The Forgers Read Online Free PDF

single-edge-razored out the flawed leaf and then sold the amputated book to a secondhand shop for a fraction of the money I had originally paid. I never allowed anything out of my windowless, well-lit workshop that wasn’t first-tier quality. Others were less scrupulous. So whenever I discovered a small anomaly, I respectfully and privately brought it to the attention of whatever dealer had it in stock. I was cautious not to make a nuisance of myself and didn’t bother alerting anyone to signatures that were conspicuously bogus—let somebody else point out that William Burroughs, not my era but just for instance, rarely dotted the “i”s in his first name—but near misses, professional work with a telltale Achilles’ heel, were fair game.
    Just before Memorial Day that same spring, knowing of my lifelong interest in all things Sherlockian, my favorite bookseller, Atticus Moore, up in Providence, gave me a ring and told me he had acquired a large group of remarkable letters written by Conan Doyle in May and June 1901 to Greenhough Smith, editor of the Strand Magazine . Seventeen letters in all, they detailed at length progress being made on the manuscript of what would become The Hound of the Baskervilles , which the Strand published later that same year. Though they appeared never to have been mailed for some reason and were apparently unpublished, all the biographical points checked out, according to my friend. Written from Devon, they described in fresh detail precisely how Doyle had gotten the original idea from a journalist acquaintance, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, while vacationing at the Royal Links Hotel on a headland overlooking the North Sea in Norfolk. A draft passage set in Grimpen Mire, based on the real-life bog, Fox Tor Mire, that never made it into the published manuscript was penned on the verso of one letter and then crossed out. In another letter, Conan Doyle describes having privately witnessed a midnight apparition out his mullioned window after having visited Park Hall, the ancient Robinson manor house on which Baskerville Hall probably was based, an apparition he dared not mention to his companions as it too closely resembled the monstrous, mythological hound of his story-in-progress—a monster “best confined to the precincts of memory.” The letter concluded he would retain “an inquisitorial attitude” about the vision, although he fails to mention it further in the subsequent epistles.
    It was as unique and historically interesting a clutch of letters as my dealer friend had ever handled. Given the letters were written by my favorite writer from childhood to this day, a writer of exquisite, enviable cunning and a craftsman of the first order, I knew immediately that they had to be mine no matter the cost. He asked if I would like to run up to Providence to see them and have a late lunch afterward.
    I would and did, grabbing the first train north the very next morning. As I watched the inlets along the Connecticut coast pass by, the sailing boats and osprey nests on their stilts, my mind itself traveled in different directions. Part of me urgently hoped this unposted correspondence was genuine, as I would dearly love to add it to my small “permanent” collection—I incarcerate the word permanent within quotes because I think it is one of the most fraudulent words in the English language, and signifies an incontestable falsehood. Another part, however, suspected the letters and that unpublished manuscript fragment were simply too good to be true—much like the idea of permanence—even though my friend was one of the most respected authorities in the world.
    After looking them over for an hour and haggling out a fair purchase price, by which I mean hefty but not eviscerating, we had an excellent downtown meal at Capriccio, his treat, and I was back in New York that same evening with my newly acquired trove. To say I was excited would be