The action moves from England to northern France in Robert Ryan’s Dead Man’s Land. It’s 1918, and Dr. John H. Watson—following an emotional split from Sherlock Holmes—has been commissioned as a

major with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Though now in his mid-60s, he’s been dispatched to the deadly front lines as “an expert in the new techniques of blood transfusion.” In the face of persistent shellings and unrelenting carnage, Watson feels satisfaction in helping the war effort. Yet it’s his skills as a sleuth as much as a surgeon that come in handy here.

After a British soldier perishes from a bizarre ailment that turns his skin blue and his hands into claws, Watson’s transfusion techniques fall under suspicion. He’s convinced, though, that another explanation exists. So when a similar death does occur, Watson starts digging into the victims’ history, looking for connections between them. He’s aided in this effort by a volunteer nurse with the Red Cross, the resourceful Georgina Gregson, whose past clashes with the law may make her an unreliable ally. As the violence of war swirls about their heads, and snipers keep a lethal vigil in the bleak no-man’s-land between opposing armies, Watson pursues a murderer with old grudges and no compunction against adding Holmes’ onetime chronicler to the count of battlefront casualties.

Author Ryan’s depiction of combat-zone privations and the peculiar society of the trenches radiates with authenticity, and his portrayal of Dr. Watson is sufficiently faithful to have won Dead Man’s Land the authorization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate. I understand a sequel is already in the pipeline. Perhaps by then, this UK release will have found a U.S. publisher. Fortunately, it’s easily available now from online sources.

J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January Magazine.

A couple of years ago Guy Barker took dZf, his 75-minute jazz-noir-suite loosely based on The Magic Flute libretto, to Aldeburgh.  It was performed at Snape Maltings, Benjamin Britten’s spiritual and musical home, with, as always, Michel Brandon narrating my script. It must have gone down well because the Aldeburgh Music people asked Guy to come back and do something similar for the centenary of Britten’s death. But what? Guy asked me to come up with some ideas for a narrative. After all, Britten used outside sources as inspiration – Herman Melville for Billy Budd, Henry James for Turn of the Screw, Thomas Mann, John Dowland, John Donne, Shakespeare, for other works. At first I thought about something to do with the piece BB wrote for POWs in Germany (see below), but neither Guy nor I could detect a jazz component in there. Guy and I have long been fascinated by Geraldo’s Navy, the jazzers who worked on the transatlantic ships in the ‘40s and ‘50s, who played strict dance tempo on board, but once in New York sought out Bird, Dizzy, Bud, Max and other beboppers. That combo of America, the sea (both an integral part of the BB story), British dance bands and the gradual absorption of the new music from across the Atlantic, gave us a starting point. It now forms the overture to a piece called That Obscure Hurt, based on a Henry James short story (Britten used two of his supernatural tales, we’re completing the trilogy) called the Jolly Corner – a misnomer if ever there was one – about the homecoming of a New York businessman after an absence of many years who finds his old house haunted by a monstrous presence. Having set dZf in New York, we decided that this piece should be centered on London. So the action has shifted to Soho, but the premise is the same as James’s original – a man who haunts himself. Now with added CCTV cameras. And, although initially I suggested there be no spoken word and no songs, it looks like we are having both. Yup, it’s in great danger of turning into a jazz-opera with ghosts. One thing we can promise: as with Mozart and dZf, no music by Benjamin Britten will be harmed in this project.

STOP PRESS: The BBC Concert Orchestra today announced the appointment of composer, arranger and jazz trumpeter Guy Barker as its new Associate Composer. The position, previously held by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and the Art of Noise’s Anne Dudley, will be for an initial period of two years beginning in April 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2013/bbccoguybarker.html

Don’t ever buy second-hand books with a New Year’s Day hangover. Wondering around a local used bookshop with my eyes narrowed against the punishing light, I came across what I thought was a true-life adventure by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called Lone Dhow. When I got home, my eyes focussed a little better and I saw it was by ADRIAN Conan Doyle, ACD’s son by his second wife Jean. Lone Dhow is a tale about trying to capture a live tiger shark for the University of Geneva and there is something rather self-regarding about the tone. Certainly ACD’s biographer Andrew Lycett is less than complimentary about Adrian, calling him ‘a spendthrift playboy…who used the Conan Doyle estate as a milch-cow’. Adrian wrote a volume of Holmes stories (apparently with the help of John Dickson Carr), published as The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, and established a replica of Holmes’s 221b at his home in Switzerland. Some of the tales are rather stilted but the best match the quality of his father’s later tales. There is an interesting interview by a young Joan Bakewell Adrian with on You Tube that includes him driving his Lamborghini and showing off his medieval castle and its Holmes’s shrine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THtIleV3sfg

