Author Interview With David Marcum, Author of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes

There are good Sherlockians, great Sherlockians, and then there is David Marcum, the most knowledgeable Sherlockian I've had the pleasure of meeting in my brief career as a MX author. I first met David via e-mail when I reviewed his exceptional pastiche mashup Sherlock Holmes In Montague Street Volume 1. Since then I have corresponded with David on about a weekly basis. He has been a great mentor and friend. He's also one hell of a writer. Below, in honor of the release of the complete edition of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes (http://tinyurl.com/luanxjv), I have included the first part of a two part interview with Mr. Marcum.

1. Out of all the books you could have written, why did you decide to write a Sherlock Holmes short story collection?

First of all, I want to thank you for asking me to participate in your interview series. Where I live, in eastern Tennessee, there isn’t a lot of Sherlockian fellowship going on, so it’s great to be able to communicate in this way. I also want to warn or apologize in advance to the readers about some of the answers that turned into essays – when Derrick said that I “can take as much space as you need answering the questions,” I believed him.

Now, to the first question. It’s a two part answer. The short version is that I’ve been a huge fan and collector of stories related to Sherlock Holmes since I was ten, and I wanted to add a thread to the Great Holmes Tapestry. As a boy, I saw lists of other people’s pastiches, in de Waal’s World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and other places, and I wanted to be included with that group.

The longer version is that I’ve simply wanted to write since I was a kid. I remember borrowing my dad’s typewriter to compose additional volumes of The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators when I was eight or nine years old. (I still have some of them. The chapters are about a paragraph long each.)

My first real attempt at writing was during my first career, working as a Federal Investigator in an obscure government agency that eventually shut down and disappeared completely. In the early 90’s, after the Cold War was over, it became clear that our agency was in trouble, leading to a lot of internal bad feelings. In order to keep us going for a while longer, my fellow investigators and I were being forced to travel around the country for great chunks of time, loaned to other offices. I was in Albuquerque for a couple of months, far from home, and one day while driving around I got the idea for a story about what would happen if some of the people within my agency had been running a really evil secret scam for years, and now that the end was in sight, they were forced to make one last score – namely, stealing technology from the legendary plants in Oak Ridge, TN, near where I live. On impulse, I turned the car into an Albuquerque Walmart and bought a pack of paper and a typewriter, and spent every remaining night in my room while in Albuquerque knocking out a novel. I finished it when I got home. Of course, the hero who stopped these guys was a thinly disguised version of me, and it was fun to make some of my bosses and co-workers evil agents for the Russians. I’d started out trying to be a new Clive Cussler, but it ended up more along the lines of Ludlum or Craig Thomas. Creating the book was very cathartic, but writing it was all that I ever did about it. I never pursued publishing it, although it still exists in the form of 600+ typewritten pages, stored in my old government briefcase and shoved under the bed.

Later, after the government job ended, I went back to school to get a second degree in order to become a Civil Engineer. After being laid off from an engineering company in early 2008 at the start of the Great Recession, I thought about writing a Holmes story while I had the time to do so. I had always wanted to do that, and I’d tried to write a few of those along the way as well, but never to completion.

I realized that I’d always speculated about the true origins of Solar Pons, a Holmes-like detective created by August Derleth, featured in over 60 stories, and set in the 1920’s and 1930’s. (If you haven’t read any Solar Pons, you really should!) I had finally figured out to my own satisfaction who Pons really was, and how he was connected to Holmes, and I decided to write about that. But that story, which eventually became “The Adventure of the Other Brother,” was too intimidating, so I sat down and decided to write another one first just for practice. That was what ended up becoming “The Adventure of the Least Winning Woman,” the first story in what ended up becoming The Papers of Sherlock Holmes.

