Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

Introduction

An Introductory Rumination on Stories for Which the World Is Not Yet Prepared

Charles V. Prepolec

Never underestimate the impact of the fantastic on an impressionable child, be it in print, film or television. You never quite know where it may lead, or when it might
bite you on the ass. In my case, it eventually led to the creation of
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes
, so feel free to hold the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Homer (the Greek chap, not Simpson), Alexander Korda, Stan “The Man” Lee, Lester Dent, Ray Harryhausen, Creature Feature presentations on Saturday afternoon television, Otto Penzler, Hammer Films and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle accountable for the book you now hold in your hands. Although, to be perfectly fair, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Greek myth in general should probably shoulder some of the blame too, but for now we’ll stick to the shortlist. You see, as an only child, I spent a lot of time exploring fantasy worlds wherever I could find them — and quite frankly, I found them everywhere!

Hitchcock’s
Three Investigators
(okay, Hitch himself is off the hook since he didn’t write a one of them) were probably my first exposure to slightly scary mysteries. Well, at least some of the covers were sort of scary. One that had a glowing disembodied head on it had to be safely put away before the lights went out in my bedroom each night. My thanks to those fine folks at Scholastic Books (the same fine folks who, if memory serves, were inexplicably responsible for making me aware of Sawney Bean while I was still under ten years of age) for messing with my young mind! Right about the same time, through a chunky paperback book found in my school library, Greek myth popped into my life with
Jason and the Argonauts
, which in turn led to a far too early reading of Homer’s
Odyssey
. Jason, Hercules, and the clever Odysseus became early heroes. My sense of heroic fantasy, heroes and their heroic deeds, was forming, although a strange fear of cannibals was lurking in there somewhere too. Thank you again Scholastic. At about the same time I also had my first brush with Sherlock Holmes. I found myself reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, but at the time I didn’t find it terribly engaging and didn’t finish it. Anyhow, that Greek myth interest was further fuelled when Ray Harryhausen’s
Jason and the Argonauts
turned up on television. Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation gave magical life to creatures that had previously only existed in my imagination. In short order I was begging to be taken to see his Sinbad films (for the record, Kali has always been my favorite Harryhausen creation), which indirectly took me back to Alexander Korda’s
The Thief of Bagdad
. Now that was the mother load for skewing this kid’s idea of fantasy. It was the most magical thing I had ever seen, and it had the best villain ever in Conrad Veidt’s Jaffar! He made
Tom Baker’s Prince Koura seem like a boy scout by comparison. What kid wouldn’t want to be Sabu?

So with a major itch for heroic fantasy, I did what most geeky kids would do, start reading comic books and developing the first stages of ‘collector’s mania’.
The Mighty Thor
,
Iron Man
,
Dr. Strange
,
Tomb of Dracula
, the
Uncanny X-men
, and on and on went the list of Marvel comics. Stan Lee had a lot to answer for when he had the idea to infuse the tired superhero books of the 1950s with the soap opera antics of romance comics. Can you say addiction? I knew you could. It was all the perfect fodder to fuel my fascination with heroic fantasy figures. It also led me to discover the world of pulp heroes in a roundabout way. At the time, the mid-1970s, Marvel was producing a line of black and white magazine sized comics and amongst them was
Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze
. Incidentally, there was also a two-part adaptation of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
in
Marvel Preview
, which was my second brush with Sherlock Holmes. The pictures helped, but I still wasn’t terribly impressed. Through that Doc Savage magazine I discovered the near perfect heroic fantasy character. Doc Savage combined the best of everything I’d encountered up to that time. He was built like a hero from Greek myth, with bronzed skin and freaky gold eyes, blessed with a brilliant mind, surrounded by a band of lesser heroes, each with their own scientific specialty and had adventures that almost always had a huge fantasy element. Suddenly used bookstores entered my life as part of the quest to accumulate as many of the Doc Savage paperback reprints that I could get my hands on. It became an all-consuming passion. I must have been driving my poor parents nuts with my obsession, but they thought reading was good for me (can’t imagine what they would have made of the Bond books or John Norman’s Gor series I was also reading at the time) and so indulged me in my interests. I can vividly recall successfully convincing them to drive me some 300 kilometers north just so that I could scour the virgin territory of Edmonton’s used bookshops. I eventually managed to accumulate about 102 of the paperback reprints, before moving on to another obsession, but not before reading Phil Farmer’s curious Doc Savage bio
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
and being introduced to the inbred wonders of his Wold-Newton family tree. Suddenly there was a thread, however tenuous; tying together all these fantastic fictional heroes, and look, there on a low branch is that Sherlock Holmes guy again. I also discovered The Avenger, The Spider and, of course, The Shadow! Like Doc Savage, I first encountered The Shadow in comic books, although the fact they were published by DC bothered me no end! Still, Denny O’Neil’s stories and more importantly Mike Kaluta’s unsurpassed artwork did the trick. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” became my catchphrase. Rarely got an answer to that one, but what did I know about ‘evil’ or ‘the hearts of men’? I was a twelve year old kid and The Shadow was cool. So cool that when I spotted him in a book called
The Private Lives of Spies, Crime Fighters, and Other Good Guys
by Otto Penzler, and discovered there were films with The Shadow, I simply had to have it! While The Shadow chapter was pretty thin, I was introduced to a whole new genre that captured my imagination, however fleetingly. The detective in print and film had entered my life … and there was that Sherlock Holmes guy again. I can recall being quite taken with a photo of John Barrymore as Holmes holding a gun on the grotesquely featured Gustav Von Seyffertitz as Moriarty, but little else.

