Story Profile: “The Chapel of the Holy Blood”

Story Profile: “The Chapel of the Holy Blood”

 

I love Sherlock Holmes stories.  And I also love G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories.  So when Belanger Books announced their anthology Sherlock Holmes and the Great Detectives, featuring original mysteries where Sherlock Holmes joined forces with other famous (public domain) detectives from that era, I decided to write a story where the two of them solve a crime together.

 

I was inspired by a reference to Father Brown’s niece in “The Worst Crime in the World.”  Father Brown’s sister is trying to get her daughter to make a “prudent” marriage to a wealthy man.  The first attempt to pair the poor girl off to an heir fails miserably, so I wondered what would happen if Father Brown’s sister set her sights on making another rich fellow her son-in-law.  

 

Many of the Father Brown stories feature the priest investigating seemingly paranormal events that turn out to have purely natural– though often sinister– explanations.  In “The Chapel of the Holy Blood,” the paramour of Father Brown’s niece lives in a country estate that used to be a monastery.  When the monks who lived them were killed by the forces of Henry VIII, and the property seized, a legend spread that blood would drip from the walls of the chapel during times of trouble.  When Father Brown discovers a gory sight on his visit, he doesn’t believe this is a magical occurrence, but he requests Sherlock Holmes’s help in using his famous test from A Study in Scarlet to prove that the reddish substance is indeed blood.  The two detectives soon start working together to find out what caused it.

 

I didn’t want to spend time having the two sleuths introducing themselves to each other, so I suggested that the two met while looking into the cases of the Vatican cameos and the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca, both stories briefly referenced in the original Holmes Canon but never fully told.

 

It was great fun for me to write this story, and I hope that mystery fans have equally as much fun reading it.

 

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” will be released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).

 

“The Chapel of the Holy Blood” can be found in Sherlock Holmes and the Great Detectives, and is available from Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle editions.