The extensive group of related heroes, detectives, explorers, and villains came to be known as “the Wold Newton Family.” Clearly, The Peerless Peer has a place as one of the primary books in Wold Newton mythos. How could it not, when Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, the Jungle Lord, Leftenant Drummond, The Shadow, G-8, Lord John Roxton, and Allan Quatermain are all members of this extended family?
In addition to these, other members of the Wold Newton Family include Solomon Kane (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); Captain Blood (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Monsieur Lecoq; Phileas Fogg; the Time Traveller; Rudolf Rassendyll; A. J. Raffles; Wolf Larsen; Professor Challenger; Arsène Lupin; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; Doctor Fu Manchu and his nemesis Sir Denis Nayland Smith; Joseph Jorkens; Sam Spade; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; Kilgore Trout; Travis McGee; and many more.
There are some other references in The Peerless Peer which solidify it as one of the foremost entries in the Wold Newton series. Watson’s accidental reference to the sixth Duke of “Holdernesse” (rather than “Greystoke”) makes it clear that story is tied to Holmes’ previous case, “The Adventure of the Priory School.” In Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage, Farmer’s reveals that the great-nephew of the sixth Duke from “Priory School” is none other than the Ape Lord himself. And the sixth Duke’s bastard son is the father of pulp hero Doc Savage. Furthermore, “Holdernesse Hall” is actually Pemberley House, from Pride and Prejudice.
The biggest mystery that Holmes solves in The Peerless Peer is that of the Jungle Lord himself. He was legitimately the eighth Duke, but in order to avoid publicity surrounding his “feral man” status, he chose to pretend to be the seventh Duke, his late cousin, whom he greatly resembled. (This becomes a major plot point in Farmer’s and my subsequent Wold Newton novel, The Evil in Pemberley House.)
At this stage a recounting of the ducal relationships is in order. The fifth Duke and the sixth Duke were brothers. The seventh Duke was the son of the sixth Duke. The Jungle Lord’s father was the son of the fifth Duke, but he died before the fifth Duke. Therefore, when the fifth Duke died, the title passed to the fifth Duke’s brother. The Jungle Lord was the grandson of the fifth Duke, and thus was the great-nephew of the sixth Duke. Leftenant John Drummond, the Jungle Lord’s adopted son in The Peerless Peer, was therefore the great-great nephew of the sixth Duke. To put it another way, the sixth Duke was Drummond’s great-great-uncle.
Early in The Peerless Peer, Mycroft reminds Sherlock that he (Sherlock) knew Leftenant Drummond’s great-uncle, the late Duke (referring to the sixth Duke from Watson’s “The Adventure of the Priory School”).
When Mycroft makes this statement, everyone believes that the current duke is the seventh Duke, because the Jungle Lord, the legitimate eighth Duke, is posing as the late seventh Duke (no one knows that the seventh Duke has died). Therefore, since Leftenant John Drummond is described as the adopted son of the current (seventh) Duke, Mycroft should have reminded Sherlock that he (Sherlock) knew the Leftenant’s grandfather, the late sixth Duke.
But he didn’t.
Mycroft describes the late sixth Duke as Drummond’s great-uncle, which is very close to the real relationship as Drummond’s great-great-uncle. Despite Mycroft’s usual precision, one might overlook this slight mistake, presuming that “great-great-uncle” could be shortened in conversation to “great-uncle.”
However, Mycroft’s description of the sixth Duke as Drummond’s great-uncle demonstrates that he knew the truth of the Jungle Lord’s deception and impersonation from the beginning. One can make a mistake or shorten “great-great-uncle” to “great-uncle.” One doesn’t make the mistake of saying “great-uncle” when one means “grandfather” — especially when one is Mycroft Holmes.
Mycroft already knew — before he sent Holmes and Watson on their African adventure — that the Ape-Man’s cousin, the seventh Duke, had died, and that the Jungle Lord, the legitimate eighth Duke, had taken his late cousin’s identity.
The story of how Mycroft came upon that knowledge is undoubtedly a fascinating one.
