The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part IX

by Marcum, David;

Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches: 1905–1909

  Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches: 1910–1914

  Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches: 1915–1919

  Initially, those early stories were created for simple amusement, with countless variations on Holmes and Watson’s names that possibly seemed clever or funny in those long ago days - Purlock Hone and Fetlock Bones, Dr. Poston and Whatsoname-but now seem painfully like a first-grader’s attempt at humor. Gradually, however, stories in the true traditional Canonical style began to appear. Vincent Starrett’s “The Unique Hamlet” from 1920 is often referenced as a good early traditional pastiche. It certainly established that Holmes adventures did not have to be parodies, and that they could be presented to the public without first passing across the desk of the first Literary Agent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the late 1920’s, a new kind of Sherlockian tale arrived, when August Derleth became Dr. Parker’s Literary Agent, arranging for the publication of the first Solar Pons stories. While not actually about Holmes and Watson, these occur within Holmes’s world, and are so precise in reproducing the style and substance of Holmes’s adventures that they very much paved the way for additional stories using the correct format to follow.

  In 1930, Edith Meiser advanced the cause of pastiche significantly. She was convinced that the Holmes adventures would be perfect for radio broadcasts. She worked out a deal with the contentious Conan Doyle brothers, Adrian and Denis, and began to write scripts. Her efforts were rewarded when Holmes was first portrayed on NBC radio on October 20th, 1930, in a script adapted by Meiser from “The Speckled Band”. In that first broadcast, Holmes was played by William Gillette, the legendary stage actor who had defined Holmes for Americans for a generation or more. The show continued after that with Richard Gordon as Holmes, and Meiser kept adapting the original stories throughout the early 1930’s. Then she did a remarkable thing: She began to write pastiches of new cases, in the manner of the originals, and set in the original correct time period - and all of this with the approval of the Conan Doyle family. (At one point, she later sued the Conan Doyle heirs, asserting correctly that it was through her efforts that the entire perception of Holmes, by way of elevating Watson’s role in the narrative, had been changed. But that’s another essay for another time.) The first original story, “The Hindoo in the Wicker Basket”, appeared on January 7th, 1932. Sadly, it’s lost, but luckily a few of the pastiche broadcasts from that period still survive, either in their original form, or when they were re-done a few years later starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes.

  Meiser deserves immense credit for setting these new stories in the correct time period, and not updating them to the 1930’s. There had been several Holmes films made by that time, first silent pictures, and then with sound, such as The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929) and A Study in Scarlet (1933). All of those were produced with contemporary settings as a matter of course - automobiles and modern clothing and all the rest. Sir Arthur would have been proud of Ms. Meiser for keeping things true. After all, he had written in his autobiography Memories and Adventures (1924) about his thoughts on modern aspects shown in the silent Eille Norwood films produced from 1921 to 1923, stating, “My only criticism of the films is that they introduce telephones, motor cars, and other luxuries of which the Victorian Holmes never dreamed.” (If Sir Arthur could see what’s been to damage Holmes on screen in the present day, character assassination that goes far beyond simple modernization or the use of automobiles, he’d roll over in his grave. But perhaps, spiritualist that he was, he’s already seen and observed it. I can hear him spinning now...)

  The run of the show under Edith Meier’s guidance ended in 1936, but it resumed without her in 1939, due to the popularity of the Basil Rathbone film, The Hound of the Baskervilles. By that point, the radio show was being scripted by Leslie Charteris (under the sobriquet Bruce Taylor) and Denis Green. However, these two continued to use the exact same format created by Meiser during her run - something that still extends its influence even to the present day.

  Traditional pastiches appeared through the years - books and short stories and films and broadcasts - all serving to bring new generations to 221b Baker Street. In 1954, The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes, containing twelve very traditional adventures, was published. Originally appearing in Life and Collier’s, these stories were presented by agents Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr. The creative process wasn’t always smooth between the two authors, but the adventures themselves are excellent.