Unfortunately my detective interest was immediately sidetracked by another book, Alan Frank’s
The Movie Treasury: Monsters and Vampires
with a garish cover image of Christopher Lee being staked. Suddenly I wanted to see monster movies, and lots of them. Happily every Saturday afternoon there was a
Creature Feature
program on television to feed that particular craving. More importantly it had the added benefit of sending me back to the literature. I ended up reading
Dracula
,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
,
The House on the Borderland
,
Carnacki the Ghost Finder
,
The War of the Worlds
,
The Invisible Man
and who knows how many horror anthologies edited by the late Peter Haining. My interest in fantasy had shifted away from the bright and shiny, clean cut heroes of childhood and drifted down the dark gaslit alleys of the macabre. Comic books grew less important and gave way to somewhat more esoteric reading materials. Yup, you guessed it; puberty had begun to work its own peculiar magic! Sexual repression seemed to be the order of the day as my fantasy worlds began to take on a distinctly Victorian tinge. It seemed to me that the era was simply one big heavily populated playground for monsters, madmen and murderers, and thanks to Hammer Films on television, apparently they all looked an awful lot like either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing.

While my reading interests went all over the map at that point, bloody 80’s horror, trashy true crime thrillers, Herbert’s
Dune
series, Tolkein’s
The Lord of the Rings
, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, and God knows what else, the concept of an almost homogenous Victorian nightmare world remained firmly lodged at the back of my mind. My teen years came to an end and on a fateful day in 1986 I found myself in a comic shop. Browsing the racks I was drawn to the brightly painted image of Sherlock Holmes standing in a graveyard. It was the cover of the first issue of Renegade Press’
Cases of Sherlock Holmes
. The text was Conan Doyle’s “The Beryl Coronet”, but it was accompanied by the wonderfully atmospheric black and white artwork of Dan Day. Was that Peter Cushing’s face staring out at me? Yes, it was, although in the next panel it was Basil Rathbone’s, and in the one after that John Barrymore. Hmm, that Victorian playground concept was flashing back into my mind so I picked it up, went home and read it. Here was that Sherlock Holmes guy that I kept running across, but largely ignored, throughout my childhood. Sherlock Holmes, turned out to be calm, cool, insightful, larger than life fantastic hero and best of all, he lived in my Victorian fantasyland. By the next day I was in a used bookstore looking for a copy of
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. I found myself reading the words “
To Sherlock Holmes she was always the woman
”, and considering I was floundering after a bad break-up with my girlfriend, I was utterly and completely hooked. By the weekend I had Peter Haining’s
The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook
and discovered there was a whole world of Sherlock Holmes related material out there, including something called a pastiche. Back to the used bookshops I went. Fred Saberhagen’s
The Holmes-Dracula File
fell into my hands, Loren D. Estleman’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
followed suit, then Manly Wade Wellman’s
Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds
, and oh look, Phil Farmer’s Wold-Newtonry was back in my life with
The Adventure of the Peerless Peer
. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought the Victorian era was a literary fantasyland, but best of all, my new hero, a classic one that seemed to embody the best qualities of all my childhood interests, served as a guide through this nightmare world. To be sure, some of it was truly dire in terms of quality writing, but it was the most fun I’d had in a lifetime of reading, and fun is the key to entertainment.

