Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 7

by Marvin Kaye

  H: Why do you think that is?

  CE: Well, my mind was relaxed. The very act of running always jolts something loose in my brain. I would get my best ideas while jogging or mountain climbing or riding my bike up there. Of course, I was engaged all day long in struggling with the problems of writing the book, so my brain was primed, as it were, to come up with solutions, but I was always struck by how those solutions would present themselves at the most unexpected time. In this case, I didn’t even know I was looking for a big twist at the end until it popped into my head. But the minute it did, there was no question about it: I recognized the rightness of it.

  H: How do you balance being a novelist and playwright? Is it hard moving back and forth?

  CE: Actually, I find it refreshing. I feel like some stories are just begging to be plays, while others really need the pages of a novel in order to be properly explored. And then others strike me as screenplays. For instance, I just finished a screenplay about magicians. The title is The Assistant.

  H: Doesn’t each form have its own challenges?

  CE: Absolutely. Transition in a screenplay is a whole different technique than transition in a novel, or even a play. But I find it stimulating to move between the different forms. In a novel you have so much space, you can gas on about this and that (within reason, of course), whereas a screenplay is like an epic poem—so condensed, so streamlined. It’s story in its most essential form. And you have to think visually, which is great discipline for someone like me. I think one of the greatest dangers to a writer, by definition someone who loves language, is to be drunk with words. Danger, Will Robinson! That can lead to undisciplined, flaccid writing. Screenplay forces you out of that quickly; you’re always looking how to condense, condense, condense. And when you’re writing a play you have to show everything through dialogue and character interaction. I think it helps you to write better scenes when you’re working in prose fiction. You try to make your dialogue character-specific and pithy, just as you would in writing a play.

  H: You write music, too, isn’t that right?

  CE: Yes. I was trained as a classical pianist and singer, and Anthony Moore, my boyfriend at the time, was a composer. (His great uncle was Douglas Moore, the opera composer). Tony had a show done at Yale School of Drama, and he taught me how to do music manuscript so I could help him transcribe songs. One day about a year later I decided to write a musical, a kind of Faustian tale, and I just sat down at my piano and wrote a song. I called him out at his house in Cutchogue and played it for him over the phone. There was this long silence and I thought he hated it, but then he said, “That’s really good. It’s really interesting.” And I knew it was something I could do. I grew up playing the Great Composers, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc., so it never occurred to me until then that was something I could do. I thought they lived on a whole other plane of existence—which was only reinforced by my classical training. I never studied theory or anything like that, but when Tony said he liked my song, I knew it was something I could do. He is a very gifted composer, so I trusted his judgment. And the only thing I enjoy more than writing is writing music. It is an amazingly joyous and completely engaging, sensual thing to do. I’ve written four complete musicals and am working on a new one, 31 Bond Street, about a real life murder that took place in the 19th century on Bond Street in New York. It was the O.J. Simpson of its time: a media circus, and was referred to as The Crime of the Century. Jack Finney has written a very good nonfiction book about it called Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories.

  H: You mentioned Shakespeare a few times. Is there anything special you would like to say about him?

  CE: Oh, well, you know, he’s the Big Kahuna, isn’t he? What can you say . . . the man wrote the most exquisite poetry, dealt with The Big Questions in a way rarely equaled. My only consolation is that he wrote some real stinkers. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a wretched, boring play. Thank god.

  H: Are there any questions or topics about you, your book, and your life that you would wish to stay away from?

  CE: No, my life is an open book. Ha.

  SHERLOCK’S BIG FINISH, conducted by M J Elliott

  AN INTERVIEW WITH NICHOLAS BRIGGS

  There is no doubt that Nicholas Briggs loves the Sherlock Holmes tales. Known around the world as the voice of the Daleks in the phenomenally successful television revival of Doctor Who, he also masterminds a range of Who audio productions released by the company Big Finish. Briggs writes, directs and performs in many of the dramas (which are available as CDs or downloads from the Big Finish website), appearing alongside the stars of the original series. With 168 Doctor Who releases available at the time of writing, you’d think he would have enough on his plate ... but the allure of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes is just too strong.

  “I think there are some similarities,” Briggs observes, “because the Doctor and Holmes in many ways fulfil the same function in the plots of their respective genres. And quite often, Doctor Who stories feel a bit like Sherlock Holmes stories in the sense that some terrible thing has happened and the Doctor comes in to solve the mystery, and, of course, that’s what Sherlock Holmes does. I’ve always seen Doctor Who as a kind of mystery thriller, and I think it works brilliantly when it’s like that. Quite often, my Doctor Who audios follow that mystery thriller format. That is the similarity, and the fact that Holmes is this very singular person, slightly obsessive, with all that information in his brain, and again that’s similar to the Doctor.”

  Big Finish began its association with Holmes when it produced recordings of David Stuart Davies’s one-man plays, Sherlock Holmes—The Last Act and The Death and Life of Sherlock Holmes (the one man in question being actor Roger Llewellyn, who has toured the world with both productions and re-created them in the studio for Big Finish). But for their third audio drama, Briggs took the role of Holmes in a multi-cast production of Holmes and the Ripper, another adaptation of a stage play, this one written by Brian Clemens, architect of the Emma Peel era of The Avengers. Having already starred in a revival of the production, this was the natural début for the Briggs incarnation of the world’s greatest detective, alongside Richard Earl as his faithful Doctor Watson.

