The Adventure of the Distraught Doctor

"Ha! You put me off, do you?" said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. "I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler."
My friend smiled.
"Holmes, the busybody!"
His smile broadened.
"Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!"
Holmes chuckled heartily. "Your conversation is most entertaining," said he. "When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught."

– The Adventure of the Speckled Band

I have a confession to make: I got a little sidetracked. I was intending to review a bunch of books where Sherlock Holmes meets Count Dracula. As it turns out, this is not going according to plan. I’ve already made side trips into Holmes meets Poe territory and Holmes vs. the Ripper lore. The next book I’ll review is another Holmes vs. the Ripper novel. And today’s book is another one by Loren D. Estleman in which Sherlock Holmes is inserted into a famous Victorian story. It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes. (Oddly enough, Jekyll and Hyde were featured in another Sherlockian story I recently read, but in a very different capacity.)

This book in many ways mirrors the spirit of Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. Here, Holmes is contacted by Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer and a friend of Dr. Henry Jekyll. Utterson is concerned about his friend, because Dr. Jekyll has just drafted up a will leaving all his property to the young scoundrel Edward Hyde. Hyde is a bounder in every sense of the word, inspiring hatred in every person he meets. He has no friends, and the only reason he is tolerated on the social scene is because of his money. Yet all of his money seems to come from Dr. Jekyll, and this is slowly casting a shadow on the good doctor’s name. Utterson wants Holmes to investigate the connection between Jekyll and Hyde, and to release the doctor from the evil man’s grip.

Retrial

My Lord, members of the jury, the great Internet public, we are gathered here today to re-examine the case against one Gilbert Adair, author of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, a crime against humanity posing as postmodern literature. When he was placed on trial on the first day of November in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, the evidence was overwhelmingly against him. But in the meantime, influential bloggers such as Sergio from Tipping My Fedora pressed the case in Adair’s favour and demanded that it be re-examined. And so we bring the late Gilbert Adair back to trial to examine A Closed Book, a 1999 novel that Sergio regards highly enough to put on his “Top 100 Books” list.

…Okay, I’ve established a connection to my previous Gilbert Adair review, so I think I’ll stop the fake trial here. My original review was a very angry rant written as though I were putting Gilbert Adair on trial for crimes against humanity. He died about a month after I published the review, and I have not changed a word of that review: it stands as an example of just how furious a bad book can make me. However, it seems like putting him on trial all over again would probably be in bad taste… especially since A Closed Book is actually pretty good.

Dance of Death

Elementary, my dear Watson!

—apocryphal; attributed to Sherlock Holmes

The idea came to Robert Louis Stevenson in the form of a nightmare, according to his wife Fanny, and the first draft took only days to complete. Afterwards, she read the manuscript. As usual, she gave Robert her comments. After a while, he called her back to the bedroom and pointed to a pile of ashes: he had destroyed the manuscript and would start all over again from scratch. The story would eventually become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of the most celebrated stories of all of English literature.

But what if that manuscript survived? What if Stevenson never burnt it at all? What if the manuscript came into someone else’s possession? That is the situation created by René Reouven in his book Élémentaire mon cher Holmes (Elementary, My Dear Holmes). And in this novel, we learn that the first draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a manuscript of such concentrated evil that anyone who reads it becomes a murderer…

A Most Mysterious Murder...

Le Détective Volé (The Stolen Detective) by René Reouven begins with a disclaimer that goes something like this: “Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, and Sherlock Holmes was born in 1854, but such a minute detail wouldn’t have prevented two such remarkable people from meeting.” This is a bit misleading, since there is never at any point in the novel a moment where Sherlock Holmes meets Edgar Allan Poe. And yet…

I will admit, the concept of this novel initially had me baffled. This is a Sherlockian pastiche in which Holmes’ fictional nature is admitted from the outset, and as a result the entire novel is a literary game being played out between Reouven and his readers. Here is the premise: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is sick and tired of hearing all these comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories and his Holmes stories. So he uses H. G. Wells’ time machine to send Holmes and Watson back in time to Paris in the 1830s. Their mission is to get in touch with Vidocq, and investigate whether or not Poe ripped the idea for The Purloined Letter from the headlines. And if so, who was the real-life C. Auguste Dupin?

