Baker Street

We'll find the answer to that together with Sherlock Holmes when I return with Act Three.

I'm not in the travel business, but I was struck with the notion that perhaps England would find it profitable to offer a Sherlock Holmes tour, one that would include visits not only to his famous headquarters at Baker Street, but would include visits to all of the places where he and Dr. Watson worked their particular brand of detection.

Now, if we can imagine ourselves on one of these tours...

Then we'd find ourselves in the west of England at a pool in the Bascom Valley.

Alexander Turner died less than a month after he'd given us his confession in the inn at Hereford.

With Holmes feeding young McCarthy's counsel ammunition with which to shoot down the case for the prosecution, and with the young man revealing the reason for his Bristol visit, he won an acquittal.

That very night, Holmes and I sat before a fire in our Baker Street flat...

Watching Turner's confession turn to cinders in the

I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial.

I therefore spent the day at my club and did not return to Baker Street until evening.

It was nearly nine o'clock when I found myself in the sitting room once more.

My first impression as I opened the door was that a fire had broken out, for the room was so filled with smoke that the light of the lamp upon the table was blurred by it.

The odds are enormously against your finding it.

There are ten shillings over in case of emergencies.

Let me have a report by wire at Baker Street before evening.

And now, Watson-

I have never known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year ninety-five.

His increasing fame had brought with it an immense practice, and I should be guilty of an indiscretion if I were even to hint at the identity of some of the illustrious clients who crossed our humble threshold in Baker Street.

Holmes, however, like all great artists, lived for his art's sake, and save in the case of the Duke of Holdernesse, I have seldom known him claim any large reward for his inestimable services.

So unworldly was he, or so capricious, that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.

What then is the alternative? The line of investigation which I have myself been pursuing.

It may give us nothing, I cannot tell, but at least I shall follow it to the end.

Several letters were waiting for Holmes at Baker Street.

He snatched one of them, opened it, and burst out into a triumphant chuckle of laughter.

I think, Watson, you and I will drive together to the Russian Embassy.

End of the Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter We were fairly accustomed to receive weird telegrams at Baker Street, but I have a particular recollection of one which reached us on a gloomy February morning some seven or eight years ago, and gave Mr. Sherlock Holmes a puzzled quarter of an hour.

It was addressed to him, and ran thus.

Please await me.

To the scientific student of the higher criminal world, no capital in Europe offered the advantage which London then possessed.

But now..." He shrugged his shoulders in humorous depreciation of the state of things which he had himself done so much to produce.

At the time of which I speak, Holmes had been back for some months, and I, at his request, had sold my practice and returned to share the old quarters in Baker Street.

A young doctor named Verner had purchased my small Kensington practice, and given with astonishingly little demur the highest price that I ventured to ask, an incident which only explained itself some years later when I found that Verner was a distant relation of Holmes, and that it was my friend who had really found the money.

towards the close of November, 1894.

Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, outside the wind howled down Baker Street, as the rain beat fiercely against the windows.

On such a night, we were not at all pleased to hear a cab draw up at our door and a ring at the bell.

Ah, come in, Hopkins.

She had shot herself in the breast.

With her dying breath, she charged him with seeing that the little packet of letters and the diary should be given to the Russian embassy in London, which in due course they were.

And as we travelled back to Baker Street that night, Holmes at last condescended to explain how the mystery had been solved.

A simple case, yet in some ways an instructive one.

That's what you promised us, Doctor.

How did it begin? On a windy morning in October, in the 1890s it was, as I was dressing, I observed how the last remaining leaves were being whirled away from the solitary plane tree which graced the yard behind our Baker Street house.

I descended to breakfast, prepared to find my companion in depressed spirits, for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings.

But...

This, uh, rather gaudy relationship was of little value to him when we were at school [laughs], I can assure you.

However, the letter seemed to be very urgent, so I hurried around to Baker Street.

I found Holmes in his dressing gown, plunged in the middle of a chemical investigation.

A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner.

Stop fussing.

He'll be all right.

I sent him on to Baker Street.

With any luck, we should be there ourselves in time to have breakfast with him.

I confess too that I was irritated by the egotism which seemed to demand that every line of my pamphlet should be devoted to his own special doings.

More than once during the years that I had lived with him in Baker Street, I had observed that a small vanity underlay my companion's quiet and didactic manner.

I made no remark, however, but sat nursing my wounded leg.

I had a Jezail bullet through it some time before, and though it did not prevent me from walking, it ached wearily at every change of the weather.

This Librivox recording is in the public domain.

Recording by Ashley Jane.

Chapter 8: The Baker Street Irregulars.

"What now?" I asked.