  In the gap between this series and the next, there followed a dramatisation of one of Conan Doyle’s most famous stories, The Speckled Band, narrated in large part by Earl (who plays both Watson and the villainous Grimesby Roylott). Briggs explains: “That’s what gave me the idea to do this series like this—to take out all the ‘he said’s and ‘she said’s, but still keep the narration as a very important part. I just wanted to see how that went, and we had a lot of fun with it. I wanted this to feel as authentic as possible, especially in the light of the BBC’s new Sherlock series (which I really love). But I wanted people who want really proper authentic Sherlock Holmes to have the opportunity to hear dramatised versions. I don’t even want to put an extra twist in it, or find a clever way of adapting them. I want, in the case of the Conan Doyle ones, the Conan Doyle voice—I want Watson narrating, I want it to be as authentic as possible.” The narration is a very important element for Briggs: “When you’ve got an audio, you have to find ways of telling the story differently, and if you can’t have Watson’s voice narrating, you probably have to bend the plot a bit to make things clearer, which is a valid approach. But we don’t need to do that, we’re being more straightforward. I felt in my gut that was the right thing to do—not by thinking ‘What am I going to do with Sherlock Holmes?’. Let’s give a portal for Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to speak through. And even with the stuff that isn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we’ll still do it in that style.”

  The second full series of Sherlock Holmes audio dramas by Big Finish begins with Briggs’s own adaptation of The Final Problem and The Empty House, featuring Alan Cox—a former Watson in Barry Levinson’s 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes—as Professor Moriarty. I visited the studios during the recording of another Conan Doy
le classic, The Hound of the Baskervilles. “So many people remember The Hound of the Baskervilles because it kind of has a monster in it,” Briggs tells me. “And it’s a great title, isn’t it?” For this production, he has assembled a reliable, highly professional cast he can rely upon to convey the authentic Holmesian atmosphere in a relatively brisk recording session. “I’ve got together a bunch of actors I know can do it this way, more or less continually recording. I think Richard Dinnock has done a really good job of adapting it. All the major plot points are there, we all have our little favourite bits, and there are a couple of things that aren’t in there. But the plot is all there, and it rockets along.” Briggs is no stranger to The Hound either, having adapted it for the stage some years earlier, with Samuel Clemens (son of Holmes and the Ripper author Brian) as Sir Henry Baskerville, a role he recreates in this audio version. “It was about Watson putting a play on,” Briggs recalls, “to which he’d invited Holmes to last rehearsals, and wanted Holmes to play Holmes, to see if it was all authentic. So I brought Holmes back on during the long period when Watson was in Devonshire, and have him ask awkward questions about the plot: ‘If you were supposed to be looking after Sir Henry Baskerville, why did you go off to the postmaster?’ For the Big Finish production, many of those awkward questions are avoided by the simple act of removing the final explanatory scene in Baker Street. “When you get to the end and the Hound’s been killed, and you think, more or less, that Stapleton’s gone, and Beryl has been treated so badly and Sir Henry is a mess, it feels fulfilling and that it’s the end of the story. You don’t miss that explanation in dramatic terms.”

  But this second series is not made up entirely of Canonical adaptations. Coming in between the Moriarty saga and The Hound is The Reification of Hans Gerber. “It’s an entirely original script that I asked George Mann to do,” says Briggs. “George has written lots of stuff for the Black Library, and he’s very good at Victorian pastiche. He put himself forward very early on, and suggested a story which I liked, which had an interesting twist. He’s written something very much in the style of Conan Doyle, and very much in the style of all of them in this little series—there’s a lot of Watson’s voice.”

  Rounding off the second series is a dramatisation of David Stuart Davies’s 1992 novel The Tangled Skein, which sees the most famous fictional detective of all time battling the most famous vampire, Count Dracula. The adaptation is again by Richard Dinnock, and its placement immediately after The Hound is entirely intentional, for Skein serves as a semi-sequel to the Conan Doyle classic. It would be unfair to those unfamiliar with Davies’s novel to go into further details here—instead, I advise you to purchase them both. Dealing as it does with an undead adversary, we are going further into the realm of the fantastic than usual. Has Briggs ever considered an encounter between Holmes and the Doctor? “I was never tempted to do that, not at all. In Doctor Who, everything else we know of as fictional is fictional. So in the world of Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes is fictional. It might be a difficult one. It’s not a priority for me to do that.”

  And what does the future hold for Sherlock Holmes in the very capable hands of Mr Briggs? “I want to see what our audience likes best. I would like to carry on doing a mixture of adaptations and original stuff as well, getting other writers to come up with entirely new Holmes stories which feel like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” For the time being, though, the masterly first series of adventures can be obtained by visiting www.bigfinish.com.

