[Scenario Seeds] The Untold Cases of Sherlock Holmes.

[Catsmate]

I was thinking recent of the 'untold' cases, mentioned in Holmesian canon but never detailed. Several of them have outré implications and might inspire Who scenarios. Many of them have been related in Holmsian pastiches. There is a full list here. Here are some speculative ideas...

1. The Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow
This happened in 1894 and was incorporated brilliantly by Poul Anderson in one of his Time Patrol stories (The Time Patrol, 1955). It involved a time traveller who'd dumped some highly radioactive material in fifty century England which was dug up by an amateur archaeologist, with fatal consequences. Holmes wasn't mentioned by name (copyright) but the protagonists met him and had to keep him from figuring out what was really going on, while allowing him to prove that the arrested man was innocent and avoiding proper analysis of the radioactive material.

Addleton was a village in Kent, distinguished chiefly by a Jacobean estate belonging to Lord Wyndham and a barrow of unknown age. The nobleman, an enthusiastic amateur archeologist, had been excavating it, together with one James Rotherhithe, an expert from the British Museum who happened to be a relative. Lord Wyndham had uncovered a rather meager burial chamber: a few artifacts nearly rusted and rotted away, bones of men and horses. There was also a chest in surprisingly good condition, containing ingots of an unknown metal presumed to be a lead or silver alloy. He fell deathly ill, with symptoms of a peculiarly lethal poisoning; Rotherhithe, who had barely looked into the casket, was not affected, and circumstantial evidence suggested that he had slipped the nobleman a dose of some obscure Asiatic concoction. Scotland Yard arrested the man when Lord Wyndham died, on the twenty-fifth. Rotherhithe’s family engaged the services of a well-known private detective, who was able to show, by most ingenious reasoning, followed by tests on animals, that the accused was innocent and that a “deadly emanation” from the chest was responsible. Box and contents had been thrown into the English Channel.

Some excellent potential there; a GM could easily re-use Anderson's whole plotline while adding the PCs. Maybe they know the arrested man and are trying to help him. Or if Holmes (or a similar investigator, perhaps Jago and Litefoot?) know the PCs realise that the cause of death is odd the PCs might be called in.
It's also be easy to substitute the Paternoster Gang, though solving the problem needs access to a time machine (maybe one was also dumped in the barrow).
Moving the scenario to the modern day (or Pulp era) is also possible, though the detection of the radioactivity will happen far more quickly and will need to be factored in. Probably the police will call in UNIT, who might call in the PCs.


2. The clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee.
Trincomalee was then a town in British Ceylon and the site of an excellent harbour and naval base with a population of . How many brothers were there? Were their deaths related to the destruction of the large and splendid Hindu "Temple of a Thousand Columns" in 1624? Artifacts from the temple are still occasionally recovered from the sea.

In the earlier portion of their career in Ceylon the Portuguese showed the utmost indifference to the possession of Trincomalee; but after the appearance of the Dutch on the coast and the conclusion of an alliance between them and the Emperor of Kandy, Constantine de Sa, in 1622 alarmed at the possibility of these dangerous rivals forming establishments in the Island, took possession of the two ports of Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and ruthlessly demolished the "Temple of a Thousand Columns," in order to employ its material in fortifying the heights on which it stood. Some of the idols were rescued from this desecration, and conveyed to the Pagoda of Tamblegam; but fragments of carved stone-work and slab bearing inscriptions in ancient character, are still to be discerned in the walls of the Fort, and on the platform for the guns.

The scene of this sacrilege is still held in the profoundest veneration by the Hindus. Once in each year, a procession, attended by crowds of devotees, who bring offering of fruits and flowers, repairs, at sunset, to a spot where the rock projects above the ocean—a series of ceremonies is performed, including the mysterious breaking of a cocoanut against the cliff; and the officiating Brahmin concludes his invocation by elevating a brazen censer above his head filled with inflammable materials, the light of which, as it burns, is reflected far over the sea.

