Elementary, My Dear Holmes!

The new issue of Mysterical-E is now up after a delay, and I'm back with a column I wrote back in November. The column is entitled Elementary, My Dear Holmes! and you can find it here. In the column I take a very general look at some notable Holmesian pastiches, both good and not-so-good. I spell out my conclusions about Sherlock and its American derivative, Elementary, and why one show gets Holmes so right and the other gets Holmes so wrong. 

Note: Unfortunately there are no accompanying images to break up the block of text, but some day I will reprint the article on here complete with illustrations.

The Beasts of Holmes

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Sherlock Holmes stories are the untold stories. For as long as I can remember I have been a fan of Holmes. I was very young when I read my first three adventures—I ‘m positive that two of them were The Norwood Builder and The Speckled Band, and I think the third may have been The Red-Headed League. One of the things that’s always intrigued me, though, are the references Watson makes to some of Holmes’ other adventures.

And it turns out I’m not alone in this. Many authors have tried expanding on these references, one of the most famous collections being The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. It’s a collaboration between Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, with the two men sharing the writing duties on the first six stories and Conan Doyle writing the final six on his own – the quality takes a nosedive after the first half, but some of the stories in the first half are absolute gems. But is it mere coincidence that some of the most fascinating references involve animals?

Think about it. There’s the Giant Rat of Sumatra, a mythical beast that sounds so awesome, I can’t resist capitalising its name (even though it appears in lowercase in the canon). There’s the affair involving the politician, the lighthouse, and the cormorant. There’s that mysterious worm unknown to science, and the sinister-sounding red leech. All of these sound like terrific ideas for Holmes stories… but unfortunately, Sir Arthur never got around to them. But the next-best thing is available in French: René Reouven’s Le Bestiaire de Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes’ Bestiary). In this book, Reouven tackles Sherlock Holmes as only he can, and he delivers four stories about various animals that are referred to throughout the canon.

"At the Scene of the Crime" celebrates two years online!

Wow.

Honestly, that's all I can say. I opened up a Blogger account and created At the Scene of the Crime two years ago today. Long-time readers might recall that my debut post was a video review, to date the only one I've done. It's also one of my very worst reviews, and I'm surprised that after a video like that I wasn't chased off the Internet by a group of irate readers armed with knives and pitchforks.

But no, the mystery blogging community is a very forgiving one, and I soon found myself doing reviews on a regular basis. I've re-discovered some old favourites, and I've found new ones. I became an avid e-book reader thanks to The Mysterious Press. I've gained an appreciation for subgenres that I may have marginalized before starting this blog. I got to virtually meet some authors that I've admired tremendously, such as Paul Halter, Peter Lovesey, and René Reouven. I finally met my match in Harry Stephen Keeler. I re-read the entire James Bond series. I've finally discovered a story about the giant rat of Sumatra that has left me satisfied! (Tune in for that within the next week.) I grew a beard and shaved it off. The blog went through two major redesigns. I even started getting enough spam comments to be forced to remove Anonymous commenting! (I apologize to all users who do not wish to sign up for a Google account, but the spam was rapidly getting out of control one week, and it was all coming from anonymous spammers. I think I removed all traces of their visits, but if you spot one of their comments lying around feel free to let me know.) In general, the last two years have been a bit of a crazy ride.

Thank you for everyone who stops in to read this blog! Your encouragement, as well as the discussions we've had (both agreements and disagreements), have helped to fuel my enthusiasm for the last two years.

Last year, to commemorate my one-year anniversary, I held a month-long celebration full of crossover reviews and articles. However, I realized that I had no way to top such a performance this year. So I decided early on that I had no intention to try. Instead, I decided to commemorate this anniversary in a smaller way. I began earlier today by posting my review of Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the very first James Bond continuation that I've read.

The second part of the celebration has been a long time coming: it's the second episode of Fair and Foul Play. This was delayed by exams and by the blog redesign, and I hope readers will forgive me. I didn't intend to have such a delay between the two parts of an episode, and it won't happen with the next episode. There might, however, be a longer delay between episodes, i.e. the end of episode 1 and the start of episode 2.