Flash forward some 20-odd years and here I am, still having fun in my Victorian fantasyland and exploring the ever-expanding world of
Sherlock Holmes
. From the distance an early 21st century vantage point provides, the idealized Victorian and Edwardian world Sherlock Holmes inhabits is to the modern reader, in its own way, as strongly realized and alien a fantasy setting as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Baum’s Oz and just as much fun!
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes
will, I hope, communicate some of that sense of fun that I’ve been enjoying all these years.

Throughout this rambling rumination I’ve made mention of a number of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries and successors who worked the rich vein of fantasy fiction. In the stories ahead you will perhaps find echoes from some of their works or their characters. The connection may be very subtle or it may come through loud and clear as it does in Barbara Hambly’s “The Lost Boy”, a bittersweet tale of Sherlock Holmes and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Considering Conan Doyle’s one-time collaboration and longtime friendship with Barrie, it is a perfect starting point for our collection. Christopher Sequeira’s “His Last Arrow” is a cautionary tale, possibly inspired by Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation of
The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night
, which drives home the adage that you should be careful what you wish for as Watson appears to have brought home more than a war-wound from his time in Afghanistan. Barbara Roden’s “The Things That Shall Come Upon Them” contains our first pairing of Holmes with a classic ‘psychic detective’, in this case Hesketh-Prichard’s groundbreaking Flaxman Low. Holmes and Low both find themselves investigating, from decidedly different perspectives, strange occurrences in a house that is sure to be familiar to readers of M. R. James’ “The Casting of the Runes”. The Flaxman Low stories are a perfect example of Conan Doyle’s direct influence on a contemporary, as the Low stories began appearing in
Pearson’s Magazine
in 1898, less than a year after Hesketh-Prichard met Conan Doyle at a writer’s dinner. Another, earlier, writer’s dinner was also a meeting point for Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, who’s
The Picture Of Dorian Gray
, seems to have an echo in M. J. Elliott’s “The Finishing Stroke”, a grisly tale of art gone wrong. Martin Powell brings in Conan Doyle’s other great creation Professor George Edward Challenger in a
Boy’s Own
/pulp styled two-fisted adventure tale that could only be called “Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World”. In Rick Kennett and A. F. (Chico) Kidd’s “The Grantchester Grimoire”, Holmes meets his second ‘psychic detective’. In this case it is arguably the best known, and certainly best loved, example of the breed, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Kennett and Kidd have previously collaborated on a highly recommended collection of Carnacki pastiche available under the title
No. 472 Cheyne Walk
(Ash-Tree Press 2002). In “The Strange Affair of the Steamship Friesland”, a direct follow-up to “The Five Orange Pips”, journalist Peter Calamai presents Holmes with a unique method of correcting an early failure after consulting a certain familiar doctor with an address in South Norwood. Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have disappeared into another world, but any comparison with J. R. Campbell’s “The Entwined” stops right there, as the girl in this story dreams of nothing that could be described as a Wonderland. An aging Watson finds himself faced with the horrific power of strong remembrances when Chris Roberson delves into the untold tale of “Merridew of Abominable Memory”. When a private investigator on the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles finds himself faced with a corpse that won’t stay down he turns to the greatest detective still living for help, bringing together influences as widely removed as Bram Stoker and Dashiell Hammett in Bob Madison’s humorous and hardboiled story “Red Sunset”. Our final entry takes a decidedly different turn in that Sherlock Holmes is nowhere to be found; instead Kim Newman has Professor Moriarty, along with Colonel Moran, waging a highly personal and often hilarious
War Of The Worlds
in “The Red Planet League”.