Some Taxing Matters E-Book

Orlando Pearson

• Herausgeber: Delos Digital
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Giallo - short story (20 pagine) - When the taxman calls, even the Chancellor needs a Holmes to answer.

In 1926, a financially beleaguered Winston Churchill turns to Mycroft Holmes with an extraordinary request: to engineer a unique and secret tax exemption that would allow the Chancellor of the Exchequer to avoid paying his own substantial tax bill. Mycroft deploys his unparalleled understanding of bureaucracy, ambition, and human weakness to manipulate the Inland Revenue’s top official. But when famed author P.G. Wodehouse seeks similar relief years later, Mycroft faces a dilemma between personal favour and public principle—a sharp exploration of power, privilege, and the art of the possible in the shadow of the state.

London businessman, Orlando Pearson is the creator of The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series, which buries forever the idea that Sherlock Holmes might not have been a historical person.

Do you want to see Sherlock Holmes come to the rescue of Queen Victoria, arrange the borders of post-war Europe, clear Macbeth of murder, unravel King Oedipus’s complexities, or provide advice to the Almighty? Then you will find all this and more in the seven collections of short stories, two novels, and the six plays in the series.

When not communing with the spirits of 221b, Orlando enjoys sport, music, and browsing price comparison websites.

He has written Sherlock Holmes stories on all these topics.

Leseprobe

Cover

Some Taxing Matters

Mycroft Holmes The Secret Memoirs

5

Edited by Luigi Pachì

Orlando Pearson

Some Taxing Matters

short story

Delos Digital

This book

When the taxman calls, even the Chancellor needs a Holmes to answer.

In 1926, a financially beleaguered Winston Churchill turns to Mycroft Holmes with an extraordinary request: to engineer a unique and secret tax exemption that would allow the Chancellor of the Exchequer to avoid paying his own substantial tax bill. Mycroft deploys his unparalleled understanding of bureaucracy, ambition, and human weakness to manipulate the Inland Revenue’s top official. But when famed author P.G. Wodehouse seeks similar relief years later, Mycroft faces a dilemma between personal favour and public principle—a sharp exploration of power, privilege, and the art of the possible in the shadow of the state.

The Author

London businessman, Orlando Pearson is the creator of The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series, which buries forever the idea that Sherlock Holmes might not have been a historical person.

Do you want to see Sherlock Holmes come to the rescue of Queen Victoria, arrange the borders of post-war Europe, clear Macbeth of murder, unravel King Oedipus’s complexities, or provide advice to the Almighty? Then you will find all this and more in the seven collections of short stories, two novels, and the six plays in the series.

When not communing with the spirits of 221b, Orlando enjoys sport, music, and browsing price comparison websites.

He has written Sherlock Holmes stories on all these topics.

Contents

Cover

Mycroft Holmes The Secret Memoirs

Frontispiece

This book

The Author

Contents

Some Taxing Matters

Preface by Henry Durham, historical advisor to The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series

Some Taxing Matters as narrated by Mycroft Holmes

Historical Note by Henry Durham, historical advisor to The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series

From the same author

In the same collection

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Copyright

Cover

Frontispiece

Copyright

Book’s beginning

Some Taxing Matters

Contents

Some Taxing Matters

Preface by Henry Durham, historical advisor to The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series

What Mycroft Holmes relates below refers to matters that arose between 1926 and 1934 and is precise in the sums of money involved.

Readers may wonder what these sums are worth in twenty-first century money.

This preface was written in 2025.

Readers are safe to multiply numbers below by fifty and to convert sterling amounts into United States dollars at a rate of USD 4 to the pound to get the value in 2025 money.

Thus £1,000 in 1930 is worth USD 200,000 in today’s money.

Some Taxing Matters as narrated by Mycroft Holmes

In Dr Watson’s accounts of my brother’s activities most of the people who consulted him came from the ranks of the lowlier classes – a tide-waiter, a woman letting out a spare room, a lovelorn typist, a railway porter in a velveteen uniform. By contrast, all the people who visited me at my humble apartment in the Mall or at the Diogenes Club were from the highest echelons of society – indeed I have yet to feature a petitioner in my own writings who has not attracted a string of biographers.

The matter I relate now tells of one of the great politicians of the twentieth century and of one of its great writers.

My brother has commented that part of my regimen was to be at the Diogenes Club which is just opposite my bachelor apartment from a quarter to five until twenty to eight in the evening. It seems hardly worth mentioning that a man of my class would not prepare his own breakfast, so another part of my regimen was to be at the Diogenes at ten past eight in the morning for the first meal of the day where I stayed until nine o’clock when I departed for Whitehall. It was when I arrived at the Diogenes for breakfast on the 12th of February of 1926 that the doorman approached me.

“There’s a visitor waiting for you in the Stranger’s Room, sir,” he said. “He has been waiting for you for ten minutes and has already asked me to bring him a large glass of whisky and soda which I will have to add to your account.”

As my readers will know, the Stranger’s Room overlooks Pall Mall.

I went into it to find one of the best-known figures in the country sitting at the window and looking down over the street below.