Tim Symonds
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE MYSTERY OF EINSTEIN’S DAUGHTER
Foreword
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm and grew up in Munich, bustling, wealthy towns in the Swabian region of southern Germany. At the age of five he was shown how a compass needle always swings to magnetic North. From that moment he determined to become a great physicist, more famous than Isaac Newton.
Even today it is not widely known that at the age of twenty-three Einstein sired an illegitimate daughter with Mileva Marić, a physics student he met at the Zurich Polytechnikum, later his first wife. Mileva’s father Miloš had risen from the peasantry through the Army and the Austria-Hungarian civil service to a position of influence throughout the Vojvodina region of Serbia.
Mileva and Albert referred to the infant daughter by the Swabian diminutive ‘Lieserl’ – Little Liese. Her life was fleeting. At around 21 months of age she disappeared from the face of the Earth. The real Lieserl may never have come to the eyes of the outside world but for an unexpected find eighty three years after her disappearance. In California Einstein’s first son Hans Albert Einstein investigated an old shoebox tucked away on the top shelf of a wardrobe. It contained several dozen yellowed letters in German type, an exchange between Albert and Mileva. Italian, Swiss, German and Austro-Hungarian postmarks reflected their peripatetic life. Several letters dated between early 1901 and 1903 mention Lieserl. After September 1903 her name never appears again. Anywhere.
Lieserl’s fate remains a subject of mystery and speculation. Researchers regularly trek to Serbia to conduct investigations. They comb through registries, synagogues, church and monastery archives throughout the Vojvodina region, the place of her birth and short life. To no avail. In The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter Holmes exclaims, ‘the most ruthless effort has been made by public officials, priests, monks, friends, relatives and relatives by marriage to seek out and destroy every document with Lieserl’s name on it. The question is – why?’
Most researchers conclude the child was born with serious brain damage. Serbian bureaucracy of those times would have written the words ‘Acute Stupidity’ into her medical records. Later, when Albert and Mileva’s second son Eduard developed severe schizophrenia Einstein would hint at an inheritable disorder on the Marić side of the family. More likely Lieserl’s condition was the consequence of a very difficult birth – the mother suffered from congenital dysplasia of the hip.
Three hapless ‘must have’ theories hold sway. Lieserl must have died in an outbreak of scarlet fever in Novi-Sad in the late summer of 1903. She must have been adopted by family friends in Belgrade. She must have been placed in a home for children with special needs.
In The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter, Holmes and Watson are led to a dramatic Fourth Theory.
While works of fiction, the principal characters of my novels Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle and Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex are taken from real life. So too in Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter.
I have put explanations of some of the more unusual references in the Endnotes.
Tim Symonds
Sussex
England
Preliminaries
by
Dr. John H. Watson
The events I relate in The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter took place well into the reign of King Edward the Seventh, the year in which the Simplon Tunnel was driven through the Alps and when Charles Perrine discovered Jupiter’s seventh satellite, Elara. Across the Atlantic, Theodore Roosevelt began his first full term as President, after his second inauguration. In England there was talk of a new Automobile Association employing cycle scouts to help unwary motorists avoid police speed traps. In faraway South Africa, Thomas Evan Powell brought the Cullinan to the surface, the world’s largest rough diamond.
In the spring of that year, my comrade Sherlock Holmes undertook an investigation into what at first appeared to be a very humdrum matter concerning a recent graduate of the Physics Department of a Swiss Polytechnikum. The young man’s name was Albert Einstein. He was soon to become the world’s most revered scientist, gaining fame and respect the equal of, or greater, than Presidents and Prime Ministers.
Sherlock Holmes held Albert Einstein’s future in his hands.
Dr John H. Watson
Junior United Service Club
London
About the Author
Tim Symonds was born in London. He grew up in Somerset, Dorset and Guernsey. After several years working in the Kenya Highlands and along the Zambezi River he emigrated to the United States where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Sherlock Holmes And The Mystery Of Einstein’s Daughter was written in a converted coast house near Rudyard Kipling’s old home Bateman’s in Sussex and in the forests and hidden valleys of the High Weald. The plot is based on an original research paper Tim Symonds published, titled ‘A Vital Detail In The Story Of Albert Einstein’.
The author’s other detective novels include Sherlock Holmes and The Dead Boer at Scotney Castle and Sherlock Holmes and The Case of the Bulgarian Codex.
Dedication
To LJA
Chapter I
Watson is Offered a Commission
Early in 1905 the Strand Magazine’s Publisher, Sir George Newnes, approached me with an offer: would I accept the kingly sum of six hundred guineas in return for securing a photograph of Sherlock Holmes at the now-infamous Reichenbach Falls in the Bernese Oberland? Sir George wanted an engraving or half-tone illustration from the plate to grace the Strand’s Christmas cover. The Falls were the site of the death of the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty at the great detective’s hands fourteen years before, on 4 May 1891.Six hundred guineas was the equal of three years of my Army half-pay pension, hard-earned in the arid Pāriyātra Parvata and a pestilential stint at the Rawal Pindi Base hospital, both of which I deemed myself lucky to have survived.
‘A front-cover picture of Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls will increase the run by at least a quarter million,’ Sir George opined gleefully.
He was right. A cover reprising Holmes’s miraculous escape from a watery grave at Moriarty’s hands would generate a welcome boost to sales.
Until his reappearance some three years later it was believed my great comrade had himself died in the struggle with Moriarty. The obscure mountain stream and waterfall soon became a place of pilgrimage. The nearby Englischer Hof guest book was filled with guests’ comments, keen to pay their respects. Visitors included the New York Police Department alongside a delegation from the French Sûreté, led by Monsieur Dubuque. Troupes of young London City men and members of the burgeoning Sherlock Holmes societies travelled to the Falls in charabanc loads, wearing bands of black crêpe around their bowlers. Gaggles dressed in long grey travelling cloaks clustered at the cliff edge, staring silently down. Some cast a facsimile of Holmes’s fore-and-aft (on sale at the local hotels) into the boiling waters below. The suicide watch at the cliff edge, normally posted for forlorn young lovers, now looked out for lone figures of distraught men and women ready to throw themselves into the chasm after the man they called ‘the Master’.