This revelation also raises the distinct possibility that Mycroft knew, when he sent Holmes and Watson on their aerial trek to Cairo to capture Von Bork, that they could well be blown off course by an impending “storm of the century,” thus calling into question the coincidental nature of their meeting with the Lord of the Jungle.
But that’s another story from the battered tin dispatch-box.
Win Scott Eckert
Denver, Colorado
March 2011
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1 The Evil In Pemberley House, Philip José Farmer and Win Scott Eckert, Subterranean Press, 2009.
2 Interestingly, both Peer and “Madmen” may have been different drafts written by Watson, and each manuscript may contain large elements of the truth, despite the replacement of the Jungle Lord in Peer by Mowgli in “Madmen.” Dennis E. Power has reconciled the two manuscripts in “Jungle Brothers, or, Secrets of the Jungle Lords,” Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005.
3 In fact, the Ape-Man’s ire had significantly cooled by the late 1990s, enough to allow Farmer to write an authorized entry in the series of semi-biographical novels covering his adventures. Farmer’s The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel was published by Del Rey Books in 1999.
4 It appeared in the aforementioned collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others.
5 “O’Brien And Obrenov,” Adventure, V. 115, N. 5, March 1946; Pearls from Peoria, Paul Spiteri, ed., Subterranean Press, 2006.
Coming Soon
MORIARTY
THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES
KIM NEWMAN
A VOLUME IN VERMILLION
I
I BLAME THAT RAT-WEASEL STAMFORD, who was no better at judging character than at kiting paper. He later had his collar felt in Farnham, of all blasted places. If you want to pass French government bonds, you can’t afford to mix up your accents grave and your accents acute. Archie Stamford earns no sympathy from me. Thanks to him, I was first drawn into the orbit, the gravitational pull as he would have said, of Professor James Moriarty.
In 1880, your humble narrator was a vigorous, if scarred forty. I should make a proper introduction of myself: Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran, late of a school which wouldn’t let in an oik like you and a regiment which would as soon sack Newcastle as take Ali Masjid. I had an unrivalled bag of big cats and a fund of stories about blasting the roaring pests. I’d stood in the Khyber Pass and faced a surge of sword-waving Pathans howling for British blood, potting them like grouse in season. Nothing gladdens a proper Englishman’s heart — this one, at least — like the sight of a foreigner’s head flying into a dozen bloody bits. I’d dangled by single-handed grip from an icy ledge in the upper Himalayas, with something huge and indistinct and furry stamping on my freezing fingers. I’d bent like an oak in a hurricane as Sir Augustus, the hated pater, spouted paragraphs of bile in my face, which boiled down to the proverbial ‘cut off without a penny’ business. Stuck to it too, the mean old swine. The family loot went to a society for providing Christian undergarments to the Ashanti, a bequest which had the delightful side-effect of reducing my unmarriageable sisters to boarding-house penury.
I’d taken a dagger in the lower back from a harlot in Hyderabad and a pistol-ball in the knee from the Okhrana in Nijni-Novgorod. More to the point, I had recently been raked across the chest by the mad, wily old she-tiger the hill-heathens called ‘Kali’s Kitten’.
None of that was preparation for Moriarty!
I had crawled into a drain after the tiger, whose wounds turned out to be less severe than I’d thought. Tough old hell-cat! KK got playful with jaws and paws, crunching down my pith helmet like one of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, delicately shredding my shirt with razor-claws, digging into the skin and drawing casuall
y across my chest. Three bloody stripes. Sure I would die in that stinking tunnel, I was determined not to die alone. I got my Webley side-arm unholstered and shot the hell-bitch through the heart. To make sure, I emptied all six chambers. After that chit in Hyderabad dirked me, I broke her nose for her. KK looked almost as aghast and infuriated at being killed. I wondered if girl and tigress were related. I had the cat’s rank dying breath in my face and her weight on me in that stifling hole. One more for the trophy wall, I thought. Cat dead, Moran not: hurrah and victory!
