Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  3. New York City has always been a major setting for American fiction. Did anything about the depiction of it in this book surprise you? How many elements did you glimpse in their infancy then, which have become staples of contemporary American life? For instance, Joseph Pulitzer was just entering the newspaper business then, but the journalism awards given in his name today are the most prestigious in the country. How much can history teach us? Can history change our opinions of our own times?

  Do you like to read historical novels for the facts of the time period or the attitudes, and how much do you think you can trust such evocations in fiction? Often, historical novelists say, they’re challenged on the accuracy of facts that are absolutely true, but seem too modern. Are you encouraged to do more reading about the historical periods you encounter in novels?

  4. Mesmerism, or hypnotism, is a minor factor in these novels: it’s even hinted that Irene Adler received her last name from a little-known reference in a novel about a famous fictional mesmerist, Svengali. Trilby, the eponymous heroine of the George du Maurier (father of Daphne) novel that features Svengali, was hypnotized by him to sing beautifully although she was tone deaf. Svengali married her and forced her to tour as a singer. The Phantom of the Opera by Frenchman Gaston Leroux arrived in 1911, more than a decade after du Maurier’s Trilby, and was far less popular than it is at the present time. It too featured a “monster” training a helpless young woman to sing.

  Why, besides the ever-popular Beauty and the Beast parallels, did this theme of women forced to sing by taskmasters create two immortal characters, both of them men and villains? Another minor historical figure named Adler is mentioned in this book. Can you think of any other historical Adlers who might be suitable candidates for Irene’s Father? You could make a game of assigning historical “parents” to fictional characters. The intersection of history and fiction can produce fascinating hybrids.

  5. Sherlock Holmes has been resurrected as a character by countless writers since Doyle’s death in 1930, but by very few women. Writers claim he is a very hard character to change, that even Doyle did better with stories in which Holmes was not too dominant. How is Holmes’s character evolving in this series? Which aspects of Holmes as you first encountered him in fiction or film do you feel are immutable, and which allow for change? Does his associating with these particular characters, the three women, two of them liberated American women, throw a different light on his character?

  Three Englishmen are continuing characters the novels: Irene’s husband, Godfrey Norton, Holmes, and Quentin Stanhope. How do these men differ from each other? How do they each relate to the three women, and how is that different with each man?

  6. Douglas has said she likes to work on the “large canvas” of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multivolume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twenty-first century too short? Is longterm, committed reading becoming a lost art?

  For discussion of the Irene Adler series:

  1. Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to reevaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the recent copyright contest over The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall’s reimagining of Gone with the Wind events and characters from the African-American slaves’ viewpoints? Could the novel’s important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the classic work generally familiar to most people? What other works have attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

  2. Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels, including the time’s anti-Semitism. This is an element absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell’s strictly conventional views affect those around her? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene’s pragmatic philosophy? Why is Irene (and also most readers) so fond of her despite her opinionated personality?

  3. Douglas chose to blend humor with adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What classic writers and novelists use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

  4. The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and.the Continent, artist-tradesman and aristocrat, as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

  5. Chapel Noir makes several references to Dracula through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before the novel actually was published. Stoker is also an ongoing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modern genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late nineteenth century produced not only Dracula, Doyle’s Holmes stories, and the surviving dinosaurs of The Lost World, but also Trilby, The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dr. Jekylland Mr. Hyde, among the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery, and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

  AN INTERVIEW WITH

  CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

  Q: You were the first woman to write about the Sherlock Holmes world from the viewpoint of one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s women characters, and only the second woman to write a Holmes-related novel at all. Why?

  A: Most of my fiction ideas stem from my role as social observer in my first career, journalism. One day I looked at the mystery field and realized that all post-Doyle Sherlockian novels were written by men. I had loved the stories as a child and thought it was high time for a woman to examine the subject from a female point of view.

  Q: So there was “the” woman, Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes, waiting for you.

  A: She seems the most obvious candidate, but I bypassed her for that very reason to look at other women in what is called the Holmes Canon. Eventually I came back to “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Rereading it, I realized that male writers had all taken Irene Adler at face value as the king of Bohemia’s jilted mistress, but the story doesn’t support that. As the only woman in the Canon who stirred a hint of romantic interest in the aloof Holmes, Irene Adler had to be more than this beautiful but amoral “Victorian vamp.” Once I saw that I could validly interpret her as a gifted and serious performing artist, I had my protagonist.

