Sherlock Holmes and the Discarded Cigarette
Page 7
J.H.W.
While transcribing Dr. Watson’s case notes for this story a very coincidental event took place. When the British Museum was conducting its annual inventory (September last year) of the large number of items it has in storage that (for one reason or another) are rarely displayed and seen by the general public. An untagged small clear crystal rod was discovered among the collection. It measured about nine inches in length, had the circumference of a small napkin ring, one end had been cut as if to be placed in a socket
and the crystal rod would have easily fit inside a person’s hand. When the extensive museum records were searched to establish an acquisition date and accurately describe the nature of the mysterious object no record could be located as to how or when the museum had acquired the crystal rod or even of its intended purpose or use.
F.C.T.
Information
The Discarded Cigarette is written in the style of…
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution a 1974 novel by American writer Nicholas Meyer. It is written as a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and was adapted for the cinema in 1976. The novel’s full title is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.
Published as a “lost manuscript” of the late Dr. John H. Watson, the book recounts Holmes’ recovery from cocaine addiction (with the help of Sigmund Freud) and his subsequent prevention of a European war through the unraveling of a sinister kidnapping plot. It was followed by two other Holmes pastiches by Meyer, The West End Horror (1976) and The Canary Trainer (1993), neither of which has been adapted to film.
Pastiche
In this usage, a work is called pastiche if it is cobbled together in imitation of several original works. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, a pastiche in this sense is “a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble.” These meaning accords with etymology: pastiche is the French version of the greco-Roman dish pastitsio or pasticcio, which designated a kind of pie made of many different ingredients.
Author’s Note
With the exception of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Irregulars, The unofficial leader of the Baker Street Irregulars Peter Stockton, Dr. John Watson, his wife Mary, Mrs. Hudson the house keeper of 221 B Baker Street, Jeffery Daniels the art restorer, (Universal Catalog of Books on Art) The Brice Art Museum Exhibition Catalog 1890 edition, Charles Henry Stephenson the managing director of the Belgravia Gallery, the Belgravia Gallery, the proprietor of the Old Mint, the master of ceremonies at the St. James theater, H.G. Wells lecture at the St. James Theater and any of the hansom cab drivers mentioned all of the other characters in this story were based on people who were living in the year 1895. All of the locations mentioned in the story except for the Belgravia Art Gallery also existed in the year 1895.
The Time Machine (the novel) written by H.G. Welles
Wells had considered the notion of time travel before, in an earlier (but less well-known) work titled The Chronic Argonauts. He had thought of using some of this material in a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, until the publisher asked him if he could instead write a serial novel on the same theme; Wells readily agreed, and was paid £100 on its publication by Heinemann in 1895. The story was first published in serial form in the New Review through 1894 and 1895. The book is based on the Block Theory of the Universe, which is a notion that time is a fourth space dimension.
The story reflects Wells’ own socialist political views and the contemporary angst about industrial relations. It is also influenced by Ray Lankester’s theories about social degeneration. Other science fiction works of the period, including Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and the later Metropolis, dealt with similar themes.
The inspirations for the characters in this story of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are based on the British actors Jeremy Brett as Holmes, Edward Hardwick as Watson and the American actor Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells.
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