A View Into the Great Watsonian Oversoul: Part Two of the Interview with Sherlockian Mastermind David Marcum
For this blog posting, I wrap up my interview with the profoundly knowledgeable Sherlockian David Marcum. Mr. Marcum gives insights his novel, Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt, his Sherlock Holmes in Montague series, and his immense, ever expanding timeline of the world's greatest detective.
1. You published a Holmes novel entitled Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt in 2013. What made you decide to switch gears and go from short stories to a novel format?
Once again, thanks for inviting me back for a second set of the questions, and for telling me that it was okay to ramble some more. When I start thinking about Holmes, one thought obviously leads to another….
As far as switching from short stories to a novel, it was really just to see if I could do something longer. This particular story started as a sliver of an idea from way back, but I didn’t know what to do with it. In 2008, when I was out in the field watching an engineering project get put into the ground, a different kind of place to hide a murdered body occurred to me. As I watched some of these permanent structures being put into place, specifically in this case a sewer pipe, I realized that for the most part, once they went installed they would never be seen again. That idea hung around in my head for years, until finally I was at an all-day seminar, listening to a paint salesman give his dog-and-pony show about how great his product was for coating water tanks. I suddenly got the idea of exactly who the body was that was hidden in the place that I’d thought of years earlier.
At that point, the first volume of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes was just being released by MX, after having been revised from the original edition published a few years before. I was still waiting for Volume II to appear, but I decided to explore writing a novel. I sat down just started to type. As the story opened, it turned out to be a rainy day in Baker Street, and I quickly learned from listening to Watson that this new adventure was beginning the very next day after one of the short stories in Volume I, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle.” Watson was in a rather ill temper, as Holmes had promised him at the end of that other story that they would go to the British Museum today, and instead Holmes was involved in something else at the chemistry table. Since I’d set “Sissinghurst Castle” in the spring of 1888, the novel would therefore be set then as well. I realized that this would be a good chance to explore Watson’s feelings about being back in Baker Street, and where he saw his life going.
When I say back in Baker Street in the spring of 1888, I’m referring to a specific part of William S. Baring-Gould’s chronology: in this case, Watson’s first marriage before Mary Morstan, an idea which I personally buy into. Chronologists have long realized that some of Watson’s personal dates are confusing. He meets Mary Morstan in the fall of 1888 during The Sign of the Four, and he doesn’t marry her until sometime after that. However, several stories that are clearly set before those events refer to Watson’s wife. In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, for instance, which occurs before Sign, Watson says he’s seen little of Holmes since his marriage. Therefore, Watson had a wife before Mary Morstan. Who was she?
Some people simply assume there were only two wives, Mary, and the one in “The Blanched Soldier”, set after the turn of the century, when Holmes states that the good doctor has deserted him for a wife. Others have postulated many wives for Watson, six or more, but I agree with many that believe in the Three-Wife Solution. The second was Mary Morstan, the third was the early 1900’s model, and the first was whoever came before Mary. Baring-Gould solved the problem of this wife’s identity by identifying her as Constance Adams, whom Watson met while traveling in San Francisco a few years earlier. How do we know that Watson was in San Francisco? Because of a play found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers, Angels of Darkness, in which Watson is mentioned as a British doctor living in San Francisco. (While Watson is in the play, Holmes is not.) Confusingly, during the play Watson romances Lucy Ferrier, who is later named as the Mormon Love Hostage in A Study in Scarlet. Certainly, then, Lucy Ferrier isn’t the real name of Watson’s first wife. (Apparently when Doyle was writing the middle section of A Study in Scarlet and Angels of Darkness, he mashed up some names and facts.)
Baring-Gould didn’t get everything right, but he nailed a lot of it, and – always playing The Game, of course – I believe that Baring-Gould had inside information about much of Holmes’s life. Let me explain by going further off-trail for a minute: I greatly enjoy the Holmes novels by Laurie R. King, although I believe that her narrator, Mary Russell is insane, due to her delusional belief that she is married to Holmes. In King’s book The Moor, it is revealed that Baring-Gould’s grandfather, Sabine Baring-Gould, was actually Holmes’s godfather. While some people have criticized William Baring-Gould for supposedly lifting too much of his grandfather’s biography and grafting it onto Holmes’s past, I don’t think that this is the case. Rather, I believe that as the grandson of Holmes’s godfather, William Baring-Gould had access to information that other biographers did not, and that led him to the knowledge that Watson’s first wife was Constance. When Baring-Gould indicated that Constance died suddenly in late 1887, which resulted in Watson’s return to Baker Street soon after, he must have known something that other people didn’t. And this is what I meant, so long ago at an earlier place in this question’s answer, when I referred to Watson returning to Baker Street in early 1888, at the beginning of Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt. One woman wrote me to criticize my ignorance, telling me that Mary was Watson’s first wife, and not Constance. (People have a great sentimental attachment to Mary.) I’m afraid that I had to explain it to her, and I like to think that I made a believer out of her.
2. Your Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street series has been a bit controversial. What led you to revise Arthur Morrison's stories and make them into Sherlock Holmes stories?
Although the initial reaction was controversial, I believe that as the three volumes have appeared, people have gotten more used to the idea. For those who don’t know about this, what I did was to take all the stories featuring the character of Martin Hewitt, as written by Arthur Morrison, and with minimal alterations, change them into Holmes stories. As I state in the introductions to the three books, I personally did not get around to reading the Martin Hewitt stories until I was in my early thirties. I had ignored them for a long time, and what I knew about them was that many people believed that Hewitt was actually a young Mycroft Holmes. Then, after I had completed reading the Hewitt Canon, I was amazed to walk away with the feeling that I hadn’t been reading about Mycroft at all. Instead, the stories seemed to be more about a younger Sherlock Holmes.
It became my theory was that Hewitt’s adventures were actually Holmes’s early investigations while Holmes was living in Montague Street, circa 1876. These adventures were narrated by Brett, Holmes’s journalist neighbor. Later, from 1891-93, when Watson’s stories were taking the world by storm in The Strand, Brett chose to write up his own experiences with the younger Consulting Detective. However, when he tried to publish them, through his own literary agent, Arthur Morrison, he was stopped for some reason, and forced to change Holmes’s name to Hewitt so that publication could proceed.
In September 2013, MX threw a book-signing party for the release of Volume II of The Papers at the Sherlock Holmes Hotel in Baker Street in London. I was there on my incredible Holmes Pilgrimage, and whenever I was back in London during that trip, I stayed at that hotel. Before the signing, I was standing around talking with several MX authors, including Roger Johnson of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. Someone mentioned Hewitt, and it led me to share with Roger and the others my theory that Hewitt was really Holmes. The idea wasn’t ridiculed, and that put the seed in my head to think about editing and publishing all twenty-five of the Hewitt stories as Holmes tales. I had already converted some of them for my own benefit, keeping them in a binder in my collection. When I floated the idea to Roger Johnson, and then Steve Emecz, they were both encouraging, and I finished the conversions.
