Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #1. Arthur Conan Doyle
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who is often presented as clumsy, slapdash or evasive.
Very occasionally, this game needs to be set aside, and Klinger is rather better than Baring-Gould at that. His footnotes don’t have that slightly grumpy tone — and he frequently phrases them in the form of questions, not objecting to veracity but to credibility. I often sense that Sherlockians feel a certain frustration and resentment that Doyle didn’t care about such things as calendar dates, continuity and dovetailing fictional and real-world events — but he was writing in a period before the evolution of that style. He cites names, dates and places to make his fictions seem convincing — as Wilkie Collins had done or Bram Stoker would do — but feels no obligation to make them names, dates and places that can be verified by old maps, newspapers and the Dictionary of National Biography. Baring-Gould comes close to kicking some stories out of the Canon simply because he can’t make sense of the dates, which Klinger never does — he points out when a date given in the text as a Wednesday was actually a Friday but leaves it at that, and adds a chart at the back in a tentative attempt to put the stories in order. Overlooked in this are some things that interest me more than whether Lord Bellinger of ‘The Second Stain’ is supposed to be Gladstone or Salisbury. There are rarely notes that speculate on Doyle’s specific inspirations — these stories came from somewhere, and it might be interesting to learn whether Doyle heard an anecdote or read a news item or chanced across a plot-nugget in general reading and then spun out a Holmes plot.
When we meet Holmes in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, Doyle takes care to reintroduce him for those unfamiliar with the two novels (which, originally, would have been most of the Strand’s readership) but — opening up a whole can of worms that has never satisfactorily been dealt with — he was also stuck with the ending of The Sign of the Four, when Watson leaves Baker Street to get married. Many adaptations of the series relegate Watson’s marriage to a never-was-to-be timelines: both the Jeremy Brett and Ian Richardson versions have Watsons who don’t connect with Mary Morstan and wistfully watch her leaving his life, then settling back into bachelor cohabitation with Holmes. The premise of the series, almost sit-com like, depends on Holmes and Watson sharing rooms, with Mrs Hudson making breakfasts and clients appearing weekly, and Doyle understood he had been too hasty in having his characters move on. This is a typical example of an author not knowing as he is writing how his series will develop, establishing things which later need to be revoked or ignored — most blatantly, Holmes’s death in ‘The Final Problem’.
Of course, the lapses and lacunae are useful for subsequent hands.
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Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years, edited by Michael Kurland, is the latest of many collections of Holmes stories from authors not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It deals with ‘the great hiatus’, that period between ‘The Final Problem’ and ‘The Empty House’ (which happens to be between the first and second Klinger volumes) when Holmes was thought dead by all the world and away from London on mysterious adventures. What actually happened was this: Doyle decided to kill Holmes and delivered an entirely satisfying finale, bringing on a suitable arch-nemesis in Professor Moriarty and having the antagonists perish in a plunge over the Reichenbach Falls, with just enough ambiguity (the bodies are never found) to provide a get-out clause or the possibility that Holmes, like King Arthur, sleeps somewhere until England has direst need of him. As soon as the detective was dead, readers, editors and publishers were clamouring for his resurrection, and eventually Doyle caved in and — as is often forgotten — turned out The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most famous and best-liked of the novels, establishing that it takes place before ‘The Final Problem’. There was no real reason that this approach shouldn’t have been continued (almost all the stories published after Baskervilles, well into the 1920s, are set in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era), but an actual return from the dead was demanded and paid for. Doyle duly delivered ‘The Empty House’, which has to squirm mightily to give an explanation not only for Holmes’s survival but for his absence and (in retrospect) cruel deception of his closest friend.
