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HOLMES & THE DAUNTLESS DETECTIVE BOOKSHELF

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In which Sherlock Holmes goes canonical with MX Publishing, goes speculative with Belanger Books, and finally goes downright supernatural with Willie Meikle. We also call in on Vernon Loder’s 1928 classic murder novel The Mystery at Stowe, and revisit The Department of Dead Ends by Roy Vickers. So today’s article is for anyone who like a good crime or detective story. Unless you insist it has to be set on the mean streets of Glasgow with an alcoholic Scottish police officer barely hanging on to his job. We might have one of those in a later article, mind you…

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The Great Detective

So, first out of the cells is Sherlock Holmes, with two huge collections of new Holmes tales coming up this Autumn. In the interests of full disclosure, we note that John Linwood Grant, the old reprobate, has stories in both, but you can always pull his stories out and feed them to the cat.

The ideas behind these particular anthologies were too cool to miss out on, which is why he chanced it. Authentic Holmes with a special twist, and a new version of Wellsian fiction. Who could resist?

1) Eliminate The Impossible

For MX Publishing, the Holmes scholar and editor David Marcum has put together two volumes of new stories under the title Eliminate the Impossible. These are Volumes VII and VIII of the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – forty eight new tales specially written for Halloween.

Combined Covers

All the stories are set in the canonical world of the great detective, with the stimulating proviso that these are cases which initially appear to have some supernatural element – until Holmes is through with them. JLG contributed ‘The Second Life of Jabez Salt’, a curious tale about a hanged man who has apparently returned to threaten those who turned on him…

Royalties will go to Stepping Stones, a school for children with learning difficulties) for specific projects such as the new literary program. The Kickstarter has already exceeded its goals, but if you want to take up one of the offers, you’ll find it here, along with details of the authors:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1229605719/eliminate-the-impossible-sherlock-holmes?token=fd92312c

2) In the Realms of H G Wells

Our second Holmes for the day is another anthology with a somewhat different approach. Derrick Belanger and C. Edward Davis have collected more than twenty exciting tales which take Holmes into the imaginative realms of H G Wells.

Sherlock HGWells promo2

Drawing on Wells’s speculative stories, here our detective hero has to consider some truly strange conundrums which take him out of his usual zone. Although Conan Doyle and Wells had their occasional differences, you would hope they might appreciate a work which explores both their creations.

This, like Eliminate the Impossible, is a two volume anthology, with a wealth of wonders. Have the Martians returned – or did they ever leave? What altered beasts dwell in the shadows? And what could Cavor’s last words from the moon really mean? The anthology includes ‘The Affair of the Red Opium’, a novelette by greydog. Gosh.

  • The Case of a Natural Selection by M. M. Elmendorf
  • The Pigeon’s Rest by Emma Tonkin
  • The Curious Case of the Sleeper by Steve Herczeg
  • The Manor House Horror by Michael Siverling
  • An Adventure in Darkness by Daniel D. Victor
  • The Adventure of the Traveler’s Bootstraps by William Campbell Powell
  • The Mystery of the Last Martian by G. C. Rosenquist
  • The Affair of the Red Opium by John Linwood Grant
  • The Adventure of the Invisible Man by David Friend
  • A Matter of Some Gravity by Derrick Belanger
  • The Adventure of the Red Planet by Steve Poling
  • The Clash of the Miracle Men by Rohit Sawant
  • The First Selenites on the Earth by Derek Nason
  • The Martian Spy-Glass by Jaap Boekestein
  • The Adventure of the Beastly Excisions by Benjamin Langley
  • The Adventure of the Disintegrated Man by Michael T. Wells
  • Sherlock Holmes and The New Accelerator by Mark Levy
  • A Trap to Catch the Sun by Andrew Lane
  • The Misplaced Mystery Writer by Richard Paolinelli
  • The Beast Within by Katie Magnusson
  • Dr. Watson and the Martians by C. Edward Davis

(Bonus Story if Kickstarter meets Stretch Goal)

Sherlock Holmes in the Realms of H G Wells will be launched via Kickstarter in October, and published before Christmas by Belanger Books. We’ll keep you posted.