As I pointed out in the introductions to the books, other people have already been converting old non-Holmes stories into Holmes narratives for quite a while. A man named Alan Lance Andersen edited The Affairs of Sherlock Holmes a few years ago, where different non-series Sax Rohmer stories were reworked as Holmes adventures. Several times over the last year or so, some anonymous editor has begun republishing the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries as e-books on Amazon, retold as Holmes stories. The part that I don’t like about that particular conversion is that the anonymous editor insists on indicating that these new versions are by Arthur Conan Doyle and/or John Hamish Watson, with no mention at all of the fact that R. Austin Freeman actually wrote the original Thorndyke stories. For these Hewitt conversions, I tried to make sure that Morrison got all the credit for these stories.
Some other examples of character-switching include the British ITV series Marple, which has taken non-Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie and converted them into episodes featuring that character. A year or so ago, someone took non-Holmes stories and turned them into BBC radio scripts for a series called The Rivals, wherein different detectives such as Dupin and the Thinking Machine are each aided by Lestrade. And another fellow, (me, actually) took a non-Nero Wolfe Rex Stout story a year or so ago and re-wrote it for the The Gazette (the Nero Wolfe “Wolfe Pack” official journal) as a Nero Wolfe tale – well, actually an Archie Goodwin tale, since Wolfe doesn’t appear in it at all. Several other people have done the same thing with conversions of some of Stout’s other non-Wolfe works over the years.
By changing Hewitt to Holmes, I don’t mean in any way to diminish or take away from Morrison or Martin Hewitt, but I have always read the Hewitt stories as Holmes stories anyway, so I thought that I would enjoy it this way, and maybe other people would as well. I appreciate all of the positive comments and kind reviews that I’ve received related to this project.
3. You have been working on a complete timeline of Sherlock Holmes which includes all of his appearances, even in pastiches. This, in my opinion, is an amazing database of information. How long has this taken you to create, and will we ever get a chance to see it in print?
You’re referring to the fact that I’ve been working on a Complete Holmes Chronology, including both Canon and pastiches, since the mid-1990’s, and even though in the end it’s an impossible task, it’s really changed the way I read about Our Heroes. It also helps to somewhat explain my passion, why I wanted to get to England for so long on a Holmes Pilgrimage, and why it was almost a religious experience for me to actually go last year and visit all of those Holmes-related sites after the way that I’ve lived in that world for so long.
The way this all began is that I started collecting pastiches around the same time that I started reading Holmes, when I was a ten-year-old in the mid-1970’s. I didn’t much care about the difference between what Doyle was presenting and what other people produced, as long as it seemed authentic. I kept buying the pastiches whenever I found them, as I had learned that if you didn’t grab one when it was in front of you, it might be gone forever. I would go to the bookstore with the plan in mind to purchase some book, but if I found an unexpected Holmes volume instead, I jettisoned Plan A and bought the Holmes book.
In the mid-1990’s, I was in my early 30’s and had gone back to school for a second degree in Civil Engineering (since the Federal Agency where I was an investigator actually shut down,) and it was at that school where I really discovered the internet for the first time. This allowed me to track down tons of Holmes fan-fictions, as well as many other Holmes books that I never would have known about otherwise. (It helps that my wife is a reference librarian, who taught me very good research methods. Living in eastern Tennessee, sometimes it takes extra effort to find Holmes-related items.) That was when I really devoted myself to collecting and reading Holmes pastiches on a much more dedicated level. I had been collecting them for years, but I found that I kept re-reading the Canon and the same few favorite pastiches over and over again, and there were a lot that I’d never touched after I bought them and put on the shelves. I finally decided to dive in and read every Holmes story that I had accumulated up to that point.
At the time, I was working some really awful night jobs while going to school during the day, but at least I could do homework there when the work slowed down. I would finish my school work, and then read about Holmes. Soon, I started noticing patterns in stories, and I began to make notes, keeping them, along with relevant British maps, in a small binder that I carried everywhere with me. I was organizing the stories by year, and how they related to the Baring-Gould chronology. (If I repeatedly refer back to Baring-Gould, it’s because I first read his biography of Holmes soon after I started reading the original stories – in fact, before I had even read all of the Canon – so as I’ve mentioned, it was very influential on me. I don’t believe quite everything that he wrote, but I accept a lot of it, such as Watson’s first wife Constance, the relationship with Irene Adler that produced Nero Wolfe as a son, many of the chronological dates, and Holmes and Watson’s death dates in 1957 and 1929, respectively. It makes for a great jumping-off place.) After I finished randomly reading through every traditional Holmes story that I had at the time, I noticed that I had constructed my own rough chronology. I wasn’t finished visiting in that world yet, so I started re-reading again, this time in the chronological order that I had roughly constructed, based upon my notes.
It was amazing for me to see that there was some kind of overall pattern to all the pastiches. I called it the Great Watsonian Oversoul, where pastiche "editors" from many different years all seemed to be tapping into the whole. For instance, (and this is not a literal example, although I often saw things like this), a pastiche written in the 1930's by one author might be about a crime in Edinburgh in a certain month and year. Another pastiche, written in the 1970's by another author, might be set in the same month and year, and refer to recent events in Edinburgh. I'm certain that the second "editor" of Watson’s notes had probably never heard of the first "editor", but somehow he/she unknowingly referenced that early work in passing and the bigger picture was tied together. I have seen many instances of this.
After reading all these pastiches for so long, I can see a Whole Gestalt Holmes, covering the entire lives of Holmes and Watson. For example, I have several hundred stories (including fan-fics, etc.) set before Holmes even gets to Montague Street in the 1870’s. And the number of stories set post-retirement is staggering. I prefer Classic 1880’s most of all, but I’ll take whatever I can get. I’m on my fifth full complete re-read of everything that I have about Holmes in chronological order – that includes novels, short stories, movies, TV and radio episodes, scripts and comics, fan-fics, and whatever else I can find, so it takes a while to do the complete re-read, (especially when one also goes back and fits in new Holmes stuff as it appears or comes up for sale into the chronological years that one has just previously read about), and one also reads many other things, like Game of Thrones, in order to make one’s son happy, and one also has real-life things going on, but luckily if one is a fast reader, but not a skimmer, one can actually retain it all fairly well – and by reading everything I have regarding Holmes in that way, I get a complete and overwhelming sense of the lives of Our Heroes. By the time one starts getting to 1929, when Watson dies, and 1957, when Holmes dies at 103-years (having lived that long thanks to Royal Jelly!) it is actually somewhat emotional. And then I turn around and start again, with a fan-fiction telling how Siger met Violet, (Holmes’s parents) in the 1840’s.
With all the new items constantly appearing and being worked into my rereading, I can’t imagine how long it might take if I ever finish this pass through and start over yet again. My reading is definitely slowing down as I get older – I’m 49 now, and get sleepy too quickly. And there is so much to read. I currently have over 2,000 volumes, many of them pastiches, in my collection. I also have over 100 fat binders filled with fan-fictions, and other items that aren’t available in book form.