But KK nearly murdered me after all. The stripes went septic. Good thing there’s no earthly use for the male nipple, because I found myself down to just the one. Lots of grey stuff came out of me. So I was packed off back to England for proper doctoring. It occurred to me that a concerted effort had been made to boot me out of the sub-continent. I could think of a dozen reasons for that, and a dozen clods in stiff collars who’d be happier with me out of the picture. Maiden ladies who thought tigers ought to be patted on the head and given treats. And the husbands, fathers and sweethearts of non-maiden ladies. Not to mention the First Bangalore Pioneers, who didn’t care to be reminded of their habit of cowering in ditches while Bloody Basher did three-fourths of their fighting for them.
Still, mustn’t hold a grudge, what? Sods, the lot of them. And that’s just the whites. As for the natives... well, let’s not get started on them, shall we? We’d be here ’til next Tuesday.
For me, a long sea-cruise is normally an opportunity. There are always bored fellow-passengers and underworked officers knocking around with fat note-cases in their luggage. It’s most satisfying to sit on deck playing solitaire until some booby suggests a few rounds of cards and, why just to make it spicier, perhaps some trifling, sixpence-a-trick element of wager. Give me two months on any ocean in the world, and I can fleece everyone aboard from the captain’s lady to the bosun’s second-best bum-boy, and leave each mark convinced that the ship is a nest of utter cheats with only Basher as the other honest hand in the game.
Usually, I embark sans sou and stroll down the gang-plank at the destination pockets a-jingle with the accumulated fortune of my fellow voyagers. I get a warm feeling from ambling through the docks, listening to clots explaining to the eager sorts who’ve turned up to greet them that, sadly, the moolah which would have saved the guano-grubbing business or bought the Bibles for the mission or paid for the wedding has gone astray on the high seas. This time, tragic to report, I was off sick, practically in quarantine. My nimble fingers were away from the pasteboards, employed mostly in scratching around the bandages while trying hard not to scratch the bandages themselves.
So, the upshot: Basher in London, out of funds. And the word was abroad. I was politely informed by a chinless receptionist at Claridge’s that my usual suite of rooms was engaged and that, unfortunately, no alternative was available this being a busy wet February and all. If I hadn’t pawned my horsewhip, it would have got some use. If there’s any breed I despise more than natives, it’s people who work in bloody hotels. Thieves, the lot of them, or, what’s worse, sneaks and snitches. They talk among themselves, so it was no use trotting down the street and trying somewhere else.
I was on the point of wondering if I shouldn’t risk the Bagatelle Club, where — frankly — you’re not playing with amateurs. There’s the peril of wasting a whole evening shuffling and betting with other sharps who a) can’t be rooked so easily and b) are liable to be as cash-poor as oneself. Otherwise, it was a matter of beetling up and down Piccadilly all afternoon in the hope of spotting a ten-bob note in the gutter, or — if it came to it — dragging Farmer Giles into a side-street, splitting his head and lifting his poke. A come-down after Kali’s Kitten, but needs must...
‘It’s “Basher” Moran, isn’t it?’ drawled someone, prompting me to raise my sights from the gutter. ‘Still shooting anything that draws breath?’
‘Archibald Stamford, Esquire. Still practising auntie’s signature?’
I remembered Archie from some police cells in Islington. All charges dropped and apologies made, in my case. Being ‘mentioned in despatches’ carries weight with beaks, certainly more than the word of a tradesman in a celluloid collar you clean with india-rubber. Six months jug for the fumbling forger, though. He’d been pinched trying to make a withdrawal from a relative’s bank account.
If clothes were anything to go by, Stamford had risen in his profession. Stick-pin and cane, dove-grey morning coat, curly-brimmed topper and good boots. His whole manner, with that patronising hale-fellow-snooks-to-you tone, suggested he was in funds — which made him my long-lost friend.
The Criterion was handy, so I suggested we repair to the Bar for drinks. The question of who paid for them would be settled when Archie was fuddle-headed from several whiskies. I fed him that shut-out-of-my-usual-suite line and considered a hard luck story trading on my status as hero of the Jowaki Campaign — though I doubted an inky-fingered felon would put much stock in far-flung tales of imperial daring.
