Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #2
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Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
FROM WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK, by John H Watson, M.D.
BAKER STREET BROWSINGS: BOOK REVIEWS, by Kim Newman
ASK MRS HUDSON, by (Mrs) Martha Hudson
SHERLOCK HOLMES ON RADIO, A Review by Carole Buggé
THE ADVENTURE OF THE HANOVERIAN VAMPIRES, by Darrell Schweitzer
YOU SEE, BUT YOU FORGET, by Marc Bilgrey
TOUGH AS DIAMONDS, by David Waxman
THE MYSTERY OF THE FLYING MAN, by Ron Goulart
A STUDY IN EVIL, by Gary Lovisi
THE BALLAD OF THE GLORIA SCOTT, by Len Moffatt
MAX’S CAP by Jean Paiva
A REPUTATION FOR MURDER, by M.J. Elliott
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Publisher: John Betancourt
Editor: Marvin Kaye
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Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine is published quarterly by Wildside Press, LLC.
Copyright © 2009 by Wildside Press LLC.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
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The Sherlock Holmes characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are used by permission of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., www.conandoyleestate.co.uk.
FROM WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK, by John H Watson, M.D.
My dear friend Sherlock Holmes, albeit semi-retired, still keeps himself well informed about the huge amount of literary and cinematic adaptations, continuations, dramatizations, and alas, all too often, transgressions upon his name, character, ratiocinative career, and my reportage of those same items. Generally, I ignore them, except to the extent that my attorney still exacts royalties from sundry producers and writers who thus indulge themselves creatively. Holmes, however, eschews referencing them as artists. “More accurately, Watson, one must label most of them perpetrators.”
I am pleased to report that his reaction to the premiere issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine was quite favourable, though it must be recollected that it only contained two Holmesian adventures, my own recounting of his first investigation, that of “The Gloria Scott,” and Carole Buggé’s recounting of “The Strange Case of the Haunted Freighter,” a tale that, though I never got around to writing myself, is thoroughly adventure; indeed, I allowed Ms Buggé access to my own notes of the case.
But I am both curious and a bit trepidatious to learn what his reaction might be to this second number of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine. He will, of course, approve of the reappearance of my own report of his early inquiries into “The Musgrave Ritual.” As for Dr. Kilstein’s edited account of Holmes’s own narrative of “The Dead House,” I confess to being both pleased and embarrassed that my great good friend attributes his success in that investigation to medical knowledge that I was able to provide. To paraphrase him, “My blushes, Holmes!”
Mr. Holmes might perhaps object to another appearance by our colleague and occasional rival, that Yank, Harry Challenge, though the sort of cases his chronicler, M. Ron Goulart, chooses to set in print are not the sort of thing that Holmes involved himself him with, always excepting that nasty business at Baskerville Hall.
He probably will tolerate Matthew Elliott’s rendition of the mystery, “A Reputation for Murder,” despite the fact that he and I have encountered Ms Hilary Caine on one or two occasions and, while I have found her to be rather attractive, Holmes, I suspect, was a bit put off by her distinctly discernible egomania.
Now Mr. Schweitzer’s “Adventure of the Hanoverian Vampires ”—ah, that is quite another matter! I, personally, found it rather amusing, but I suspect it will thoroughly irritate Holmes. Indeed, I have noticed that most individuals, no matter how highly developed their apperception of the risible may be, possess a “blind spot,” shall we say, when it comes to humour directed at their mode of professional employment.
I expect that at least Holmes will have no objection to the contributions of Messrs Newman and Picker, and in that I do concur. We were both rather startled, though, to find in the first issue an advice column our own erstwhile landlady, Mrs Martha Hudson. I suppose today’s economy dictated that she seek an additional mode of remuneration, though why, of all possible professional sectors, she would seek that commodity in publishing even baffles Holmes.
