One Must Tell the Bees

Author J. Lawrence Matthews invites readers on a remarkable journey with a precocious young chemist named Holmes from the streets of London to Washington D.C. in the last year of the Civil War. This vivid, previously untold story takes place during a crucial period in history that Americans are once again seeking to understand—and may now see through the keen eyes of Sherlock Holmes, thanks to One Must Tell The Bees: The Final Education of Sherlock Holmes, (May 22, 2021, East Dean Press).

It begins in 1918 in the English countryside where the world’s greatest detective has retired to tend his bees and write his memoirs — memoirs that reveal the full story of his journey to America, first as a junior chemist at the DuPont gunpowder works in Wilmington, then as a companion for young Tad Lincoln on what turns out to be the evening of President Lincoln’s assassination — and finally as an unsung participant in the electrifying manhunt for the assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

It is Holmes’s very first case. But, as One Must Tell The Bees reveals, it is nothing like his final education …

J. Lawrence Matthews has contributed fiction to the New York Times and NPR and is the author of three non-fiction books as Jeff Matthews. “One Must Tell the Bees” is his first novel. Written at a time when American history is being scrutinized and recast in the light of 21st Century mores, this fast-paced account of Sherlock Holmes’s visit to America during the final year of the Civil War illuminates the profound impact of Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation on slavery, the war and America itself. Matthews is now researching the sequel, which takes place a bit further afield—in Florence, Mecca and Tibet—but readers may contact him at jlawrencematthews@gmail.com.