Stamford’s eyes shone, in a manner which reminded me unpleasantly of my late feline dancing partner. He sucked on his teeth, torn between saying something and keeping mum. It was a manner I would soon come to recognise as common to those in the employ of my soon-to-be benefactor.
‘As it happens, Bash old chap, I know a billet that might suit you. Comfortable rooms in Conduit Street, above Mrs Halifax’s establishment. You know Mrs H?’
‘Used to keep a knocking-shop in Stepney? Arm-wrestler’s biceps and an eight-inch tongue?’
‘That’s the one. She’s West End now. Part of a combine, you might say. A thriving firm.’
‘What she sells is always in demand.’
‘True, but it’s not just the whoring. There’s other business. A man of vision, you might say, has done some thinking. About my line of trade, and Mrs Halifax’s, and, as it were, yours.’
I was about at the end of my rope with Archie. He was talking in a familiar, insinuating, creeping-round-behind-you-with-a-cosh manner I didn’t like. Implying that I was a tradesman did little for my ruddy temper. I was strongly tempted to give him one of my speciality thumps, which involves a neat little screw of my big fat regimental ring into the old eyeball, and see how his dove-grey coat looked with dirty great blobs of snotty blood down the front. After that, a quick fist into his waistcoat would leave him gasping, and give me the chance to fetch away his watch and chain, plus any cash he had on him. Of course, I’d check the spelling of ‘Bank of England’ on the notes before spending them. I could make it look like a difference of opinion between gentlemen. And no worries about it coming back to me. Stamford wouldn’t squeal to the peelers. If he wanted to pursue the matter I could always give him a second helping.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he said, as if he could read my mind.
That was a dash of Himalayan melt-water to the face.
Catching sight of myself in the long mirror behind the bar, I saw my cheeks had gone a nasty shade of red. More vermillion than crimson. My fists were knotted, white-knuckled, around the rail. This, I understand, is what I look like before I ‘go off’. You can’t live through all I have without ‘going off’ from time to time. Usually, I ‘come to’ in handcuffs between policemen with black eyes. The other fellow or fellows or lady is too busy being carried away to hospital to press charges.
Still, a ‘tell’ is a handicap for a card-player. And my red face gave warning.
Stamford smiled like someone who knows there’s a confederate behind the curtain with a bead drawn on the back of your neck and a finger on the trigger.
Liberté, hah!
‘Have you popped your guns, Colonel?’
I would pawn, and indeed have pawned, the family silver. I’d raise money on my medals, ponce my sisters (not that anyone would pay for the hymn-singing old trouts) and sell Royal Navy torpedo plans to the Russians... but a man’s guns are sacred. Mine were at the Anglo-Indian Club, oiled and wrapped and packed away in cherrywood cases, alo
ng with a kit-bag full of assorted cartridges. If any cats got out of Regent’s Park Zoo, I’d be well set up to use a Hansom for a howdah and track them along Oxford Street.
Stamford knew from my look what an outrage he had suggested. This wasn’t the red-hot pillar-box-faced Basher bearing down on him, this was the deadly icy calm of — and other folks have said this, so it’s not just me boasting — ‘the best heavy game shot that our Eastern Empire has produced’.
‘There’s a fellow,’ he continued, nervously, ‘this man of vision I mentioned. In a roundabout way, he is my employer. Probably the employer of half the folk in this room, whether they know it or not...’
He looked about. It was the usual shower: idlers and painted dames, jostling each other with stuck-on smiles, reaching sticky fingers into jacket-pockets and up loose skirts, finely-dressed fellows talking of ‘business’ which was no more than powdered thievery, a scattering of moon-faced cretins who didn’t know their size-thirteens gave them away as undercover detectives.
Stamford produced a card and handed it to me.
‘He’s looking for a shooter...’
The fellow could never say the right thing. I am a sportsman, not a keeper. A gun, not a gunslinger. A shot, not a shooter.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer Page 10