So, dear listener, we escape occult detectives only to find that we haven’t, not quite. We thought we’d have a look at the Sherlock Holmes themed issue of Mystery Weekly, share a 1904 parody by P G Wodehouse and mention more Conan Doyle trivia than you could possibly want, but in the process we found that one of the Mystery Weekly Holmes stories is itself an occult detective tale. There is a joyous doom upon us, we fear (see also our earlier article on pastiches – shades of sherlock holmes ).
In which we consider the Holmes pastiche, for better or for worse…
Holmes forced more of the vile Turkish tobacco into his pipe, wincing as he realised that yet again he was smoking the damnable stuff in order to keep up appearances.
“Despite the fact that you are secretly my half-brother, Watson, and that you were never in the Army, I have tolerated our acquaintance. However, your medical certificate (Failed) from Goa Community College is fooling no-one, and your relationship with ‘Mary’ is an embarrassment.”
I nodded, perhaps relieved that all was being exposed at last.
“And as for you, Lestrade,” the great man continued, “It is clear that you are a Nigerian prince only working within the British police force in order to transfer surprising amounts of money from bank accounts in your homeland. The talcum powder and gum arabic disguise is obvious to even the butcher’s boy – who is, by the way, a midget in the employ of some Oriental genius.”
Lestrade looked at me and sighed, wiping a sweaty hand across his face to reveal a swathe of his true colouration.
Holmes smiled.
“I am, however, a man who relies on empathy and wild hunches, as you know, so tedious deductive reasoning has no place here. I welcome you both as comrades, and am eager to continue our investigations into the supernatural. Carnacki and Silence be damned – let us surge forth and grapple with ectoplasm in our own right.”
He threw his pipe out of the window.
“Mrs Hudson – prepare the submersible. We are bound for Arkham and colonial madness!”
Hello there. Today we’re having an introductory look at the world of the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and considering what that term actually means. There are two reasons for doing this, apart from idle entertainment. The first is that I write Holmes stories, and often mull over the whys and wherefores of doing such a thing, so why not do it here? The second is that I do like weird stories as well, and Holmes is increasingly being used as a character in weird and supernatural fiction.
Holmes pastiches (artistic works in a style that imitate that of another work, artist, or period) aren’t at all new. For example, J M Barrie of Peter Pan fame wrote a pastiche in 1893, The Late Sherlock Holmes, and in 1913 an anonymous author wrote a Holmes novel, Sherlock Holmes saving Mr. Venizelos, concerning a Greek politician threatened with assassination at a 1912 conference in London.
But we’re here to look at the nature of pastiches , not to repeat lists which others have more ably researched and compiled. Personally, I’m a great enthusiast of accurate, canonical Holmes stories. To some extent those tales fit comfortably with my non-supernatural Edwardian tales of mystery and murder, such as A Loss of Angels.
The canon, the authentic body of work by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is important, because it offers an unprecedented single time-line for a major fictional character and his associates (we’re talking novels and short stories here, by the way. The world of comics, TV and film adaptations is too large to dare contemplating today).
I do like reading and writing Holmes stories which could have happened within that time-line, and within the framework of historical circumstances, characteristics and abilities laid out by Conan Doyle. This allows for a number of enjoyable challenges, such as:
David Marcum, an experienced writer, editor and scholar in this area, has devoted a lot of time to an extensive chronology of stories which fall within the canon.
He edits the very successful MX Books of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, and expressed some of his own views (and commented on the BBC TV version) in an interview on the website I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere last year:
the tangled skeins of sherlock holmes
Of course, if you disapprove of even canonical pastiches, there are still genuine period detectives and investigative mysteries a-plenty. Try The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (ed. Nick Rennison, 2013), or Shadows of Sherlock Holmes (ed. David Stuart Davies, 1998).
But back to our ramble. Where does this leave the deliberately non-canonical writer? How heretical might he or she be? Discounting the irreverent nature of our opening passage, there are a number of approaches which occasionally yield a good yarn. The most important question is whether or not to keep Holmes (and/or Watson), fully within character and within their range of abilities as described by Conan Doyle.
