Charles Finch

I often get e-mails about A Beautiful Blue Death, some that praise it and others that criticize it, and I'm grateful for all them. In particular there's one class of reader who find small historical errors, and I like to get their e-mails. The sharpest of these pointed out that a character called Miss Harrison, George Barnard's housekeeper, would almost certainly have been referred to with the honorific "Mrs." whether she was married or not. As a lover of Sherlock Holmes I should have recognized this on my own because of the character of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221b Baker Street, where Holmes and Watson lived for many years (and where Holmes lived alone in the uncertain periods when Watson was married). There's never any mention of Mr. Hudson, though there's Billy, a page boy, if I recall correctly. And I've always thought it was an underrated act of courage on Mrs. Hudson's part that she pulled the strings to make the wax sculpture of Holmes seem animated, in order to entice Colonel Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London, to shoot it.