  Traditional pastiches appeared sporadically throughout the following decades, often few and far between, and difficult to find. Radio continued to present original Holmes stories into the 1950’s. The Holmes television show from 1954–1955, starring Ronald Howard, was made up of mostly original stories. The film A Study in Terror and the related book by Ellery Queen (1965) helped to represent Holmes in the 1960’s - “Here comes the original caped crusader!” proclaimed the posters - but pickings were slim.

  Then, in 1974, an amazing thing happened. Nicholas Meyer reminded us that Watson’s manuscripts were still out there, waiting to be found. Meyer had discovered some of Watson’s original notes, which were published as The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. A film quickly followed. An amazing Holmes Golden Age began that extends to this very day.

  I was fortunate to jump on this Holmes Train around the time that it was leaving the station. I discovered Holmes in 1975, when I was ten years old, with an abridged copy of the Whitman edition of The Adventures. I was only prompted to start reading it after seeing a piece of A Study in Terror on television. (It’s hard to believe that the film was only ten years old then, like me.) Before I’d even tracked down or read all of The Canon, I began to absorb pastiches as well. Very soon after reading my abridged copy of The Adventures, I received a paperback copy of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. (This was through the Reading Is Fundamental [RIF] Program. I well remember being led into the school gymnasium, where one side was set up with countless long tables covered in books - a sight that thrilled me even then, as I was always a sensible lad. I was allowed to pick two books, and I chose The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, with Holmes on the cover, and another that looked like a boy’s adventure, something called Lord of the Flies. I thought from the description on the back that it might be rather like one of my favorite series, The Hardy Boys. It wasn’t. But I digress.)

  I must admit that, even then, with my limited Canonical awareness, (and with apologies to Nicholas Meyer), I didn’t agree with all that was proposed in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. A benign mistreated Professor Moriarty? Hints that The Great Hiatus didn’t actually occur? No, sir. I believed The Canon, wherein the Professor was the Napoleon of crime, and the organizer of half that was evil and of nearly all that was undetected in the great city of London. And I believed that Holmes had truly fought him at Reichenbach, as reported, instead of going off to recover from his cocaine addiction in the guise of Sigerson the violinist while in pursuit of a redheaded woman.

  But that whole alternative set-up between the established Canon and this new adventure forced me to start thinking, even then, in a critical Sherlockian manner - though I didn’t realize it at the time. What did I believe? And why? This was reinforced by other seemingly contradictory adventures that I also began to encounter. I discovered William S. Baring-Gould’s amazing biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street (1962), at nearly the same time I started reading about Holmes. I also read it before I’d even found all of the actual adventures, so many of Baring-Gould’s theories are hard-wired into my brain right along with The Canon - such as certain aspects of Baring-Gould’s chronology, and all about brother Sherrinford, and the first Mrs. Watson named Constance, and a love child (Nero Wolfe) with Irene Adler. Baring-Gould related a specific version of Holmes’s defeat of Jack the Ripper. But Holmes also fought a different Ripper to a different conclusion in A Study in Terror. And then it happened again jus
t a few years later in the amazing film and book Murder by Decree (1979) - which, by the way, is another incredible pastiche that helped to bring people to The Canon, and also personally showed to me the Holmes that Watson describes in “The Three Garridebs” as a man with both a great brain and a great heart.

  I began to understand that these various accounts of Holmes versus The Ripper didn’t contradict one another - rather, they were simply different threads of a larger story, with each pulled out and tied off so as to present a complete picture of this-or-that particular case (or piece of a case) without causing confusion by referencing other side issues. This became very useful later as I began to discover more and more versions of some of the famous “Untold Cases”, such as the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Some readers might pick one or the other of these as the only “definitive” version of this case, but I believe that, as long as the different narratives are set within the correct time period, and don’t stray into some Alternate Universe or modern or science-fiction or Lovecraftian or supernatural world, then each is true. Thus, there were lots of times - each of them unique - when Holmes and Watson encountered Giant Rats. There were many Hurets that Holmes fought in 1894 - a whole nest of them, a regular Al Qaeda of Boulevard Assassins - instead of just one. There were a number of tobacco millionaires in London during 1895, and Holmes helped them all, while Watson lumped each of them into his notes under the protective pseudonym of “John Vincent Harden”.