As Kurland, author of some excellent novels with Moriarty as the lead, points out in his introduction, the explanation in ‘The Empty House’ won’t do. It was the best Doyle could manage, and the story is rather a good one, but by this time the pleasures of the Holmes canon were less to do with the plot business than with the central characters and their relationship. Readers can believe in the dastardliness of Colonel Moran and all the narrative elements are sound, but Holmes’s treatment of Watson doesn’t square with the character we thought we knew — which is why some have said the post-Reichenbach Holmes is someone else or a fiction (this is an instance of the ingratitude cited above — ascribing all the vintage Holmes tales to Watson, but blaming Doyle for the lesser stuff). A few of Kurland’s contributors, following Nicholas Meyer in The Seven-per-cent-Solution, simply put it out that ‘The Final Problem’ and ‘The Empty House’ are not 100% accurate and set out stories that explain why this is so: Gary Lovisi’s ‘The Adventure of the Missing Detective’ has Holmes take a trip to a parallel world where Moriarty has triumphed and brought about a dystopia by assassinating Queen Victoria and all that travelling-in-Tibet-disguised-as-a-Norwegian business is a cover for a tale that wouldn’t have been believed, while Kurland himself in ‘Reichenbach’ has the whole death-and-return business a deception on the part of Holmes and Moriarty who are actually reluctant allies on a secret mission for Mycroft.
Others set the veracity or otherwise of Holmes’s account to one side and tell stories that don’t contradict the originals. Michael Mallory’s ‘The Beast of Guangming Peak’ and Carolyn Wheat’s ‘Water From the Moon’ — like Jamyang Norbu’s fine novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes — look exactly to where Holmes says he was (the Himalayas), and spin mysteries involving the abominable snowman and the Great Game of imperial espionage (no one goes for North Africa, where Holmes also says he was). Linda Robertson’s ‘The Mystery of Dr Thorvald Sigerson’, Michael Collins’ ‘Cross of Gold’, Carole Buggé’s ‘The Strange Case of the Voodoo Priestess’ and Bill Pronzini’s ‘The Bughouse Caper’ have Holmes spend time in America (which Holmes doesn’t mention in ‘The Empty House’), presumably because they are Americans and know the territory best. These stories all tie Holmes in with traditions of American detection: Collins works a connection with his own Dan Fortune series (and discerns a socially-committed, left-leaning Holmes), Buggé and Pronzini partner Holmes with San Francisco and New Orleans dicks (one a sceptical hardboiled PI, the other an impressed scientific policeman) and Robertson has Holmes-Sigerson solve an elementary puzzle in an interesting locale (Alaska).
The most interesting, if not necessarily the finest, stories take advantage of the hiatus to give us a Holmes through eyes other than those of the hero-worshipping and perhaps naïve Dr Watson. Rhys Bowen’s ‘The Case of the Lugubrious Manservant’ has Freud treat an amnesiac who turns out to be a post-Fall Holmes and gives this away in its subtitle (how much more interesting if it had been Moriarty?) and provides a third Freudian analysis of the detective (after novels by Meyer and Keith Oates). Peter Beagle’s ‘Mr. Sigerson’ (which is the finest story here) has Holmes working as a violinist in a mittel European orchestra in an adventure recounted by a more sceptical narrator who doesn’t much care for the detective, presenting a mystery of the sort Doyle liked along with an emotional tangle which might have been beyond his range. This is an instance of a pastiche with a point, as much a criticism as a celebration not only of Holmes but of Doyle; almost all the other stories are fun — even indulgent fun like Richard Lupoff’s pulp-reference-packed ‘God of the Naked Unicorn’ — and one or two provide some plot or character meat, but Beagle probes the deepest and hits a nerve.
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Kim Newman is a novelist (Anno Dracula, Life’s Lottery) and critic (Nightmare Movies, Apocalypse Movies). His latest books are Horror: Another 100 Best Books (co-edited with Stephen Jones) and the short story collection Dead Travel Fast. Forthcoming are another collection, The Man From the Diogenes Club, and a study of the UK TV series Doctor Who. He is also working on a BBC-TV documentary about Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Sherlock.
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