But to return to the subject at hand, I hope you will enjoy listening to the conclusion of the "mysteries in audio" segment of Fair and Foul Play. In this conclusion, I rejoin Sergio for a discussion that picks up where we left off discussing audiobooks, radio plays, and other mysteries set in the world of audio. Due to some tech issues, the images I used to illustrate the video all disappeared and I cannot explain why, but the audio itself is intact. I therefore suggest listening to this video as though it were a radio broadcast, which is only appropriate considering the subject matter. (And hopefully YouTube will be more co-operative next time!) I made some minor tweaks to the opening credits, but the show's format remains unchanged.

What a Twist!

Jeffery Deaver is an internationally acclaimed thriller author with whose work I am unfamiliar. But I know this much about him: he’s one of the many authors to try his hand at a James Bond pastiche. I’ve never read any of them, having confined my Bond reading to the original Ian Fleming novels. But I was open to the idea. After all, I read plenty of Sherlock Holmes pastiches back in the day and enjoyed them fine, what’s so different in concept about a James Bond pastiche? And so I approached Deaver’s Carte Blanche with some real hope. I was expecting a solid read.

Basically, Carte Blanche is Bond in modern day. Some signals are intercepted and the secret service finds out that Some Villains are behind a Nefarious Plot. Bond’s mission is to stop it, of course, but that doesn’t mean he can’t romance the beautiful ladies he comes across, and it sure doesn’t stop our villains from being over-the-top and dramatic. Our villain is Severan Hydt, a Dutch-born megalomaniac whose everyday cover is that of an environmentalist, running a waste disposal corporation. He also gets his jollies while viewing dead corpses. His sidekick is Niall Dunne, an Irishman from Belfast who thinks of everything and is the deadliest villain Bond has faced since the last Irishman in From Russia with Love.

Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man

Daisy Harker ought to be grateful for the kind of life she is leading. Her husband is attentive and loving and he even has a good relationship with his mother-in-law, who lives nearby. By all accounts, Daisy should be basking in glory, having attained the American Dream. Her life couldn’t possibly get any better. But Daisy happens to be in a Margaret Millar novel, and she’s about to discover that her life has many secrets completely unknown to her. This is Millar’s A Stranger in My Grave.

It all starts with a nightmare. In this nightmare, Daisy discovers that she is dead. While walking her dog, she came across her own headstone in the cemetery, giving her date of death in 1955. But why should that be? Daisy is very much alive, and cannot recall anything special about the day in question. Her husband tells her to forget about it, and her mother does the same. But then Daisy’s estranged father gives her a call. He asks her to pay a man named Steve Pinata, who has just bailed him out of prison.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy...

Katie Lennox is a teenager from modern-day London, and she wishes she were someone else. Her parents died in a tragic accident a few years ago, and so she left her native Massachusetts to live with her Grandma Cleaves in London. The only person left for Katie is her sister, but her band has recently hit it big and she has been spending all her time on the other side of the pond.

So one day, Katie goes to Madame Tussauds, where a Jack the Ripper exhibition is taking place. All of a sudden, she finds herself in a dress back in London of 1888. Katie decides to stay behind and find out just who Jack the Ripper is, and we’re off to the races. How hard could it be to discover the Ripper’s true identity? After all, Katie has seen plenty of CSI…

Sounding Gabriel's Horn

It seems that back in the 1930s, bullfighting was a lot more socially acceptable than it is today. For in Todd Downing’s The Last Trumpet, Hugh Rennert (a retired U. S. Customs Service agent and Downing’s series detective) does not hesitate to be seen at a bullfight in Matamoras, Mexico. But the social excursion quickly turns into a serious business when bullfighter Carlos Campos dies horrifically, gored by a bull.