3) The Dreaming Man

Thirdly in our Holmes news, we have the pleasure to publish a special review by Dave Brzeski, in which he reports for us on Willie Meikle’s book, Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man, out from Gryphonwood Press earlier this year. This seemed a good point to mention it, and yep, in this one the detective openly meet the supernatural.

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Dave Brzeski writes:

I have to confess that I have a bit of a history with this book. When the first part was initially published on its own as Sherlock Holmes: Revenant in 2011, I picked up a review pdf… but I didn’t get around to it. I actually bought a signed paperback copy at Fantasycon in 2012, but still didn’t read it. Them in 2013 it was reissued as a bonus story in the collection, Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy and Other Stories in 2013 and again I managed to get a review pdf from the author. Nope, still didn’t find the time.

Now ‘Revenant’ has been reissued once again, but this time as the first half of the novel, Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man. Yet again I was supplied with a review copy, this time on Kindle. Unwilling to face the potential embarrassment of not getting around to reviewing it yet again, I decided I’d better prioritise it.

I’ve read quite a few post-Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories – I’ve even edited several. I can’t deny the fact that I have at times expressed some concern over the sheer number of Sherlock Holmes supernatural adventures that have seen print over the last several years. I felt there was a very real danger that they could soon outnumber the canonical styled tales. This does not mean that I’m automatically biased against supernatural Holmes stories, just that they really need to be very good.

There’s another element that I generally do not want to see in a new Holmes adventure—Moriarty! Yes, he’s always been regarded as Holmes’ greatest adversary, but he only appeared in two of the original stories. It has sadly proven near impossible for the many authors who’ve followed in the wake of Conan Doyle to resist using Moriarty to an extent that’s only rivalled by Jack the Ripper.

William Meikle has not only given us a supernatural Holmes story, but it also involves Moriarty—I hope no one considers this too much of a spoiler, but I figure anyone who can’t work out exactly who is referred to in the blurb, “A fall is coming, a fall that has haunted Holmes’ dreams, and now must be faced again, in the place where past and present become one, and two old foes meet for a final battle.”, has likely never heard of Sherlock Holmes or Moriarty.

I’m a fan of Meikle’s work, so I didn’t let myself be put off. Just as well, as this is possibly the best Sherlock Holmes supernatural adventure I’ve read to date, if not one of the best post-Conan Doyle stories of any sort.

Any misgivings I may have held about the supernatural elements of the story were soon dispelled. Meikle treats the supernatural in a very scientific way, which makes it much easier to stomach Holmes’ reluctant acceptance. It works so much better than the endless re-imaginings of the Hound of the Baskervilles as a werewolf tale. ‘Revenant’ is very good, the new material, ‘The Dreaming Man’ is even better.

I’ve yet to read Meikle’s Concordances of the Red Serpent, or Augustus Seton Collected Chronicles, both of which are referenced here, but I hope to find time to rectify that soon. Seton in particular is a major player in this story which cleverly ties in Sherlock Holmes to the author’s own Meikleverse characters and concepts.

I recommend this book very highly to anyone who might fancy seeing how Holmes and Watson might cope with a case which does not lend itself so easily to a rational explanation. This is not to say I didn’t find any faults. When I’ve edited new Sherlock Holmes books, I tend to keep a copy of the complete stories open on my desktop, so I can check the dialogue against that of Conan Doyle. Willie Meikle has a tendency to overuse a mild pejorative, “bally”, that was never present in the original adventures. When I have to resort to that level of nitpicking to balance an overly positive review, I must really like the book!

(Dave Brzeski is a regular reviewer and editor of things strange, pulpish and/or arcane, as well as being an editor for the magazine Occult Detective Quarterly)

You can find copies of the book in various formats through these links:

51Ni21ZtcCLdreaming man on amazon uk

dreaming man on amazon us

Stowe It, You Chaps

If you want a break from the consulting detective, then why not spend time with an ex-Colonial Administrator who is really after the girl. In Vernon Loder’s The Mystery at Stowe (1928), the amateur sleuth Jim Carton doesn’t turn up until page 57, and his main motivation is to clear suspicion from his childhood sweetheart. Not quite Conan Doyle. Carton both annoys and interests the police officers as they go about their investigation, and is looked on with doubt by most of the participants in general. Even his sweetheart is uncooperative – but why?

stowe detective

The Mystery at Stowe was the first of twenty two novels by Vernon Loder, who was really a chap called John George Hazlette Vahey (1881-1938). Vahey also wrote under the pseudonym John Haslette from 1909 to 1916, including The Mesh (1912), and used few other names besides – even Henrietta Clandon.