Were the Atkinsons involved in a salvage attempt, and killed by something they'd recovered?


3. His summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder
Instead of an idea of mine I refer you to Michael Kurland's excellent The Infernal Device, one of his Professor Moriarty novels. In that series Moriarty is one of the protagonists, occasionally opposed by Holmes (portrayed as an obsessed man blinded by his vendetta against Moriarty), a somewhat amoral man with a code of his own who organises crimes to fund his scientific research. The book has a renegade Okhrana agent, a stolen submarine, multiple side investigations and a balloon battle.


4. The case of Mr James Phillimore.
This man (sometimes identified as a banker in pastiches) stepped back into his own house to get his umbrella, and was never more seen in this world. The Whoniverse has had people falling though time and space, or being kidnapped similarly. Perhaps Mr. Phillimore was one such? Or disintegrated by an energy weapon? Or was he even human? Could an alien have adopted his guise and then decided to suddenly drop it?


5. The disappearance of cutter Alicia.
This craft "sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from where she never again emerged, nor was anything further ever heard of herself and her crew". What was the disappearance intentional? Perhaps the ship had been fitted with an experimental time machine, the product of a genius inventor. Or did she fall though a time rift? Or become the victim of a Time Scoop or Miniscope? Was the ship, and those aboard, dropped onto some alien world, or are they continually reliving the same loop of time?
It's possible that this reference inspired Garry Edmonson's novel The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream. The novel (published in 1965) featured an experimental US Navy ship called the Alice which ended up lost in time.

The Alice was an odd ship in the modern navy: wood hulled, sail powered, and sporting a veritable Christmas tree of metal sensors to detect submarines hanging from her mast. But a freak accident involving an illicit vacuum-still hurtles the vessel back in time, making it...The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream!

Or did some visitor to Earth grab the Alicia in order to obtain test subjects? In The Horror of Fang Rock, the Rutan created a fogbank to isolate the island, maybe another scout used similar technology on another mission.


6. The Case of Isadora Persano and the Worm Unknown to Science
Specifically that the "well-known journalist and duellist" was found stark raving mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science.
Fascinating. Is the worm related to the Memory Worm perhaps? Obviously a smaller specimen than the one in The Snowmen if it could fit into a match box. Or was it actually the same worm, lost by the Doctor (or Strax) in 1892. Maybe Persano was bitten and lost his entire memory, regressing to babyhood?


More ideas later.


Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[Catsmate]

A second batch.

7. The Blackmailing of One of the Most Revered Names in England
Mentioned in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes says to Watson that:

If matters came to a crisis I should endeavour to be present in person, but you can understand that, with my extensive consulting practice and with the constant appeals which reach me from many quarters, it is impossible for me to be absent from London for an indefinite time. At the present instant one of the most revered names in England is being besmirched by a blackmailer, and only I can stop a disastrous scandal. You will see how impossible it is for me to go to Dartmoor.

Subsequent events and actions suggest that Holmes was fabricating an excuse and the case may not have actually existed. But if it had?

Who was being blackmailed? Well Princess Louise of Wales was married that year [1889 seem the most plausible period for Hound], was there perhaps something to her discredit?
More interestingly 1889 saw the breaking of the infamous Cleveland Street scandal. This involved a male brothel located at 19 Cleveland Street (north of Oxford Street near Tottenham Court Road) run by one Charles Hammond and patronised by members of the British Establishment, including (at least) Lord Arthur Somerset (equerry to the Prince of Wales), Colonel Jervois (2nd Life Guards) and Henry James FitzRoy, Earl of Euston. It was rumoured that Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales and second-in-line to the British throne, was also a patron though this has never been substantiated. Many of the prostitutes were telegraph boys, aged 15-17. There was a major governmental cover-up.