Once I started writing, the other stories just flowed out. I write very organically, with no outline. I’ve talked to a few other writers about this, and some do the same thing - just let the characters go and see what happens. For instance, I simply imagine Holmes and Watson sitting and talking, and I let them talk, transcribing what they say. I’m as surprised as they are when there is a ring at the bell and some client appears at their door. My writing method is similar to when Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, is telling Watson how he studied a map of Devonshire all day, and that his mind was there “in spirit.” As Holmes says, "My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.” I don’t smoke, but when I start writing, I go into the zone, and come out three or four hours later with five or ten pages written, and all of my coffee is gone. It’s amazing to start with nothing, and come out the other end with something. Even though it needs polishing, it now exists.

Initially, I just showed the stories to my family. In 2011, I got the itch to have them published, and worked with George Vanderburgh at the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. He published them that fall, and some people actually bought them. In early 2013, I communicated with Gerard Kelly, a former Battered Silicon author who had switched to MX Publishing. He told me about his positive experience, so I reached out to Steve Emecz about putting out a new MX edition of The Papers, and there has been no looking back. We reworked the original book into two volumes, and now it’s been recombined back into a new hardcover edition, made into an audiobook, and there are Russian and forthcoming Indian editions as well. I’ve been very happy with the whole process, and Steve has been great to work with. Also, Bob Gibson has been exceptional. He took a photo of Holmes and Watson in the sitting room that I had come up with and made some incredible covers out of it. All in all, I highly recommend them.

2. Your story, "The Haunting of Sutton House," is unique in that you have two different mysteries from two different times in Watson's life recounted together. Why did you take such an unusual approach in recounting these two stories as one?

As before, there are two answers. The first involves playing The Game, which approaches the Canon as if it presents actual, historical events, and that Holmes, Watson, and the rest were real people. Sometimes Watson disguised names or events, but the basic facts that he presented were real. I’ve always played The Game quite seriously, especially when I was able to go to England in 2013, and certainly when working on these books. When looking at things that way, as I explain in the book’s introduction, I’m just the editor, Watson was the writer, and if the narrative tells two mysteries, then it’s because Watson wanted to do it that way. I feel like I’m channeling what I like to call the Great Watsonian Oversoul. That’s what I believe all the other “editors” of Watson’s notes are tapping into as well.

The other answer relates back to how I write. It’s free-flowing, without a plan. Back in 2008, when I was laid off from work and first wanted to see if I could write a pastiche or two, I would do my job-hunting chores in the morning, and then sit down and write until early afternoon. I didn’t have any outlines, but would just see where the story went. At some point during those weeks, I was eating lunch in front of the TV when I ran across one of those shows where a team, consisting of two or three people, visits a supposedly haunted house or building. This particular episode related to Sutton House, a real location in east London. I normally don’t watch those shows, but as I was open-minded then for story ideas, and since this was about London, I stuck in a tape. A few days later, I watched the show, and made notes about the ghosts that supposedly lived in the house, and also a very rough sketch of the layout of the building. Then I sat down and started writing. I knew the story was going to be about this haunted building, but that’s all that I knew. When the client initially showed up and told his story, I met him for the first time along with Holmes and Watson, and I simply heard what they heard. The rest was still a mystery. And then – unexpectedly to me – Holmes left for a while and Watson remained behind in Baker Street and started daydreaming about a case they had just completed. That came out of nowhere. This daydream turned into the flashback portion, which ended up alternating and paralleling the main case at Sutton House.

This experience has happened since then, as well. I now have a new set of stories “edited” for the next short story collection, which I hope will be published some time in 2015. One of the stories was originally supposed to be a short entry, and then suddenly one of the characters mentioned out of the blue how the current case might relate to Holmes’s past involvement in solving the Reckless Goings-on of the Suicide Club. I had no idea that was going to happen, and it opened up a whole new level to the story. I knew that I had to follow it through, and I’m glad that I was just letting the characters talk, because I might never have heard it otherwise.

“The Haunting of Sutton House” turned out to be one of the more popular stories in the first book. I was in touch with Larry Albert at Imagination Theater, a nationally syndicated radio drama group, and he encouraged me to write a script from the flashback portion of the story. It was aired nationally in November 2013 as part of their series, “The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” which is authorized by the Conan Doyle Estate. It was an incredible thrill to be able to add to the very long radio history of Mr. Holmes, and my second script from the book, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle,” is being broadcast the nationally the week of November 23rd, 2014.

