Late summer, 1905. Sherlock Holmes has settled in Sussex to tend his bees. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, has other ideas. Sinister whispers are doing the rounds at Horndean Castle, where the Earl of Allencourt is hosting a country house cricket match packed with English and Australian stars fresh from the Ashes.
Holmes is coaxed out of retirement. Watson, enjoying a quiet medical practice at last, declines to budge. So Conan Doyle sends a substitute scribe: his 23-year-old friend, admirer and fellow cricketer, P.G. Wodehouse.
Victor Trumper and Archie MacLaren take guard. G.K. Chesterton and G.H. Hardy check in as guests. Wodehouse toddles down to pen the mystery and, while he’s at it, stumbles upon a lifetime’s worth of material: a woolly-headed peer with a fondness for a massive pig, a young woman whose laughter could rattle the cutlery, and Nietzsche dismissed as fundamentally unsound.
Cricket, romance and mystery all play on the same pitch, with twists in the tale, turns in the track, and real history running underneath it all. Footnotes mark where fact and fiction meet.

“A magical mixture of mysterious events and actual occurrences … extensively researched incidents combined with an inbuilt instinct for storytelling, surprise, imagination and humour.”
Tony Ring, Wodehouse scholar, from the Foreword