Blackmail seems an unlikely subject for a AITAS scenario, but it could be fitted in. Perhaps a researcher from the future, even one of the PCs, wished to research the incident and properly document what actually happened. Cameras from a century or more in the future could easily be installed, but what if hardcopies (or video) fell into the wrong hands? In addition to demonstrating such anachronistic technology there's the problem of an almighty scandal.
Plenty of opportunity for intrigue in the murky side of Victorian London, withe the PCs at cross purposes with Holmes, the police, agents of the brothel patrons, journalists and more.


8. The Case of Matilda Briggs.
The Matilda Briggs was a ship "associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared". Now the matter of the giant rat was already mentioned in the EU novel All-Consuming Fire (complete with Azathoth, the Diogenes club, the giant [alien] rat and the Matilda Briggs), though Benny claimed she didn't "remember half of these things happening". This shouldn't be taken as a bar to creating a new scenario involving a giant rat and a ship named Matilda Briggs. Perhaps the giant rats created by Magnus Greel by feeding enhanced meat to sewer rats weren't wiped out? Or perhaps someone gained access to Greel's abandoned lair under the Palace Theatre before the authorities (the police or Torchwood) or Jago cleared it. In the hurried abandonment of that base and the move to the Chinese laundry some equipment could have been missed. Or perhaps some items survived the fire at the laundry and fell into the hands of a Tong minion or mad scientists. Holmsian chronologists put this case before 1896, so there's a few years scope.
A ship could make an excellent base of operations for Mad Science.


9. The Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden
All that's revealed of this case is mentioned in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist when Watson says that Holmes was "immersed at the moment in a very abstruse and complicated problem concerning the peculiar persecution to which John Vincent Harden the well-known tobacco millionaire had been subjected".
Perhaps the persecution was of a truly peculiar nature? Something from another planet, time or dimension could have attached itself to Mr. Harden and required skills not possessed even by the talented Great Detective to remove? Or was Harden himself from elsewhere and being pursued? Why?


10. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.
Who was Vigor? What was so odd about him or her? And why Hammersmith? In the Victorian period the area was a relatively new addition to the metropolis, basically since 1864 when the Metropolitan Line was extended to Hammersmith Broadway, with much building work occuring in the 1870 and '80s. In 1890 the borough had a population of almost a hundred thousand.
Perhaps Vigor was related to Charing Cross Hospital, a colleague of Watsons' might have called him in for advice on a strange patient.
'Wonder' also suggests a public interest.


11. The Story of the Red Leech and the Death of Crosby the Banker
Not to be confused with Isadora Persano and his mysterious worm. Watson mentions that "the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker" occurred in 1894 (a busy year for Holmes).
Certainly there are red leeches (like this one) but might the worm in question have originated from somewhere even more exotic? A careless traveller might have left behind a parasite from their own planet.
Then again the matter of The Crimson Horror took place in 1893, might one of Mr. Sweet's progeny have survived and returned to plague London a year later? According to Vastra the Red Leech was a tiny parasite which infected water and secreted a deadly poison. Could Crosby have been associated with Mrs. Gillyflower and have tried to grow a symbiotic leech of his own?


12. The Loss of the Sophy Anderson.
Another lost ship. This investigation happened in 1887 and all that Watson relates is the fact that a British barque (a smallish three-masted sailing ship) named the Sophy Anderson was lost and that Holmes unearthed the facts surrounding the incident. What could have happened? Did the ship disappear completely, lost to a rift in space-time? Was it sunk by some alien intervention, or a crew driven mad by something in the cargo hold?
Perhaps the PCs were aboard...


Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[Catsmate]

Third batch, anyone else have any to add?

13. The Adventures of the Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa
The island is fictional, at least there's none named Uffa. Curiously it also appears in another ACD story, Our Midnight Visitor.

