THE WEST END HORROR: A Posthumous Memoir of John H. Watson, M.D.

Following the success of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) which this may be 2% short of--Mr. Meyer received many communiques as well as this ""long lost manuscript"" of Dr. Watson's, withheld rather than lost. It is roughly carbon-paper dated after WW I and before Holmes' death, and deals with the stabbing of a drama critic McCarthy with a Javanese knife, applied with ""humane immediacy,"" to be followed by the murder of his young ingenue-mistress. Real people are in and out of the wings: Oscar Wilde and Gilbert & Sullivan and Shaw and Ellen Terry and particularly Bram Stoker whose lair they case. After all Stoker had been known to use Indian cigars, one of the telltale smoked herrings. There is the same good humor (Holmes appears with far greater affability in these two chronicles than heretofore), the same discreet surveillance and olympian interpretation all preceding Holmes' unnerving discovery of a far greater horror that might overtake more than the West End. . . . A three-pipe evening, for any loge seat in the house.