The Canary Trainer

Blurb

The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson is a 1993 Sherlock Holmes pastiche by Nicholas Meyer. Like The Seven Percent Solution and The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer was published as a "lost manuscript" of the late Dr. John H. Watson. In "The Adventure of Black Peter", an original Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story from 1904, Watson mentions that his companion recently arrested "Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East-End of London." This Wilson is not related to the eponymous character of Meyer's novel. Meyer's "trainer" is Erik, the principal figure of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. It is from this unchronicled tale that The Notorious Canary Trainers take their name.
The Canary Trainer describes Holmes's adventures during the "Great Hiatus" of 1891-4, when he was traveling the world, trying to escape the minions of Professor Moriarty; in Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, however, a different impetus is given for this period, and this alternate scenario is maintained here.