I began with a simple question: “Why has no one written significant pastiches about the period known as the Great Hiatus in Sherlockian canon?” And I couldn’t find a suitable answer.
When Conan Doyle sent Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls in 1891, the world thought him dead. Three years later, in The Adventure of the Empty House, he reappears in London, brushing off the missing years with the lightest of detail, a mention of Tibet, Persia, Mecca, and little else. This gap, known to Sherlockians as the Great Hiatus, struck me as one of the most fascinating silences in the Canon.
That silence is what drew me in. For a figure so carefully documented by Watson, from his pipe tobacco to his monographs on cigar ash, how extraordinary that we know almost nothing of those years. The Hiatus became, for me, the perfect canvas on which to imagine Holmes at work in the shadows, beyond the familiar setting of Baker Street.
There was another challenge that intrigued me; writing Holmes without Watson. For three novels, I wanted to strip away the great chronicler and find a creative mechanism that would allow Holmes to speak in his own voice. It forced me to approach the character differently not only as the brilliant reasoner Watson describes, but as a man recording his own perilous game during a time when he was presumed dead.
That was the genesis of Sherlock Holmes and the Hecate File. I wanted to capture Holmes as strategist, survivor, and secret agent, operating under the radar of history. By filling in those missing years, I could explore the detective at his most vulnerable, and perhaps his most human.
The Great Hiatus remains one of the Canon’s richest untold spaces. To me, it isn’t a gap in the record, it’s an invitation.
Andrew Peel
Andrew Peel is the author of Footsteps on the Moor a thoughtful reimagining of Sherlock Holmes time on Dartmoor via a private journal discovered by his brother Mycroft.