I undid the wrappings with great curiosity, for Holmes did not normally give gifts. I opened the dark velvet jewller’s box and found inside a shiny new set of picklocks, a younger version of his own. “Holmes, ever the romantic. Mrs. Hudson would be pleased.
It is an amazing thing, the difference to one’s powers of concentration a pair of comfortable shoes can make.
I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head...
Most damning of phrases: He meant well.
What does it mean, to lose one’s mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast?
That’s what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.
The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.
You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.
It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe...
Holmes, I’m a 24 year old prude.
Men do, I’ve found, accept the most errant nonsense from a well dressed woman.
Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one’s daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage.
Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast.
The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.
In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.
Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.
I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.
When you’re putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.