We decided to include it on greydogtales because it’s rollicking good fun, a great example of classic crime fiction, with a cast rather too large to remember most of the time. In addition, the suspect is a bold female explorer, expert in using poisoned Amazonian weapons, the murder victim has a dart in her back, and no one can work out how any of it happened.

Cue 200 pages of misdirection, and a most peculiar solution, which one commentator described as ‘borderline genius yet utterly insane’ – well, we just had to mention the book. Our only warning is that you need to get through the first couple of chapters and all the many people littering the house party before it gets into its stride. More a Poirot-type gathering than a Holmesian one.

There are no ghosts or Martians here, by the way. It may be something to order from the library for a laugh – we’re not pretending it’s anything more than a satisfying bit of Golden Age mystery. Should you want your own copy, it’s on Amazon.

stowe detectivethe mystery at stowe

The Inverted Detective

Finally, a brief reminder of a book we covered some time ago, The Department of Dead Ends by Roy Vickers. Our initial mention of this detective oddity was here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/sherlock-holmes-versus-the-thinking-machines/

As we said at the time, The Rubber Trumpet, the first of Vicker’s thirty-seven stories featuring the fictitious Department of Dead Ends, appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in September 1934.

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Partial collections of the stories were later made in 1947, 1949, and 1978. We have the 1978 Dover Edition, introduced by E F Bleiler (who also edited science fiction and fantasy fiction anthologies).

A friend of ours, Nina Zumel, has recently written up her own take on the collected stories, including discussion of the ‘inverted mystery’ concept. Her article is well worth a read.

“The bulk of each story focuses on the crime and its background: what makes the murderer tick, what drove them to what they did. The narration is omniscient and rather distant, and tends to read a bit like a non-fiction true crime article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. In fact, Vickers worked for a while as a journalist on the crime beat, as well as a court reporter. As in real life, the crimes are messy and often unpremeditated, the solutions less brilliant deduction than luck plus legwork and the ability to remember things and put them together.”

You can find the whole piece on her site here:

https://multoghost.wordpress.com/2017/08/07/the-department-of-dead-ends/

Enough detective stuff for today. We’re away for a few days, but will be back later next week with the usual irrational mixtures of literature, lurchers and life…

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Mobile Holmes and Imperial Weird: Strange Tales of Empire

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Welcome, dear listener. Sherlock Holmes again, the shadows of the British Empire, new magazines and general chaos. We’ll have to call this one a midweek medley. And we need to investigate Django’s bald spot anyway, so our Edwardian Arcane series will have to wait a day or two. The daft little donkey has developed one of those patches on his tail which may be a sebaceous gland problem, a flea allergy, or mites, and as he will keep chewing at it, no doubt the vet will have an extra holiday this year.

hot dog day
hot dog day

So while we employ hibiscrub and a medicated shampoo, we’ll update you on that other stuff…

Strange Empire

A map of the world, showing the British Empire coloured in red at the end of the nineteenth century. Date: late 19th century
A map of the world, showing the British Empire coloured in red at the end of the nineteenth century. Date: late 19th century

Continue reading Mobile Holmes and Imperial Weird: Strange Tales of Empire →

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Carnacki: The Second Great Detective

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Here’s a thought. Astonishingly, there are more stories written in homage to Carnacki the Ghost Finder than there are of any Victorian or Edwardian detective save Sherlock Holmes. That’s not just occult detectives, that’s all of them, from the amateur investigator to the perspicacious policeman. He may be a niche interest to some, but he’s an impressive one. His creator William Hope Hodgson would probably be shocked, and H P Lovecraft a little puzzled (he wasn’t fond of Carnacki).

