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Sherlock Holmes and the Remaining Improbable
by Susanne M. Dutton

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The game is not afoot. The Better-Every-Day world of 1895 is gone, even hard to recall as WWI ends. From his rural cottage, Holmes no longer provokes Scotland Yard’s envy or his landlady’s impatience, but neither is he content with the study of bees. August 1920 finds him filling out entry papers at a nearly defunct psychiatric clinic on the Normandy coast. England’s new Dangerous Drugs Act declares his cocaine use illegal and he aims to quit entirely. Confronted by a question as to his “treatment goal,” Holmes hesitates, aware that his real goal far exceeds the capacity of any clinic. His scribbled response, “no more solutions, but one true resolution,” seems more a vow than a goal to his psychiatrist, Pierre Joubert. The doctor is right. Like a tiny explosion unaccountably shifting a far-reaching landscape, the simple words churn desperate action and interlocking mystery into the lives of Holmes’ friends and enemies both.

Author Q & A

Can you describe your dream home? 

I can say I am living in my dream home. I kid you not. I often stop and put a hand on one of my stucco walls and say, “Thank you, Emilio!” to the man who built it because he did build it, literally, by hand. The place is not big, but just enough for my husband and me and a couple guests. My home is not luxurious, or dramatic or glamorous, but pretty in an old way. During a late 19th Century economic depression in Italy, a stonemason migrated to Philadelphia. He, along with four brothers, moved to this neighborhood with other Italian families. Some are still here, including Emilio’s family. When Emilio had done well enough building homes and other structures here, he built this house for his own family. Atop the overhang of the front door, he put what looks like a red stone dragon, but it is the winged Lion of Venice, a symbol of the home he left. He quarried the stone out of which the house is built from the ground on which it sits. How did I get so lucky? 

If we were to come to your house for a meal, what would you give us to eat?

I would definitely ask what kind of thing you like. I am best at salads and baked goods. 

Tell us about the absolute BEST fan letter you have received.  

I don’t know if this qualifies, but I decided it was a compliment and will not forget it:  “No doubt about it. This is truly creative.”  I’m also pleased when someone tells me they miss one of my characters, which had happened more than once.  

Say your publisher has offered to fly you anywhere in the world to do research on an upcoming book, where would you most likely want to go?

I’d elect to go to London, to a meeting of the London Society for Psychical Research, especially if I could manage to go in 1893. That would guarantee a blockbuster. I intend to write more Sherlock Holmes and I’m interested in the spiritualist movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries because Holmes’ author was a leader in that movement. Imagine the creator of the scientific “no ghosts need apply” Holmes attending séances!  For the author, however, spiritualism was the essence of a modern and more scientific religion. In fact, the 1890’s membership of the Psychical Society listed scientists, philosophers, and state leaders (including a future Prime Minister.) 

Who designed the book cover for the book you are touring?

My publisher, Propertius Press, has a whole team for graphics and production, so I was able to choose from four. That was hard. I choose a simpler one featuring an antique clock, a touchstone image for my story. Another cover competed mightily.  It’s more colorful and shows a scene. If my book were a play, that cover might be on the program. On the other hand, the publisher can still use that scene in promotions, so I benefit either way. 

Excerpt

Watson writes:  

Not for the first time, I felt a surge of gratitude for Holmes’ unspoken understanding that his digs at Bolt Cottage couldn’t suit me. No doubt his cottage fit his needs precisely, but it was no place for a visitor, perhaps purposely so. Some might say it was no place for any inhabitant at all, full as it was with apparatus meant for Holmes’ scientific inquiries, not to mention the maps and almanacs, the world’s newspapers, and of course, his library. Books lined shelves and the stairway to the sleeping loft. Books invaded the corner of the ground floor room usually devoted to meal preparation, too. They filled the unused icebox, the pots that never knew soup, and lined most of the cupboards. Books climbed the walls, stacked and somehow tracked in their positions with ribbons that hung from the center pages in a festive display—red, black, gold, green, purple, blue, white. Holmes claimed his color-coded system was modern and flawless. I never grasped it.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susanne Dutton is the one who hid during high school gym, produced an alternative newspaper and exchanged notes in Tolkien’s Elfish language with her few friends. While earning her B.A. in English, she drove a shabby Ford Falcon with a changing array of homemade bumper strips:  Art for Art’s Sake, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, Free Bosie from the Scorn of History. Later, her interests in myth and depth psychology led to graduate and postgraduate degrees in counseling. 

Nowadays, having outlived her mortgage and her professional counseling life, she aims herself at her desk most days; where she tangles with whatever story she can’t get out of her head. Those stories tend to seat readers within pinching distance of her characters, who, like most of us, slide at times from real life to fantasy and back. A man with Alzheimer’s sets out alone for his childhood home. A girl realizes she’s happier throwing away her meals than eating them.  A woman burgles her neighbors in order to stay in the neighborhood.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Susanne grew up in the SF Bay Area, has two grown children, and lives with her husband in an old Philadelphia house, built of the stones dug from the ground where it sits. 

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