Sherlock Holmes - The Thinking Engine

James Lovegrove

• Publisher: Titan Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781783295036
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783295043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

March 1895. Hilary Term at Oxford. In the newly built extension to the University Galleries, Professor Quantock has put the finishing touches to a wondrous computational device which, he claims, is capable of analytical thought to rival that of the cleverest men alive. Indeed, his so-called Thinking Engine seems equal to Sherlock Holmes himself in its deductive powers. To prove his point, Quantock programmes his machine to solve a murder in the Jericho area which has been baffling Oxford police. The Engine identifies a suspect who proves not to have a valid alibi for the night of the crime. The man is duly arrested and arraigned. Sherlock Holmes cannot ignore this challenge. He and Watson travel to Oxford, where a battle of wits ensues between the great detective and his mechanical counterpart as they compete to see which of them can be first to solve a series of crimes. As man and machine vie for supremacy, it becomes clear that the Thinking Engine has its own agenda. Holmes's and Watson's lives are on the line as a ghost from the past catches up with them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Also Available from Titan Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Chapter One: The Rubenstein Collection Mummy
• Chapter Two: The Bumptious American
• Chapter Three: An Insult and a Challenge
• Chapter Four: The Head-in-the-Clouds Academic
• Chapter Five: The Jericho Murders
• Chapter Six: The Taint of Violent Death
• Chapter Seven: A Master Craftsman at Work
• Chapter Eight: The Thinking Engine Thinks
• Chapter Nine: A Monstrous Turn of Events
• Chapter Ten: The Three Letters
• Chapter Eleven: A Signature in a Dead Tongue
• Chapter Twelve: The Honourable Aubrey Bancroft
• Chapter Thirteen: The Distance of Care
• Chapter Fourteen: Just Another Jobbing Intellectual
• Chapter Fifteen: The Greater Glory of Lord Knaresfield
• Chapter Sixteen: Parson’s Pleasure
• Chapter Seventeen: A Kind of Agent Provocateur
• Chapter Eighteen: Pressure from the Press
• Chapter Nineteen: The Mystery of the Missing Stroke
• Chapter Twenty: An Impromptu Self-jettisoning
• Chapter Twenty-One: A Kind of Mutiny
• Chapter Twenty-Two: “Gas Par”
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The False Armour of Rage
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Voice Cabinet
• Chapter Twenty-Six: A Chip off the Old Block
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Soul of a Napoleon
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Stranger in the Turf
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Proposition
• Chapter Thirty: A Living Scarecrow
• Chapter Thirty-One: Saving Sherlock Holmes
• Chapter Thirty-Two: Moran the Ronin
• Chapter Thirty-Three: A Brace of Errands
• Chapter Thirty-Four: Midnight at the Museum
• Chapter Thirty-Five: The Nuances of Language
• Chapter Thirty-Six: Moriarty and the Turk
• Chapter Thirty-Seven: Unholy Trinity
• Chapter Thirty-Eight: A Great Brass-and-Steel Sham
• Chapter Thirty-Nine: A Spider Again
• Chapter Forty: Rods
• Chapter Forty-One: The Tiger at Bay
• Chapter Forty-Two: The Last Straw
• Chapter Forty-Three: Shrewd People
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author