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copyright m s corley 2016

There were rumours of C Auguste Dupin (from Edgar Allan Poe) in the side-wings, but as you’ll see below, I think we can show that Carnacki has the distinct edge over any other detective of the period. We’re discounting multi-authored characters such as Sexton Blake or Nick Carter. Sexton Blake first appeared in 1893, and was a ‘house’ character written by dozens of people (including even the SF author Michael Moorcock, later on) for various magazines.

Nick Carter, first appearing in 1886, was the same, a ‘house’ character with at least a dozen authors, though this series does bear the distinction of being one of the first of its kind to have one or two female authors contributing over the years.

a_great_conspiracy_by_nicholas_carter

Last October we had a month-long celebration of William Hope Hodgson, in which we ran a series called The Inheritors, covering writers who had taken his themes or characters and written new, related fiction. Today we’re concentrating only on the Ghost Finder and those who follow in his footsteps. You’ll find some cracking stuff below, if you haven’t already been there before us.

inheritors

We’ve argued elsewhere why Carnacki might be so popular, so here we’re only going to do a head-count. But given that we’ve pitted Carnacki against Holmes, it may be worth reminding ourselves of their approaches, which must be part of the attraction. Both Great Detectives believed in:

  • Looking for logical, realistic explanations for unusual or unlikely events
  • Utilising the latest scientific methods when pursuing a case
  • Drawing on a collection of monographs and papers for key aspects of their work

As to their views on investigation and the supernatural:

“I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle,’ as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact. I view all reported ‘hauntings’ as unproven until I have examined into them, and I am bound to admit that ninety-nine cases out of a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth! Well, were it not for the hundredth, I should have few stories to tell – eh?”

Thomas Carnacki, The Thing Invisible

“If Dr. Mortimer’s surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.”

Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Holmes does not state that such things cannot be (although he debunks much superstition as nonsense in other stories). He says that it is outside of his concept of scientific deduction. The crucial difference, of course, is that Carnacki believed that you could apply deduction to a situation where ‘forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature’ were at work. He categorised and studied what he called ab-natural phenomena, and investigated them, when they were genuinely present, with the same keen eye. Holmes Plus, as it were.

(You can find more reflections on Holmes issues and pastiches in this posts: shades of sherlock holmes )

There are stories written since which include both characters. In Kim Newman’s short stories about the Diogenes Club, from the Holmes stories, it is mentioned that Carnacki was a member of the Diogenes Club as a special occult investigator; when he retired, his position was taken by Newman’s character Richard Jeperson. Carnacki is also mentioned as having investigated several cases alongside Sherlock Holmes.

Barbara Hambly and A F (Chico) Kidd have both written stories which feature Carnacki aiding Sherlock Holmes in occult investigations (The Adventure of the Antiquarian’s Niece and The Grantchester Grimoire respectively, whilst Spanish author Alberto López Aroca wrote the short story Algunos derivados del alquitrán (Some Coal-tar Derivatives) which apparently featured Carnacki visiting a retired Sherlock Holmes in Fulworth.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Breath of God (2011) is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel by Guy Adams which concerns a mystery involving the supernatural deaths of people. In the course of his investigation, Holmes meets Aleister Crowley and Thomas Carnacki.

But back to the main Inheritors. Since we last brushed on this, the number of stories has grown yet again, and so we’ll freshen our ab-natural glasses. We won’t mention comic book or graphic novels appearances today, except to remind you that we recently featured M S Corley, who is producing a new illustrated series specifically about Carnacki, with some spectacularly stylish artwork. More about that when it’s available.

Let’s see if we can do some number-crunching. We’ll have to re-mention people we’ve covered over the year, but we’ve added latest tallies and publications.

meiklestich

The most prolific author is Willie Meikle, who has now written nearly forty stories of Carnacki, with more on the way. Willie says of this work:

“Carnacki resonated with me immediately on my first reading many years ago. Several of the stories have a Lovecraftian viewpoint, with cosmic entities that have no regard for the doings of mankind. The background Hodgson proposes fits with some of my own viewpoint on the ways the Universe might function, and the slightly formal Edwardian language seems to be a “voice” I fall into naturally. I write them because of love, pure and simple.”

