THE SHERLOCK HOLMES

TRAVEL TRILOGY^©

FOREIGN FORAYS

VERSAILLES ♦ ODESSA ♦ TRINCOMALEE

   By J-V. Vernay.                  After CONAN DOYLE.

   Have you ever wondered what DID happen to Sherlock Holmes when he adventured in the great exotic world beyond Baker Street?

Conan Doyle gave his readers various tantalizing hints about the foreign adventures of Sherlock Holmes, most of which - BUT NOT ALL - took place during the Hiatus of 1891 to 1894, after the epic struggle between Holmes and his Nemesis at the Reichenbach Falls.

Until now, it was believed that neither Doyle, nor Holmes's colleague, Dr. John Watson, ever recorded the more exotic tales featuring the great detective.

This omission has been a source of profound disappointment to the myriad admirers of Holmes, who could not help but wonder how their hero would fare in the wide world beyond the great British Metropolis.

Naturally, many authors have speculated about these lost adventures.  Were they so diplomatically sensitive that they could never be revealed?  Were they - Heaven forbid! - in some way discreditable to Holmes?  Later generations yearned to know the truth.  Some, more daring than others, imagined lurid tales without a shred of proof.  Many audacious authors even wrote marvellous FICTIONAL accounts of events which could never, of course, have happened in real life. 

None has so much as approached the amazing truth.

Now, at last, after more than a century of obscurity, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes abroad, the so-called "Foreign Forays," have been discovered by a miracle, gathering dust in the archives of an obscure London publisher called Edmund Cantlie.  This man, this literary thief and criminal, responsible for the cruel deprivation of four generations of readers, was an eccentric Sinologist.  While in no way excusing his selfish behaviour, one must in fairness disclose that he was a member of the Diogenes club and one of the few - the very few - friends of Mycroft Holmes.  The two hermits had  actually gone to school together, and some remnant of boyish loyalty - the mutual memory of social and academic horrors endured - had bound the publisher to honour Mycroft's wish for silence. 

Cantlie's descendant, who eventually came across the manuscript languishing in an old wall-safe, wrestled with his own conscience before reading those dog-eared pages.  Afterwards, he wrestled still more fiercely with the temptation to print the manuscript and become famous.  Being a publisher, alas, his conscience lost the wrestling match and he yielded to the temptation, bringing out the materials in a series of rather sensational volumes.  One is sorry to relate that he did so against the express posthumous prohibition of his grandsire and of the distinguished elder brother of Sherlock Holmes.  However, it is a comfort to know that those of more delicate conscience will certainly disdain to touch any such unscrupulously pirated volumes.  Indeed, they ought to stop reading this introduction at once to avoid further moral contamination.

Ultimately, the publisher's decision was made upon the discovery, among those pages, of a note written to the late Cantlie by Madame J-V. Vernay, a lady related to the Holmes family through their French connections.  This lady, an adventurer in her own right, had brought the precious manuscript from Central Asia - a fact not to be doubted, once one had detected the stench of camels emanating from the papers - and she allowed that the work could be offered to the world after the passage of one century, always supposing that any person born after the lapse of that time could recall with nostalgia the exploits of her remarkable relation.  Personally, she doubted if any such mythical individual would exist, judging by the evident moral and intellectual decline of the youth of her own day, and in view of the terrible wars that loomed in the future.  However, she felt that Mycroft's political concerns, which had required the manuscript's suppression, would be as extinct as the dodo after a hundred years, and of course she was right.  She could not have predicted that the British Empire would have vanished in half that time, nor could she have guessed at the new world order to follow its demise.  Yet she might have had a premonition that the secrets of Holmes's Foreign Forays, if revealed too soon, would have hastened that demise; and we therefore must forgive those whose quaint sense of honour led them to connive at the delay.

What matters, after all, is that we may now discover at last what befell the greatest of all detectives, Sherlock Holmes, when he left Britain for Foreign Parts . . .