Showing results by author "Orlando Pearson" in All Categories

Orlando Pearson, master narrator of history and Holmestry, has done it again.

Holmes and Watson at the darkest place on earth in April 1945.

Orlando Pearson, Dr. Watson's successor as the assistant to Sherlock Holmes, was entrusted by the doctor with notes on cases too controversial to publish during Holmes's career. The three complete stories in this volume were withheld respectively due to the threat they posed to national security, the disclosure of a scandal in a foreign Royal family, and the exposure of excessively close links between Government ministers and industry.

It has taken over 80 years, but at long last, the British government’s embargo on reporting this slice of diplomatic history has been lifted. It was in November 1940 that a senior minister at the British foreign office in blacked-out London commissioned Holmes and Watson to go to Berlin to negotiate a prisoner of war swap with the German high command. And the price demanded by Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Göbbels, for any prisoner's release? That the two work with the Berlin police to capture a serial killer who is stalking the city’s railway network.

Sir Joseph Porter was first lord of the Admiralty in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore which was a thinly veiled parody of WH Smith, British politician extraordinaire who first held that role and then ascended to the post of first lord of the Treasury. And an astounding revelation about Sherlock Holmes as we make a discovery this is both entirely unfamiliar and entirely familiar.

In the early days of their collaboration, Dr Watson assessed Sherlock Holmes’s knowledge of chemistry as profound. It is thus hardly surprising that German chemist and future noble prize winner, Fritz Haber, should approach the Great Baker Street detective, for help on a new and transformative industrial process that he is trying to make viable. But, as the first World War breaks out, was there more to the process than met the eye?

Orlando Pearson mixes the Great Baker Street detective with history both familiar and unfamiliar to deliver his customary heady brew of Holmesiana.

Two kings, a model, a traitor, two wombats, two poets, an accountant, more lobbyists than you can count, three titans of business, two artists, a pawnbroker…and Sherlock Holmes.

Unearthed after being lost for nearly a century, at last the memoirs of Mycroft Holmes are available to the general public. In this volume we see what it is when one extraordinarily talented person is the British Government as Mycroft Holmes applies his skills in statecraft to tax evasion, royal honors, Partygate, the 1918 Armistice, and the Abdication crisis of 1936.

Volume III of The Redacted Sherlock Holmes presents six more scintillating stories from the pen of Orlando Pearson about the great Baker Street detective.

Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and Inspector Gregson, long out of touch with Sherlock Holmes, meet the great detective on 28 June 1914, the day of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The Germans have introduced a new code and it has baffled the British secret service. As international tensions increase and more messages in the new code are intercepted, the urgency to decrypt mounts, but Holmes is preoccupied with the events that form the narrative of His Last Bow.

Volume II of the Redacted Sherlock Holmes presents more stories manifestly too scandalous to publish in the lifetime of the great Baker Street detective.

Holmes is petitioned by the groom of the Bedlam lunatic asylum to investigate a couple who have appeared at his stables. And after the notorious winter of 1894-5, the politician Mr. Lawler, previously encountered in The Minister and the Moguls, gives Holmes a commission to investigate whether the climate is changing and whether industrialization is the cause.

In May 1941, Hitler's Deputy, Rudolf Heβ flew solo to Great Britain. The reason for his flight remained a mystery throughout the rest of the War as he brought no new peace proposals, provided no new insight into Hitler's plans, and did not claim political asylum. In May 1945 and with the war almost at an end, the British Government must decide whether to send the frequently overwrought Heβ back to Germany to face trial on war crimes charges.

Five more sizzlingly scandalous Sherlock Holmes stories from the pen of Orlando Pearson. Mr. Pearson mixes the canon with elite sport, business high jinks, a musical mystery, a literary mystery, Realpolitik, and in "The Hounding of Peer Baskerville" rolls the most famous of all detective stories on 20 years. A must for traditionalists, lovers of mystery, and anyone who likes a rattling good listen.

It is 1909, and 20 years have passed since the great Devon adventure. Holmes is consulted by Sir Henry Baskerville’s son after a shepherd in the baronet’s clothes is found dead at the foot of a cliff. Watson is dispatched to Dartmoor to investigate and finds that the publication of his novel - controversial at the time because of the inadequacies it exposed in Holmes’s handling of the original case - has had some wholly unexpected consequences for the members of the dramatis personae of the original story.

It is the last night before Watson’s second wedding. Holmes tells Watson of his utter vanquishment by an adversary he never met in a tale set in 1880s Germany and featuring Goethe, Beethoven, Karl Benz, and Bertha Benz. By the end of this story, the listener would have found out about Holmes’ role in the invention of the motor car, powered flight, and the mobile phone, as well as his involvement in the discovery of a 10th symphony of Beethoven.

The King of Nova Alba approaches Sherlock Holmes. The current king’s predecessor on the Nova Alban throne, King Duncan, came to a violent end, and Holmes' petitioner is the prime suspect. He wants Sherlock Holmes to find the true killer. There is many a twist in a familiar tale, before Holmes reveals the utterly unexpected truth. Two years after Delos' publication of the story version of "A Scandal in Nova Alba", here it is at last as a stage-play.

Why is Ignatius Foley, member of parliament for Perth, so anxious to retrieve some administrative documents that have fallen out of his pocket at his fiancée’s house? His betrothed, Jean Leckie, wants to find out. And what has happened in Bulgaria that makes Mycroft so anxious to dispatch his brother there with promises of major honors for successful prosecution of the investigation? A case set in 1907 and with no parallels whatsoever to more recent events.

Gottlieb von Cramm, a German tennis star of the 1930s, petitions Holmes for help. The sportsman is being blackmailed on a matter of the utmost delicacy, and when the blackmailer reveals all to the National Socialist authorities, it is Holmes who comes to the rescue by asking Reichsmarschall, Herman Göring to intervene. But is the better than expected outcome to the case a result of Holmes’ intervention, or is Cramm’s glamourous mother keeping her own role to herself? And why does Frau von Cramm’s seem so familiar to Holmes?