  Q: It was that simple?

  A: It was that complex. I felt that any deeper psychological exploration of this character still had to adhere to Doyle’s story, both literally and in regard to the author’s own feeling toward the character. That’s how I ended up having to explain that operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna. I tend to describe Irene as a “dark” soprano to avoid assigning her either the erroneous contralto voice or the not-quite-right mezzo-soprano voice. It’s been great fun justifying Doyle’s error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing.

  Even more satisfying has been reinventing an Irene Adler who is as intelligent, self-sufficient, and serious about her professional and personal integrity as Sherlock Holmes, and far too independent to be anyone’s mistress but her own. She also moonlights as an inquiry agent while building her performing career. In many ways they are flip sides of the same coin: her profession, music, is his hobby. His profession, detection, is her secondary career. Her adventures intertwine with Holmes’s, but she is definitely her own woman in these novels.

  Q: How did Doyle feel toward the character of Irene Adler?

  A: I believe that Holmes and Wat
son expressed two sides of Dr. Doyle: Watson, the medical and scientific man, also the staunch upholder of British convention; Holmes, the creative and bohemian writer, fascinated by the criminal and the bizarre. Doyle wrote classic stories of horror and science fiction as well as hefty historical novels set in the age of chivalry. His mixed feelings of attraction to and fear of a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him to “kill” her as soon as he created her. Watson states she is dead at the beginning of the story that introduces her. Irene was literally too hot for Doyle as well as Holmes to handle. She also debuted (and exited) in the first Holmes-Watson story Doyle ever wrote. Perhaps Doyle wanted to establish an unattainable woman to excuse Holmes remaining a bachelor and aloof from matters of the heart. What he did was to create a fascinatingly unrealized character for generations of readers.

  Q: Do your protagonists represent a split personality as well?

  A: Yes, one even more sociologically interesting than the Holmes-Watson split because it embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. As a larger-than-life heroine, Irene is “up to anything.” Her biographer, Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh, however, is the very model of traditional Victorian womanhood. Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women’s restricted roles then and now. Narrator Nell is the character who “grows” most during the series as the unconventional Irene forces her to see herself and her times in a broader perspective. This is something women writers have been doing in the past two decades: revisiting classic literary terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.

  Q: What of “the husband,” Godfrey Norton?

  A: In my novels, Irene’s husband, Godfrey Norton, is more than the “tall, dark, and dashing barrister” Doyle gave her. I made him the son of a woman wronged by England’s then female-punitive divorce law, so he is a “supporting” character in every sense of the word. These novels are that rare bird in literature: female “buddy” books. Godfrey fulfills the useful, decorative, and faithful role so often played by women and wives in fiction and real life. Sherlockians anxious to unite Adler and Holmes have tried to oust Godfrey. William S. Baring-Gould even depicted him as a wife-beater in order to promote a later assignation with Holmes that produced Nero Wolfe! That is such an unbelievable violation of a strong female character’s psychology. That scenario would make Irene Adler a two-time loser in her choice of men and a masochist to boot. My protagonist is a world away from that notion and a wonderful vehicle for subtle but sharp feminist comment.

  Q: Did you give her any attributes not found in the Doyle story?

  A: I gave her one of Holmes’s bad habits. She smokes “little cigars.” Smoking was an act of rebellion for women then. And because Doyle shows her sometimes donning male dress to go unhampered into public places, I gave her “a wicked little revolver” to carry. When Doyle put her in male disguise at the end of his story, I doubt he was thinking of the modern psychosexual ramifications of cross-dressing.

  Q: Essentially, you have changed Irene Adler from an ornamental woman to a working woman.

  A: My Irene is more a rival than a romantic interest for Holmes, yes. She is not a logical detective in the same mold as he, but is as gifted in her intuitive way. Nor is her opera singing a convenient profession for a beauty of the day but a passionate vocation that was taken from her by the king of Bohemia’s autocratic attitude toward women, forcing her to occupy herself with detection. Although Doyle’s Irene is beautiful, well dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes. Now we call it “Grrrrl power.”

  I like to write “against” conventions that are no longer true, or were never true. This is the thread that runs through all my fiction: my dissatisfaction with the portrayal of women in literary and popular fiction then and even now. This begins with Amberleigh—my postfeminist mainstream version of the Gothic-revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970s–and continues with Irene Adler today. I’m interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me of necessity, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.