Only it seems that the death was not accidental. Before he succumbed to his injuries, Campos accused someone in the crowd of blinding him by shining a mirror into his eyes. The police attempt to make a search but they are thwarted in their efforts. But it’s a good thing Hugh Rennert was present – he undertakes the investigation and discovers that Campos was not the first casualty. Nor will he be the last…

Birds of Prey

The passengers on the train to Mexico City had plenty of reason to be nervous. Times are rough and there is a railway strike in Mexico at the moment. Trains everywhere are being tied up and delayed, and as if that weren’t enough, part of the journey takes the train through a region that has a rather bad reputation. And then there are the vultures flying overhead, like an omen of doom. With all that to deal with, the corpse was most certainly not needed.

But a corpse does pop up in Todd Downing’s Vultures in the Sky, and it is the corpse of a Mexican man. He has died under strange circumstances, which don’t necessarily rule out a natural death but which certainly makes the theory far less tenable than it might otherwise have been. If this is a case of murder, the killer acted swiftly and murdered the man under circumstances where the fellow passengers’ vision was impaired. But the killer didn’t count on one man on board: U.S. Customs Service agent Hugh Rennert.

007 Reloaded: Octopussy and the Living Daylights

Well, this has been a long journey, but they all must eventually come to an end. I’ve been making my way through Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels book-by-book, and have rediscovered old favourites and made new ones. I’ve finally gotten to read You Only Live Twice, the only adventure I had not yet read. And I concluded the novels a while back with my review of The Man with the Golden Gun.

However, James Bond refused to die there. One final book was published after Ian Fleming’s death, collecting the last James Bond short stories. The book was called Octopussy and the Living Daylights, and those two stories originally formed the entire book. However, over time two more stories were added to this book (which is sometimes published as Octopussy). For me this formed one final glimmer of excitement—when I originally read this book, I am fairly certain that there were only the two titular stories in the collection. (A few years ago when I first read these books, I must have gotten hold of an earlier edition.) So although I thought I had no more Bond to discover, it turns out I had two more adventures to read! So what did I think of these stories? Let’s get started.

Reviewers Beware!

I was intrigued by the plot summary of Michael Mayo’s Jimmy the Stick, a novel published by The Mysterious Press last year. It tells the story of Jimmy Quinn, a bootlegger and gunman who used to be a runner for a bunch of mobsters. Then, Prohibition kicked in, and Jimmy got his leg hurt. After the injury, Jimmy’s leg was never again the same. Running was no longer an option, and Jimmy walked around with a walking stick, hence his nickname “Jimmy the Stick”. So he retired from the running game, opened a speak, and has been doing decently for himself.

But then everything goes to blazes. An old criminal pal of Jimmy’s, Walter Spencer, gives him a call and asks him to come over to his rural New Jersey home ASAP. The Lindbergh baby has just been kidnapped, and Spencer’s hysterical wife is convinced that their child could be next. It’s nonsense, of course, but Spencer has to go to a very important meeting out of state. So Jimmy gets hired to protect the kid and to keep order around the house.

Not-so-funny funny books

Comic books are destroying the youth of America! Consider the evidence: they promote and glorify violence as a way of life. They actively promote racism and intolerance. Some comic books, such as the tales of Batwing and his young ward Sparrow, promote some of the ghastliest sexual perversions. And how do we know all this? Simple. Dr. Werner Frederick says so.

As a result, the comic book industry is in a tough place. Congress is getting set to examine the problem of comic-books and how they defile the moral fabric of America’s youth. Angry parenting groups are burning comic books and the industry is losing money. Enter Jack Starr, the Starr syndicate’s troubleshooter. Whenever trouble rears its ugly head, Jack has to go and take care of it, and Dr. Frederick’s passionate anti-comic-books crusade certainly qualifies… This forms the plot of Max Allan Collins’ Seduction of the Innocent.

007 Reloaded: The Man with the Golden Gun

James Bond went missing after the events of his previous adventure, You Only Live Twice. He was finally reported as missing, believed killed and M wrote an obituary that appeared in the previous novel. But of course Bond is still very much alive, and he strolls back into London one day ready to report the results of his mission direct to M. But something seems wrong with Bond and suspicions are aroused. He’s acting almost too much like himself to the point of theatricality. Instead of coming back to his old flat, he’s staying at an expensive hotel. Instead of returning to England via one of the usual routes, he went by a circuitous route, entering the country with a faked passport.

