-- young Trevor began to talk about those habits of observation and inference which / had already formed into a system -- [GLOR].

We know Holmes only through the writings of Watson, just as we know Socrates only through the writings of Plato. We tend to consider those "middle-men" as the world's foremost authority on their subjects. However, each person is the world's foremost authority on themselves. Whereas Holmes and Watson had a long and fruitful collaboration, there are large periods of the life of Holmes to which Watson did not have access. The most dramatic period was, of course, the "Great Hiatus", between 1891, when Watson assumed that Holmes had died [FINA], and 1894, when Holmes reappeared disguised as a book-seller [EMPT]. Even during the period of their collaboration (March 1881 - August 1914), they were not inseparable. In the very first case, we learn that Holmes

had invariably breakfasted and gone out before / (Watson) arose in the morning. Sometimes he spent his day at the chemistry laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting rooms, and occasionally in long walks, which appeared to take him into the lowest portions of the city [STUD].

Watson is most unreliable as a witness of the late stages of the career of Holmes. As he notes himself - / have seldom drawn my cases from the later phases of my friend's career [ILLU]. He claims that Holmes moved to the Sussex Downs to raise bees and that he published a book entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen [LAST].

I would modestly suggest that there was more afoot than Watson knew. It seems highly unlikely that someone with the mind of Holmes would retire quietly to the country in his early fifties and raise bees. On a number of occasions, Holmes gave us insight into his mind:

My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built [WIST].

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces [DEVI].

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my most proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exultation [SIGN].

Hence the cocaine. / can't live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? [SIGN].

Watson claimed that Holmes disliked the country:

--- neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime [CARD].

Why would he delude his faithful colleague for those many years? I humbly suggest that he did not want to embarrass his friend with his low opinion of the accounts of the cases. He had indeed expressed such an opinion to Watson's face in occasional flashes of anger:

You have attempted to tinge it (detection) with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you had worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid [SIGN].

--- you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing [COPP].

There is some evidence that Holmes was somewhat embarrassed by those "adventures" as told by Watson. Soon after they met, Holmes was already complaining that

There is no crime to detect or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it [STUD].

From the point of view of the criminal expert, London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty [NORW].

Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by Nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible [FINA].

I would contend that Holmes had already, unknown to Watson, worked on those larger mysteries, that his disappearance was less due to the avoidance of Professor Moriarty's gang than to the avoidance of Watson and the relatively trivial day-by-day problems into which he was sucked, and that his "retirement" was to enable him to focus on those larger issues.

During a sabbatical in the 1990-1991 academic year, I was able to pursue my theories. Following the first clue that the farm to which Holmes retired was five miles from Eastbourne [LAST], I took a train from London to Eastbourne. Using two other clues - that the farm commanded a great view of the Channel and that it was a half-mile from The Gables, a famous coaching establishment [LION], by triangulation I zeroed in to its approximate location. Taking the advice of Holmes himself, I inquired at the local public-houses about the farm [SOLI]. A regular at the third pub I entered, who fancied himself as a local historian, directed me to it. Fortunately, it neither continued its career as a farm or evolved, as had 221 B Baker Street, into a sort of shrine to the memory of Holmes-and-Watson but was being rented to tourists. Since it was off-season, I was able to rent it for the month of March 1991 and pursue my investigations at my leisure.

The attic revealed nothing. An apocryphal manuscript of Watson, describing a case with Sigmund Freud, was ostensibly found in an attic. ¹ However, that was too obvious for a mind like Holmes. Following his advice once again, I measured the height of the farm-house, the height of the rooms, and the thickness of the ceilings [SIGN].

Simple subtraction revealed missing space and pointed to a false ceiling. Taking my cue from Holmes, I will not describe my emotion but simply state the fact that, in the space above the false ceiling, there lay my quarry - the manuscript of The Whole Art of Detection. What follows is a transcription of this wonderful document. I have taken the liberty of adding footnotes to place it in its modern context, trusting that Holmes would have approved since he conceded that even he had little capacity to foresee the future [HOUN].