Another Scandal in Bohemia (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes)

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  “Did he—tell you nothing else?”

  “What else is there to tell, Irene? I was pleased to be informed of his involvement in the entire affair.” I glanced at Godfrey. “Quentin was the man in the tinted glasses who left us the guidebook, can you imagine that?” I eyed Irene again. “And I was not too angry that you and Allegra had seen Quentin first and didn’t tell me of his presence, or even confirm that the poor man was truly alive.”

  Irene was speechless. Godfrey took that rare opportunity to excuse himself and leave the parlor.

  “How was your and Godfrey’s holiday?” I asked.

  “Sublime! Vienna is as enchanting as it is reputed to be. We drove, we walked, we ate, we talked, we waltzed, we went out to the theater, we stayed in—everything was sublime.”

  Her eyes rested knowingly on me. “Much truth pertains to the fact that one most treasures what one most is in danger of losing, or fears that one is.”

  “Indeed, danger as well as absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  Irene leaned avidly forward on her chair. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, how did you learn the truth of that aphorism.”

  “From acute and constant observation, Irene. You know that I keep a diary.”

  “Of course I do! And what is in it since your return from Prague.”

  “I am shocked. My diary is private unless I choose to share it with you.”

  “And you do not choose to share your most recent... adventures alone, with me?”

  I smiled and rolled yarn. “Just as you do not wish to share with Godfrey the information that Quentin’s contact in the Foreign Office is a Mr. Mycroft Holmes—”

  “I did not know that!” Irene interrupted in high dudgeon.

  “Neither did I until Quentin told me. But I do not imagine that you will tell Godfrey that, nor will you tell him that Sherlock Holmes was in contact with Quentin during the scheme to abstract the false King from Bohemia.”

  Irene sat back, deep in the upholstered chair. “No. Godfrey has enough to worry about.”

  “Tatyana,” I said. “You must worry about her as well.”

  “And what of Quentin, then?” Irene demanded with a trace of petulance.

  “I will worry about Quentin.”

  Irene flounced up and regarded me like a woman who, had she the equipment, would twitch her tail. “I must find Sophie and see what her aunt has in mind for supper. I am famished, and if I cannot be fed news, I will have to make do with food.”

  I smiled as she left the room. I was still smiling when Godfrey peeked in a few minutes later.

  “Where is Irene?” he asked.

  “Sulking in the back garden, no doubt, and contemplating the leeks.”

  “You are not angry about our last slight deception, Nell?”

  I laid my work down and looked up at him. “How could I be angry at such a reunion; though I was a bit... distraught at the suddenness of it.”

  “Nothing that Stanhope couldn’t handle, though?” Godfrey asked, a twinkle in his pewter-colored eyes.

  “You know that there is nothing that Quentin cannot handle, Godfrey.”

  “And nothing that our dear Miss Huxleigh cannot handle,” he added, looking at me so carefully that I blushed.

  I resumed my winding task. “We shall have to see about our dear Miss Huxleigh in due time.”

  CODA

  The alert and faithful reader will have realized by now that these excerpts from the diaries of Penelope Huxleigh are notable for their lack of corroboration with the assembled tales known as the Canon of Sherlock Holmes.

  Except for the fact that Holmes himself stated his connection with the French family name of Vernet, not a particle of evidence in this document verifies the events Miss Huxleigh describes.

  Holmes claimed as a relation Emile Jean Horace Vernet, a painter of the martial scenes so popular with the French, who lived from 1789 to 1863. Since Vernet’s sister was Holmes’s grandmother, Emile would have been Holmes’s great-uncle. His son, Emile Charles Hyppolyte (182I-1900), was a landscape painter, but Holmes makes no mention of contact with any member of this artistic family. Marie Augustine Vernet (1825-98) could have been Emile’s daughter or niece, but history has blurred the page that carried the specifics of that particular family tree, especially as regards its female members.

  (The Vernet reference occurs in the memoir called “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” which is dated to the 1880s. "Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms,” Holmes commented after mentioning his French connection to Dr. Watson.)

  The whereabouts of Holmes and even Dr. Watson during the time of this escapade are also vague, and neither prove nor disprove the issue. Holmes dispensed with the case of “The Greek Interpreter” in mid-September of that year, and was not presumably involved in other cases at year’s end.

  The Ripper case that Holmes and Watson discuss so briefly was to become the crime of that century and the next and remains officially unsolved to this day, entering a third century of continued speculation. (Those interested in an astounding unofficial solution to the identity of history’s most notorious serial killer are referred to subsequent volumes of Miss Huxleigh’s diaries, Chapel Noir and Castle Rouge, edited by myself.)

  The Holmes Canon makes no mention that the London detective ever investigated or even commented upon the Whitechapel atrocities, an omission that now seems sinister in the light of events related in the previously cited books.

  Nor can any careful historian prove the substitution of a double for the true King of Bohemia for a period of months in 1888. (In fact, the entire point of the incidents described in this portion of the diaries is the seamless accomplishment of a discreet restoration of the proper royal order.) Certainly the matters related here tally with what is known of Russian colonial ambitions both in the exotic East and in Eastern Europe.

  As for the intriguing and shameless woman known only as Tatyana, the single name (as likely a pseudonym as “Sable”) guarantees that she will remain a historical mystery.

  Again, there is precedence. Russian ballerinas of the nineteenth century were often the mistresses of wealthy and noble men, even of the czar. Nor was it unknown for them to engage in spy work on their wide travels with various performing companies.

