MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

As happens to people with extreme sensitivity, Sherlock Holmes suffered periodic accesses of melancholy. This morbid state could last several weeks. My friend then locked himself in his room completely in the dark and refused to receive anyone other than Queen Victoria or someone who looked like Her. I had to talk to him through the closed door of his room and Mrs. Hudson was forced to pass his meal under the door, which meant reducing his food to very thin slices of ham and cheese. As for the intake of liquids, the only thing we could do was spill buckets of water in the hope that it formed puddles on the other side of the door so Holmes could slurp them through a straw. However, this diet seemed to me insufficient, so one day I showed myself up at home with a fruit capable of providing both solid and liquid food. "How do you plan to pass a coconut under the door?" objected Mrs. Hudson, who was a very nit-picking woman. In my youth I had played rugby and had an enviable a...

Sherlock Holmes provided numerous services to Queen Victoria. On one occasion he held her handbag while she knocked out a tribal chief from one of the virgin territories of her vast empire. On another occasion, Holmes had the honor of being knocked out by the Queen while the tribal chief held her handbag. On another occasion it was the tribal chief who knocked out the Queen while Holmes held his spear. During this unfortunate episode, the Queen's handbag disappeared and Holmes was entrusted with the task of recovering it. With Australia being an entire continent, the task of finding the handbag could have been titanic. However, Holmes' canine sense of smell greatly facilitated things. Indeed, Queen Victoria gave off a very characteristic smell, the effect of a perfume that a Birmingham perfumer made exclusively for her. Holmes rightly deduced that her handbag would emit the same smell, so he requested that he be allowed to sniff the Queen. An urgent meeting of the Ministers of...

One day, at midnight we received a notification from Inspector Lestrade, who required our immediate presence in a certain number of the Strand, near Temple Bar. Holmes was so eager to take action that I was not able to convince him to take our time to dress, so Lestrade was puzzled when he saw us appear in night shirt and night cap. However, the case in front of him was too complex to give relevance to such a trivial thing. Indeed, in the middle of a room no larger than the Royal Albert Hall lay a paleontologist in the middle of a large pool of ink. "What has happened?" I asked Lestrade as Holmes took out his large round magnifying glass and began to trot around the corpse with the trunk very tilted forward to approximate the magnifying glass as much as possible to its target. “You tell me” was the answer of Lestrade, whose expression was so remarkably baffled that I felt seriously troubled at his appearance. "The body has no apparent signs of violence except for that ...

Sherlock Holmes's brain needed to be permanently busy, otherwise it would gargle. The noise made by a brain gargling is one of the most painful things to hear, perhaps only comparable to the noise made by two members of parliament when they are crushed against each other. If this noise is accompanied by the continuous turning of the eye pupils and a convulsive movement of the whole body similar to that of a “rumba” dancer, you will understand that I, Dr John Watson, decided to invent a case only for appease my friend's fasting brain. Who would have thought that what began as a purely invented case would eventually lead to the neutralization of an imminent attack on Queen Victoria herself. But let's take it bit by bit. One morning my friend Holmes received a letter that I had written using the automatic writing system. That is: taking care to forge the handwriting, I had let my hand write at will without me being aware of the words I was producing. The result was as follow...