The Canary Trainer

The Canary Trainer

The Canary Trainer: From the Memoirs of John H. Watson is a 1993 Sherlock Holmes pastiche by Nicholas Meyer. Like The Seven Percent Solution and The West End Horror, The Canary Trainer was published as a "lost manuscript" of the late Dr. John H. Watson. In "The Adventure of Black Peter", an original Arthur Conan Doyle Holmes story from 1904, Watson mentions that his companion recently arrested "Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East-End of London"; this Wilson is not related to the titular character of Meyer's novel. Meyer's "trainer" is Erik, the principal figure of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. It is from this unchronicled tale that The Notorious Canary Trainers (a Sherlockian scion in Madison, Wisconsin, founded in 1969) take their name.

The Canary Trainer describes Holmes's adventures during the "Great Hiatus" of 1891-4, when (according to the Sherlockian Canon) he was traveling the world, trying to escape the minions of Professor Moriarty; in Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, however, a different impetus is given for this period, and this alternate scenario is maintained here. The bulk of the novel is a first-person narrative, in which Holmes recounts a visit to Paris, where he played violin for the Palais Garnier and became entangled with a mysterious "Phantom". Although Dr. Watson appears only in the novel's 1912 bookend scenes, a significant sub-plot concerns Holmes' efforts to (temporarily) replace the former with a young Parisian, who, while useful, is not nearly as brave or devoted as Holmes' usual companion.

This novel was published after but takes place before Meyer's third Holmes pastiche, The West End Horror.