I keep reading and re-reading about Holmes over the years, simply because I always like to be in the world of Holmes somehow. I read other books about other completely different characters concurrently, but there is always a Holmes book with me. (For instance, I always bring some Holmes narrative to work and read it during lunch. Today it’s was an amazing fan-fiction novel called A Case of Insanity by an author who writes under the nom-de-plume of Westron Wynde. Right now I’m also reading an Ellery Queen radio play, and Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.) Eventually, as I kept rereading the complete Canon each time, (and not just the very limited original sixty-story Canon,) I began to formalize my Chronology more and more and keep it as a Word document. As I said, I'm now on my fifth re-read of the Canon and every pastiche that I have. I’m currently up through mid-1897 this time, fitting in new stories as I buy or find them, and constructing Version 5.0 of the Chronology.
One has to make a few assumptions with the Chronology. The first is that Holmes was much busier than he and Watson let on in the Canon. It seems that nearly everyone’s pastiche starts with Holmes not having had any work for weeks, lying around whinging and cocaine-ing. In fact, if all these pastiches are to be believed – and I try to believe and work in every traditional one that I can – then Holmes and Watson were involved in a lot of concurrent cases. (This is the theme of my latest book of five stories, hopefully to be published next year: Holmes is in one case when another intrudes, or two take place concurrently, etc.) This idea actually works out when you read the stories. In any given adventure, the only recorded events of a certain day might be a 15-minute conversation taking place during a chapter or two over breakfast or late at night, and that conversation is actually all that is presented for that day. What else happened during that day? Probably some of the events of another pastiche, which Watson separated out when writing so as not to confuse the particular narrative that he is relating.
Part of keeping the Chronology is looking for obvious temporal clues sprinkled throughout the stories, such as mentions of specific dates, seasons, months, days of the week, or even phases of the moon. Sometimes, editors of Watson’s papers are a wee bit careless, saying that a certain specific date is a Monday, when a cursory examination of a Perpetual Calendar reveals that it’s really a Thursday. When they do that, they throw the whole dating of that particular adventure wide open and into question. If that statement is incorrect, how trustworthy are other given chronological facts?
I try to include every legitimate pastiche within the Chronology, unless it is too AU, too supernatural, too offensive (such as making Holmes or Mycroft or Watson or Irene Adler into The Ripper), anything slash, or something that’s just plain awful. Sometimes I have to "bend" the stories a little - or a lot - to make them fit, (as I said I do with the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King – as I’ll explain soon,) by making a note in the Chronology about how this or that is “Incorrect” and doesn't fit with the big picture and the established facts. I excuse these narrative inconsistencies by believing that Watson intentionally obfuscated some things, or was careless, or that maybe even the "editors" of Watson's notes were careless, or possibly had their own agendas that they laid on top of Watson's original rough outlines and notes. For example, author Peter Tremayne, (a pseudonym of Peter Berresford Ellis,) tries to make every person in the Canon Irish. Sherlock and Mycroft? Irish. He states that Mycroft actually works for the Irish Government and not the British Government. Mrs. Hudson? Irish. Sherlock and Mycroft went to University in Ireland. And so on. Tremayne obviously has his own axe to grind about the Irish issue, and when I read his stories I am forced to note that, while the essential matters related to the events are correct, Tremayne has this Irish part “Incorrect”, having grafted his own agenda onto Watson’s original notes.
As mentioned, the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King are excellent, but they take some serious rationalization as well. I’ve always liked the King books, but I don’t believe her assertion that Holmes and Mary Russell were married – with him in his sixties, and she a fifteen-year-old when they met. Several years ago, I emailed Laurie King about my theory that Russell was, in fact, insane, and had imagined the whole marriage to Holmes. Ms. King was politely tolerant, and seemed to be glad that someone was playing The Game with her books. She even put my theory on her website, and her fans, sadly, weren’t so tolerant. Then, I “discovered” a story about Mary Russell’s delusions called “Descent Into Madness”, which is free on-line as a fan-fiction since it involves her copyrighted character. This narrative helps to smooth over that pesky marriage problem, and allows me to enjoy reading the Russell books at their chronologically-appropriate location. Several Sherlockians really liked this story. Roger Johnson of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London wrote in “The District Messenger” that it was a neat solution to the marriage problem. A noted Sherlockian emailed me privately and said that he couldn’t read the Russell books now without thinking of my theory. Another Sherlockian who runs a major Holmes website told me that he’d lost patience with Russell a long time ago and that this was a good use of my time. Here is the link to the story, if anyone would care to read it:
http://www.sherlock-holmes.com/Marcum...
As I said earlier, another assumption with the Chronology that I use is to take most – but not all - of Baring-Gould's chronology as a jumping-off point. This helps nail down a framework to build this thing on. So if a pastiche incorrectly has Watson living in Paddington during the time when he should be in Kensington, I note it in my chronology. Maybe someone compliments Watson on a recent story in The Strand, even though the narrative in which the compliment takes place occurs in the 1880’s, years before The Strand is even in existence. (Many “editors” of Watson’s notes don’t seem to realize that Watson didn’t start publishing in The Strand until 1891, and that after 1893, he didn’t publish there again until 1903.) Perhaps a story indicates that Watson is staying in Baker Street during a time when he is definitely married. Is his wife traveling? Does this story take place at the same time as another story where Watson is staying in Baker Street while he’s married? Maybe these two stories fit together somehow. It might tend to offend some "editors" of Watson’s notes that I have disagreed with them and specific statements in the stories, and that I’ve marked things as “Incorrect” when dating their stories or correcting what doesn’t fit, but after all, a chronology like this is a very subjective thing.
In any case, I have thought over the years that I might try someday to have the Chronology published, although it is always a living work in progress. I have many, and probably all, of the “official” chronologies (Baring-Gould, Bell, Brend, Zeisler, Hall, etc.) that have been published specifically about the stories in the Canon, but the only thing I've ever seen like my pastiche chronology was in the back of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, in which editor Mike Ashley attempted to fit the limited number of pastiches in that particular volume into a larger Canonical chronology.
Another rationalization that occurs when placing various cases in the Chronology involves sorting the different narratives of famous unrecorded cases. For example, there are a lot of pastiches about Huret, the Boulevard Assassin. Why so many? Don’t they contradict one another? I believe that in 1894 Holmes rooted out a whole nest of Hurets. Multiple investigations regarding multiple Hardens, the tobacco millionaires? Holmes helped a lot of tobacco millionaires in that year, and Watson simply changed all their names in his notes to Harden to preserve their anonymity. There were a lot of Giant Sumatran Rats and Red Leeches and Canary Trainers over the years, too.
And Jack the Ripper? I have a few dozen or more Holmes vs. Ripper stories...and I think that almost all of them are true, (as I’ll explain soon….) Holmes-versus-The Ripper may be what prodded me into reading more of the Holmes books in the first place. Not long after I acquired my first Holmes book, but before I read any of it, I saw a piece of A Study in Terror on television, so that was my first experience with Holmes was his encounter with The Ripper. That movie was also what prodded me into going ahead and reading that one Holmes book that I owned, and look where that has taken me.