If you’re not going to stay anywhere near the originals, then it begs the question as to why you’re doing it. One obvious answer is The Brand – the name sells. Stick ‘Sherlock Holmes’ on a story and you have a few people automatically interested. But that’s a bit cheap. I’m tempted to say that you should cut loose at that point and write your own, individual period consulting detective with a proper name, background and set of characteristics. Why half-Holmes it when you’ve gone that far? Be original.
And what might you bear in mind if you write tales which are non-canonical but still contain a distinct Holmes? I’ve nothing against complete spoofs, which can be amusing. However, if you want to retain the Holmesian connection with any dignity, then some thought is needed (for those who take Holmes very seriously, please don’t jump on the messenger. This already happens and there’s inevitably more to come, so the stable door is no longer relevant).
Broadly, you end up with a range of options which include:
If you want to look at different approaches, then you could peruse books like The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (ed. John Joseph Adams, 2009), an anthology where notable authors explore mysterious and sometimes quite fantastical alternatives to the canon.
Combining a recognisable Holmes and the weird or supernatural is one of the most popular routes. An introduction to this area is the anthology Shadows over Baker Street (2003), edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan. It’s a mixed bag of stories from eighteen different authors which nevertheless has some very enjoyable moments. The Gaslight Arcanum (ed. Jeff Campbell and Charles Prepolec, 2011) is another more recent collection of uncanny tales.
By the way, Holmes’ most quoted comment on the supernatural is not quite as definite as some think. In The Hound of the Baskervilles he merely refers to his belief that normal investigative techniques and logical deduction would be of no use in supernatural cases.
“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.”
Giving in to temptation last year, I ended up with a curious compromise, and wrote a novella, A Study in Grey, which was historically accurate and included a canonical Holmes (nothing changed at all), but also contained a separate plot strand concerning genuine psychic issues. The intent, and possibly the result, was to leave the Great Detective unchallenged but allow the reader to experience that little bit more.
Others too numerous to name have gone further, some of them excellent authors in their own right. William Meikle, a master of the supernatural adventure tale who also contributed to The Gaslight Arcanum, has had the confidence to take a strong, recognisable Holmes and place him in weirder situations than Conan Doyle envisaged (as in Sherlock Holmes: Revenant, 2013), with more to come. Neil Gaiman himself produced one of the best known ‘weird Holmes pastiches’ in his story A Study in Emerald, which is in Shadows over Baker Street, also mentioned above.
Last Minute Addendum: We should also point out that Willie Meikle is ambidextrous in his Holmesian fiction – he has also written several canonical tales, in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES ABROAD, THE ASSOCIATES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, and the forthcoming SHERLOCK HOLMES’ SCHOOL FOR DETECTION.
I make no value judgements. As writers and readers we can choose pastiches which are canon or non-canon. We can even have both, if we’re wild enough.
If you prefer your Holmes straight, but still like detectives who investigate strange and supernatural mysteries, then the brand new Occult Detective Quarterly is launching this Autumn. See top right for more details.
And we’re done for today. Back in two or three days with something which will be entirely different, and don’t forget that you can sign up for free (top left) to be kept in the greydogtales loop…
Classic detectives are fun. And a bit weird. We love a stylish old mystery, and so today we enjoy ourselves and highlight three peculiar crime-solvers at once, with a serious nod to Sherlock Holmes in the process. Our tireless trio are Jacques Futrelle’s Augustus S F X Van Dusen, Edgar Wallace’s Mr J G Reeder and Roy Vickers’ Detective-Inspector Rason (in order of decreasing weirdness).
We’re going to start in the middle with our absolute favourite, Mr J G Reeder. It’s strange in a way that the character is so little known nowadays, as he stands out amongst his contemporaries in fiction. His creator Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was already known for his thrillers, and was prolific, being described as being able to write a full novel in three to four days. Prior to Wallace, most British thrillers had featured amateur or private detectives as their main protagonists – Wallace almost single-handedly popularised the use of a police officer as the main investigator.