We’ve featured Willie before, but you can now find a full list of his Carnacki stories here:

william meikle: carnacki and me

His latest collection, Carnacki: The Watcher at the Gate, has just been released in e-book format.

carnacki: the watcher at the gate

BALLPARK TOTAL: 40

joshstitch

Joshua M Reynolds is the other most prolific writer in this area, having started with Carnacki and taken the concept further with his tales of Charles St. Cyprian, The Royal Occultist, who is Carnacki’s successor in that role. Josh has produced, so far:

  • Several pure Carnacki stories
  • Three tales of Carnacki and St Cyprian
  • A host of stories going through 1919 to 1925, revolving around St Cyprian and his ‘assistant’ Ebe Gallowglass

“I first came across Hodgson in an anthology called Grisly, Grim and Gruesome. The story was “The Horse of the Invisible”, which is still perhaps my favourite Hodgson story – Hodgson’s descriptions of the sounds the eponymous phantom makes still creep me out a bit, even today. Even then, I was drawn to the idea of someone investigating a haunting as if it were a mystery. I credit that story with sparking my love of not just Hodgson, but occult detective fiction as a whole, really.”

Joshua’ latest full-length Royal Occultist novel is The Infernal Express.

the infernal express

You can find a fairly exhaustive and useful list of Royal Occultist adventures, including Carnacki’s direct appearance, here:

royal occultist chronology

BALLPARK TOTAL: 45

brandonstitch

Brandon Barrows wrote The Castle-Town Tragedy last year, three novellas covering new exploits of Carnacki (illustrated by the terrific Dave Felton), and has further Carnacki stories in the pipeline. We recently asked Brandon what his Ghost Finder roots were:

“One of the reasons I wanted to write Carnacki was that, while he’s very much steeped in the occult, he was first and foremost a man of science. He went in wanting to DISBELIEVE and only allowed himself to consider the supernatural when all other options were pushed aside. So many classic occult-detectives seem like little more than vehicles to get to whatever neat demon or ghost the writer has thought up, but with Carnacki, WHH brought an element of real detective work into the mix that I’ve always found immensely satisfying.”

Castle-Town is a great read, available as a limited edition first run at the moment, but we hear that it may also be available in e-book next year, along with a possible trade-paperback.

the castle-town tragedy

BALLPARK TOTAL: 5

Chico Kidd and Rick Kennett have separately or in collaboration written more than a dozen Ghost Finder tales, the bulk of which are collected in No. 472 Cheyne Walk.

no. 472 cheyne walk

BALLPARK TOTAL: 15

grantstitch

John Linwood Grant, late as always, has written a number of Carnacki stories, and is in process of writing and getting published a rather larger number of his Tales of the Last Edwardian stories, which concern the activities (and fates) of the four men who listened to the Ghost Finder’s own recounting of his investigations all those years ago at Cheyne Walk.

a study in grey

BALLPARK TOTAL: 10

So from six authors alone, we have some 115 stories related to Carnacki. That’s not counting further works in the pipe-line, the Holmes/Carnacki crossovers mentioned at the start, or those writers who have written individual Carnacki stories for other anthologies. If we add Carnacki: The New Adventures, and Carnacki: The Lost Cases, anthologies edited and published by Sam Gafford, we have maybe another 25 entries by numerous authors.

samstitch

And we could add in David Langford’s excellent Carnacki parodies, with his character Dagon Smythe, for another 5.

We’re talking 150 or more stories which are either specifically Carnacki in action, or which continue his work in the early part of last century and reference him regularly. Given that the larger part of these were written a century after Hope Hodgson penned his original stories, we think we proved that The Second Great Detective deserves a certain amount of recognition.

It would be foolish not to point out that some of the above authors will be appearing in the forthcoming Occult Detective Quarterly – advertising rarely hurts – and that there may even be a story or two relevant to this article.

odqillo5occult detective quarterly kickstarter

If you support the Kickstarter, not only will you be in at the start with generous subscription offers, but there are some excellent rewards available, including an M S Corley mini-poster and FREE e-books from 18thWall Publications (see Kickstarter Updates), who have published both Joshua M Reynolds and the tragic John Linwood Grant.

Pledge now, and get happy…

scarlet

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