Author Interview with Daniel Victor on his Holmes/ Raymond Chandler Mash-up The Final Page of Baker Street
Daniel D. Victor has returned from his own great hiatus with a masterpiece entitled The Final Page of Baker Street. The novel does a wonderful job of blending the styles of Doyle and Raymond Chandler, who appears as one of the protagonists in the story. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Victor over the last few weeks and started in with why he had been absent for the last twenty years.
1. Your first Sherlock Holmes book was The Seventh Bullet which was published in 1992. What made you decide to write a Sherlock Holmes book then, and why did it take you over twenty years to return to the great detective?
I was nineteen when President Kennedy was assassinated and have been intrigued by political assassinations ever since. Not long after Kennedy's murder, I took a lit class in graduate school that required a paper on a "second-rate" American novelist. In skimming survey book, I saw a footnote reporting that little-known novelist David Graham Phillips had, in fact, been assassinated. That was enough for me. I read some of his political novels, wrote the paper, and eventually turned my research into a full-length doctoral dissertation.
Phillips was actually most famous for a series of articles he wrote in 1906 for William Randolph Hearst. In "The Treason of the Senate," he accused various US Senators by name of "treason" for not representing the American people. Although President Teddy Roosevelt hoped to insult Phillips by calling him "the man with the muckrake" (the first use of the term in American literature), Phillips' articles helped bring about the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution requiring that Senators be elected by direct vote of the people instead of by state legislatures as had previously been the case. In 1911, Phillips was shot to death by a crazed gunman who immediately shot himself. There were wounds from six shots in Phillips, and the suicide added one more. Yet witnesses identified the then-missing gun as a six-shooter. As a result of such confusion, the facts surrounding Phillips' death remained unclear. A seventh-bullet suggested a second gunman. Although I'd contemplated the anomalies in the case for a while, it was only years later, after a student of mine suggested that some of the Senators who'd been the target of Phillips' pen had ultimately killed him, that I started thinking about who could be called upon to set the record straight. Sherlock Holmes immediately came to mind, and in my novel The Seventh Bullet, I sent Phillips' sister to England to appeal to Holmes to come out of retirement, travel to New York, and find out what really happened to her brother--all of which Holmes does.
I can sum up why it took me twenty years to return to Holmes in a single word: family. One of the book-signings I did for The Seventh Bullet took place across the street from a hospital, an important fact because my wife Norma was just about nine-months pregnant at the time St. Martin's published the book in mid-October of 1992. Our first child was born just two weeks later and our second, two years after that. Norma stayed home with each newborn, but as full-time teachers with two small kids to raise, neither one of us had any spare time. If a few free moments did magically materialize for me, napping generally took precedence over writing--although I confess that during the years we were raising our kids, I did manage to compose one novel, a murder-mystery that contained a short story featuring a Holmes-like Edwardian detective named Corliss Simms. A Study in Synchronicity was born out of the challenges I faced getting The Seventh Bullet published. But only after I retired following forty-six years of public-school teaching did I feel confident that I would have the time to research and write another Holmes novel. I turned back to Holmes because the use of his logic allows me to create new ways of looking at historical events. I think it's another way of saying, "Don't believe everything you read." Conveniently, my role as a high-school American lit teacher familiarized me with American writers whom I not only taught about, but who also lived in London at the same time Holmes and Watson did. In "The Final Page of Baker Street," Holmes encounters the young Raymond Chandler. I have future plans that involve Stephen Crane and Mark Twain.
2. For The Final Page of Baker Street, why did you set the real Raymond Chandler in the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes instead of having, say, the fictional Philip Marlowe teaming up with the consulting detective?