In September 2013, I was able to go on my trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England and Scotland, and while in London I was able to go to Sutton House. While in London, I only visited sites related to Holmes, the Canon, and many of the better pastiches. (For instance, I went to The Tower, because there are many good pastiches set there, but I did not go on the London Eye – there’s nothing Sherlockian about it.) I showed up at Sutton House in my deerstalker, which I’ve worn everywhere from fall to spring as my only hat since I was nineteen years old, and I certainly wore it everywhere while I was in England. I did NOT tell the nice people at Sutton House that I’d written a story about the house being haunted, because I didn’t think that they would appreciate it. (I had a cup of tea in their tearoom, which has some books on a shelf, and I peeked to see if my book was there, but it wasn’t. Even now, they may not yet know about the story that I set there.) It was great fun to wander through the house and see places that I had described without having been there. And it made me realize the touch of ignorance or arrogance that is involved in writing about someplace as specific as a real house that I hadn’t actually visited before.

3. In "The Adventure of the Missing Missing Link," you have Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, and Doyle involved with the Piltdown man hoax. There is a theory that Doyle was involved in this hoax. What are your thoughts on this theory and did this theory inspire your story?

I actually only became aware of the theory about Doyle’s possible involvement at some point after the story was written. This is yet another example of not having a clue at the beginning where the story is going, and just running along after the characters to see where they led me. The idea for this story actually came from my wife, who is a librarian. She had seen something about Sir William Osler, a famous doctor in the early twentieth century who had done much to reform the way that students are taught in medical schools. She asked me if there had been a pastiche where Holmes and Osler met. I knew that of all the thousands of them that I’ve read, I hadn’t encountered one – which doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist somewhere. When it was time to write the next story, her question stuck in my head. I found some information Osler, saw what time-frame he was in, and realized that it was during a very important period of Holmes’s life, when he was undercover as Altamont in the years before the Great War.

So I started writing the story by having Watson on a visit to Holmes’s Sussex retirement villa in 1912, and Holmes asks Watson if he has heard of Osler. It turns out that Holmes has been requested to come to Oxford to consult the man on some matter. At that point I still didn’t know why, but I had read that Osler was something of an expert on bones. That led to the connection to the discovery of the Piltdown Man, which I knew was from around that time period as well. I checked, and it fit perfectly. In the story, Doyle’s involvement in the hoax came about when I included him because he was living in Sussex at that time near the scene of the action. It also served to remind and reinforce the idea that he was Watson’s literary agent.

Later, I saw something about the possibility that Doyle might possibly be responsible for the whole Piltdown Caper. (There is another Holmes pastiche, Sherlock Holmes and the Skull of Death by Robert E. McClellan, which also touches on the Piltdown matter, but it uses the discovery of the bones as a jumping-off place for a different story.) I had sort of borrowed the idea of using a hoax, and the concept of all the other contingency hoaxes being constructed by Mycroft’s department, from an old Clive Cussler book, Vixen 03, where the characters talk about all of the various scenarios that governments concoct to plan against their enemies and even their friends. (In spite of my Holmes obsession, books about him aren’t the only things that I read. I was reading Clive Cussler’s novels way back when there were only four of them out there. If you’ve seen how much space Cussler’s titles occupy in bookstores now, you know that I’m talking about a long time ago.)

4. For your stories, "The Brother's Request," and "The Madman's Ceremony," you place the setting in your home state of Tennessee, bringing in the historical town of Rugby as well as your own family. Part of the fun is implying that you are related to Dr. Watson and even Basil Rathbone. What made you decide to set a Sherlock Holmes story within your family's history with real family members as characters?

Years before I started writing these stories – or “editing” Watson’s notes – and when I was going back to school part-time to become a Civil Engineer, I started using the internet for the first time. I would kill time between classes in the library or computer lab exploring, and naturally, I was usually trying to find things related to Holmes. There were a lot fewer websites then, and searches were much more primitive, especially because I didn’t know how to search. My wife is a reference librarian with a couple of master’s degrees, and she nudged me in the right direction a few times in order to tease out things, even though it usually meant more Holmes books or stories arriving on our doorstep.

