The Three Monarchs Read Online Free PDF

well have been an automobile accident for all the excitement those two authorities managed to put into their prose. Even the headlines were dull.
    But what really puzzles me is the narrative of Dr John Watson. He describes the entire affair in Strand Magazine , starting with the knock on the door of his consulting room on the evening of April 24th 1891 and continuing with his journey to Switzerland. I yield to no one in my admiration for the chronicler of the adventures, exploits, memoirs, casebooks and so on of the great detective. As I sit at my Remington Number Two improved model typewriter (an American invention, of course) and begin this great labour, I know that I am likely to fall short of the standards of accuracy and entertainment that he maintained to the end. But I have to ask myself – how could he have got it so wrong? How could he have failed to notice inconsistencies that would have struck even the most obtuse police commissioner as glaringly obvious? Robert Pinkerton used to say that a lie was like a dead coyote. The longer you leave it, the more it smells. He’d have been the first to say that everything about the Reichenbach Falls stank.
    You must forgive me if I seem a touch overemphatic but my story – this story – begins with Reichenbach and what follows will make no sense without a close examination of the facts. And who am I? So that you may know whose company you keep, let me tell you that my name is Frederick Chase, that I am a senior investigator with the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York and that I was in Europe for the first – and quite possibly the last – time in my life. My appearance? Well, it’s never easy for any man to describe himself but I will be honest and say that I could not call myself handsome. My hair was black, my eyes an indifferent shade of brown. I was slender and though only in my forties, I was already too put-upon by the challenges life had thrown my way. I was unmarried and sometimes I worried that it showed in my wardrobe, which was perhaps a little too well worn. If there were a dozen men in the room I would be the last to speak. That was my nature.
    I was at Reichenbach five days after the confrontation that the world has come to know as ‘The Final Problem’. Well, there was nothing final about it, as we now know, and I guess that just leaves us with the problem.
    So. Let’s take it from the start.
    Sherlock Holmes, the greatest consulting detective who ever lived, flees England in fear of his life. Dr Watson, who knows the man better than anyone and who would never hear a word said against him, is forced to admit that at this time Holmes is at less than his best, utterly worn out by the predicament in which he finds himself and which he cannot control. Can we blame him? He has been attacked no fewer than three times in the space of just one morning. He has come within an inch of being crushed by a two-horse van that rushes past him on Welbeck Street; he has almost been hit by a brick that falls or is thrown from a roof on Vere Street – and, right outside Watson’s front door, he finds himself attacked by some good fellow who’s been waiting with a bludgeon. Does he have any choice but to flee?
    Well, yes. There are so many other choices available to him that I have to wonder what exactly was in Mr Holmes’s mind. Not, of course, that he’s particularly forthcoming in the stories, all of which I’ve read (without ever once guessing the solution, for what it’s worth). To begin with, what makes him think he will be safer on the Continent than he will be closer to home? London itself is a densely knit, teeming city, which he knows intimately and, as he once confided, he has many rooms (‘five small refuges’, Watson says) scattered around the place, which are known only to him.
    He could disguise himself. In fact he does disguise himself. Only the next day, after Watson has arrived at