I suppose I'm a postmodernist in that I have always been a skeptical reader, one who questions the certainty of what people traditionally call "facts." How do we know what's really true? Are we to believe everything we read in history books? By combining fictional characters with "real" people, I think that I force readers to question what is real and what isn't. I consider it a compliment when someone asks me if a character I created is real or fictional. If I can blur the line in my fiction between what is historical and what is fake, maybe I can blur the line in reality as well. Besides, since it was Chandler and not Philip Marlowe who was a London contemporary of Sherlock Holmes, it only made sense to have Holmes team up with Ray.
3. In your novel, you credit Raymond Chandler as the true author of the story "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone." Should any other stories of Watson's be credited to Chandler?
With its third-person narrator, "The Mazarin Stone" is one of the very few Holmes stories not told by Watson. The obvious question is why? The "true" authorship of the story has, in fact, been debated for years, but thanks to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, the "definitive" explanation soon became clear to me once I discovered the article called "Concerning the Authorship of 'The Mazarin Stone'" (Spring 1959). Combining G.B. Newton's case for Billy the Page's being the "true" author of the story with the fact that Raymond Chandler, who was attending school at nearby Dulwich College, was at just the right age to be a page-boy at Baker Street, I realized that the young Chandler must have been the author of the piece and that the so-called problems with the text could be attributed to the inexperience of the novice writer. (We should also not forget that over the years Conan Doyle gave the same name "Billy" to different page-boys working for Mrs. Hudson.) As my novel suggests, Chandler would have been either too young or too involved with events that were actually occurring in his own life to have had the opportunity to write any other Holmes stories. What's more, Watson would never have stood for it.
4. Chandler's hard boiled fiction is much more violent and sexual than that of Doyle. Where do you most see Doyle's influence over Chandler's work?
Both writers created private detectives although I suppose the distinction is made between Holmes' amateur status and Marlowe's professionalism. Holmes worked from his flat, for instance; Marlowe, from his office. Both writers seemed to have been forever associated with their two detectives, sometimes to the detriment of their creative instincts. But I suppose the greatest influence of Conan Doyle on Chandler was Chandler's decision not to be Conan Doyle. For many years, Chandler, born in Chicago, raised in Ireland and England, struggled to define himself. For a while, it looked as if he was content to be an Englishman, but then he traveled back to America and ultimately began writing stories featuring a "hard-boiled" detective who was not, as Chandler described Sherlock Holmes, "lacking emotional values." Chandler was constantly breaking with tradition; Conan Doyle's detective was a perfect target.
5. The question all Sherlockians hate. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have access to one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?
I prefer the intricacies of novels to the directness of short stories. As a result, I would take The Hound of the Baskervilles with me to that desert island. I like the complexity of the plot, the changes in narration including the manuscript about the Hound and Watson's letters to Holmes, and even the ambiguities that could elicit a literary response called Sherlock Holmes was Wrong by Pierre Bayard. I must also say, however, that I used to love teaching "The Speckled Band." Perhaps the mysterious species that gives the story its name might actually be found on that desert island.
6. You've hinted at this in your answer to my first question. What are your future projects? Can you say more about the trilogy with Mark Twain and Stephen Crane?
In reference to future stories about Holmes in particular, I've been working on three (including the Chandler book) that I've come to regard as a related group. My working title for the trilogy is Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati, and like The Seventh Bullet, my Holmes pastiche from twenty years ago, all deal with American writers who were living in England at the start of the twentieth century. In Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place, the detective meets the daring and persuasive Cora Crane who enlists Holmes' help in finding her husband Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. As happened in reality, Crane has gone missing in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street, Mark Twain reveals what caused him in reality to write "A Double-Barreled Detective Story," in which he ridicules Sherlock Holmes, who actually appears as a character in Twain's piece. My novel's title, incidentally, comes from a letter Mark Twain really wrote in which he told how long it took him to get from his London house to Baker Street. Why he wanted to get there is what the book is about.
I might add that, unrelated to Sherlock Holmes, I am also working on a novel based on my experiences as a high school teacher in Los Angeles where I taught for forty-six years before retiring. In a veiled allusion to T.S. Eliot I've titled the book Cruel September.