  Back in the mid-1970’s, however, before the Golden Age really began to bloom, it was still a bit hard to find good traditional Holmes stories. Nicholas Meyer’s second Holmes discovery, The West End Horror (1976) is just about perfect - I thought so then, and still do. A few years later, I discovered Enter the Lion (1979) by Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright, and realized that a view of Holmes’s world didn’t always have to be through Watson’s perspective. This was reinforced when I found John Gardner’s Moriarty books and Carole Nelson Douglas’s histories of Irene Adler.

  The 1980’s and 1990’s brought more and more new Holmes stories - although “more and more” is a relative term because, while there were certainly more than there used to be, they were still hard to find and hard to acquire. There were some great anthologies, including The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985), The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1987), and The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (1997). Master pasticheurs such as Barrie Roberts and June Thomson brought us multiple volumes of truly high quality narratives. Publishers like Ian Henry and Breese Books provided excellent stories which - with a little digging - were much more easily obtained than before. These books could now conveniently be ordered through chain bookstores and also Otto Penzler’s remarkable Mysterious Bookshop. Then things became even easier with The Rise of the Internet. The world of pastiches changed forever.

  I began to use the internet when I went back to school for a second degree in engineering in the mid-1990’s. My tuition gave me access to the school’s computer lab, where I spent a great deal of time between classes. More importantly, it allowed me to have free printing. I didn’t feel any shame in printing whatever I could, literally thousands and thousands of pages, as I was being charged exorbitant fees for things like Intramural Sports, an activity in which I, as a grown-up part-time student, would never participate.

  My time in the computer lab was spent searching for on-line Holmes pastiches - and there were many. I started by working my way through the links on Christopher Redmond’s original mind-blowing sherlockian.net website, and moved on from there, printing as I went. I’m glad that I archived these stories, because many of them have long since vanished, evaporated in an ephemeral e-puff of vapor. But I have them, along with all the others I’ve continued to collect since then, in over one-hundred-seventy-five big fat white binders lining the floor in front of the bookshelves containing of my Holmes collection.

  As I progressed in my quest to acquire more traditional Holmes stories, I was able to refine my research techniques, aided by hints provided by my incredible wife, who is a research librarian - and very tolerant of my Holmes vice. These same techniques helped me to discover and track down a previously unknown myriad of additional traditional Holmes adventures, most of which I had never before encountered. I was already an addict, but this sudden tapping-in to the mother-lode of High-Grade Holmes only fed upon itself, and I began to collect more and more. I started reading and re-reading all of it, and along the way, making notes in a binder that I took with me everywhere, containing maps, useful information, and anything that would increase my understanding and pleasure in the stories. When I finished that first pass through everything I had at that point, I found that I had constructed a rough Holmes Chronology of both Canon and pastiche. Since then, it’s been through multiple ongoing revisions, and now it’s over seven-hundred-and-fifty densely printed pages, showing the complete lives of Holmes and Watson, and not just what is presented in those very few five-dozen stories funneled our way by the Literary Agent. And yet, even with all of that information about the lives of Our Heroes, it isn’t enough. More! Give me more!

  In the years since the mid-1990’s, the opportunity to find, read, collect, and dive into more and more Holmes adventures has only increased. Holmes has been well represented on radio. Bert Coules, who first supervised and helped write one of the best adaptations of the entire Canon for radio ever, then continued with his own set of original pastiches. Jim French, along with his able right-hand Larry Albert as Watson and John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes, guided Imagination Theatre through one-hundred-thirty original adventures (so far), as well as the only version of the complete Canon featuring the same actors as Holmes and Watson, along with each script being by written by one person, Matthew Elliott.

