The often staid world of Sherlockia was rocked this week when, during the annual convention of the scholarly organization The Baker Street Irregulars in St. Paul, Mo., special guest speaker Mr. Alan Pearson, great-nephew of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, revealed the first of what he claimed could be several bombshell revelations contained in a recently discovered tin dispatch box of the late author’s papers.
These notes, Mr. Pearson explained, were accompanied by a letter from his great-uncle explaining that the revelations contained in them were so sensitive that they it would be irresponsible to reveal them until everyone connected with the cases involved was “deceased, and thus safely beyond the reproaches and persecution of the public at large.”
To the stunned assembly of Sherlockians, Mr. Pearson made public the first of these revelations, revealing for the first time that Mr. Jabez Wilson, Holmes’ jovial but mystified client in the incident documented by Dr. John Watson under the title The Red-Headed League, was, in the words of Conan Doyle, “in fact a gentlemen possessed of certain unnatural and scandalous desires, one even publically rumored to be a known Mandrake.” This communication was met with a volley of gasps, followed from some quarters by a vigorous round of applause.
Holmes and Watson make an obvious deduction based upon Mr. Wilson’s trouser material.
Several hundred papers on the subject were already being planned by the attendees as Mr. Pearson explained that in the near future he would also expose which character in The Hound of the Baskervilles was, in fact, a “Son of David.”
