity. My favourites are: ‘snibbed’, ‘foeman’, ‘sickish’ (used by Lestrade) and ‘passementerie’. That said, the book is actually being written in around 1916 and I would imagine that by this time Watson’s own language and writing style would have become more modern.

8. Not too many murders. Again, this is a point that I’ve already made but it was a very important discipline to set out at the start. And actually, when I count up the bodies, it does rather looks as if I’ve failed.

9. Include all the best-known characters — but try and do so in a way that will surprise. Mrs Hudson is there, of course, as well as Lestrade, Mycroft and Wiggins. In each case, I added very little to what was known about them simply because it seemed to be taking liberties. I have, however, given Lestrade a Christian name… Doyle only every provided an initial. And of course, I had to have Moriarty in the book… that was obvious from the start. Even so, I shied away from making him the main villain. It’s odd that a character who is only mentioned in about three of the Sherlock Holmes stories and who only appears in one should have had such a huge impact on crime fiction. Perhaps it has something to do with his name? I loved including him in Chapter 14 and although I have no plans to write a second Sherlock Holmes novel, I have a suspicion that the two of us will meet again…

10. Rule number ten was the most important rule of all and as I am writing this in August, before the publication of The House of Silk, I don’t yet know if Orion will have twisted my arm and made me break it (the rule, not my arm). It was this. When publicising the book, never, ever be seen wearing a deerstalker hat or smoking a pipe. I actually asked my agent to put this into the contract.

By the time you read this, I will know if The House of Silk has been a success or not. All I can say is that I have never written a book with more pleasure nor been more pleased with the result. This essay appears, I believe, in the ebook. Doyle, who was always a man ahead of his time, would have had no trouble with it but personally I find it hard to believe. No paper, no cover, no back cover blurb? But then I always was oldfashioned. The nineteenth century is where I most like to be.

Anthony Horowitz

August, 2011, Crete

Ten Fiendishly Difficult Questions about Sherlock Holmes

1. Who wrote ‘Dynamics of an Asteroid’?

2. What was Victor Hatherley’s profession and which part of his body did he lose?

3. What do the killers in The Speckled Band, The Lion’s Mane and Silver Blaze all have in common?

4. What was Mary Watson’s maiden name?

5. What links The Greek Interpreter, The Final Problem, The Empty House and The Bruce-Partington Plans?

6. Why is The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone unique?

7. Napoleons plus students plus gables plus orange pips equals what?

8. What relevance does the answer to Question Seven have to 221B Baker Street?

9. Who was ‘the second most dangerous man in London’?

10. Name the odd one out: Inspector Lestrade, Wiggins, Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson.

Answers

1. Professor Moriarty.

2. He was an engineer. He lost his thumb. (The Engineer’s Thumb)

3. They were all animals.

4. Mary Morstan.

5. Stories in which Mycroft Holmes appears or gets a mention.

6. It’s the only Holmes story told in the third person.

7. 17. (The Six Napoleons, The Three Students, The Three Gables, The Five Orange Pips).

8. There were seventeen steps to Holmes’s rooms.

9. Colonel Sebastian Moran (The Empty House).

10. Dr John Watson. The others have no Christian names.

Copyright

AN ORION EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Orion Books.

This ebook first published in 2011 by Orion Books.

Copyright © Anthony Horowitz 2011

The right of Anthony Horowitz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.