THE ADVENTURE OF THE TROUBLED SPOT By Sir Arthur Colon Boyle (Pseudonym of  Peter K Sharpen)     "Amazing!," said Dr. Watson as he stacked his pipe with tobacco from Holmes' jar while he wasn't looking.     "Elementary 101, my dear Watson," he responded, placing his deer-stalker on the hat-stand by the door and throwing his coat over a chair and caressing his beloved violin in passing.     "But how could you know?" asked Watson excitedly, puffing excitedly on his pipe and sending wafts of illicit smoke into the Baker Street flat.     "Elementary, too, my dear Watson,", he also replied excitedly, suddenly realising that the stench from Watson's pipe matched his own.     In an orgasm of smoke, Holmes explained:     "It was obvious from the outset. The poor man had run out of TCP and since retained the red mark that he had encountered the day before. Like the letter, someone had purloined it."     "Do you think it a study in scarlet?", asked Watson, coughing loudly on his pipe not used to the expensive tobacco.     " Rather a sign of the four," responded Holmes, wiping his eyes from the smoke and poking up two fingers at Watson in a reverse victory sign.     "He was a hound, that Baskerville," intoned Holmes, tapping his pipe in the ash-tray alongside the previous ash.     " A valley of fear," Watson replied.     "Well it was certainly a scandal in Bohemia," laughed Holmes. "The Red Headed League certainly had a case of identity crisis  over the Boscombe Valley Mystery."     "Is that relevant to the spot?" asked Watson, tamping out his pipe with a gusto onto a previously clean ash-tray.     "Yes, yes, my dear fellow. The five orange pips were nothing to the man with the twisted lip who had the adventure with the blue carbuncle. Now it's my turn with the Red Spot."     "And that's not to mention the problem you had with the speckled band on that engineer's thumb, you remember, the Nobel Bachelor that Beryl Coronet mentioned when that copper Beeches mentioned, in a silver blaze but with a jaundiced yellow face about the stock broker's clerk and Gloria Scott."     "Just so," answered Holmes, retrieving the jar of tobacco from Watson who had forgotten his previous thieving misdemeanour and was eagerly groping for more tobacco to fill his pipe.     "I believe," he continued, "that what we are doing, is a Musgrave ritual that only makes the Reigate puzzle seem that you are a crooked man stealing my tobacco. Don't you have any patients to attend?"     "I am but the resident patient of your house," responded Watson, now devoid of tobacco for his pipe. "I await the Greek interpreter on the Naval Treaty that has been the final problem of my life. I await the eternal Sherlock Holmes."     "You are an empty house," replied Holmes. "You were built by the Norwood builder with dancing men and a solitary cyclist from the Priory school and your friend Black Peter, the nephew of Charles Augustus Milverton who was one of the heirs of the six Napoleons."     "But that was after my affair with the three students!" barked Watson, still devoid of tobacco, since his dole cheque hadn't arrived.     "It was an adventure," Watson mused.     "I'm not a-mused," replied Holmes, "but will you stop musing?"     "It was an adventure," continued Watson, eyeing Holmes' stuffing tobacco in his pipe, yet again," but I remember the adventure of the three students. Especially the one with the golden pince-nez. Now he may have been missing three-quarter of his marbles but at the Abbey Grange, where we use to go for a quick pipe, he managed a second stain on his coat from the wisteria lodge."     Holmes continued to light his pipe in full view of Watson. He could see the red circle under Watson's left eye but it was nothing like the red spot he had seen earlier on the cardboard box that held the Bruce-Pertington Plans. He was not the dying detective that his friends made him out to be. He had made news in the disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax when she succumbed to the Devil's Foot, a mysterious disease that had appeared in the Case Book of Sherlock Holmes but had in fact been written by Watson, his last bow.     He felt sorry for Watson at that point and offered his some of his rapidly deplenishing tobacco. He was on the spot but couldn't educe it.  Watson had been an illustrious client. Not the blanched soldier of the Marazine Stone fraud from the Three Gables. Watson had also known the Sussex vampires. It was Watson who had diagnosed the three garridebs. At Thor Bridge, it was Watson who had helped the creeping man gather the lion's mane dish and the veiled lodger from Shoscombe Old Place who turned out to be the retired colourman.     So was this the meaning of the red spot? Did the red spot indicate a change of pace, a retirement into transvestism? Was it not he, who acquired the red spot from gazing into the mirror each day (many times) and applying endless make-up? The questions were not answerable. Holmes was stumped.     Was Watson a poof? Can you find 61 works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this story?

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