J G Reeder is a former police investigator with considerable experience in money-related crimes such as forgery, counterfeiting and bank heists. Taking up a position in the Department of Public Prosecutions, he is assigned a number of cases where officials are rather stumped. The character was first introduced in Edgar Wallace’s novel Room 13, but really took off in a series of short stories published in 1925.
This might be seen as a standard set of crime stories for the period, except for the nature of Reeder himself. In appearance and surface behaviour, Reeder is a mild-mannered civil servant of nineteen twenties fiction, polite and unassuming, described at one point as looking more like a rabbit than a officer of the law. He speaks gently and tries not to stand out. His mind, however, is extraordinary. He himself puts it down to being able to think precisely as his opponents do.
“I have that perversion,” he said. “It is a terrible misfortune, but it is true. I see evil in everything… in dying roses, in horseshoes – in poetry even. I have the mind of a criminal. It is deplorable!”
The Poetical Policeman
The end result of his ‘criminal’ mind is that whilst the investigator is orthodox in every visible way, his approach to investigations is often highly unorthodox. The mysteries themselves are novel and quite interesting, but Reeder’s character elevates every tale.
It’s difficult to cherry-pick, but for us one of the most enjoyable is The Green Mamba, originally entitled The Dangerous Reptile. An ‘uncrowned emperor of the underworld’, Mo Liski is persuaded that Reeder must be taken down. The story which follows is a wonderful exercise in subtlety as the investigator misleads and misdirects everyone around him, a non-criminal mastermind at his finest.
“The world is full of sin and trouble,” he said, shaking his head sadly; “Both in high and low places vice is triumphant, and virtue thrust, like the daisies, underfoot. You don’t keep chickens, do you, Mr Liski?”
The dangerous reptile is, naturally, J G Reeder. If you want our secret opinion, Mr Reeder could probably have out-manouevred even Sherlock Holmes, but we shall never know. Our recommended Sleuth of the Week.
Associated trivia – The stories were turned into a UK TV series between 1969 and 1971, and rather well done. Doing an excellent job as Reeder was the actor Hugh Burden, who conveniently also starred in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, one of our favourite mummy films.
Wallace links to our own writing, as well. As a young man in the army he ended up South Africa during the Second Boer War. In 1898 he left the army to become correspondent for Reuters, then correspondent for ‘The Daily Mail’. He wrote a series published as ‘Unofficial Dispatches’, but due to his viewpoint and criticisms, Lord Kitchener removed Wallace’s credentials. Wallace was therefore operating at the same time that Henry Dodgson and Redvers Blake, lead characters in our short novel A Study in Grey, became disenchanted with aspects of the war, especially the concentration camps. And yes, Wallace and one of our characters did meet, but that’s for another story…
Our next detective, who has no first name, is not in J G Reeder’s class, but he and his cases are curious enough to deserve a mention today. His creator, William Edward Vickers (1889-1965) was an English mystery writer better known under his pen name Roy Vickers (he had five or six other pseudonyms as well).
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. 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).
The Department of Dead Ends is Scotland Yard’s dumping ground for unsolved mysteries – some serious, some mundane. It’s a classic cold case set-up, with the expectation that most will never be looked at again or ever solved. The set-up is described as:
“…that repository of files which were never completed, of investigations without a clue and clues which led nowhere. From time to time, quite illogically, Inspector Rason finds a connection between happenings in the outside world and the objects in his Scotland Yard museum, a rubber trumpet, maybe, or a bunch of red carnations. Then events move inexorably to their appointed end.”
The central investigator, Detective Inspector Rason, is not a character on whom to dwell for too long, although the stories are themselves interesting. He’s neither as clever nor as ruthless as Mr Reeder. Instead, he acts as a collector of trivia, one who sees tiny links between people and items. Some of his cases are solved entirely by accident, or via an afterthought.
