A Slight Trick of the Mind

At 93 years old, the retired detective Sherlock Holmes returns to his farmhouse on the Sussex Downs after nearly two months abroad in India, Australia, and occupied postwar Japan. He walks with two canes, and the specifics of his journey already feel unfathomable. His farmhouse, his rituals, and his apiary, the collection of beehives he has kept for decades, remain ingrained and reliable. Settling into his armchair, he falls asleep and dreams of standing naked in a field of marigolds, stung on the throat by a bee, unable to recall the remedy as his throat swells shut.

He wakes gasping to the voice of Mrs. Munro, his young housekeeper. Holmes burns nearly all his correspondence, saving only letters about his narrow interests: queen bee cultivation, royal jelly (a nutrient-rich secretion produced by worker bees), and prickly ash, a Japanese shrub he suspects may promote longevity. He asks about Roger, Mrs. Munro's 14-year-old son, and learns he himself instructed the boy to wait at the hives, though he cannot recall doing so.

Holmes ventures to the beeyard and reunites with Roger, who has capably tended the hives, presenting the boy with a glass vial of dead Japanese honeybees. Holmes harbors paternal feelings for Roger, whose father died among British army casualties in the Balkans, but finds it impossible to express affection. During Holmes's weeks abroad, Roger has been sneaking into the forbidden attic study to read an unfinished manuscript buried beneath the old man's papers. Titled "The Glass Armonicist," it recounts an earlier case and ends abruptly after two chapters.

The manuscript opens with Holmes setting aside his masterwork, The Whole Art of Detection, to record a case from memory, defending Dr. John Watson against dramatists who portray the doctor as foolish. In 1902, Thomas R. Keller, a nervous young accountant, visits Holmes at Baker Street about his wife, Ann, who suffered two miscarriages and was told she could never bear children. Despondent, Ann found solace when Keller gave her an antique glass armonica, a rare instrument of rotating glass bowls played with wet fingers, and arranged lessons with Madame Schirmer, a German musician living above Portman's Booksellers. Ann's reluctance gave way to obsession: she composed melancholic pieces and began playing sustained tones while calling out the names chosen for her unborn children, attempting to summon the dead. Keller fired Madame Schirmer and removed the armonica; Ann appeared to recover but began disappearing on the same days as her former lessons. Holmes takes the case, though his true motive is personal: an attraction to Mrs. Keller and a desire to experience the armonica. At Portman's, Holmes deduces Ann went elsewhere in the building; upstairs, they find only a boy taking lessons. He pockets her photograph. Here the manuscript breaks off.

The novel moves fluidly between Holmes's Sussex life and his memories of Japan. In Kobe, Mr. Tamiki Umezaki, a slender poet in his mid-fifties, greeted Holmes at the station alongside Hensuiro, introduced as his brother. They traveled through wartime ruins to Mr. Umezaki's Victorian-style house. When challenged to demonstrate his observational talent, Holmes delivered a sweeping analysis: Mr. Umezaki was educated at Oxford, is a poet and armchair Communist, and Hensuiro is not his brother but his romantic companion. Mr. Umezaki confirmed most deductions but corrected one: Maya, the woman Holmes had assumed was the housekeeper, is his mother.

They traveled westward by train. At Hiroshima, they observed temporary shacks amid fields of horseweed on charred earth. At the Atom Bomb Dome, a skeletal reinforced-concrete structure near ground zero, Holmes felt both regret and hopefulness from sparrows perched on its rusted girders. At Shukkei-en Garden, now fenced off and scarred by the blast, Mr. Umezaki revealed his true purpose. After his younger brother Kenji died of tuberculosis, his father traveled frequently to London and Berlin, eventually sending young Tamiki a copy of A Study in Scarlet with a letter stating that after consulting "the great detective Sherlock Holmes," he had decided to remain in England indefinitely. The family never heard from him again. Holmes, unable to recall any meeting with Matsuda Umezaki, could offer no answers.

Over successive evenings, Mr. Umezaki revealed his mother's destructive grief, including her attempt to persuade him as a child to die by suicide with her. Holmes privately resolved to fabricate a story. Late one night at their inn in Shimonoseki, he whispered a constructed history: Matsuda had been recruited through Holmes's brother Mycroft for secret diplomatic work and eventually vanished into the interior of Erromango, an island in the New Hebrides. Mr. Umezaki was visibly transformed by the account. On their last day, they found the prickly-ash shrub in the dunes near the sea, and Holmes savored the moment as the apex of his journey.

Back in Sussex, tragedy strikes. One afternoon, Holmes finds Roger stretched out in the high grass, his face covered in stings, his pupils fixed on the sky. "Quite dead, my boy. Quite dead, I fear" (150). He deduces anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction, then retreats to his study, locking the door as Mrs. Munro's wails course through the house. That night, compelled by grief, Holmes finishes "The Glass Armonicist." In the manuscript's third chapter, he describes disguising himself to follow Mrs. Keller and discovering the innocent truth: She had been borrowing books from Portman's, listening to the armonica from a hidden garden behind the shop, then walking to the Physics and Botanical Society park. There, Holmes watched her cradle a worker bee on her gloved palm, whispering to it with reverence. The epilogue reveals Mrs. Keller was struck and killed by a locomotive, making no attempt to save herself. Holmes concluded she had extracted herself from the human equation, perhaps because creation was "both too beautiful and too horrible" for her perceptive soul (251).

The morning after Roger's death, Mrs. Munro appears at the beeyard with a canister of petrol, demanding Holmes destroy the bees. He refuses. Retracing Roger's trail, Holmes finds a watering can attended by wasps and realizes the boy discovered a wasps' nest threatening the apiary and tried to drown the colony, a fatal miscalculation, since flooding a wasps' nest only provokes the insects. The stings bore no embedded stingers, confirming wasps rather than bees. Holmes pours petrol into the nest and ignites it, then weeps behind his beekeeper's veil.

After the funeral, Mrs. Munro returns and tells Holmes she intends to leave. She accuses him of being inhuman: "What have you ever known about loving anyone?" (235). Holmes shares something deeply personal: Decades earlier, he watched Mrs. Keller cradle a bee on her palm with reverence, and this single communion, not science or books, propelled him into his lifelong devotion to bees. Mrs. Munro asks why Roger had to die. Holmes answers that sometimes things occur beyond understanding, and the unjust reality is that such events are exactly what they are and nothing else. Before she leaves, Holmes seizes her hand; they stand together, communicating grief through the gentle pressure of fingers, then she slips free.

Holmes descends the cliff trail toward the beach, watching the sea grow radiant with the setting sun. He closes his eyes and envisions the durable things: wild daffodils, herb beds, and breezes in the pines. A lone worker bee lands on his neck. He captures it in his fist, opens his fingers, and watches it dance upon his palm before sending it into the air, envious of its effortless flight into "such a mutable, inconsistent world" (244).