For more on Daniel D. Victor, visit his MX page at http://mxpublishing.com/brand/Daniel+....
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...
1. Your first Sherlock Holmes book was The Seventh Bullet which was published in 1992. What made you decide to write a Sherlock Holmes book then, and why did it take you over twenty years to return to the great detective?
I was nineteen when President Kennedy was assassinated and have been intrigued by political assassinations ever since. Not long after Kennedy's murder, I took a lit class in graduate school that required a paper on a "second-rate" American novelist. In skimming survey book, I saw a footnote reporting that little-known novelist David Graham Phillips had, in fact, been assassinated. That was enough for me. I read some of his political novels, wrote the paper, and eventually turned my research into a full-length doctoral dissertation.
Phillips was actually most famous for a series of articles he wrote in 1906 for William Randolph Hearst. In "The Treason of the Senate," he accused various US Senators by name of "treason" for not representing the American people. Although President Teddy Roosevelt hoped to insult Phillips by calling him "the man with the muckrake" (the first use of the term in American literature), Phillips' articles helped bring about the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution requiring that Senators be elected by direct vote of the people instead of by state legislatures as had previously been the case. In 1911, Phillips was shot to death by a crazed gunman who immediately shot himself. There were wounds from six shots in Phillips, and the suicide added one more. Yet witnesses identified the then-missing gun as a six-shooter. As a result of such confusion, the facts surrounding Phillips' death remained unclear. A seventh-bullet suggested a second gunman. Although I'd contemplated the anomalies in the case for a while, it was only years later, after a student of mine suggested that some of the Senators who'd been the target of Phillips' pen had ultimately killed him, that I started thinking about who could be called upon to set the record straight. Sherlock Holmes immediately came to mind, and in my novel The Seventh Bullet, I sent Phillips' sister to England to appeal to Holmes to come out of retirement, travel to New York, and find out what really happened to her brother--all of which Holmes does.
I can sum up why it took me twenty years to return to Holmes in a single word: family. One of the book-signings I did for The Seventh Bullet took place across the street from a hospital, an important fact because my wife Norma was just about nine-months pregnant at the time St. Martin's published the book in mid-October of 1992. Our first child was born just two weeks later and our second, two years after that. Norma stayed home with each newborn, but as full-time teachers with two small kids to raise, neither one of us had any spare time. If a few free moments did magically materialize for me, napping generally took precedence over writing--although I confess that during the years we were raising our kids, I did manage to compose one novel, a murder-mystery that contained a short story featuring a Holmes-like Edwardian detective named Corliss Simms. A Study in Synchronicity was born out of the challenges I faced getting The Seventh Bullet published. But only after I retired following forty-six years of public-school teaching did I feel confident that I would have the time to research and write another Holmes novel. I turned back to Holmes because the use of his logic allows me to create new ways of looking at historical events. I think it's another way of saying, "Don't believe everything you read." Conveniently, my role as a high-school American lit teacher familiarized me with American writers whom I not only taught about, but who also lived in London at the same time Holmes and Watson did. In "The Final Page of Baker Street," Holmes encounters the young Raymond Chandler. I have future plans that involve Stephen Crane and Mark Twain.
2. For The Final Page of Baker Street, why did you set the real Raymond Chandler in the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes instead of having, say, the fictional Philip Marlowe teaming up with the consulting detective?
I suppose I'm a postmodernist in that I have always been a skeptical reader, one who questions the certainty of what people traditionally call "facts." How do we know what's really true? Are we to believe everything we read in history books? By combining fictional characters with "real" people, I think that I force readers to question what is real and what isn't. I consider it a compliment when someone asks me if a character I created is real or fictional. If I can blur the line in my fiction between what is historical and what is fake, maybe I can blur the line in reality as well. Besides, since it was Chandler and not Philip Marlowe who was a London contemporary of Sherlock Holmes, it only made sense to have Holmes team up with Ray.