Not long after that, I read Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, with its identification of the killer as Athelney Jones. I’m not even sure that I had read Sign yet or knew who Jones was, so identifying him as the Ripper wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it might have been. Later, when I saw Murder by Decree in 1979, which was my first complete Holmes film, in a theater with my dad – a great memory – I was confused that yet someone else was being identified as The Ripper. It was one of my first experiences in seeing that there were alternate versions of Holmes’s cases.
Somewhere in that time period – since I wasn’t too discriminating in those days, reading what I could find – I made my way through Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) and realized that people could write things about Holmes that were horribly, sickeningly wrong too.
Over the years, as I constructed my day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour chronology, the most challenging part has been the fall of 1888. When reading all the different and conflicting versions of the Holmes’s encounters with The Ripper, I came to the startling conclusion that any one of these versions isn't more true than the others, but in fact they are all true – well, only Chapters 1-4 of The Last Sherlock Holmes Story are true, as the rest of that one was an abomination and clearly written by Moriarty to besmirch Holmes’s reputation. Each version of Holmes-versus-The Ripper is one of many tiny separated parts of a much bigger overall truth. The fall of 1888 was clearly Holmes's finest hour, with The Hound, Sign, and many other cases all twined around saving England from the massive Ripper conspiracy.
When it was all over, in late November ‘88, Holmes and Mycroft certainly met together at the Diogenes Club and decided that instead of leaving a vacuum of no information – since they couldn’t reveal the real truth – they would control the facts by releasing the whole story in many separate and apparently contradictory pieces, each its own complete and self-contained narrative naming a different Ripper. Some parts of what happened during the massive investigation Watson didn't even know about. For example, in The Mycroft Memoranda, the truth about one of the many Rippers in the conspiracy is even kept from Watson....
After I was fitting everything together about the fall of ‘88, I didn’t want to throw out the Baring-Gould chapter about the Ripper investigation, even though it clearly indicated that Athelney Jones was the Ripper, a solution with which I did not agree. So, in one of the ways that I rationalize these things to include a story in the Chronology, I decided that Athelney Jones didn’t really do it. He knew that in some way the Crown was implicated, so he threw himself on the sword and tried to seem as if he were the Ripper. Later, in a scene not recorded by Baring-Gould, Jones was bawled out for being an idiot and sent back to work, which is why he appears in several post-1888 pastiches. (Apparently, he’s going to be a main character in Anthony Horowitz’s new book Moriarty, being released this fall, and set soon after Reichenbach in 1891. Interestingly, or strangely, he’s described as “Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, a devoted student of Holmes's methods of investigation and deduction.” I don’t know if he’s a devoted student – he certainly wasn’t back in 1888 – but maybe he came around after he was shown some mercy following his Ripper debacle.)
After seeing how complicated the Chronology for the fall of 1888 becomes, with some books broken down literally paragraph by paragraph, it is easy to realize that the Ripper investigation was truly Holmes's finest hour.
So sometimes I think about publishing this “Whole Art of Detection”, but it would be huge, and very subjective, possibly divisive, a formatting nightmare, and as I wrote earlier, “impossible,” because it’s a never-ending project that gets updated daily as I read and add new material. And yet, I wouldn’t trade how much extra enjoyment it’s given me while visiting Holmes’s world.
4. You are one of the most learned and well-read Holmes followers that I know. If you could recommend one must have pastiche that every Holmes fan should read, which would it be? What makes this book stand out?
The possibilities for this question are so overwhelming that I could write another essay, but I’ll actually try and limit my answer. There are so many excellent “editors” of Watson’s notes out there, and I could quickly construct a massive list of not-to-be-missed cases. But after thinking about this for several days, I keep coming back to the same story as an excellent example, an oldie but a goody, “The Adventure of the Deptford Horror” by Adrian Conan Doyle. Even after all these years, I can still feel the mood and atmosphere of this one, and the ending is still terrifying in its quiet way.
I won’t give away too much about it to those who haven’t discovered it yet, but it’s obviously derivative of another famous Canon story. Still, in some ways it is better than that original story.
When I first started collecting Holmes pastiches, I was very fortunate to discover a copy of The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son, and John Dickson Carr. “The Deptford Horror” is one of the stories in the latter half of the book, supposedly written completely by Adrian Conan Doyle after Carr dropped out of the project, either due to ill health, as mentioned in the book’s introduction, or possibly for less pleasant reasons. In any case, the younger Doyle does an incredible job, and I really wish that he’d “edited” more of Watson’s works.
There are so many great pastiche practitioners, both now and in the past, and it’s so hard to pick one out, but for right now this is my answer, and I’ll stick to it. For right now….
5. What are your current projects?
There are several things going on right now. First and foremost, I recently finished “editing” the latest book of Holmes short stories, and plans are that MX will publish it next spring. I just need to give it a final run-through, and then I’ll let my wife have a look at it.
I was very fortunate to be able to contribute two essays to the most recent issue of The Solar Pons Gazette http://www.solarpons.com/Annual_2014_... , and I’ve written a couple of original Pons stories for inclusion in next year’s Gazette as well. Bob Byrne, the editor of the Gazette, is planning a new on-line collection of Pons stories, and I was much honored that he asked me to participate. They are titled “The Adventure of the Doctor’s Box” and “The Adventure of the Distasteful Society”. (As I mentioned in the last interview questions, if you don’t know Solar Pons yet, you should!)
Imagination Theatre just broadcast my second script, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle,” based on a story in my first book. They produced my first script, “The Terrible Tragedy of Lytton House” last year. For those of you who don’t know, Imagination Theater provides an hour of syndicated radio entertainment each week across the country and on the web, in the classic style. They have various rotating series characters, such as Harry Nile, Hilary Caine, and even Raffles the Gentleman Thief, as well as non-series shows classified as “Movies For Your Mind.” But best of all, for Sherlockians they provide incredible stories faithful to the true Canonical Holmes.
I understand that both of these scripts are scheduled to be published in forthcoming issues of a respected Sherlockian journal next year, but I won’t count those chickens quite yet. I’ve been working on the next script for Imagination Theatre. Finally, I’ve submitted a new pastiche to hopefully be included in a major Holmes collection that is being released next year. I’m waiting to hear back and see if I made the cut on that one. If the story isn’t used, I can always use it in a new collection of Holmes stories. I’m already getting the itch to write more of them – I mean “edit” more of Watson’s notes – and the last collection of new stuff hasn’t even been proofed by my wife yet.
6. Any last thoughts?
I’d just like to thank you for the chance to answer these questions, and for you allowing me to take all of this space to follow these Holmesian thoughts down their different rabbit holes. Trying to figure out how to explain in a somewhat linear fashion how much I enjoy the stories – all of the stories! – and also how much I admire the characters of Holmes and Watson has been a lot of fun. It’s really an incredible time to be a Sherlockian, and I’m very proud and lucky to be able to add a little bit to it, in the company of so many great people.
David Marcum welcomes readers to contact him with questions or comments via his e-mail address at thepapersofsherlockholmes@gmail.com. For a complete list of Mr. Marcum's Sherlockian publications through MX, please go to (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 historical analysis 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 Mr. Belanger's Amazon page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...