I have a piece in this weekend’s Sunday Times Travel on skiing (very badly) in Arosa in Switzerland. I was drawn to the resort partly because at the time I was writing Dead Man’s Land, featuring Dr Watson, and I knew Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had put Arosa on the map. The author was a keen sportsman and when he was staying at Davos (for his wife’s health) he ordered skis from Norway and set about teaching himself the discipline. As he wrote in The Strand magazine in 1894 “You let yourself go, gliding delightfully over the gentle slopes, flying down the steeper ones, taking an occasional cropper, but getting as near to flying as any earthbound man can. In that glorious air it is a delightful experience.’”

He was soon good enough to attempt the treacherous crossing over the Maienfelder Furka pass linking Davos to Arosa, which he did in the company of two local guides (the Branger Brothers). “But now we had a pleasure which boots can never give,” he wrote, “For a third of a mile we shot along over gently dipping curves, skimming down into the valley without a motion of our feet.  In that great untrodden waste, with snow-fields bounding our vision on every side and no marks of life save the tracks of chamois and of foxes, it was glorious to whizz along in this easy fashion.” Conan Doyle was one of the first English writers to eulogize the joys of skiing and he prophesized: “I am convinced that there will come a time when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the ‘skiing’ season.” Within a few years both Davos and Arosa became winter favourites of his readers.

It is a very tenuous link between jazz and the dead of World War One, but I inadvertently made the connection last week. I had gone to The Forum in Kentish Town to interview Mancunian trumpet player Matthew Halsall (of whom more another time) and I was sitting with the band in a nearby café. I mentioned Dead Man’s Land, the new Dr Watson novel, and the young drummer to my right became very animated on the subject of WW1. This was Rob Turner who, as well as filling the drum chair for Halsall that night (it is often taken by Cinematic Orchestra’s Luke Flowers), is also a ‘sound artist’. By another coincidence he also drums for the piano trio GoGo Penguin, an album I had recently bought and thoroughly enjoyed. To use name-dropping shorthand – if you like EST, Neil Cowley, Albaran Trio or Bad Plus, you’ll love Fanfares (on the Gondwana label) although it has strong elements, especially in the interplay of the rhythm section, that is all its own. Turner is not your average jazz drummer – as influences he cites not Tony Williams or Jack DeJohnette but Aphex Twin and John Cage (he quotes the latter: ‘There is no noise, only sound.’)

But, to the war dead. That evening Turner let drop a project so ambitious, I called him up to discuss it a few days later. ‘It came to me overnight, literally,’ he said down the phone. ‘I woke up and thought – I wonder if it can be done? So I went to Steve Mead, artistic director of the Manchester Jazz Festival and he mentioned it to the Imperial War Museum and they were really interested.’

The idea is to build a text-recognition machine that will read out the names of all the casualties of World War One, close to forty million of them. ‘We wanted it to have no political agenda, so all countries are represented, all sides and both military and civilian casualties, too. It will operate 24 hours a day, with 3 seconds or so allowed for each name. I did think about running it chronologically, so if people knew their relative died at Loos in 1915, then they could come along. But the problem was you have these clumps where people died in vast numbers, such as day one of The Somme, that it skewers the timing. So we think it will be in alphabetical order.’ The next stage is to try and get funding for further investigation into the computer software and, if it goes ahead, to build the machine in time for the 100th anniversary of the start of the war in 2014 (it would probably be installed at IWM North). And how long will it take to recite the roll call of the fallen? Turner: ‘Well, that’s one thing that brings home the scale of the losses– even running day and night, it will take four years to list them all.’

GoGo Penguin play The Vortex (020 7254 4097, http://www.vortexjazz.co.uk) in Dalston,  London on December 7th, with a DJ set by Matthew Halsall.