Very truly yours, Irene Norton, née ADLER.
“What a woman—oh, what a woman!” cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. “Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”
“From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes coldly. “I am sorry that I have not been able to bring your Majesty’s business to a more successful conclusion.”
“On the contrary, my dear sir,” cried the King; “nothing could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire.”
“I am glad to hear your Majesty say so.”
“I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward you. This ring—” He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger and held it out upon the palm of his hand.
“Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly,” said Holmes.
“You have but to name it.”
“This photograph!”
The King stared at him in amazement.
“Irene’s photograph!” he cried. “Certainly, if you wish it.”
“I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I have the honour to wish you a very good-morning.” He bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set off in my company for his chambers.
And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.
GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES
READERS GUIDE
“Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who could be called ‘the’ woman by Sherlock Holmes.”
—GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991
To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’s acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious woman in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. An author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.
Set in 1880-1890 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, and New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas’s portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way,” noted the New York Times, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.” In Douglas’s hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from “A Scandal in Bohemia” becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler’s exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day’s leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.
Critics praise the novels’ rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and “welcome window on things Victorian.”
“The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself,” noted Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene’s Last Waltz), “a long and complex jeu d’esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the passion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compassion for the intellect behind it.”
About This Book
Good Night, Mr. Holmes, the first Irene Adler novel, opens in London with Sherlock Holmes and Watson discussing the events of “A Scandal in Bohemia” and especially the woman at the center of that first Sherlock Holmes short story, the American diva Irene Adler.
Often rated the favorite Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia” is recommended reading, or rereading for a discussion of Good Night, Mr. Holmes, which retells the Doyle story from Irene’s point of view, not Watson’s. The novel also embellishes on the events in the story and presents the characters in a different light, especially Irene Adler, who has been revived and reinvented as a fully fleshed out leading lady in her own right.
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 cultural 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. It’s been great fun justifying Doyle’s error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing. My Irene Adler 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 regard the character of Irene Adler?
A: I believe that Holmes and Watson 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. Unfortunately, male writers, screenwriters and directors ever since have hypersexualized Irene Adler as the stereotyped romantic interest for Holmes rather than his victorious opponent. In both recent film incarnations, Irene Adler was shown as the mere tool of Moriarty, H
olmes’s archenemy. Rachel McAdams in the two Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films was a pert, larcenous vixen. The British TV series Sherlock portrayed her via Lara Pulver (apparently naked in one scene,) as a lesbian dominatrix who only “beat” Holmes literally, with a whip. Not her wit.
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 three 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, which Conan Doyle opposed. So he’s 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, only he really is “a superior man” of his time. Sherlockians anxious to reunite 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. What an unbelievable violation of a strong female character’s psychology... a scenario that made 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. Incidentally, the plot point that Irene and Godfrey must be wed before noon is a totally fictional element used to convey urgency.
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 “cigarettes.” 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.
Q: Essentially, you’ve recreated Irene Adler as not merely an ornamental woman but 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 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 her mind with detection. Although Doyle’s Irene is beautiful, well dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes.
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 post-feminist mainstream version of the Gothic-revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970s—and continues with Irene Adler. I’m interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.
Q: How do you research these books?
A: My theatrical background since grade school educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays and trying to write “Hollywood” to make a film of my favorite novel so I could play the little girl in it when I was eight. (A film of Through the Desert was ultimately made decades later in Poland.) My mother’s book club meant that I cut my teeth on Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontës, 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 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 is a treasure house of specifics and photographs.
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.
For Discussion
1. Did you know the Conan Doyle story that this novel expands upon before reading this book? Or after? How are the two pieces similar, and where do they differ?
If you’ve only read the novel, are you interested now in reading the Conan Doyle story? Why did the author pluck the particular character of Irene Adler from this series of stories for revival a hundred years after the story involving her was published? If you know the Holmes stories well, are there any other women characters who’d lend themselves to their own novels. Whom would you pick?
2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “killed” Irene Adler in the same story that introduced her. Yet readers are forever intrigued by this woman who was the only one to fascinate the monkish Holmes, as well as outwit him. Why would the author have done that? Conan Doyle gave Irene both beauty and brains, but he didn’t make Holmes both handsome and brilliant. Does this make such a “perfect” woman character less believable? Less likeable? Does she show any failings in this novel?
3. The Drood Review of Mystery observed of Chapel Noir: “This dark tour de force proves by its verbal play and literary allusiveness that Douglas wants neither Irene nor herself underestimated in fiction. More important, she wants women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world.”
Why do you think the author chose to give Irene her own “Watson” to narrate the novel? How does Nell Huxleigh echo or contrast Dr. Watson? Does using a traditionally restricted Victorian woman as the narrator make you more aware of any Victorian remnants in the upbringing and lives of contemporary women?
Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels. This element is 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 are Irene and most readers so fond of Nell despite her limited and self-limiting opinions? Is there a bit of her in all modern women still? Are women still expected to monitor matters of morality in contemporary families and lives? Have modern women broken out of the sexual double standard, and is there a price?
4. What do you think of the major men characters in this novel: Sherlock Holmes, the King of Bohemia, and Godfrey Norton? What attitudes to women does each embody? Why did Conan Doyle make Holmes so “allergic” to women? Is he saying that intellectualism is purely masculine? He made Watson something of a ladies’ man who has consorted
with the women of “three continents” and has two or possibly three wives over the breadth of the stories. Why are modern readers, and some writers, eager to give Holmes a romantic interest? Do they see him as incomplete? Do they want to see this somewhat misogynistic man succumb to female power? What does he have in common with Mr. Spock from the Star Trek universe? Can you think of other difficult and compelling characters in modern storytelling on the page and onscreen? What is their mythic appeal?
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 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 that 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?
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 39