When M sees Bond, we find out the reason for these discrepancies in a gloriously-over-the-top scene that somehow manages to really work. And once that’s out of the way, M decides to give Bond a new mission. Bond is sent out to Jamaica to pursue the assassin Scaramanga, known locally as The Man with the Golden Gun. Scaramanga is one of Bond’s deadliest opponents: an expert shot, in peak physical condition, and a sado-masochist who has sex right before he goes out for another hit job… The secret service has decided that it’s about time that Scaramanga’s career be terminated, and Bond is the man for the job.

007 Reloaded: You Only Live Twice

The last time we saw James Bond, he and Ernst Stavro Blofeld were engrossed in a duel on a snowy mountaintop, where colourful characters such as Irma Bunt took supporting roles. But after the events of that book, James Bond becomes depressed and loses his will to live. You Only Live Twice opens with M and Sir James Molony discussing 007’s future with the Secret Service after Bond has badly bungled his last two missions. M wants to fire Bond, but Sir James convinces him to give Bond one last chance by giving him an impossible mission, though not necessarily a lethal one. Perhaps being thrown back into the field will reinvigorate Bond.

And so M summons Bond to his office… only to discover Bond isn’t there. When Bond finally does show up, M decides to ignore the whole episode and orders Bond to go to Japan. His mission is to make contact with Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, and to obtain important information from him. Over the course of his stay in Japan, Bond slowly learns more and more about Japanese customs, and then he learns about the sinister “Castle of Death” run by the mysterious Swiss botanist, Dr. Guntram Shatterhand.

All Aboard the Cliché Train!!!

There’s a certain type of mystery plot out there that is really starting to get on my nerves. The plot isn’t confined to a single sub-genre. The book can be set in a charming English village where an elderly lady plays the role of amateur sleuth. It can just as easily be a tough-as-nails hardboiled story about a tough wise-cracking PI. But for some reason, many authors think it’s a clever idea to use the following twist ending: the killer is gay.

What does the author of such a tale expect me to do? Throw my hands in the air and scream “Oh, my God!!! A gay person!!! I thought they were only mythical creatures that hid in forests, picked berries while the moon was full, and secretly stole pens whenever you needed them!” This twist ending has long outgrown its shock value… and its welcome. And the ending has introduced a brand-new set of clichés to the genre, clichés I’m sick of seeing.

007 Reloaded: On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Beautiful women show up everywhere in the James Bond series. But when Bond meets Tracy di Vicenzo, he feels something very different for her. She isn’t just another prize to be won and bedded. At the start of the novel, Bond prevents her from potentially committing suicide… and just as suddenly, the two find themselves kidnapped. Bond takes this time to reflect on the past few days, his initial encounter with Tracy, etc., and when the kidnapper finally reveals himself, it turns out to be Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange… the head of the Union Corse.

Marc-Ange thanks Bond for helping Tracy, and Bond gets a flash of inspiration. The two men form an unlikely alliance to hunt down Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (If you need a refresher on Blofeld and what he was up to last time, see my review of Thunderball.) Marc-Ange shares Bond’s hatred of Blofeld, who has bribed several of his men away from the Union Corse. Before long, Bond is back in London and is summoned to the College of Arms. He finds out that Blofeld has been in touch with the College, eager to engage them on a research project. It seems Blofeld is very eager to establish himself as the rightful heir to the de Bleuville title. Perhaps he wants to acquire a veneer of respectability like some of the previous Bond villains. Perhaps he’s simply lusting after a title. Either way, Blofeld has revealed himself and it’s up to Bond to play the cards right. So the plot is hatched: Bond will impersonate a Scottish nobleman and gain access to Blofeld’s stronghold, on the pretext of needing a personal interview to establish certain details. And thus Bond is plunged into an unforgettable adventure, though it’s probably all in a day’s work when you’re On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.