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    Without My Boswell
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    Without My Boswell
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    Without My Boswell
    Ebook161 pages2 hours

    Without My Boswell

    By Hugh Ashton

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “I am lost without my Boswell,” declares Sherlock Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia”. Indeed, the interplay between the solid ex-Army doctor, and the more mercurial purveyor of “ineffable twaddle” forms a large part of the appeal of the adventures which Watson caused to be published, and Watson himself, as well as acting as a publicist for Holmes’ business, provides more solid assistance on many occasions.

    But... before John Watson had that fateful encounter with the eccentric beater of corpses at Barts, there was a consulting detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes, who had already built up a practice and a reputation that extended to Scotland Yard. However much he may have felt lost without his Boswell later in his career, Holmes was playing a solo game when he started out.

    We see a little of Holmes alone (apologies for the inevitable pun) in “The Case of the Gloria Scott” and “The Musgrave Ritual”, and it is in Watson’s account of this latter adventure that we hear of some other cases at a time when Holmes was presumably learning his trade.
    The written accounts of some of these were in the dispatch-box, bound together in an envelope, in Watson’s writing.

    The envelope was inscribed “Before My Time”, again in Watson’s hand.
    The stories in here are all somewhat less interesting from the point of view of the interplay between Holmes and other characters, but they all shed a light on Holmes’ methods of deduction as he learned his trade, and often also shed light on his character. As Holmes himself remarked, not all of these may be seen as successes, but none of the cases here may be regarded as a complete failure. Here they are - with five original illustrations by Andy Boerger.

    The Tarleton Murders
    The Case of Vamberry, the Wine Merchant
    The Singular Affair of the Aluminium Crutch
    The Case of the Abominable Wife
    The Adventure of the Two Bottles

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInknbeans Press
    Release dateFeb 10, 2014
    ISBN9781311149732
    Unavailable
    Without My Boswell
    Author

    Hugh Ashton

    Hugh Ashton was born in the UK in 1956, and after graduation from university worked in the technology industry around Cambridge (the first personal computer he used was Sir Clive Sinclair’s personal TRS-80) until 1988, when a long-standing interest in the country took him to Japan.There he worked for a Japanese company producing documentation for electronic instruments and high-end professional audio equipment, helped to set up the infrastructure for Japan’s first public Internet service provider, worked for major international finance houses, and worked on various writing projects, including interviewing figures in the business and scientific fields, and creating advertorial reports for Japanese corporations to be reprinted in international business magazines.Along the way, he met and married Yoshiko, and also gained certificates in tea ceremony and iaidō (the art of drawing a sword quickly).In 2008, he wrote and self-published his first published novel, Beneath Gray Skies, an alternative history in which the American Civil War was never fought, and the independent Confederacy forms an alliance with the German National Socialist party. This was followed by At the Sharpe End, a techno-financial-thriller set in Japan at the time of the Lehman’s crash, and Red Wheels Turning, which re-introduced Brian Finch-Malloy, the hero of Beneath Gray Skies, referred to by one reviewer as “a 1920s James Bond”.In 2012, Inknbeans Press of California published his first collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures, Tales from the Deed Box of John H. Watson M.D., which was swiftly followed by many other volumes of Holmes’ adventures, hailed by Sherlockians round the world as being true to the style and the spirit of the originals by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Inknbeans also published Tales of Old Japanese and other books by Ashton, including the Sherlock Ferret series of detective adventures for children. He and Yoshiko returned to the UK in 2016 for family reasons, where they now live in the Midlands cathedral city of Lichfield.In December 2017, Inknbeans Press ceased to be, following the sudden death of the proprietor, chief editor and leading light. Since that time, Ashton has reclaimed the copyright of his work, and has republished it in ebook and paper editions, along with the work of several other former Inknbeans authors.He continues to write Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as various other fiction and non-fiction projects, including documentation for forensic software, and editing and layout work on a freelance basis, in between studying for an MSc in forensic psychological studies with the Open University.

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