Euphemisms

  

 

Right now The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart is with my editor. Normally I don’t change anything in a draft while my editor is going through it. But lately I’ve been waking up at three in the morning with urgent, miniscule changes to this one. For instance the other night I immediately had to change the word “syphilis” to “the French complaint.”

Why did the question of syphilis even come up in a Sherlock Holmes tale? Oh, that’s simple. It explains Watson’s familiarity with sunglasses in 1924.