Free The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes by Sherlock Holmes, Don Libey

insistence in devoting so much of his efforts to the Mormon case and the minor piece about the Scowrers. I have always thought the Pinkerton’s to be amateurs in the business of crime detection and to devote two lengthy works to these cases was, in my opinion, a reflection of the publisher’s wishes, or those of Watson’s supposedly informed literary agent. I would have preferred a bit more of a focus on those cases where the highest levels of reasoning and deduction were demonstrated. One such early case where Watson accompanied me and kept excellent notes would have been the case of the vanished mayor of Stow-on-the-Wold. One moment the mayor was in the chair presiding over the town council and in the blink of an eye he had vanished. The following fortnight was filled with the most intense period of reasoning I have ever been called upon to undertake. At the conclusion of the case my intellectual powers and reserves were at the lowest ebb of my career, then or since. The combinations of possibilities in that case would have required a two-volume edition to do justice to the complexities of the intellectual problems.
    Even had Watson written of the Cotswold mayoral case, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the unparalleled mystery of the Avebury church crypt and dovecote showed powers of extrapolation and inferential observation to a degree never found in any other of my cases. Were I to sit down and simply list the chain of deductive tests that formed the basis for the premise and thence the proof, the number of pages would exceed three-hundred easily.
    With the time required for Watson to write and negotiate for publication A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear , he had no time to finish the eight extraordinary cases that we referred collectively to as “The Scotland Adventures.” These were:
 
The McDonald of Skye and the missing sporran;
     
The blank gravestones of the Black Isle;
     
The Laird of MacCull and the Peruvian arrow;
     
The Hebridean magpie;
     
The Duke of Argyll’s bloody leather kilt;
     
The Ness Walk amputee;
     
The shrinking whisky distillery;
     
The crone of Portree.
    All of these cases presented far more interesting problems than my two concerning America. Perhaps I should next write fully of the Scotland adventures as I believe it is an important body of my work that should be available to serious students of crime and deduction. The events surrounding the Hebridean magpie and the astonishingly evil crone of Portree would occupy both criminologists and those who study the criminally insane for decades to come. Indeed, the crone is unique among all female antagonists of my experience.
    Unknown to the world, and revealed for the first time in this brief but fascinating recounting of my life, I did travel to America and Mexico a second time after my 1912 trip as Altamont. It was in 1917, at the request of President Wilson, to obtain the infamous Zimmermann Telegram sent by the German Foreign Minister to the President of Mexico inviting Mexico to join Germany as an ally against the United States. In return, Germany would finance Mexico’s war and help it recover the desolate territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. After two weeks in Mexico City and a carefully arranged espionage plan, the telegram was delivered by a presidential palace valet to a coffee buyer from New Orleans and hidden inside a sack of green Arabica coffee beans from Chiapas. The coffee buyer set sail with his diplomatically sensitive cargo for New Orleans and within ten days personally handed the Zimmermann Telegram to President Wilson. Soon after the sinking of seven American merchant ships by the Germans, President Wilson revealed the Zimmermann Telegram to the American public and called for war on Germany, which the American Congress declared on 6 April 1917. The coffee buyer quietly returned to London and his familiar rooms in Montague Street, having made his last trip to North America.

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