In that wise, she has asked me to remind readers to send her letters for her to write replies in her next column. Send such queries by e-mail to: mrshudson@wildsidepress.com.
Well, now, I’ve had my say for this issue, so I shall turn over the residuum of this column to the Parker College scholar Professor J. Adrian Phillmore (Gad, what a name!)
—John H. Watson, M. D.
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Mr Kaye, the editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, has asked me to comment on the balance on its second issue. Though I suspect this honour y clept chiefly derives from the fact that with age he has become something of a slacker, I admit he has on two occasions done a tolerable job of setting down my own Holmesian, and other adventures; we’ve also done a few anthologies together, with the cooperation of Dr Watson and the brittle acquiescence of Mr Holmes. Thus I take up the task that Mr Kaye ought to have done himself.
Dr Watson has provided his views upon the inclusions in which he and Holmes are involved, directly or otherwise. In addition, this second edition of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine offers “Tough as Diamonds,” an interesting mystery story by newcomer David Waxman, a revenge tale, “You See, But You Forget,” by cartoonist-writer and ex-standup comic Marc Bilgrey.
“Max’s Cap,” a gangster story with a soupçon of the supernatural, is one of the posthumous tales by Jean Paiva, author of the two Tor Books novels The Last Gamble and The Lilith Factor, which was a nominee for Best First Novel by the Horror Writers of America.
Doing my best to decipher Mr. Kaye’s crabbèd cuneiform, I see that the Holmesian parody by Kim Newman, which was promised for this issue, will appear in an upcoming issue of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, as will new fiction by Peter King, Gary Lovisi, Roberta Rogow, Stan Trybulski, Paula Volsky, and Mark Wardecker, in addition to return appearances by Marc Bilgrey, Hal Blythe, Bruce Kilstein, and Darrell Schweitzer.
Well, excuse me, I have an appointment elsewhere and I must open my umbrella, so I shall say au revoir. . . .
—J. Adrian Fillmore
Gadshill Adjunct for English Literature
Parker College (PA)
BAKER STREET BROWSINGS: BOOK REVIEWS, by Kim Newman
The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Random House, $23.95) by Ted Riccardi is a linked collection of tales (‘nine adventures from the lost years’) filling in the same gap as the stories in the Michael Kurland-edited Sherlock Homes: The Hidden Years (reviewed last issue) and Jamyang Norbu’s novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes. We’re concerned with the so-called ‘Great Hiatus,’ the period when the world thought Holmes dead after his struggle with Moriarty in Switzerland. Doyle has him claim to have poked around Tibet during this time; and Riccardi, an academic whose “special interests are the history of India and the cultures of the Himalayas,” extends this to include wanderings throughout the sub-continent, sometimes carrying out official missions for brother Mycroft, sometimes chancing across crimes (as detectives on holiday always do) and too often just poking his long nose in. Whereas Kurland presented pastiches and Norbu deliv
ered a genuine novel, this feels more like fan fiction—it’s Riccardi’s first attempt at writing fiction of any kind and is hampered by a kind of crankiness that makes it often hard-going. Awkwardly, Riccardi insists on staying close to Doyle by having Watson as narrator, though he is present at none of the adventures—which have to be relayed to him by Holmes some years after the events. This multiple distancing from any dramatic meat is emphasised by the typical mystery structure whereby the detective has to listen to various accounts of the puzzle in question or theorise as to what has actually happened, so that the actual nut of story is too often wrapped in layer after layer of ‘he said to me.’ We do get stabs at often-evoked ‘missing adventures’ in “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” and “A Singular Affair at Trincomalee,” but the most memorable effort is “The Case of the French Savant” in which Holmes doesn’t catch a contemporary crook but delves into a historical Nepalese mystery. Apart from plugging continuity, there’s no very pressing need for these stories; and the results are rather dry, only occasionally coming to life as Riccardi works one of his enthusiasms into standard mystery business.