  Q: How do you research these books?

  A: From a lifetime of reading English literature and a theatrical background that educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays when I was eight years old. My mother’s book club meant that I cut my teeth on Austen, Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dumas, and Dickens.

  In doing research, I have a fortunate facility of using every nugget I find, or of finding that every little fascinating nugget works itself into the story. Perhaps that’s because good journalists must be ingenious in using every fact available to make a story as complete and accurate as possible under deadline conditions. Often the smallest mustard seed of research swells into an entire tree of plot. The corpse on the dining-room table of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was too macabre to resist and spurred the entire plot of the second Adler novel, The Adventuress (formerly Good Morning, Irene). Stoker rescued a drowning man from the Thames and carried him home for revival efforts, but it was too late.

  Besides using my own extensive library on this period, I’ve borrowed from my local library all sorts of arcane books they don’t even know they have because no one ever checks them out. The Internet aids greatly with the specific fact. I’ve also visited London and Paris to research the books, a great hardship, but worth it. I also must visit Las Vegas periodically for my contemporarily-set Midnight Louie mystery series. No sacrifice is too great.

  Q: Why have the reissued paperback editions of three of the first four Adlers been given new titles?

  A: After Good Night, Mr. Holmes and its sequel, Good Morning, Irene were published in the early 1990s, another mystery novel titled Good Night, Irene came out. The very similar title formats caused great confusion in the publishing industry over several books. When I resumed the Adler series after a seven-year hiatus and the first paperbacks were almost out of print, it was an opportunity to end the confusion for good, as well as update the covers. Good Night, Mr. Holmes, the first Adler novel, retains its title and was reissued in January of 2005. Good Morning, Irene is now in print as The Adventuress, and Irene’s Last Waltz is now in print as Another Scandal in Bohemia. The reissued, retitled editions also have the original title on the cover, for readers’ information, and the new titles all relate to Conan Doyle’s foundation story, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” I made some small revisions in the reissues, including correcting a time-line glitch resulting from the seven-year hiatus.

  Q: You’ve written fantasy and science-fiction novels, why did you turn to mystery?

  A: All novels are fantasy and all novels are mystery in the largest sense. Although mystery was often an element in my early novels, when I evolved the Irene Adler idea, I considered it simply a novel. Good Night, Mr. Holmes was almost on the shelves before I realized it would be “categorized” as a mystery. So Irene is utterly a product of my mind and times, not of the marketplace, though I always believed that the concept was timely and necessary.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Browder, Clifford. The Wickedest Woman in New York. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1988.

  Bunson, Matthew E. Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. New York: Macmillan, 1994.

  Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Coleman, Elizabeth Ann. The Opulent Era. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1989.

  Crow, Duncan. The Victorian Woman. London: Cox & Wyman, 1971.

  Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes. Various editions.

  Du Maurier, George. Trilby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

  Forman, John, and Robbe Pierce Stimson. The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age: Architectural Aspirations, 1879–1901. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

  Holdredg
e, Helen. The Woman in Black: The Life of the Fabulous Lola Montez. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955.

  Homberger, Eric, with Alice Hudson. The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of Nearly 400 Years of New York City’s History. New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

  Jackson, Kenneth T., editor. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.

  Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: A History of Unique, Eccentric & Amazing Entertainers. London: Robert Hale, 1987.

  Keller, Allan. Scandalous Lady: The Life and Times of Madame Restell, New York’s Most Notorious Abortionist. New York: Atheneum, 1981.

  Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. New York: Times Books, 1994.

  Mackay, James. Allan Pinkerton: The Eye Who Never Slept. Edinburgh, Scotland: Mainstream Publishing Company, 1996.

  Montez, Madame Lola. The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet. With Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascinating. New York: Chelsea House, 1969 reprinting.

  Montez, Lola (Countless of Landsfeld). The Lectures of Lola Montez. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1858.

  Patterson, Jerry E. Fifth Avenue: The Best Address. New York: Rizzoli, 1998.

  Seymour, Bruce. Lola Montez: A Life. Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, 1996.

  Varley, James E. Lola Montez: The California Adventures of Europe’s Notorious Courtesan. Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1996.

  White, Stuart Edward. Gold. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1913.

  For Fun:

  Tierney, Tom. Ballet Stars of the Romantic Era: Paper Dolls in Full Color. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. (La Lola as a paper doll with four costume changes.)