The Man with the Hairy Face

Dr. Watson was the chronicler of every Sherlock Holmes adventure published in The Strand magazine between 1887 and 1927. He reported them with honesty in the bluff, army-style of a military doctor, so frank in their account of human behaviour that they were too risqué for the morals of Victorian England. George Newnes, the editor, purged each story before its publication. Newnes also replaced Watson’s jocular illustrations with Sidney Paget’s more innocuous portrayals.

Newnes deleted everybody’s backgrounds but in these accounts Watson reveals Holmes’s family: his father, Professor Julian Cornelius Bortzoy Holmes; his wife, Wendy; his sister, Rachel, as well as Mycroft. Watson also exposes Mrs. Hudson’s property empire and he tells us how Professor Moriarty became “the Napoleon of crime.” Some of this new material is shocking, even by today’s standards!

These unexpurgated stories are new, exciting and funny – even Holmes’s deerstalker has a story behind it. They are for lovers of Sherlock Holmes and a new audience who have experienced the great detective and the good Doctor at work, and, in this, at play.

Book 6 – Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson bump into one another in an infamous opium den in East London. Holmes is on a commission from a lady in Kent to find her husband, who has gone missing. For no apparent reason, they travel to her family house in Kent and spend a bizarre night of bumpiness, but by dawn Holmes has made a startling deduction. They travel back to London, to Bow Street police station, where they reveal the culprit and a solution to the mystery. When they go in search of breakfast afterwards, they encounter Professor Moriarty, who always starts his working day even earlier than the famous detective duo.