1. You published a Holmes novel entitled Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt in 2013. What made you decide to switch gears and go from short stories to a novel format?
Once again, thanks for inviting me back for a second set of the questions, and for telling me that it was okay to ramble some more. When I start thinking about Holmes, one thought obviously leads to another….
As far as switching from short stories to a novel, it was really just to see if I could do something longer. This particular story started as a sliver of an idea from way back, but I didn’t know what to do with it. In 2008, when I was out in the field watching an engineering project get put into the ground, a different kind of place to hide a murdered body occurred to me. As I watched some of these permanent structures being put into place, specifically in this case a sewer pipe, I realized that for the most part, once they went installed they would never be seen again. That idea hung around in my head for years, until finally I was at an all-day seminar, listening to a paint salesman give his dog-and-pony show about how great his product was for coating water tanks. I suddenly got the idea of exactly who the body was that was hidden in the place that I’d thought of years earlier.
At that point, the first volume of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes was just being released by MX, after having been revised from the original edition published a few years before. I was still waiting for Volume II to appear, but I decided to explore writing a novel. I sat down just started to type. As the story opened, it turned out to be a rainy day in Baker Street, and I quickly learned from listening to Watson that this new adventure was beginning the very next day after one of the short stories in Volume I, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle.” Watson was in a rather ill temper, as Holmes had promised him at the end of that other story that they would go to the British Museum today, and instead Holmes was involved in something else at the chemistry table. Since I’d set “Sissinghurst Castle” in the spring of 1888, the novel would therefore be set then as well. I realized that this would be a good chance to explore Watson’s feelings about being back in Baker Street, and where he saw his life going.
When I say back in Baker Street in the spring of 1888, I’m referring to a specific part of William S. Baring-Gould’s chronology: in this case, Watson’s first marriage before Mary Morstan, an idea which I personally buy into. Chronologists have long realized that some of Watson’s personal dates are confusing. He meets Mary Morstan in the fall of 1888 during The Sign of the Four, and he doesn’t marry her until sometime after that. However, several stories that are clearly set before those events refer to Watson’s wife. In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, for instance, which occurs before Sign, Watson says he’s seen little of Holmes since his marriage. Therefore, Watson had a wife before Mary Morstan. Who was she?
Some people simply assume there were only two wives, Mary, and the one in “The Blanched Soldier”, set after the turn of the century, when Holmes states that the good doctor has deserted him for a wife. Others have postulated many wives for Watson, six or more, but I agree with many that believe in the Three-Wife Solution. The second was Mary Morstan, the third was the early 1900’s model, and the first was whoever came before Mary. Baring-Gould solved the problem of this wife’s identity by identifying her as Constance Adams, whom Watson met while traveling in San Francisco a few years earlier. How do we know that Watson was in San Francisco? Because of a play found in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s papers, Angels of Darkness, in which Watson is mentioned as a British doctor living in San Francisco. (While Watson is in the play, Holmes is not.) Confusingly, during the play Watson romances Lucy Ferrier, who is later named as the Mormon Love Hostage in A Study in Scarlet. Certainly, then, Lucy Ferrier isn’t the real name of Watson’s first wife. (Apparently when Doyle was writing the middle section of A Study in Scarlet and Angels of Darkness, he mashed up some names and facts.)
Baring-Gould didn’t get everything right, but he nailed a lot of it, and – always playing The Game, of course – I believe that Baring-Gould had inside information about much of Holmes’s life. Let me explain by going further off-trail for a minute: I greatly enjoy the Holmes novels by Laurie R. King, although I believe that her narrator, Mary Russell is insane, due to her delusional belief that she is married to Holmes. In King’s book The Moor, it is revealed that Baring-Gould’s grandfather, Sabine Baring-Gould, was actually Holmes’s godfather. While some people have criticized William Baring-Gould for supposedly lifting too much of his grandfather’s biography and grafting it onto Holmes’s past, I don’t think that this is the case. Rather, I believe that as the grandson of Holmes’s godfather, William Baring-Gould had access to information that other biographers did not, and that led him to the knowledge that Watson’s first wife was Constance. When Baring-Gould indicated that Constance died suddenly in late 1887, which resulted in Watson’s return to Baker Street soon after, he must have known something that other people didn’t. And this is what I meant, so long ago at an earlier place in this question’s answer, when I referred to Watson returning to Baker Street in early 1888, at the beginning of Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt. One woman wrote me to criticize my ignorance, telling me that Mary was Watson’s first wife, and not Constance. (People have a great sentimental attachment to Mary.) I’m afraid that I had to explain it to her, and I like to think that I made a believer out of her.
2. Your Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street series has been a bit controversial. What led you to revise Arthur Morrison's stories and make them into Sherlock Holmes stories?
Although the initial reaction was controversial, I believe that as the three volumes have appeared, people have gotten more used to the idea. For those who don’t know about this, what I did was to take all the stories featuring the character of Martin Hewitt, as written by Arthur Morrison, and with minimal alterations, change them into Holmes stories. As I state in the introductions to the three books, I personally did not get around to reading the Martin Hewitt stories until I was in my early thirties. I had ignored them for a long time, and what I knew about them was that many people believed that Hewitt was actually a young Mycroft Holmes. Then, after I had completed reading the Hewitt Canon, I was amazed to walk away with the feeling that I hadn’t been reading about Mycroft at all. Instead, the stories seemed to be more about a younger Sherlock Holmes.
It became my theory was that Hewitt’s adventures were actually Holmes’s early investigations while Holmes was living in Montague Street, circa 1876. These adventures were narrated by Brett, Holmes’s journalist neighbor. Later, from 1891-93, when Watson’s stories were taking the world by storm in The Strand, Brett chose to write up his own experiences with the younger Consulting Detective. However, when he tried to publish them, through his own literary agent, Arthur Morrison, he was stopped for some reason, and forced to change Holmes’s name to Hewitt so that publication could proceed.
In September 2013, MX threw a book-signing party for the release of Volume II of The Papers at the Sherlock Holmes Hotel in Baker Street in London. I was there on my incredible Holmes Pilgrimage, and whenever I was back in London during that trip, I stayed at that hotel. Before the signing, I was standing around talking with several MX authors, including Roger Johnson of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. Someone mentioned Hewitt, and it led me to share with Roger and the others my theory that Hewitt was really Holmes. The idea wasn’t ridiculed, and that put the seed in my head to think about editing and publishing all twenty-five of the Hewitt stories as Holmes tales. I had already converted some of them for my own benefit, keeping them in a binder in my collection. When I floated the idea to Roger Johnson, and then Steve Emecz, they were both encouraging, and I finished the conversions.
