The Ectoplasmic Man

TITAN BOOKS

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN

ISBN: 9781848569041

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: October 2009

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Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 1985, 2009 Daniel Stashower.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed in the USA.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD

David Stuart Davies

ISBN: 9781848564930

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

THE VEILED DETECTIVE

David Stuart Davies

ISBN: 9781848564909

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Manly Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman

ISBN: 9781848564916

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

THE MAN FROM HELL

Barrie Roberts

ISBN: 9781848565081

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

THE STALWART COMPANIONS

H. Paul Jeffers

ISBN: 9781848565098

For David
and
Sally

The author wishes to thank the following people for their invaluable help and guidance: Evan and Anne Thomas, Doug Stumpf, Peter Shepherd, Frank MacShane and the Tuesday Club, Stephen Koch, Joseph Epstein, Jon Appleton, Lillian Zevin, Nicholas Meyer, The Book Ranger, Richard Ruhlman, Marta Panajoth, Sara Stashower, Rachel Weintraub, Fred and Hildegarde, Emily, The John Beach family and especially its Manhattan satellite, Chip Tucker, Harold the green pig, Jack Berman and Miss Ellen O’Neill Beach.

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editor’s Foreword

Author’s Foreword

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Ninteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Epilogue

I
was not the one who discovered the note from John H. Watson to Bess Houdini, but I was the first to recognise that John H. Watson was not the John Watson from Nebraska, who juggled meat hooks, but the famous
Dr
John H. Watson, biographer and companion of Sherlock Holmes.

It happened shortly after the death of Al Grasso, when we members of the New York City Society of American Magicians began sorting through the accumulated clutter in his shop, The Grasso-Hornmann Magic Company. Grasso’s was — and is — New York’s most peculiar landmark. It is the oldest magic store in America, and the spiritual birthplace of many of our greatest magicians. In almost any other magic store in the country you’ll find the magic enclosed in glass cases. Not so at Grasso’s. At Grasso’s you dive into the tricks as you would a pile of leaves. It’s not so much a store as a museum, a dim warehouse on the second floor of an old office building, where printed silks and tasselled wands and huge metal hoops are all jumbled together and randomly stuffed into boxes and onto shelves. The place is full of magic books and pamphlets, some of them
very rare, none of them in any kind of order. In one corner is a scarred leather-top desk where Al Grasso kept his records, such as they were, and hanging above it there are more than one hundred sepia photographs of the great vaudeville magicians. And when the sun is shining in through the back window, you can catch a glimpse of some huge stage illusion among the stacks of packing crates — the corner of The Mummy’s Asrah, or the golden tail of The Chinese Dragon — relics of the great full-evening magic shows of the 1920s and ’30s.

It’s a wonder that anybody ever found anything of use in all that dust and clutter, but every year thousands of magicians would come — beginners and professionals — and each of them would uncover the one book, trick, or memento which he had always wanted and had never been able to find.

Straightening the place out, then, even with the best of intentions was a sad, almost blasphemous task. We took our slow and deferential time about it, allowing the older members time to pause over each piece of memorabilia and tell stories of the old days. Working in this fashion, we did not begin excavating Al Grasso’s desk until the third afternoon, and in the process uncovered a brittle, coffee-stained manila envelope marked “Return to Bess Houdini.”

It was like hearing sleigh bells on Christmas Eve. We all knew that Al Grasso had been a close friend of Mrs Houdini. We also knew that sometime during the First World War Grasso’s, then called Martinka’s, had been owned by Harry Houdini. But most of us regarded Houdini as something of a mythical figure, and it just didn’t seem possible that we could be holding an envelope, an envelope with coffee stains on it, meant to be given to his wife. Maybe it was something that had belonged to Houdini, we thought. Maybe it was the plans to an escape. The whole group of us, about seven that afternoon, stared at the envelope for about five minutes before someone finally dumped the
contents out onto the newly cleared desktop.

