There wasn’t supposed to be a third book. I mean, a second Sherlock Holmes book made sense, because I had already written it, lo these many years ago, as a screenplay. So my second book actually inspired my first one. that was alright. That was cool.
And no, my third book didn’t follow from my second, but from my first book. But not as that book was originally written. Have I confused you enough? Let me explain.
Skirting spoilers, one of the elements that went into my first book, The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle–besides Sherlock Holmes and Shaw’s Pygmalion—was another book, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And as in Stevenson’s tale, the first iteration of my novel ended with a long-written post-mortem “confession” written by the villain.
It was …kind of clunky. And one of my beta readers nailed me on it. She didn’t want to hear a litany of excuses from a bad’un. And they were, inevitably excuses. My villain did not repent of his sins.
I knew she was right. My novel needed a new ending. A new angle. I needed to show how Holmes and Watson had been affected by the singular events that had I had chronicled. Not only their uncanny encounter with Professor Higgins and Mr. Hyde, but the Great War which had nearly laid waste an entire generation of young Englishmen, as well as the pandemic which swiftly followed. How would it have affected them?
I needed to look no further than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Now, to forestall future objections from Doyle’s many fans, it’s true that the creator of the world’s most rational detective had always been interested in spiritualism. But it was after the war, when he lost both his brother and his son to the raging epidemic of influenza which swept the globe, killing fifty million people, that he became the apostle of spiritualism to a world aching for his message of comfort. There was no death, only a transition to the other side. The dear departed were anxious to contact the bereaved.
So I gave Holmes a transfusion, and Doyle was the blood donor. I made Doyle’s conversion on the road to Damascus Holmes’s. The confession still exists in my book, but Holmes never reads it; he throws it onto the fire without looking at it. He can sense the evil radiating from it. He already knows what’s in it. (And the reader can fill in the blanks from clues I’ve provided.) It is, I think, a much better ending. There was only one problem: too much research.
Not “oh, no, this is too much research!” I love research. Rather I did too much research. Because I came upon a fascinating tidbit: the whole “curse of King Tut” story was largely created and promulgated by one man—spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle. On April 5, 1923, Lord Carnarvon, who had financed the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, died of blood poisoning. Interviewed by the papers the very next day, Doyle laid the blame squarely on elementals stirred to life and vengeance by the sacrilege of invading the tomb. The papers, eager for any mention of Tut, had a field day with it.
So I thought: what if spiritualist Sherlock Holmes was responsible for the Curse of King Tut legend? And what if he was challenged by Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn, to prove it? To investigate not only the death of her father, but that of her uncle and an Egyptian prince and an American millionaire, all deaths laid to the curse? To travel to Luxor and face Tutankhamun?
Sigh. The temptation was too great. There had to be a third book. The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart.
Timothy Miller is a native of Louisiana, a graduate of Loyola University in New Orleans. He has three Sherlock Holmes novels under his belt: The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle, The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter, and The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart. He tended bar for twenty-five years everywhere from Bourbon St. in New Orleans to Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. When not mourning over his beloved New Orleans Saints, he is mourning over his beloved Chicago Cubs. His favorite superhero is Underdog.
