Scott Pearson | The Case of a Christmas Past

It’s just a week before Christmas in 1887 when Eddie Sykes turns up at 221B Baker Street. He’s haunted by a nightmare that he has begun to fear is actually a memory of a Christmas ten years earlier—a memory of a murder he did nothing to stop. With little more than a glimpse of a body in an alley within a dream, he implores Holmes to bring him some peace for Christmas by catching the murderer.

“The Case of a Christmas Past” is included in Sherlock Holmes: Two Turtle Doves, alongside two poems and two stories by my friend Chris Abbott. I’ve been editing Chris’s Holmes stories and novellas since 2020, and he’s been after me for a couple years to write a Holmes story for him. In the fall of 2025 he asked me for a Christmas-themed Holmes story, and I was rather surprised that an idea popped into my head. The excerpt below is from the opening scene of the story (note that some elements of British style are used—single instead of double quotation marks and a lack of periods following abbreviations).

The Case of a Christmas Past

Christmas Day fell on Sunday in 1887, and the Sunday prior had brought us a case that barely appeared to be a case at all. If asked to wager soon after our unexpected visitor arrived, my money would have been on Sherlock Holmes turning his back and picking up his violin, with the polite dismissal of the young man falling to me. But I would have lost that imaginary bet.
       It had been a cold and dry month, and with a temperature that Sunday not far above freezing, my friend and I were comfortably tucked beneath blankets in our chairs before a roaring fire. We were having our afternoon tea when we heard the muffled sounds of Mrs Hudson answering the door downstairs. Holmes had immediately perked up, setting aside a treatise on insects he’d been reading and annotating, a glint appearing in his grey eyes. It had been rather slow lately, though not so devoid of investigations that I would expect him to take on just any case that came over the threshold.
       I folded up the Sunday Times I’d been paging through, tossed my blanket aside, and got up. Walking to the door, I opened it just as Mrs Hudson reached the top of the stairs with a young, nervous man trailing behind her.
       ‘I tried to tell him it was your teatime,’ Mrs Hudson said disapprovingly, glancing back over her shoulder, ‘but he was most insistent.’
       Before I could respond, Holmes spoke up from behind me. ‘That’s quite all right, Mrs Hudson, let the man in, and bring up some fresh tea, would you?’
       With a sigh, Mrs Hudson shuffled off down the stairs. The man at the door took off his cap, twisting it in his hands, and stepped inside. . . .