On the small island of Uffa, young Archie McDonald sees a man spying through the window of his room. He goes out furious and they have some fight, but finally the stranger explains his presence. His name is Charles Digby. He just landed on the island. He says he wants to spend a few days with the locals. Archie and his father agreed to host him. The following days, Digby behaves strangely. Archie surprises him in an isolated area admiring a large diamond and hiding it in a little pouch around his neck. On the evening, McDonald's father falls on a newspaper article about the theft of one of the biggest French diamond. The description of the thief matches with Digby. They understand that their tenant is actually Achille Wolff sought by all polices. McDonald's father decides to take his diamond while Archie just wants to report the man to the police for the reward. A few days later, the three men take the boat to a neighbouring island. During the crossing, McDonald's father attacks Wolff with a hatchet, but the latter fights back. Both wounded, the two men fall in the water and they drown. The diamond are lost forever.

Of course maybe the island isn’t named Uffa, but rather an island occupied by Uffa, a variant of Wuffa, a (possibly) historical sixth century king of East Anglia (~571-~578CE). Might the unfortunate Grice Patersons have been taken thirteen centuries back in time? Accident? Natural phenomena? Or were they kidnapped by a meddler after they'd Seen Too Much of his plans to alter the history of Britain and rule from behind the throne? It could possibly be tied in with the Addleton Tragedy.


14. The Bogus Laundry Affair.
The only reference to this is in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box where Holmes mentioned a man named Aldridge "who helped us in the bogus laundry affair". Apparently he was a large, powerfully built and swarthy man. It happened prior to 1893 but there are no details. Might it be a reference to the Chinese Laundry used by the Tong of the Black Scorpion? Dis it survive the final confrontation between the Doctor, his allies and Greel and the Tong members?


15. The Case of Mrs. Etherege's Husband
Another cryptic reference (from A Case of Identity). The eponymous Mrs. Etherege had lost her husband, and despite a police investigation he couldn't be found. However Holmes found his easily. Might his disappearance have been out of the run-of-the-mill for spousal disappearances?


16. The Singular Affair of the Aluminium crutch
What was so unusual? Was it the origin of the crutch, it's hidden contents, or the nature of it's owner? Or was it that Holmes (and Watson) encountered some people from far beyond Victorian London in the course of a more-or-less routine enquiry?


17. The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland.
A case that nearly killed both Holmes and Watson, in 1887. What was so shocking, and dangerous, about the ship? Was it something, or someone, aboard? Or had it passed beyond the oceans of nineteenth century Earth.

• An entire campaign could be constructed from the reference to this ship, the giant rat of Sumatra (then a Dutch possession), the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis, all set in what's now Indonesia. Might they be linked to the 1887 posting of Dutch anatomist, geologist and paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois to the colony? And to his 1891 discovery of "a species in between humans and apes", Pithecanthropus erectus or Java Man, what's now known as Homo erectus. Dubois did a lot of fieldwork at sites in central and eastern Java.
• Or perhaps the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa is the link? Did it reveal something of such value that Baron Maupertuis floated a company to finance his schemes?
  

18. The Matter of the Two Coptic Patriarchs.
This happened in (probably) July 1898 and kept Holmes busy during the early part of the Adventure of the Retired Colourman?
Were they perhaps identical? And both claiming to be the one true Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria? What is the cause of the duplication? Clone? Created by whom, and for what purpose? Shapeshifted Zygon? Another left-over Kamelion-type android, abandoned by the Gelsandorans? An Auton scout?

• Really the Whoniverse does have a lot of ways to create Doppelgängers

Or is the duplicate Patriarch indeed human, from a parallel universe or a period in the past or future? Maybe just a good actor?
Did someone create a duplicate Patriarch? Why? Is it part of a Sinister Plan? Common fraud, using the guise to gain access to a particular place? An accident? Or just the day-to-day weirdness of the Whoniverse?
Or was it aimed at Holmes, a distraction from a more important matter?



Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[misterharry]

I've enjoyed reading these. The one that particularly sticks in my mind from Conan Doyle's stories is the case of the giant rat of Sumatra (covereed above under The Case of Matilda Briggs). Several non-canon novels have been written about it by subsequent authors. I read one in which the rat was revealed to be a tapir (!) driven mad by cruel treatment and used in a similar manner as the Hound of the Baskervilles. I'm sure GMs can do better than this.