As I pointed out in the introductions to the books, other people have already been converting old non-Holmes stories into Holmes narratives for quite a while. A man named Alan Lance Andersen edited The Affairs of Sherlock Holmes a few years ago, where different non-series Sax Rohmer stories were reworked as Holmes adventures. Several times over the last year or so, some anonymous editor has begun republishing the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries as e-books on Amazon, retold as Holmes stories. The part that I don’t like about that particular conversion is that the anonymous editor insists on indicating that these new versions are by Arthur Conan Doyle and/or John Hamish Watson, with no mention at all of the fact that R. Austin Freeman actually wrote the original Thorndyke stories. For these Hewitt conversions, I tried to make sure that Morrison got all the credit for these stories.
Some other examples of character-switching include the British ITV series Marple, which has taken non-Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie and converted them into episodes featuring that character. A year or so ago, someone took non-Holmes stories and turned them into BBC radio scripts for a series called The Rivals, wherein different detectives such as Dupin and the Thinking Machine are each aided by Lestrade. And another fellow, (me, actually) took a non-Nero Wolfe Rex Stout story a year or so ago and re-wrote it for the The Gazette (the Nero Wolfe “Wolfe Pack” official journal) as a Nero Wolfe tale – well, actually an Archie Goodwin tale, since Wolfe doesn’t appear in it at all. Several other people have done the same thing with conversions of some of Stout’s other non-Wolfe works over the years.
By changing Hewitt to Holmes, I don’t mean in any way to diminish or take away from Morrison or Martin Hewitt, but I have always read the Hewitt stories as Holmes stories anyway, so I thought that I would enjoy it this way, and maybe other people would as well. I appreciate all of the positive comments and kind reviews that I’ve received related to this project.
3. You have been working on a complete timeline of Sherlock Holmes which includes all of his appearances, even in pastiches. This, in my opinion, is an amazing database of information. How long has this taken you to create, and will we ever get a chance to see it in print?
You’re referring to the fact that I’ve been working on a Complete Holmes Chronology, including both Canon and pastiches, since the mid-1990’s, and even though in the end it’s an impossible task, it’s really changed the way I read about Our Heroes. It also helps to somewhat explain my passion, why I wanted to get to England for so long on a Holmes Pilgrimage, and why it was almost a religious experience for me to actually go last year and visit all of those Holmes-related sites after the way that I’ve lived in that world for so long.
The way this all began is that I started collecting pastiches around the same time that I started reading Holmes, when I was a ten-year-old in the mid-1970’s. I didn’t much care about the difference between what Doyle was presenting and what other people produced, as long as it seemed authentic. I kept buying the pastiches whenever I found them, as I had learned that if you didn’t grab one when it was in front of you, it might be gone forever. I would go to the bookstore with the plan in mind to purchase some book, but if I found an unexpected Holmes volume instead, I jettisoned Plan A and bought the Holmes book.
In the mid-1990’s, I was in my early 30’s and had gone back to school for a second degree in Civil Engineering (since the Federal Agency where I was an investigator actually shut down,) and it was at that school where I really discovered the internet for the first time. This allowed me to track down tons of Holmes fan-fictions, as well as many other Holmes books that I never would have known about otherwise. (It helps that my wife is a reference librarian, who taught me very good research methods. Living in eastern Tennessee, sometimes it takes extra effort to find Holmes-related items.) That was when I really devoted myself to collecting and reading Holmes pastiches on a much more dedicated level. I had been collecting them for years, but I found that I kept re-reading the Canon and the same few favorite pastiches over and over again, and there were a lot that I’d never touched after I bought them and put on the shelves. I finally decided to dive in and read every Holmes story that I had accumulated up to that point.
At the time, I was working some really awful night jobs while going to school during the day, but at least I could do homework there when the work slowed down. I would finish my school work, and then read about Holmes. Soon, I started noticing patterns in stories, and I began to make notes, keeping them, along with relevant British maps, in a small binder that I carried everywhere with me. I was organizing the stories by year, and how they related to the Baring-Gould chronology. (If I repeatedly refer back to Baring-Gould, it’s because I first read his biography of Holmes soon after I started reading the original stories – in fact, before I had even read all of the Canon – so as I’ve mentioned, it was very influential on me. I don’t believe quite everything that he wrote, but I accept a lot of it, such as Watson’s first wife Constance, the relationship with Irene Adler that produced Nero Wolfe as a son, many of the chronological dates, and Holmes and Watson’s death dates in 1957 and 1929, respectively. It makes for a great jumping-off place.) After I finished randomly reading through every traditional Holmes story that I had at the time, I noticed that I had constructed my own rough chronology. I wasn’t finished visiting in that world yet, so I started re-reading again, this time in the chronological order that I had roughly constructed, based upon my notes.
It was amazing for me to see that there was some kind of overall pattern to all the pastiches. I called it the Great Watsonian Oversoul, where pastiche "editors" from many different years all seemed to be tapping into the whole. For instance, (and this is not a literal example, although I often saw things like this), a pastiche written in the 1930's by one author might be about a crime in Edinburgh in a certain month and year. Another pastiche, written in the 1970's by another author, might be set in the same month and year, and refer to recent events in Edinburgh. I'm certain that the second "editor" of Watson’s notes had probably never heard of the first "editor", but somehow he/she unknowingly referenced that early work in passing and the bigger picture was tied together. I have seen many instances of this.
After reading all these pastiches for so long, I can see a Whole Gestalt Holmes, covering the entire lives of Holmes and Watson. For example, I have several hundred stories (including fan-fics, etc.) set before Holmes even gets to Montague Street in the 1870’s. And the number of stories set post-retirement is staggering. I prefer Classic 1880’s most of all, but I’ll take whatever I can get. I’m on my fifth full complete re-read of everything that I have about Holmes in chronological order – that includes novels, short stories, movies, TV and radio episodes, scripts and comics, fan-fics, and whatever else I can find, so it takes a while to do the complete re-read, (especially when one also goes back and fits in new Holmes stuff as it appears or comes up for sale into the chronological years that one has just previously read about), and one also reads many other things, like Game of Thrones, in order to make one’s son happy, and one also has real-life things going on, but luckily if one is a fast reader, but not a skimmer, one can actually retain it all fairly well – and by reading everything I have regarding Holmes in that way, I get a complete and overwhelming sense of the lives of Our Heroes. By the time one starts getting to 1929, when Watson dies, and 1957, when Holmes dies at 103-years (having lived that long thanks to Royal Jelly!) it is actually somewhat emotional. And then I turn around and start again, with a fan-fiction telling how Siger met Violet, (Holmes’s parents) in the 1840’s.
With all the new items constantly appearing and being worked into my rereading, I can’t imagine how long it might take if I ever finish this pass through and start over yet again. My reading is definitely slowing down as I get older – I’m 49 now, and get sleepy too quickly. And there is so much to read. I currently have over 2,000 volumes, many of them pastiches, in my collection. I also have over 100 fat binders filled with fan-fictions, and other items that aren’t available in book form.