  CARTOON, by Andrew Toos

  THE ROOTS OF THE PSYCHIC DETECTIVE IN FICTION, by Lee Weinstein

  I

  I sat on a stool in the cluttered laboratory beneath my basement apartment. It was chilly enough to make me wear a robe, but the dozen or so candles burning around the room made it look warm. The phone book lay on the table in front of me.

  I stared at my ad in the Yellow Pages. It read:

  HARRY DRESDEN—WIZARD

  Lost items found. Paranormal investigations.

  Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates.

  No Love Potions, Endless Purses,

  Parties or Other Entertainment.

  This excerpt from a vignette on Jim Butcher’s website introduces us to his popular character, Harry Dresden, a hardboiled detective who also happens to be a wizard.

  He is the protagonist of a continuing series of novels, The Dresden Files, which began in 2000. He is also one of the more recent variations on the psychic or occult detective, a familiar figure in the annals of horror fiction for over a century; a figure that assumes many forms in today’s literature. Afficionados of dark fantasy may be familiar with such classical characters as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin.

  But in recent years, psychic detectives have come in all shapes and sizes from the hardboiled Harry Dresden to TV FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of The X Files fame to renegade reporter Carl Kolchak. There’s the series by Rick Kennett about Ernie Pine, the reluctant ghost hunter (1988-1992), the Charlie Goode stories by Steve Rasnic Tem (1991), the John Taylor character in the Nightside series, starting in 2003, described by its author, Simon R. Green, as the fantasy equivalent of James Bond, and the female supernatural sleuth, Penelope Pettiweather (1990-1995), by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.

  The recent anthology, Those who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives (2011) edited by Justin Gustainis, contains 14 original stories by writers associated with urban fantasy and paranormal romance, such as Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman, and Gustainis himself, an author who has written about the character Quincy Morris, the great grandson of the character in Dracula.

  But, back before the days of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, the supernatural sleuth has had a long history. This type of character, an investigator who approaches the supernatural using knowledge and logic, has evolved from a familiar model, that of Sherlock Holmes.

  Tracing the evolution of this character back through time reveals a number of characters who stand out in the history of this sub-genre. One of the last series before the modern era were the Lucius Leffing stories by Joseph Payne Brennan, which were written in and set in the 1970’s but had a distinctly Victorian air about them. Leffing’s adventures were chronicled by none other than Joseph Payne Brennan, who cast himself as a character in these stories, as Leffing’s Watson figure, a common element to most of these series. Many of them were non-supernatural mysteries, appearing in such places as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, but a number involved genuine hauntings of various sorts.

  Another series, along slightly different lines, was the Titus Crow series of novels and short stories by Brian Lumley. These appeared from 1970 to 1989. The series was part of the Chthulhu Mythos and Crow was a character who went up against Lovecraftian entities rather than conventional folkloric antagonists.

  Manly Wade Wellman’s stories about John the Balladeer appeared from the early 60’s into the 1980’s. John was a backwoods minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar, who wandered through the Appalachians encountering and defeating supernatural menaces. Wellman also wrote a series about John Thunstone, a more traditional type of psychic detective.whose adventures appeared in Weird Tales magazine starting in the 1940’s. He was a larger-than-life, independently wealthy investigator who sometimes carried a swordcane forged by a saint and dealt with both traditional occult menaces and a few that Wellman had invented for the series such as the humanoid Shonokins.

  Also featured in Weird Tales, but more well-known, was Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, who appeared in something like 90 stories between 1925 and 1951 and was one of the most popular series to run in Weird Tales magazine. Quinn was the magazine’s most popular writer. De Grandin was a French physician and expert on the occult who lived in Harrisonville, New Jersey. He was assisted by Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, who acted as his Watson figure. Robert Weinberg notes in the entry for the series in Survey of Fantasy Literature (1983) that in these stories Quinn was b
reaking away from the purely supernatural by incorporating advances in science. Thus in one story a ghost is dissipated by means of a radioactive substance that de Grandin uses as a weapon.

  A slightly different sort of occult detective was created by Sax Rohmer (Arthur Sarsfield Ward) of Fu Manchu fame. Morris Klaw was an mysterious elderly-appearing man who solved non-supernatural crimes by psychic means. The stories, which appeared in magazines from 1913 to 1920 were collected as The Dream Detective (1920). He would sleep at the scene of the crime on an “odically sterilized” pillow and clues would present themselves in his dreams. (Odic force was a vital force akin to electromagnetism which was hypothesized in the mid-19th century. ) Klaw’s adventures are narrated by his chronicler, a Mr. Searles, There were originally 9 stories, to which a tenth was added in later editions.

  And then there was The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1926) by Dion Fortune (Violet Mary Firth) who was a member of the occultist organization The Order of the Golden Dawn, as was Rohmer. This was a British organization which was extremely influential in occultist belief in the twentieth century. Dr. John Richard Taverner is a psychiatrist and occultist who runs a nursing home, and his cases are narrrated by his Watson, Dr. Eric Rhodes. The cases, were, according to the author, composites based on true occurrances, and Taverner himself was based on Fortune’s mentor, a man ironically named Moriarity, William Moriarty. His cases involved possession, vampirism and other occult problems.