With the addition of the more fantastical elements, these could easily form the basis of an entire campaign for the Paternoster Gang or, my favourites, Jago & Litefoot.

[Catsmate]

Jun 17, 2016 13:42:35 GMT misterharry said:

I've enjoyed reading these. The one that particularly sticks in my mind from Conan Doyle's stories is the case of the giant rat of Sumatra (covereed above under The Case of Matilda Briggs). Several non-canon novels have been written about it by subsequent authors. I read one in which the rat was revealed to be a tapir (!) driven mad by cruel treatment and used in a similar manner as the Hound of the Baskervilles. I'm sure GMs can do better than this.

With the addition of the more fantastical elements, these could easily form the basis of an entire campaign for the Paternoster Gang or, my favourites, Jago & Litefoot.

Thank you!
The novel you mention is one of my (far too large!) collection of Holmes pastiches; The Giant Rat of Sumatra by Rick Boyer. One of the better ones.

The late Victorian period abounds with possibilities; maybe Holmes and Watson are real (as in All-Consuming Fire) and compete with Jago & Litefoot and the Paternoster Gang? With Holmes preferring to stick to the more mundane cases perhaps.

[misterharry]

Jun 17, 2016 13:55:03 GMT Catsmate said:

The late Victorian period abounds with possibilities; maybe Holmes and Watson are real (as in All-Consuming Fire) and compete with Jago & Litefoot and the Paternoster Gang? With Holmes preferring to stick to the more mundane cases perhaps.

I like to think that the real detectives that Conan Doyle used as the basis for Holmes and Watson operate in London (under their real names) in addition to the Paternoster Gang and Jago & Litefoot. But Conan Doyle uses elements from all of them (plus the 4th Doctor) for inspiration in his characterisation of them in the stories.

[Catsmate]

Jun 17, 2016 14:23:17 GMT misterharry said:

Jun 17, 2016 13:55:03 GMT Catsmate said:

The late Victorian period abounds with possibilities; maybe Holmes and Watson are real (as in All-Consuming Fire) and compete with Jago & Litefoot and the Paternoster Gang? With Holmes preferring to stick to the more mundane cases perhaps.

I like to think that the real detectives that Conan Doyle used as the basis for Holmes and Watson operate in London (under their real names) in addition to the Paternoster Gang and Jago & Litefoot. But Conan Doyle uses elements from all of them (plus the 4th Doctor) for inspiration in his characterisation of them in the stories.

That sound good to me. There's plenty of room in Victorian London, and Britain, for a few investigators of the odd. Just look at The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
In fact I'd add two other possibilities to your list:
Houdini and Doyle himself: the recent television series could be a source of ideas. There's already some crossover into the Whoniverse by both of them; Houdini met the First and Fifth Doctors in the audioplay Smoke and Mirrors, travelled with the Third (and Jo Grant) briefly and later met the Eleventh Doctor in the short story Houdini and The Space Cuckoos while the Fourth Doctor encountered Doyle in novel Evolution.

Professor Edward Challenger: Doyle's other creation, "the homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science". Like Holmes, Challenger was based on one of Doyle's professors William Rutherford. Perhaps with a little of the Fourth Doctor's overbearing manner mixed in. However he, and his circle, could be inserted into the Whoniverse quite easily.

[Catsmate]

The fourth and probably final batch.

13. The Matter of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer

...the arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.
                                                                                                                                                        The Adventure of Black Peter

This one has intrigued me for decades. It was adapted by Adrian Conan Doyle into The Adventure of the Deptford Horror though he doesn't pursue the canaries...
What was so special, and sinister, about Wilson's canaries? Were they merely small yellow birds, or something far different? Had they been bred to attack? Perhaps, from the "plague-spot" reference they carried disease?
Or were the canaries just a harmless hobby, and did Wilson have a completely different claim to infamy?


