The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes by June Thomson

Gounod’s Faust at his Canterbury music-hall on the night before its première. (Dr John F. Watson)
    * The quotation is taken from the Odes of Horace and may be literally translated as follows: ‘The span of our short life forbids us to embark on lasting hopes.’ (Dr John F. Watson)
    * The Empire music-hall was situated in Leicester Square and was the haunt of notorious ladies of the town who paraded its promenade, known as the Empire Gallery. After protests from a certain Mrs Ormiston Chant, the management erected screens between the gallery and the auditorium which were torn down by a group of counter-protesters, objecting to what they termed ‘Prudes on the Prowl’, amongst whom was the then Mr Winston Churchill. The Empire was closed on 21st January 1927, after the final performance of Lady Be Good which starred Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele. (Dr John H. Watson)
    * This case, published in 1887 under the title of ‘A Study in Scarlet’, was the first investigation in which Dr John H. Watson assisted Mr Sherlock Holmes. (Dr John F. Watson)
    * Mr Sherlock Holmes expressed a very similar idea in a slightly different form in ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’ in which he states: ‘It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ (Dr John F. Watson)
    * Dr John H. Watson kept his word and refrained from publishing an account of the case although he makes a passing reference to it in ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’. However, Mademoiselle Marguerite Rossignol is not named and he refers instead to Vigor, the Hammersmith Wonder, who is listed, among others, under the letter ‘V’ in Mr Sherlock Holmes’ encyclopaedia of reference. (Dr John F. Watson)

THE CASE OF THE MAPLESTEAD MAGPIE
    Although the year ’95 was an exceedingly busy period for Sherlock Holmes with such investigations as the tragedy of Woodman’s Lee * and the case of Wilson, the notorious canary trainer, † engaging his attention, it was one particular inquiry, never brought entirely to a successful conclusion, which occupied much of my old friend’s time and energy in the late summer and early autumn. It concerned a series of burglaries at country houses during which priceless family heirlooms were stolen by an exceedingly clever master-thief, who called himself Vanderbilt, and his accomplice, a professional safe-breaker, known among the criminal fraternity as a yeggman. †
    Holmes had tracked the two villains down and arranged for their arrest by Inspector Gow of the Kent County Constabulary at the residence of a potential victim, where they were caught red-handed while attempting yet another burglary. However, he would not allow me to publish an account of the adventure in case it came to the attention of the man who had organised the thefts and whom Vanderbilt had refused to identify. Because of this unknown individual’s obsession with collecting rare works of art, Holmes gave him the sobriquet of The Magpie. The Magpie had promised, should Vanderbilt bearrested, that a large sum of money would be waiting for him on his release from prison provided that his own name was not revealed.
    It would not be an exaggeration to state that, in the months following Vanderbilt’s arrest in June ’95, Holmes himself became obsessed with the identity of The Magpie. Even while he was still engaged in hunting down Vanderbilt and his yeggman, he had already built up a mental dossier of the man and was convinced that he must be exceedingly wealthy but eccentric, with some shameful secret surrounding his birth or antecedents which persuaded him to collect these objets de vertu, once owned by eminent individuals, in order to compensate for his own lack of a distinguished pedigree.
    Indeed, The Magpie had become so real to him that my old friend, not generally given to imaginative speculation, preferring facts to fancy, had gone to the length of picturing him