I’m always looking for more Holmes stories to read and collect. Back then, there were just a few sites with fan-fictions and online stories, mostly linked through Sherlockian.net, run by Chris Redmond. I had access to free printing in the library, and since I paid a lot of student fees to the school for things that I never ever used as a part-time adult student, such as intramural athletic fees, I felt no guilt at all when printing all of these stories whenever I could find them.

One of the items that I found on the internet was a reprint of a story called “Sherlock Holmes and the Brown Mountain Lights” by James McKay Morton. (I think that the website where it lived has long since vanished.) It described a visit by Holmes and Watson to Linville, NC in 1921. That’s just a couple of hours or so over the Great Smoky Mountains from where I live in eastern Tennessee. I had visited there before, and it was fun for me to think that Holmes and Watson had gotten that close to my home. But that’s where I left the whole idea for quite a while.

I had always been vaguely aware that one line of my ancestors was from the Watson line, but at some point it hit me for real that I actually really did have Watson blood in me. Of course, there are many, many Watsons in the world, but still it was a fun thing to realize. My great-grandmother, the one who ended up being in the story, was Rebecca Watson Marcum (1874-1927). Her father was James Watson (1851-1930). His father, my great-great-great grandfather Hiram Watson (1825-1913), was the one who came over from England as a child, around 1830. His parents in England were William and Rebecca Watson, and I don’t know anything past that point, including where they came from. If anyone out there has more information about them, it would be much appreciated.

When I started writing the stories, finishing one and then looking for ideas for the next, it occurred to me that since Holmes and Watson had been close to my area of the world in 1921, why wouldn’t Watson decide to go on across the mountains, looking for a long-lost cousin? Sadly, in the Watson papers that I found and “edited,” he didn’t actually include a diagram showing exactly how the family connection exists, so I just have to take his word for it that he had a good reason to venture off into the Tennessee wilderness of the early 1920’s to find my great-grandmother. (If I had realized at the time that her father, James Watson, was still alive when the story was set, I would have included him as well, but it didn’t work out that way.) Mostly Holmes and Watson spend the story in the company of my paternal grandfather, William Calvin “Willie” Marcum, Rebecca Watson Marcum’s son.

I set the story where Watson first encounters my ancestors, “The Brother’s Request,” in the small town of Oneida, where my dad was from, and where my distant Watson cousins lived and still live. I was somewhat familiar with the place, as well as the area outside of town in what is now the Big South Fork National Recreation Area. It’s where they all lived in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. When I started writing about it, I didn’t have any plan regarding the Holmes flashback segment, detailing his earlier visit to the area in 1892 during the Great Hiatus. It only became known to me when he started telling about it while they traveled. It turned out that he had been around the nearby Utopian community of Rugby during its hey-day in the early 1890’s, and that became an important feature in his narrative.

After writing the story where Watson meets his long-lost relatives, and getting Holmes and Watson that close to where I was born and still live, I found that I wanted them to come all the way to my hometown as well. So I wrote the next story, “The Madman’s Ceremony.” As I said in the book’s introduction, if I hadn’t yet gotten to go to England to walk where they walked, I had no shame in finding out that they had come here, to walk where I walk.

At the time I was writing the stories, it was never with publication in mind. Therefore, I put in a lot of visits to local areas with great personal association, mainly for the entertainment of my wife and son. Various buildings are mentioned where I have lived or worked or attended school. The place with the cave at the end of the story is still here in a city park, although it is really a low spot by a large rocky outcropping that floods in wet weather. My son and I used to tell each other stories about how there must be a lost cave under it somewhere, and that got worked into the book. There hadn’t really been a crime in the earlier Tennessee story, “The Brother’s Request,” so I tried to make this story much more adventurous and dangerous.

