Showing results for "Meditations" in Historical Fiction

The air is the first thing. For a solitary archivist on the fourth floor of a vast library, the world is not measured in sight or sound, but in scent. This is a life lived in the stacks, a world contained by the fire door and the heavy, metal-plated threshold. Inside, the air is honest. It is the dry, stable smell of paper fibers, acidic ink, and the sweet, vanilla-like decay of lignin. It is the smell of preservation, of time held still.

Chiliad consists of two interrelated stories, stories filtered through the melancholy imagination of a narrator perched on the banks of a river that flows backward and forward through time. The first movement, "Men and Sin", takes place in the millennial year of 1000 AD. The second, "A Moment at the River's Heart", occurs exactly 1000 years - the length of a "chiliad" - later, as the new millennium approaches.

Holmes is consulted by Mr Devine on an unusual matter. Mr Devine has apprehended two malefactors in a well-watered garden in the Middle East and is unsure what is an appropriate form of retribution to impose. Holmes, Watson, and Mr Devine discuss the problem at length before arriving at a solution which satisfies all of them. Orlando Pearson himself then pens an essay setting out a radical theory about Sherlock Holmes and this theory is given further substance in an extraordinary fragment of Dr Watson’s writing found in the Public Record Office long after Watson’s death.