14. The Amateur Mendicant Society
In The Five Orange Pips Watson refers to "the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse". What were they up to? Was this a group of organised, amateur beggars in the manner of Neville St. Clair in The Man with the Twisted Lip. Has a group of men decided to pursue this form of "work"? Do they meet, in their subterranean club, to organise areas of operation and settle disputes?
Or is the club a front for something more sinister? Do the amateur mendicants gather information for blackmail perhaps? Overhearing confidences in the guise of vagabond? Or do they scheme to gain power in society, controlled by someone who originated far from Victorian London?


15. The Crimes of Count Negretto Sylvius
Sylvius (Villains Wiki) had only one 'onscreen' encounter with Holmes (The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, 1903, which ended with his arrest and the recovery of that gem) but seems to have been a minor master criminal being involved in a number of matters; the convenient death of old Mrs Harold, who bequeathed to him the Blymer estate, the matter of Miss Minnie Warrender and the robbery in the train-de-luxe to the Riviera on 13 February 1892.

• The "train-de-luxe to the Riviera" was almost certainly  Le Train Bleu, properly the Calais-Méditerrannée Express, the famous French night express connecting Calais and the French Riviera; it was immensely popular with the wealthy and appeared in an Agatha Christe novel. It operated from London (Holborn Viaduct, Charing Cross and Victoria) to Ventimiglia in Italy via Paris Nord, Lyon, Marseille, Cannes, Nice and Monte Carlo.

In the Holmesian canon he was a one-off antagonist, but what if he was a little more than a mundane criminal? What was so special about the Blymer estate? How exactly did he kill Mrs Harold (was she the widow of Harold Blymer?)? What happened to Minnie Warrender? Just what did he steal from the Blue Train?

• He's described as a "famous game-shot, sportsman, and man-about-town", a physically large and swarthy man with a large dark moustache, a "cruel, thin-lipped mouth" and "a long, curved nose like the beak of an eagle". He dressed well, but too flamboyantly for English taste, especially in his jewellery.

Might he be something more than a criminally inclined human? Or one not native to the Victorian era?


16. The Case of Doctor Moore Agar
Agar appears twice in the Holmes canon; the second is when he sends the detective to Cornwall to recuperate from overwork (and perhaps overindulgence in cocaine) where he and Watson become entangled in the Adventure of the Devil's Foot. However Watson also mentions an earlier encounter when Agar, describing it was a "dramatic introduction".
Did the doctor consult Holmes on a mystery he'd found? Or was he suspected of committing a crime and in need of help? The "dramatic introduction" could then be his arrest in Holmes' rooms.

• Dr. Agar is said to be "of Harley Street", the upmarket and fashionable haunt of the medical profession; it's in the borough of Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament and other government offices. This would suggest some degree of wealth and success.

Could the good doctor have found that a patient was more (or less) than he seemed? Was a government minister actually something far different, and willing to go to extremes to hide his secret?


17.The Remarkable Case of the venomous lizard.
Holmes mentioned this business, which he called a "remarkable case" during the Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. He also referred to a 'gila' lizard but he may not have been exact about the type of lizard involved.
Was this case, which took place before November 1896, an encounter between one Great Detective and another? Certainly she was a venomous lizard...
Or was the lizard in question a pet of one of the other Earth Reptiles who died when their hibernation pod was disturbed during the London Underground works? Might that have been the cause for Holmes' investigation?

• In fact Vastra's semi-official backstory links her t Henry Jago (she took part in his "Monstre Gathering") and also possibly to the  Tong of the Black Scorpion (her first encounter with Jenny).

18. The Case of Wilson the District Messenger
Actually Wilson wasn't a District Messenger but the manager of one of the company's offices, patronised by Holmes in the case of The Hound of the Baskervilles (~1888). Holmes knew Wilson from a previous encounter:

He turned into one of the district messenger offices, where he was warmly greeted by the manager.
"Ah, Wilson, I see you have not forgotten the little case in which I had the good fortune to help you"?
"No, sir, indeed I have not. You saved my good name, and perhaps my life".
"My dear fellow, you exaggerate. I have some recollection, Wilson, that you had among your boys a lad named Cartwright, who showed some ability during the investigation".