In the second of the stories in Tennessee, this one set in my hometown, I had Holmes and Watson encounter my other grandfather, whose name was Rathbone. In one of the old Holmes radio shows from the 1940’s, Holmes indicates that he is related to the Rathbones. Since Watson found his own distant cousins in the first story, Holmes finds some of his relatives in the second, although that ends up being a very minor point in the story.

When I finally decided to submit the stories for publication, I was hesitant about including these two, since they were so personal, and they involved inclusion of real family members, as well as visits to real places. However, I realized that many Holmes pastiches by other authors have the two characters traveling to places that are probably actually in those authors’ stomping grounds, although the reader may not realize it. This was just a little more blatant. And also, I’d put a lot of effort into these stories, and the book would be much shorter without them. In the end they were published too, and no one seems to mind. Well, except for one reviewer who didn’t see the fun that I had by writing about family connections from me to both Holmes and Watson, spreading out in different directions.

5. This has been called my meanest question, but I ask it of every Sherlockian. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?

It is a mean question, but it’s a good question. It makes one really think about the answer, instead of just tossing something off. It’s very difficult, and I don’t have an answer that is totally satisfying to me, because it’s a different answer every day. And you didn’t think I could just answer the question without leading up to it, did you?

I assume that you mean that I should pick a story from the original Canon, but I don’t think of Holmes as being limited in that way. When I first started reading about Holmes in the mid-1970’s, it was because I saw part of the pastiche film A Study in Terror (1965) on television, and was then prompted to go dig out an abridged version of The Adventures that I had back in my room, previously untouched. And even a couple of years before that, I had read a Solar Pons story called “The Adventure of the Grice-Paterson Curse” in a children’s anthology, so my mind was initially introduced to the Holmes-and-Watson style by first enjoying Solar Pons and Dr. Parker. (Again, seek out Solar Pons and read about him!)

The first Holmes story that I actually remember reading was “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” and even then it resonated somehow. No matter what else I read over the years – and I’ve read and still read a lot of stuff by other authors in addition to the Holmes stories – I’ve always returned to Holmes, and I’m always reading a Holmes story concurrently with a book by some other author.

The Canon is just a tiny percentage of the whole Holmes Spectrum. I’ve been reading and re-reading all of my collected Holmes stories for years, and organizing them into a massive Chronology of the man’s life – not just the Canon, but every legitimate traditional Holmes story I can find. When I re-read now, I think of Holmes’s life as a whole giant gestalt, and not just defined by sixty “official” stories and a few favorites by a limited number of authors.

Very soon after my initial dip into The Adventures, back in 1975, I came across a copy of The Seven-Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, given out at school by the RIF (Reading is Fundamental) Program, just a year or so after its initial publication. I didn’t realize that I was on the front edge of that era’s great Sherlockian Reawakening which had started with that very book. By reading it, before I’d even read very much of the Canon at all, my mind was being stretched and influenced by a pastiche. I saw that Meyer had also written another Holmes story, The West End Horror. I convinced my mom to buy it for me on a trip to purchase school clothes, and I remember starting it eagerly while sitting on the floor of the Boys Department in Sears, by a rack of jeans.

The point of all of that is to say that as I was finding Holmes, I was absorbing pastiches as I easily as I did the Canon, with equal enjoyment. I realized fairly quickly that most of The Seven-Percent Solution ended up being unacceptable due to its contradictions with the Canon, but The West End Horror blew my mind at the time, and I enjoyed it better than I did some of the original stories. (I was lucky enough to tell Nicholas Meyer that when I met him a few years ago at a Sherlockian conference and got him to sign my copy of it. Many references to that book say that it’s a Holmes-versus-The Ripper novel, but it’s actually set in 1895, and the victims are actors and theatre critics and not Whitechapel prostitutes.) It was the perfect story to help set the Holmes hook even deeper into my lip.