3. In your novel, you credit Raymond Chandler as the true author of the story "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone." Should any other stories of Watson's be credited to Chandler?
With its third-person narrator, "The Mazarin Stone" is one of the very few Holmes stories not told by Watson. The obvious question is why? The "true" authorship of the story has, in fact, been debated for years, but thanks to The Sherlock Holmes Journal, the "definitive" explanation soon became clear to me once I discovered the article called "Concerning the Authorship of 'The Mazarin Stone'" (Spring 1959). Combining G.B. Newton's case for Billy the Page's being the "true" author of the story with the fact that Raymond Chandler, who was attending school at nearby Dulwich College, was at just the right age to be a page-boy at Baker Street, I realized that the young Chandler must have been the author of the piece and that the so-called problems with the text could be attributed to the inexperience of the novice writer. (We should also not forget that over the years Conan Doyle gave the same name "Billy" to different page-boys working for Mrs. Hudson.) As my novel suggests, Chandler would have been either too young or too involved with events that were actually occurring in his own life to have had the opportunity to write any other Holmes stories. What's more, Watson would never have stood for it.
4. Chandler's hard boiled fiction is much more violent and sexual than that of Doyle. Where do you most see Doyle's influence over Chandler's work?
Both writers created private detectives although I suppose the distinction is made between Holmes' amateur status and Marlowe's professionalism. Holmes worked from his flat, for instance; Marlowe, from his office. Both writers seemed to have been forever associated with their two detectives, sometimes to the detriment of their creative instincts. But I suppose the greatest influence of Conan Doyle on Chandler was Chandler's decision not to be Conan Doyle. For many years, Chandler, born in Chicago, raised in Ireland and England, struggled to define himself. For a while, it looked as if he was content to be an Englishman, but then he traveled back to America and ultimately began writing stories featuring a "hard-boiled" detective who was not, as Chandler described Sherlock Holmes, "lacking emotional values." Chandler was constantly breaking with tradition; Conan Doyle's detective was a perfect target.
5. The question all Sherlockians hate. If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have access to one Sherlock Holmes story, which would it be and why?
I prefer the intricacies of novels to the directness of short stories. As a result, I would take The Hound of the Baskervilles with me to that desert island. I like the complexity of the plot, the changes in narration including the manuscript about the Hound and Watson's letters to Holmes, and even the ambiguities that could elicit a literary response called Sherlock Holmes was Wrong by Pierre Bayard. I must also say, however, that I used to love teaching "The Speckled Band." Perhaps the mysterious species that gives the story its name might actually be found on that desert island.
6. You've hinted at this in your answer to my first question. What are your future projects? Can you say more about the trilogy with Mark Twain and Stephen Crane?
In reference to future stories about Holmes in particular, I've been working on three (including the Chandler book) that I've come to regard as a related group. My working title for the trilogy is Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati, and like The Seventh Bullet, my Holmes pastiche from twenty years ago, all deal with American writers who were living in England at the start of the twentieth century. In Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place, the detective meets the daring and persuasive Cora Crane who enlists Holmes' help in finding her husband Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. As happened in reality, Crane has gone missing in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street, Mark Twain reveals what caused him in reality to write "A Double-Barreled Detective Story," in which he ridicules Sherlock Holmes, who actually appears as a character in Twain's piece. My novel's title, incidentally, comes from a letter Mark Twain really wrote in which he told how long it took him to get from his London house to Baker Street. Why he wanted to get there is what the book is about.
I might add that, unrelated to Sherlock Holmes, I am also working on a novel based on my experiences as a high school teacher in Los Angeles where I taught for forty-six years before retiring. In a veiled allusion to T.S. Eliot I've titled the book Cruel September.
For more on Daniel D. Victor, visit his MX page at http://mxpublishing.com/brand/Daniel+....
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...
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Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Ramblings of a Sherlockian
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