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The Final Solution (HarperCollins, $16.05), sub-titled A Story of Detection (originally published in a slightly different form in the Paris Review), is a novella-length, Holmes pastiche by Michael Chabon, author of the outstanding The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Set towards the end of WWII, it’s one of that subset of stories which finds the Great Detective in his dotage but not senile (though occasionally flustered) and tackling one last mystery even as he devotes the greater part of his declining years to bee-keeping. Amusingly, Conan Doyle’s casual, offhand remarks about Holmes’s retirement pastime have meant subsequent writers being forced to do at least a couple of days’ research into apiary in order to flesh out an aspect of Holmes’s biography that his creator probably made up on the spot and rarely pondered afterwards. As in H.F. Heard’s A Taste of Honey, which remains the Holmes-in-retirement effort to beat, there’s a coy withholding of the hero’s name, or those of any of his associates, and the aged detective is only one thread of a larger design. The murder of a commercial traveller on the Sussex Downs leads to the arrest of the fairly rotten son of a local vicar, who is ethnically unusual for the region. Holmes takes the case at the slightly-resentful invitation of the local police, not to catch the killer but to find a missing parrot owned by a refugee Jewish boy and which is given to spouting strings of numbers in German which some believe constitute vital coded information. It’s a mix of the farcical and the melancholy, with some good mystery spadework but little interest in the whodunit angle. Chabon gives us a credible, cranky old Holmes, contemplating the utopian, mostly crime-free (bar the occasional regicide) cities of his hives and contrasting them with a London he has left behind in time as well as mileage, but finally drawn back to sleuthing again. The title is ironic, since this is one of several recent efforts (cf: Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid) that finally comes to question the whole idea of a solution—the killer is apprehended, the boy reunited with his bird; but big questions remain unanswered and unanswerable; and it is suggested that the tidy wrap-ups of most mysteries merely seek to impose an order on a chaos which can never be dispelled.
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A Slight Trick of the Mind (Anchor Books, $12.95) by Mitch Cullin, author of Tideland (recently filmed by Terry Gilliam), is sub-titled [clears throat] a novel and has a certain overlap with The Final Solution. Again, we’re presented with Sherlock Holmes the elderly beekeeper, and we find him confronted with mysteries which force him to reconsider his attitude to the whole business of solving puzzles. Like a lot of books about very old people, it unfolds out of order as ancient and recent memories bubble up in the mind of its protagonist. In 1947, Holmes is lately returned from a trip to Japan where he has stayed with a fellow apiarist, who has also sought further elucidation of the disappearance, decades, earlier of his diplomat father (who told his family that he had met Holmes, though the detective thinks he has no memory of the man). As he recalls his trip to Japan, with observations on the lately-defeated people and the ruins of Hiroshima, Holmes is also driven to write an account of an apparently trivial case, involving a woman who seems too involved with her armonium lessons, and that took place just before his retirement. Roger, the son of Holmes’s current housekeeper, assists Holmes in his bee-keeping, and is drawn to read the serial-like installments of the detective’s memoir, though a surprising and tragic turn two-thirds of the way through the book means he never gets to the end of the tale, which has little in common with Doyle’s mysteries and gets closer to the tone of that apparently irrelevant passage about the disappearing family man in The Maltese Falcon. Cullin ambitiously gets under Holmes’s skin, prodding him to question the way his mental processes have estranged him from ‘normal’ life—the strongest suit of the book is its attitude to solutions, with Holmes deducing the exact circumstances of one accidental death but never sharing his conclusions and putting forward a tentative wrap-up to another mystery that chiefly serves as a comfort to the ‘client’ though it’s clearly supposed to be a convenient invention. A flaw, to this British reader, is that Cullin too often defaults to American words (‘pants’ for ‘trousers,’ ‘cement’ for ‘glue’) when supposedly writing from inside the consciousness of a Brit who’d never use those expressions. Doyle has Watson speak of his ‘well of English’ being permanently defiled by Americanisms, which is an excuse for some writers to take greater liberties, but that get-out shouldn’t apply to books written in the third person or narratives purportedly penned by the precise sleuth rather than the sloppy doctor. Still, A Slight Trick of the Mind has a probing, troubling, melancholy sensibility which makes it a more distinctive, satisfying read than many a straight-ahead ‘the game’s afoot’ pastiche.