  The age of the female dancer/choreographer was dawning in the 1890s, even as global unrest encouraged great nations to call upon unusual persons for supposedly patriotic purposes. Not many years later another dancer/spy would become notorious enough to remain a historical byword of both of her professions, although under a pseudonym: Mata Hari.

  Fiona Witherspoon, Ph.D., AIA*

  November 5, 1993

  *Advocates of Irene Adler

  ANOTHER SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA

  READER’S 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

  "With Good Night, Mr. Holmes Douglas ushered in a 1990’s explosion of women-centered history-mystery, reschooling us about the ornery presence of women in both social and literary history.”—JO ELLYN CLAREY, THEY DIED IN VAIN

  ABOUT THIS READERS GROUP GUIDE

  To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas’ 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. The author interview, biography, and bibliography at the end will aid discussion as well.

  Set in the 1880-1889 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, Transylvania, and later the U.S. 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’ portrayal of “this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her ind
ependent way,” noted the New York Times, recasts her “not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time.”

  In Douglas’ 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 pre-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

  Another Scandal in Bohemia is the fourth Irene Adler novel. It opens in 1888 in Paris, where the newly wedded Irene and her barrister husband Godfrey have fled after eluding the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in London. Irene’s loyal companion—spinster and parson’s daughter Nell Huxleigh—has joined the couple in their rural retreat near Paris. While the worldly Irene relishes her new Paris home, Nell remains true to the time’s limited expectations of a Victorian woman and fears the corrupting Parisian influence on British rectitude. However, the mystifying and the murderous follow Irene wherever she goes, or she finds them.

  The murder of a humble bead girl at the great Paris fashion house of Worth draws Irene an international plot to reshape the map of Europe. It also draws her back to the one place she should not go... Prague, which she once fled to escape its possessive king. Yet Irene can’t resist a mystery, even one of the heart. As she’s drawn into the plight of Queen Clotilde, her successor in the King’s life, she finds much is rotten in the state of Bohemia. While Irene, her dashing barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, and everyone’s favorite Victorian spinster, Nell Huxleigh, careen from Paris salons to Prague castles and beer gardens, Holmes is just behind with an agenda of his own. Before the adventure ends, thrones will tremble, the mystical clay monster of Prague called the Golem will walk, and Irene will confront her deadliest opponent.

  1. The new title is taken from “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first Sherlock Holmes story that introduced the American opera singer named Irene Adler.

  In this fourth novel, Irene faces snobbery from the great ladies of Paris, but wins out. What weapons does she employ to shrug off their vindictiveness? The great French couturier, Worth, started out as an English drapery clerk who slept under a counter at night. What do the Irene Adler novels say about class and various characters’ “worth”.

  2. Why is Irene both puzzled and tempted by the new Queen of Bohemia’s confession that the King, her husband, hasn’t consummated their marriage. Why does she risk her own marriage to investigate? Is it a matter of vanity? Or her intense curiosity? Or something else?

  3. Like Worth, the Rothschilds banking family has risen from poverty-stricken beginnings to great influence and wealth. In their case they also faced prejudice against the Jews. Is their political role in Europe and beyond surprising? How have they treated the women in the family? In a scene that could be out of a fairytale, Irene, Godfrey and Nell are each given a gift. How do their various treasures reflect their pasts and reference their future? Irene lost her lifelong career at the beginning of the series in Good Night, Mr. Holmes. Will working for the Rothschilds formalize her new career, detection? Sherlock Holmes has worked for crowned heads before the King of Bohemia. Is he also an “extraordinary ordinary man” that Irene describes Godfrey as?

  4. Like Holmes, Irene has a flair for disguise and the dramatic. Having been an opera singer, which is a physically taxing career beyond mere acting, does she tend to investigate as a writer/director/performer in schemes of her own invention? How does her “grande opera” mentality lead her astray? Does she recognize her tendency to “overplay” her hand? What role does Nell play the scheme of things? What flaws does Doyle’s “superwoman” have in this incarnation? How do the other characters point them out?

  5. The Golem of Prague is a figure of Jewish folklore and one of more modern horror that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. Why does the presumed monster invoke both pity and fear in film incarnations? Does the part he plays in this novel hark back to nineteenth–century novels that came after Frankenstein?

  6. Doyle made Irene Adler bright, beautiful, and daring... and promptly killed her in the literary sense, for the story that celebrates her also introduces her as “the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” Douglas had to resurrect her and explain the apparent death to continue her story, and her relationship to Sherlock Holmes. Does the fact that Irene Adler is an renaissance woman—intelligent, artistically gifted, courageous—make her less appealing? Is she any less or more extravagant in her gifts than Sherlock Holmes? Do people resent in women what they accept in men? Do women particularly do this to other women? Is that why Nell Huxleigh, the more conventional recorder, is a reader favorite? And why Watson is regarded with more affection if not admiration than Holmes? Do superheroes whether Holmes or Adler, Mr. Spock or Xena the Warrior Princess, need sidekicks we can identify with to humanize them? What other superheroes does our culture offer? How many are women as opposed to men? Do you have any?

  FOR DISCUSSION OF THIS 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 re-evaluate 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 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? She not only embodies the limited lives of “proper” Victorian women, but she despises anything “French” to a ridiculous degree. The English and the French have a centuries-long history of mutual dislike, but why is Nell so xenophobic? 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 limited opinions?

  3. Douglas chose to blend humor with the 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 other writers and novelists can you think of who 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, and as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

  5. Chapel Noir, the series’ fifth novel, makes several references to Dracula through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before his novel actually was published. Stoker is also a continuing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, includin
g Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modem genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late-nineteenth century produced not only Dracula and Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and the surviving dinosaurs of The Lost World, but Trilby and Svengali, The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, some of 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.