Jim Webster for providing insights into ‘circumstantial evidence’ versus ‘direct evidence’ in criminal cases. I met Jim and his wife-to-be Karen when we were all students in Göttingen and at UCLA. Jim has spent his life as an attorney-at-law fighting for the rights of the under-dog and would have made a fine mentor to the censor Wang.
Craig Brough, Information Services Librarian, Public Programmes Directorate, Royal Botanic Gardens. Fruit trees in China etc. Ever helpful on the most abstruse enquiry on little-known flora.
Janice Phillips, Chief Executive & HR Administrator Office, British Association of Optometrists, responding immediately to my query on Victorian eye-glasses.
Neil Handley MA, AMA+, FRSA, curator of the British Optical Association Museum, for his very useful description of the railway glasses Holmes needed to disguise his non-Chinese grey eyes. The museum is based at the College of Optometrists. Visitors and researchers welcome.
Dr. Annie Hodgson, York University Chemistry department, who said, ‘This has to be one of the most intriguing emails I have ever had. As a great fan of Sherlock Holmes (I am currently reading my way through all the original stories) I am happy to see if I can help you.’ - and came up trumps (chemically speaking) whenever I needed advice on poisons!
Howard White. My old friend and ‘listening board’ of St. Leonard’s On Sea. He scouted the hard-to-find Old Roar Falls in the hills near Hastings which I used in my short story ‘A Most Diabolical Plot’ in the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, part 111 (Editor David Marcum), published in 2015.
Dr. Michael Pritchard FRPS. Director-General, Royal Photographic Society. Author of ‘A History of Photography In 50 Cameras’. For telling me about the Aeroscope. I also asked about disguised cameras and received the following information: ‘There were a lot of disguised cameras available in 1906 - cameras hidden in bags, hats, canes, watches, books, etc. Some were more novelties than anything else but others were capable of producing reasonable quality photos. Houghton’s Ticka camera was available by 1906 and was capable of producing decent images on film.’
Andy Patterson, for providing me with the article ‘No Shadows’, by Luke S. K. Kwong, published in ‘History Today’ in September 2000.
Tang Li, Public Services Librarian at Yale’s East Asia Collection, who suggested reading the curious ‘China under the empress dowager, being the history of the life and times of Tzu’ hsi’, by J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse.
Frances Wood, English librarian, Sinologue and historian widely known for her writings on Chinese history.
Google and Wikipedia. When I grew up in Guernsey there was one tiny (and private) library, the Priaulx. Other library books took a fortnight to order from mainland Britain - if you knew what you wanted to read. Now, with the click of a mouse, the whole universe from obscure Chinese scrolls to gravitational waves flies through the ether to my computer in deep woodland in East Sussex.
And last but definitely not least, the Bard of Stratford:
William Shakespeare (c. 1564–1616). Poet, playwright, whose ‘Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ gave General Yuán the idea for his own plot against the Emperor, after hearing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, describe his murder: ‘Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon...’
For Shakespeare’s contemporary audiences the vileness of the crime was reinforced by the ugly effects of the poison, which clotted King Hamlet’s blood and ‘corrupted’ his body.
First published in 2016 by MX Publishing
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© Copyright 2016 Tim Symonds and Lesley Abdela
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Cover by Brian Belanger
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