These are not detailed forensic investigations where science and team effort prevail. Rason might hear something in a corridor, and remember an item on a shelf. And that’s it. It’s an unusual way of doing things, and Vickers emphasises the random nature of existence above all else. The most casual action or incident in one town on an unimportant day might easily link to an horrific crime elsewhere a week or a year later. The connections are sometimes ingenious, and might make you worry a little if you’re a career criminal. Did you leave a discarded ticket on a train three years ago?
Although Vickers wrote over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories, it was on the basis of the Department of Dead Ends that he developed a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished writer of inverted mysteries. You’ll probably have to find this lot second-hand nowadays.
‘One of the half-dozen successful books of detective short stories published since the days of Sherlock Holmes.’ Manchester Evening News
Finally, the earliest and most weird of our three sleuths. If there is a cold, calculating challenger to Holmes, one who shares his irascibility, his disdain for others, and his logical bent, then it is Professor August S F X Van Dusen – also known as The Thinking Machine and in the press, ‘the American Sherlock Holmes’.
Van Dusen was the creation of Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912), an American writer and journalist. Rather tragically, Futrelle died on the Titanic after insisting his wife take her place in one of the lifeboats. Despite having written a number of novels, he is best known for his tales of Van Dusen, who is in some ways a monstrous central character – Holmes with less redeeming features. Our sleuth this time is no Holmes in appearance, either:
“he was slender with the droop of the student in his thin shoulders and the pallour of a close, sedentary life on his clean-shaven face. His eyes wore a perpetual, forbidding squint – the squint of a man who studies little things – and when they could be seen at all through his thick spectacles, were mere slits of watery blue. But above his eyes was his most striking feature. This was a tall, broad brow, almost abnormal in height and width, crowned by a heavy shock of bushy, yellow hair.”
The Problem of Cell 13
Where Holmes had his Watson, Professor Van Dusen had journalist Hutchinson Hatch, perhaps drawn from Futrelle’s experience working for the Atlanta Journal.
Acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author Harlan Ellison says of Van Dusen, in his introduction to the 2003 collection of Thinking Machine stories:
“This irascible genius, this diminutive egghead scientist, known to the world as “The Thinking Machine,” is no less than the newly rediscovered literary link between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe: Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who—with only the power of ratiocination—unravels problems of outrageous criminous activity in dazzlingly impossible settings.”
It’s tempting to think that Ellison, who is sometimes described as an irascible genius himself, felt a certain bond with Van Dusen.
Some of the short stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and the Boston American. They’re a mixed bunch, and some are exercises in the most unlikely uses of logic, to the point of being rather unbelievable. If you ever questioned Holmes’ ability to make logical deductions from limited evidence, then you can have a field day here. The most widely anthologised tale, The Problem of Cell 13 (1905), relies on a chain of arrangements and events which stretch credibility about as far as you can go.
They’re still rather enjoyable, though. Because of their age, the full text of many of the stories can be found at:
And Amazon UK has a Futrelle mega-pack available for Kindle, containing 47 of Futrelle’s stories.
Van Dusen is odd enough to have cropped up in other media a few times. The professor appeared in two episodes of the excellent 1970s Thames Television series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
In those episodes (in the second series of Rivals), the marvellous Douglas Wilmer portrayed Van Dusen in “Cell 13” and “The Superfluous Finger.”
This is rather appropriate, as Wilmer played Sherlock Holmes himself in the first series of the UK sixties production of Holmes’ exploits, filmed in black and white. Peter Cushing was to take the role for the second series, this time in colour. Despite much criticism of production problems by both actors, Wilmer is actually a rather good Sherlock.
In addition, the character appeared in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel Nemo: Heart of Ice (20130. Van Dusen aids explorer Janni Nemo when she encounters H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods in Antarctica.
So have a squint at some of the above stories, and see what you think.
In a couple of days on greydogtales – we don’t know. We’re not detectives…