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Ghosts in Baker Street (Carroll & Graf, $16.95), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower, is another themed collection, taking as its motto ‘no ghosts need apply’ (from “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”) but endeavouring to deliver cases in which Holmes and Watson are involved with the apparent supernatural. Some contributors walk a fine line between providing a rational explanation and leaving the door open a crack for phantoms to creep in; and none—not even Loren D. Estelman, who also contributes an essay about his novels in which Holmes meets Dracula and Dr Jekyll—pitch the sleuth into a full-on ghost story. The mostly-American contributors also tend to set out promising mysteries which get bogged down in infodumps of historical research—into the suffragette movement in Jon L. Breen’s “The Adventure of the Librarian’s Ghost,” Victorian theatrical lore in Carolyn Wheat’s “A Scandal in Drury Lane, or The Vampire Trap,” squalour and poverty in Colin Bruce’s “Death in the East End” (mostly, and effectively, a Watson story—with a wet-blanket Holmes scene at the end), or Irish cultural and political history in Michéal and Clare Breathnach’s “The Coole Park Problem.” Stashower presents a neat sidelight on The Hound of the Baskervilles in “Selden’s Tale,” which doesn’t use Watson as a narrator; but mostly we’re on more familiar ground. Also included are several bits of non-fiction—an overview of occult detective stories from Barbara Roden (strong on the older stuff, but oblivious to any activity in the current century), and a set of thoughts on Holmes provided by Caleb Carr (author of The Alienist) almost in apology because his own contribution grew into a novel and has been published separately.
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The Italian Secretary (Carroll & Graf, $23.95), by Caleb Carr, is that novel. Here, Holmes and Watson are summoned to Scotland by Mycroft (more active than usual) to investigate a couple of deaths at Holyroodhouse, the Royal palace where David Rizzio, Italian Secretary to Mary Queen of Scots, was foully murdered. A haunting, revealed as a sham, is at the heart of the mystery; and again a pile of research clogs up the gears of the plot. Here’s a case where one of Doyle’s interpolated confessional narratives or discover
ed historical manuscripts (a device rarely favoured by pasticheurs) would come in handy. Oddly, a pregnant housemaid who figures vitally in the plot is given the name, Allison Mackenzie, which sounds fine and Scots but is also famously the heroine of Peyton Place, an association presumably not intended by Carr. Knowing it was intended to be a shorter piece but grew in the writing doesn’t do the book any favours, though it’s a decent enough yarn when it gets going.
ASK MRS HUDSON, by (Mrs) Martha Hudson
Whenever you wish to ask my advice, you may address your inquiry to “Ask Mrs Hudson” at: mrshudson@wildsidepress.com
Your query may be of a personal or impersonal nature; I am pleased to give advice on any topic whatsoever.
Sincerely,
(Mrs) Martha Hudson
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Dear Mrs Hudson,
I have a problem. My mate Nigel won’t speak to my girlfriend, because she called him a mealy-mouthed little dung beetle without a brain.
Not only that, but she also glued the sleeves of his rugby jersey together and hung them from the lamp posts in front of his house. When he complained, she stole his underwear at Christmas and strung it up over the town nativity crèche. Now she’s taken to spying on him when he leaves his flat, shouting rude remarks when he gets into his car or comes home at night. She even bought a telescope so she can see into his flat through our bedroom window.
The thing is, I quite like my girlfriend and all, but Nigel and I have been together since our days at Eton, and I don’t want to risk losing him. What can I do to make peace between the two of them?
Signed,