The first item we examined did a lot to dispel our reverence. It was a photograph of Houdini and a friend, in which the great magician, unaware he was being photographed full length, was standing on his toes to appear taller than the other man. The Great Houdini was embarrassed about his height!

There were more pictures in the envelope, mostly of Houdini and other, shorter magicians. And there were letters to and from Houdini concerning the sale of Martinka’s. And finally, there was a small piece of yellowed notepaper which had fallen to the floor and went unnoticed until Matt the Mindreader picked it up, read it, said, “Huh! The meat hook man!” and passed it to me. The note read:

For the second time that day I felt the thrill of discovering a tangible link to one of my idols, and even more astonishingly, evidence that Sherlock Holmes and Harry Houdini had actually met! No sooner had I considered
this possibility than an even more incredible one occurred to me: perhaps somewhere in the store lay an unpublished Watson manuscript!

As I recall it, I explained this possibility to my friends in my usual measured, sonorous tones. They insist I shouted like a madman. Either way, we began a frantic, reckless search for the manuscript in the darkest recesses of Grasso’s. All the while I tried not to think of how slim the chances of finding it were. Even if Watson’s manuscript had arrived at Martinka’s, it would almost surely have been forwarded, discarded, or lost forever in the jumble that became Grasso’s. But at that moment we were all too caught up in the search to worry about any of that. We must have looked like the Keystone Kops, diving into stacks of papers, dumping out cartons of documents, and rifling through the files; not missing a trick, as it were. Manuscripts were uncovered and hastily scanned, only to be revealed as treatises on dove vanishing or coin manipulation. Then, miraculously, after only twenty minutes or so, we found Dr Watson’s manuscript. It had been serving as a shim under the unsteady leg of a goldfish vanish table. Ignominious as this may seem, it probably saved the manuscript from being thrown out.

The bundle was in fairly good condition, apart from the sinkhole where the table leg had rested. The first few pages were on the point of crumbling and the last few were stained with oil or grease, but all of it was legible. I know this because I immediately sat down and read straight through while my friends tried to repair the damage done by our search. If possible, Grasso’s was now even more disordered than when we began cleaning it three days before, and we then abandoned all hope of restoring it to order; but I had an original, unpublished Sherlock Holmes story.

That’s where my troubles really began. If discovering a Watson manuscript seemed unlikely, convincing the world of the discovery
bordered on the impossible. I faced an army of disbelievers. To begin with, the sceptics said the writing was not Watson’s; but surely he would not, at the age of seventy-five, have made his own longhand copies. Then there were those who doubted that he would have gone to the trouble of writing the story merely to cheer up Mrs Houdini. I can only answer that that is exactly the sort of man he was. Furthermore, in 1927 Watson had no real need of money and would have been able to pursue whatever writing appealed to him.

Though this case is unique among Holmes adventures, it was not the first time that Watson kept a completed story under wraps for reasons of discretion. His chief concern would have been to avoid embarrassing the august person involved in the episode. Whatever his reasons, Watson succumbed to viral pneumonia within two years of his note to Mrs Houdini. Surely Holmes took no interest in the project, so any hope of the story coming to light died with Watson.

No sooner were these objections answered than new ones were raised. Some people even went so far as to accuse me of having written the story myself, despite my assurances that I am an untalented boor. Then there was that contemptible faction that insists that Sherlock Holmes existed only in the mind of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They are a spurious lot, surely, but they comprise a large faction in the publishing industry and therefore could not be ignored. Finally, after many months of effort, I was able to convince William Morrow and Company, a sympathetic publishing house, that, however dubious the origin of the manuscript might be, it was still a damn good story. I leave it to the reader to make the final judgement. I myself have no doubts, and I assure the reader that the most fantastic assertions and events herein are the most easily verified. The episode related by Bess Houdini in Chapter Three is retold by Milbourne Christopher in his biography,
Houdini: The Untold Story.
The escape introduced by Houdini in the Epilogue became a standard feature in his stage show; and he recreated the amazing stunt
described in the nineteenth chapter in the movie
The Grim Game.