I keep reading and re-reading about Holmes over the years, simply because I always like to be in the world of Holmes somehow. I read other books about other completely different characters concurrently, but there is always a Holmes book with me. (For instance, I always bring some Holmes narrative to work and read it during lunch. Today it’s was an amazing fan-fiction novel called A Case of Insanity by an author who writes under the nom-de-plume of Westron Wynde. Right now I’m also reading an Ellery Queen radio play, and Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.) Eventually, as I kept rereading the complete Canon each time, (and not just the very limited original sixty-story Canon,) I began to formalize my Chronology more and more and keep it as a Word document. As I said, I'm now on my fifth re-read of the Canon and every pastiche that I have. I’m currently up through mid-1897 this time, fitting in new stories as I buy or find them, and constructing Version 5.0 of the Chronology.
One has to make a few assumptions with the Chronology. The first is that Holmes was much busier than he and Watson let on in the Canon. It seems that nearly everyone’s pastiche starts with Holmes not having had any work for weeks, lying around whinging and cocaine-ing. In fact, if all these pastiches are to be believed – and I try to believe and work in every traditional one that I can – then Holmes and Watson were involved in a lot of concurrent cases. (This is the theme of my latest book of five stories, hopefully to be published next year: Holmes is in one case when another intrudes, or two take place concurrently, etc.) This idea actually works out when you read the stories. In any given adventure, the only recorded events of a certain day might be a 15-minute conversation taking place during a chapter or two over breakfast or late at night, and that conversation is actually all that is presented for that day. What else happened during that day? Probably some of the events of another pastiche, which Watson separated out when writing so as not to confuse the particular narrative that he is relating.
Part of keeping the Chronology is looking for obvious temporal clues sprinkled throughout the stories, such as mentions of specific dates, seasons, months, days of the week, or even phases of the moon. Sometimes, editors of Watson’s papers are a wee bit careless, saying that a certain specific date is a Monday, when a cursory examination of a Perpetual Calendar reveals that it’s really a Thursday. When they do that, they throw the whole dating of that particular adventure wide open and into question. If that statement is incorrect, how trustworthy are other given chronological facts?
I try to include every legitimate pastiche within the Chronology, unless it is too AU, too supernatural, too offensive (such as making Holmes or Mycroft or Watson or Irene Adler into The Ripper), anything slash, or something that’s just plain awful. Sometimes I have to "bend" the stories a little - or a lot - to make them fit, (as I said I do with the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King – as I’ll explain soon,) by making a note in the Chronology about how this or that is “Incorrect” and doesn't fit with the big picture and the established facts. I excuse these narrative inconsistencies by believing that Watson intentionally obfuscated some things, or was careless, or that maybe even the "editors" of Watson's notes were careless, or possibly had their own agendas that they laid on top of Watson's original rough outlines and notes. For example, author Peter Tremayne, (a pseudonym of Peter Berresford Ellis,) tries to make every person in the Canon Irish. Sherlock and Mycroft? Irish. He states that Mycroft actually works for the Irish Government and not the British Government. Mrs. Hudson? Irish. Sherlock and Mycroft went to University in Ireland. And so on. Tremayne obviously has his own axe to grind about the Irish issue, and when I read his stories I am forced to note that, while the essential matters related to the events are correct, Tremayne has this Irish part “Incorrect”, having grafted his own agenda onto Watson’s original notes.
As mentioned, the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King are excellent, but they take some serious rationalization as well. I’ve always liked the King books, but I don’t believe her assertion that Holmes and Mary Russell were married – with him in his sixties, and she a fifteen-year-old when they met. Several years ago, I emailed Laurie King about my theory that Russell was, in fact, insane, and had imagined the whole marriage to Holmes. Ms. King was politely tolerant, and seemed to be glad that someone was playing The Game with her books. She even put my theory on her website, and her fans, sadly, weren’t so tolerant. Then, I “discovered” a story about Mary Russell’s delusions called “Descent Into Madness”, which is free on-line as a fan-fiction since it involves her copyrighted character. This narrative helps to smooth over that pesky marriage problem, and allows me to enjoy reading the Russell books at their chronologically-appropriate location. Several Sherlockians really liked this story. Roger Johnson of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London wrote in “The District Messenger” that it was a neat solution to the marriage problem. A noted Sherlockian emailed me privately and said that he couldn’t read the Russell books now without thinking of my theory. Another Sherlockian who runs a major Holmes website told me that he’d lost patience with Russell a long time ago and that this was a good use of my time. Here is the link to the story, if anyone would care to read it:
http://www.sherlock-holmes.com/Marcum...
As I said earlier, another assumption with the Chronology that I use is to take most – but not all - of Baring-Gould's chronology as a jumping-off point. This helps nail down a framework to build this thing on. So if a pastiche incorrectly has Watson living in Paddington during the time when he should be in Kensington, I note it in my chronology. Maybe someone compliments Watson on a recent story in The Strand, even though the narrative in which the compliment takes place occurs in the 1880’s, years before The Strand is even in existence. (Many “editors” of Watson’s notes don’t seem to realize that Watson didn’t start publishing in The Strand until 1891, and that after 1893, he didn’t publish there again until 1903.) Perhaps a story indicates that Watson is staying in Baker Street during a time when he is definitely married. Is his wife traveling? Does this story take place at the same time as another story where Watson is staying in Baker Street while he’s married? Maybe these two stories fit together somehow. It might tend to offend some "editors" of Watson’s notes that I have disagreed with them and specific statements in the stories, and that I’ve marked things as “Incorrect” when dating their stories or correcting what doesn’t fit, but after all, a chronology like this is a very subjective thing.
In any case, I have thought over the years that I might try someday to have the Chronology published, although it is always a living work in progress. I have many, and probably all, of the “official” chronologies (Baring-Gould, Bell, Brend, Zeisler, Hall, etc.) that have been published specifically about the stories in the Canon, but the only thing I've ever seen like my pastiche chronology was in the back of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, in which editor Mike Ashley attempted to fit the limited number of pastiches in that particular volume into a larger Canonical chronology.
Another rationalization that occurs when placing various cases in the Chronology involves sorting the different narratives of famous unrecorded cases. For example, there are a lot of pastiches about Huret, the Boulevard Assassin. Why so many? Don’t they contradict one another? I believe that in 1894 Holmes rooted out a whole nest of Hurets. Multiple investigations regarding multiple Hardens, the tobacco millionaires? Holmes helped a lot of tobacco millionaires in that year, and Watson simply changed all their names in his notes to Harden to preserve their anonymity. There were a lot of Giant Sumatran Rats and Red Leeches and Canary Trainers over the years, too.
And Jack the Ripper? I have a few dozen or more Holmes vs. Ripper stories...and I think that almost all of them are true, (as I’ll explain soon….) Holmes-versus-The Ripper may be what prodded me into reading more of the Holmes books in the first place. Not long after I acquired my first Holmes book, but before I read any of it, I saw a piece of A Study in Terror on television, so that was my first experience with Holmes was his encounter with The Ripper. That movie was also what prodded me into going ahead and reading that one Holmes book that I owned, and look where that has taken me.
Not long after that, I read Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, with its identification of the killer as Athelney Jones. I’m not even sure that I had read Sign yet or knew who Jones was, so identifying him as the Ripper wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it might have been. Later, when I saw Murder by Decree in 1979, which was my first complete Holmes film, in a theater with my dad – a great memory – I was confused that yet someone else was being identified as The Ripper. It was one of my first experiences in seeing that there were alternate versions of Holmes’s cases.