What had Mr. Wilson been involved in? Had a package entrusted to his care gone astray? The reference to Holmes perhaps saving his life suggests a serious criminal matter. Or was he linked to something like the Cleveland Street scandal?

• The London District Messenger Service and News Company (50 Lime Street) was formed in the June of 1890, absorbing previous services , and was a private concern, not part of the nationalised Post Office telegraph service. It employed boys (usually 13-15) to carry messages and small packages around the city.  It employed from six hundred to over a thousand boys (1,100 at it's peak in 1910) who remained at it's offices when not engaged, they wore a uniform including the distinctive 'pillbox' hat. Rates were 3d per half-mile or 6d per mile for simple deliveries; per hour or 5s per day for general hire, for odd jobs such as purchase of theatre tickets, dog walking and more. Taxi fares and other expenses not included. Such messenger boys were popular in Victorian children's fiction and often linked to male prostitution. The company had around twenty London offices. It's telegraphic address ("OPPONENTS, LONDON") best conveys it's relationship with the official Post Office. After 1898 the basic messenger service was unprofitable and the company specialised in theatre tickets.
• They're one of those bits of background that offer splendid potential for Victorian and later (Edwardian/Pulp) scenarios. A boy could have lost a message or package, seen or overheard something strange during the course of his duties or disappeared under sinister circumstances.
  

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?

[rulandor]

I don't have much to contribute apart from being awestruck by the deluge of great plot ideas that you continue to baffle us with, Catsmate.

For my next Doctor Who campaign I am planning a character home base in the Victorian era, and I am sure that many of your plots will come in handy for that.

[Catsmate]

Jun 20, 2016 16:19:34 GMT rulandor said:

I don't have much to contribute apart from being awestruck by the deluge of great plot ideas that you continue to baffle us with, Catsmate.

For my next Doctor Who campaign I am planning a character home base in the Victorian era, and I am sure that many of your plots will come in handy for that.

Thank you.
One of the curses if an obsessive mind is that once I start on an idea it sticks with me.

[senko]

There was an acutal Doctor Who story where he adventured with Holme's and Watson. It was interesting in that the further they went away from London the less use Holme's was and the more Watson was. London Holme's is Amazing, India he was very good, alien planet he simply had no knowledge to draw upon for his deductions whereas Watson was able to fall back on his army training to deal with the uknown better.

[Catsmate]

Jun 21, 2016 7:50:41 GMT senko said:

There was an acutal Doctor Who story where he adventured with Holme's and Watson. It was interesting in that the further they went away from London the less use Holme's was and the more Watson was. London Holme's is Amazing, India he was very good, alien planet he simply had no knowledge to draw upon for his deductions whereas Watson was able to fall back on his army training to deal with the uknown better.

The excellent All-Consuming Fire, which used a few bits from the references to the untold cases (the the giant rat of Sumatra, the schemes of Baron Maupertuis et cetera).
You make an excellent point about the specialisation of Holmes' knowledge being of little use far from home and the reality he knew, while Watson was more in his element.

ETA: there's also an audioplay of All-Consuming Fire.

[daemos]

In the criminal parlance of the day, a "canary" was a female look out who would "sing" (give warning) of anyone approaching the criminals, hence Wilson probably trained these girls and loaned them out, for a cut of the proceeds, to any crook who needed them.

Regards

Iain

[Catsmate]

Jun 22, 2016 9:13:18 GMT daemos said:

In the criminal parlance of the day, a "canary" was a female look out who would "sing" (give warning) of anyone approaching the criminals, hence Wilson probably trained these girls and loaned them out, for a cut of the proceeds, to any crook who needed them.

Regards

Iain

Interesting. I've never seen that meaning of the term used in a Holmes story (Myers used 'canary' as singer in one of this novels). In fact according to some dictionaries of slang (Greens' Ware's) it can also mean prostitute and sovereign (the coin).

Thanks for that.