As a side note, I should mention that I’ve always had a unique connection to reading mystery stories, and with my background, I’ve always thought it strange that I prefer these classic-type mysteries over police procedurals. Or maybe it’s not strange at all. My dad started work as a State Trooper in the 1950’s, and when I was a small child in the late 1960’s, he transferred to the state Tennessee Bureau of Investigation – something like a Scotland Yard Inspector, Tennessee-style. He covered a number of counties in eastern Tennessee, and had an office in our house. Early on, he would let me read his case files, and I encountered some pretty realistic – and gruesome – things. For example, one of his most lauded cases involved a doctor killed in a shotgun murder, where the victim’s head was blown off. Therefore, when I read about that kind of murder in The Valley of Fear, I didn’t need to imagine how something like that looked – I had seen the photos. My dad sometimes let me go with him on investigations. He taught me how to pull fingerprints, and he was also the law enforcement officer who first made use in a criminal investigation of a young Dr. William Bass, the famed forensic expert known for the Body Farm – located just a few miles from where I’m writing this ever-growing essay – and now the co-author of the Jefferson Bass mysteries. He and my dad were friends, something that my dad was very proud of.

So to wander back to the question: When considering a favorite Holmes story, there is more than just the Canon to pick from. It may be sacrilegious to some, but to me Doyle was simply the first literary agent for Watson, and certainly not the only one. Watson’s notes have been found and edited by countless other people over the years, myself included. The absolute best pasticheur, in my opinion, is consistently Denis O. Smith. Close to him was the late Barrie Roberts, and some others, including June Thompson, Mike Hogan, Gerard Kelly, Tony Reynolds, and Hugh Ashton. Bert Coules’s BBC radio dramas should not be missed. Rick Boyer’s The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a masterpiece, and may be the finest pastiche of them all. Some fan-fiction authors do incredible work, and should not be discounted just because they haven’t appeared in “real” books or magazines. (See my essay in the Baker Street Journal: “In Praise of the Pastiche.”) One of these fan-fiction authors who has made the transition and had some of her works published in book form by Lulu.com is Marcia Wilson (known in the fan-fic world as “Aragonite”.) Her stories tell about things from the perspective of Lestrade, Bradstreet, Gregson, and others on the official side. I’ve told her repeatedly that it’s as if she found Scotland Yard’s tin dispatch box. Highly recommended. (And I’m trying to recruit her to the MX Family….)

But in spite of all the good stories by so many people, I’ll confine my choices for a desert-island story to the Canon. My gut reaction was to blurt out “The Speckled Band,” because it never fails to satisfy. Holmes is brave, and the setting never gets old. Other good ones among so many include “The Red-Headed League” and The Hound of the Baskervilles. But for today, I’m going to go with . . . “The Second Stain.” To me it has so many things, from an opening in the sitting room with a very important visitor and a vital crisis, to Holmes being willing to put the Prime Minister in his place. Watson is able to provide a nudge in the right direction, and Lestrade is in it as well, and the visits to Lucas’s house and then the encounter with Lady Hilda all add up to make it a great story.

Tomorrow I might pick a different one. In fact, I just had some thoughts about “The Six Napoleons,” but I’ll stop for now so that this answer doesn’t get even longer….

The interview will continue in the middle of December. Up next, an interview with author Daniel D. Victor on December 1st followed by a surprise interview on December 4th.

To see the complete works of David Marcum, visit his author page at MX publishing (http://tinyurl.com/nvo2fbs).

Sherlockian Author Derrick Belanger's publications include an eclectic mix: book reviews, articles for education journals, short stories, poems, comic books, and the graphic novel, Twenty-Three Skidoo! A former instructor at Washington State University, and a current middle school Language Arts teacher, Derrick lives in Broomfield, Colorado with his wife Abigail Gosselin and their two daughters, Rhea and Phoebe. Currently, Derrick is working on several Sherlockian projects: The second book in the MacDougall Twins with Sherlock Holmes series entitled Attack of the Violet Vampire, The pastiche novel Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of Cthulhu, the teaching guide How to Teach Like Sherlock Holmes, and the annotated book The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Ultimate Edition, as well as several projects in the Science Fiction genre. He also co-authors the web site Mystery Aircraft.com with author Chuck Davis.
Visit Derrick's Amazon Page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...