Somewhere in that time period – since I wasn’t too discriminating in those days, reading what I could find – I made my way through Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) and realized that people could write things about Holmes that were horribly, sickeningly wrong too.
Over the years, as I constructed my day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour chronology, the most challenging part has been the fall of 1888. When reading all the different and conflicting versions of the Holmes’s encounters with The Ripper, I came to the startling conclusion that any one of these versions isn't more true than the others, but in fact they are all true – well, only Chapters 1-4 of The Last Sherlock Holmes Story are true, as the rest of that one was an abomination and clearly written by Moriarty to besmirch Holmes’s reputation. Each version of Holmes-versus-The Ripper is one of many tiny separated parts of a much bigger overall truth. The fall of 1888 was clearly Holmes's finest hour, with The Hound, Sign, and many other cases all twined around saving England from the massive Ripper conspiracy.
When it was all over, in late November ‘88, Holmes and Mycroft certainly met together at the Diogenes Club and decided that instead of leaving a vacuum of no information – since they couldn’t reveal the real truth – they would control the facts by releasing the whole story in many separate and apparently contradictory pieces, each its own complete and self-contained narrative naming a different Ripper. Some parts of what happened during the massive investigation Watson didn't even know about. For example, in The Mycroft Memoranda, the truth about one of the many Rippers in the conspiracy is even kept from Watson....
After I was fitting everything together about the fall of ‘88, I didn’t want to throw out the Baring-Gould chapter about the Ripper investigation, even though it clearly indicated that Athelney Jones was the Ripper, a solution with which I did not agree. So, in one of the ways that I rationalize these things to include a story in the Chronology, I decided that Athelney Jones didn’t really do it. He knew that in some way the Crown was implicated, so he threw himself on the sword and tried to seem as if he were the Ripper. Later, in a scene not recorded by Baring-Gould, Jones was bawled out for being an idiot and sent back to work, which is why he appears in several post-1888 pastiches. (Apparently, he’s going to be a main character in Anthony Horowitz’s new book Moriarty, being released this fall, and set soon after Reichenbach in 1891. Interestingly, or strangely, he’s described as “Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, a devoted student of Holmes's methods of investigation and deduction.” I don’t know if he’s a devoted student – he certainly wasn’t back in 1888 – but maybe he came around after he was shown some mercy following his Ripper debacle.)
After seeing how complicated the Chronology for the fall of 1888 becomes, with some books broken down literally paragraph by paragraph, it is easy to realize that the Ripper investigation was truly Holmes's finest hour.
So sometimes I think about publishing this “Whole Art of Detection”, but it would be huge, and very subjective, possibly divisive, a formatting nightmare, and as I wrote earlier, “impossible,” because it’s a never-ending project that gets updated daily as I read and add new material. And yet, I wouldn’t trade how much extra enjoyment it’s given me while visiting Holmes’s world.
4. You are one of the most learned and well-read Holmes followers that I know. If you could recommend one must have pastiche that every Holmes fan should read, which would it be? What makes this book stand out?
The possibilities for this question are so overwhelming that I could write another essay, but I’ll actually try and limit my answer. There are so many excellent “editors” of Watson’s notes out there, and I could quickly construct a massive list of not-to-be-missed cases. But after thinking about this for several days, I keep coming back to the same story as an excellent example, an oldie but a goody, “The Adventure of the Deptford Horror” by Adrian Conan Doyle. Even after all these years, I can still feel the mood and atmosphere of this one, and the ending is still terrifying in its quiet way.
I won’t give away too much about it to those who haven’t discovered it yet, but it’s obviously derivative of another famous Canon story. Still, in some ways it is better than that original story.
When I first started collecting Holmes pastiches, I was very fortunate to discover a copy of The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur’s son, and John Dickson Carr. “The Deptford Horror” is one of the stories in the latter half of the book, supposedly written completely by Adrian Conan Doyle after Carr dropped out of the project, either due to ill health, as mentioned in the book’s introduction, or possibly for less pleasant reasons. In any case, the younger Doyle does an incredible job, and I really wish that he’d “edited” more of Watson’s works.
There are so many great pastiche practitioners, both now and in the past, and it’s so hard to pick one out, but for right now this is my answer, and I’ll stick to it. For right now….
5. What are your current projects?
There are several things going on right now. First and foremost, I recently finished “editing” the latest book of Holmes short stories, and plans are that MX will publish it next spring. I just need to give it a final run-through, and then I’ll let my wife have a look at it.
I was very fortunate to be able to contribute two essays to the most recent issue of The Solar Pons Gazette http://www.solarpons.com/Annual_2014_... , and I’ve written a couple of original Pons stories for inclusion in next year’s Gazette as well. Bob Byrne, the editor of the Gazette, is planning a new on-line collection of Pons stories, and I was much honored that he asked me to participate. They are titled “The Adventure of the Doctor’s Box” and “The Adventure of the Distasteful Society”. (As I mentioned in the last interview questions, if you don’t know Solar Pons yet, you should!)
Imagination Theatre just broadcast my second script, “The Singular Affair at Sissinghurst Castle,” based on a story in my first book. They produced my first script, “The Terrible Tragedy of Lytton House” last year. For those of you who don’t know, Imagination Theater provides an hour of syndicated radio entertainment each week across the country and on the web, in the classic style. They have various rotating series characters, such as Harry Nile, Hilary Caine, and even Raffles the Gentleman Thief, as well as non-series shows classified as “Movies For Your Mind.” But best of all, for Sherlockians they provide incredible stories faithful to the true Canonical Holmes.
I understand that both of these scripts are scheduled to be published in forthcoming issues of a respected Sherlockian journal next year, but I won’t count those chickens quite yet. I’ve been working on the next script for Imagination Theatre. Finally, I’ve submitted a new pastiche to hopefully be included in a major Holmes collection that is being released next year. I’m waiting to hear back and see if I made the cut on that one. If the story isn’t used, I can always use it in a new collection of Holmes stories. I’m already getting the itch to write more of them – I mean “edit” more of Watson’s notes – and the last collection of new stuff hasn’t even been proofed by my wife yet.
6. Any last thoughts?
I’d just like to thank you for the chance to answer these questions, and for you allowing me to take all of this space to follow these Holmesian thoughts down their different rabbit holes. Trying to figure out how to explain in a somewhat linear fashion how much I enjoy the stories – all of the stories! – and also how much I admire the characters of Holmes and Watson has been a lot of fun. It’s really an incredible time to be a Sherlockian, and I’m very proud and lucky to be able to add a little bit to it, in the company of so many great people.
David Marcum welcomes readers to contact him with questions or comments via his e-mail address at thepapersofsherlockholmes@gmail.com. For a complete list of Mr. Marcum's Sherlockian publications through MX, please go to (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 historical analysis 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 Mr. Belanger's Amazon page at http://www.amazon.com/Derrick-Belange...
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Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Ramblings of a Sherlockian
Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and other writings by Author (and future Publisher) Derrick Belanger
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