  Over the years, pastiches on screen have included A Study in Scarlet (1933) with Reginald Owen, the Arthur Wontner films of the 1930’s, and the Basil Rathbone films from before, during, and after World War II. The 1959 version of The Hound with Peter Cushing had pastiche aspects. It was followed by the previously mentioned A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree. A new generation of movie-goers encountered Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). After a long wait came Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), each with a more action-packed Holmes, and then Mr. Holmes in 2014. (Some were unsettled at seeing Holmes in the aforementioned action-oriented films, showing such things as bare-knuckle boxing on screen, when those had previously only been presented off-stage. Likewise, others were uncomfortable viewing an elderly Holmes in his nineties - but if one has read about the entire lifespan of the man, then it’s only natural to see him at any age.)

  On television, the 1954–1955 series with Ronald Howard - mostly pastiches - was followed by a 1979–1980 series from the same production group, this time starring Geoffrey Whitehead. Douglas Wilmer starred as an amazingly Canonical Holmes on the BBC from 1964 to 1965, and Peter Cushing followed in his footsteps in 1968. The Hound was televised with Steward Granger as Holmes in 1972, and again with Tom Baker in 1982 and Richard Roxburgh in 2002. The early 1980’s had Young Sherlock (1982), two Canonical films by Ian Richardson in 1983, and The Baker Street Boys (1983).

  Holmes’s popularity was greatly increased by way of the Granada films, which ran from 1984 to 1994, featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes, and both David Burke and Edward Hardwicke as very sensible and intelligent Watsons. As the show progressed, some of these Granada versions tended to stray into most definite pastiche territory.

  Holmes’s other television appearances, both Canonical and stand-alone pastiche, have included Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976), Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death (1984), Hands of a Murderer (1991), Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1991), Sherlock Holmes: Incident at Victoria Falls (1992), The Hound of London (1993), four films starring Matt Frewer (2000–2002), Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004) and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars (2007).

  Exce
pt for these, there has sadly been nothing about Sherlock Holmes on television since, except for a couple of shows that shamelessly trade on the use of Holmes’s name but only damage his reputation. A few others, such as House, MD, successfully incorporated Holmesian characteristics while forgoing any attempt to replace the originals with subversive and objectionable versions. (In this current bleak period when there has been nothing about Holmes and Watson on television for ever ten years, one would be well advised to contact master dramatist Bert Coules, who has a set of scripts - complete and ready for filming - that depict Holmes and Watson in the early 1880’s, the correct time period. I can’t convince Bert to give me a peek, so someone is going to have to film them so I, and everyone else, will be able to know the stories!)

  The discovery of new cases by Holmes and Watson only continues to increase - and that’s a great thing. And it must be an indicator that people like me crave more and more adventures featuring Our Heroes. Still, I sometimes refer to myself as a missionary for The Church of Holmes, and my greatest task seems to be trying to make people respect these extra-Canonical Holmes adventures.

  With ever-changing paradigms in communication and publishing, the discovery of new Holmes adventures seemingly accelerates every day. In addition to a few story collections or the rare novel presented by “mainstream” publishers, companies such as MX Publishing, Belanger Books, Wildside Press, Wessex Press, and others continue to make it possible for new “editors” of Watson’s works to reach a public starving for additional narratives.

  Sadly, there is sometimes an attitude from some quarters that pastiches are somehow less worthy than pure scholarly examinations of The Canon. Often pastiches are dismissed - except when a friend or celebrity has written one, in which case exceptions and are made and special dispensations granted. At other times, these new stories can only be considered “acceptable” if they are in a very pretty book from an approved list of publishers. In cases like this, where other adventures are rejected without a second glance simply because they don’t have the right pedigree, the potential reader is left immensely cheated. There are some amazing Holmes tales out there - online as fan fiction, or appearing in print-on-demand books - that are as good as anything one can find anywhere, and with of them are better than the original Canonical stories!