The Curse of Dracula

When spooks have a midnight jamboree, 
They break it up with fiendish glee. 
Now, ghosts are bad, but the one that's cursed
Is the Headless Horseman, he's the worst

—Brom Bones, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

In my last Holmesian review, I chastised Loren D. Estleman for using the plot device of killing Holmes off for a few pages before bringing him right back, an overused plot device in the realm of Holmesian pastiches. I advocated for more creativity from pastiche writers. And I definitely got that from David Stuart Davies in The Tangled Skein. The problem is, I’m still not sure whether I enjoyed the book or not. One minute I’ll love it, and the next minute it will have me more irritated than an English prof who thinks Edgar Allan Poe was a time-travelling postmodernist. (I’m not even making that up, but that’s a story for another day.)

The Tangled Skein is a really clever sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles. You will recall that Sherlock Holmes’ body was never recovered after the incident at the Reichenbach Falls. Well, the body of the guilty party in The Hound of the Baskervilles was also never recovered. And Sherlock Holmes discovers that this party is alive and very much well… and seeking revenge on Holmes for having foiled his plans.

A Tribute to Bill Pronzini, a Fellow Enthusiast

Today marks Bill Pronzini’s 70^th birthday, and so I wanted to join in the discussion on the blogosphere with my own tribute to the author. Pronzini is a well-known and respected author, but he’s something of a rarity on the modern mystery scene: he knows a lot about the genre’s history. His collection of books and pulp magazines is massive, and he has written and contributed to several reference volumes, including three books on “alternative classics” (i.e. books so bad that they become good): Gun in Cheek, Son of Gun in Cheek, and Six-Gun in Cheek (the final volume specifically on Westerns). He and his wife Marcia Muller teamed up to create a classic reference volume, 1001 Midnights. And his output as a writer and editor is extremely prolific.

One of the best things about Bill Pronzini is his fairness to both “sides” of the genre. He can praise John Dickson Carr and Raymond Chandler in the same sentence, and his praise will be articulate and intelligent. Pronzini’s enthusiasm for the hardboiled/noir subgenre got me interested in reading more works in such a vein. Recently, I read the book Books to Die For, a book which I have criticised heavily for a variety of reasons. However, certain individual contributions are brilliant. Pronzini’s was one of them. He chose to talk about an author I’d never heard of before, Elliott Chaze, and his novel Black Wings Has My Angel.

The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count

I was never much of a fan of the idea of Sherlock Holmes meeting Count Dracula. The only thing they really have in common is that they were both popular characters written at around the same time period. Apart from that there’s nothing. They inhabit separate universes. Holmes is the ever-rational man who discounts all supernatural explanations as a matter of course, while the
world of Dracula is one of terror and superstition.

But somehow, Holmes vs. Dracula became a thing. There are plenty of takes on this throughout Holmesiana, and a quick Google search of “Holmes vs. Dracula” will turn up dozens of stories. And today I’m reviewing one of the very earliest – if not the first – examples of this kind of novel, Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Dracula is one of those immortal stories that pretty much any intelligent person knows, even if they haven’t read the story themselves. It’s right up there with Hamlet, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Christmas Carol. I had read Dracula before, but for reasons I will clarify in a moment, I wanted to revisit the classic novel.

So, here’s a really brief overview of the story for anyone who doesn’t know it: Dracula is an evil vampire who leaves his native land of Transylvania to come to England. He wreaks havoc there, draining the blood of a young woman without being suspected… that is, until someone calls in Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who realises that Dracula is behind it all.

Petri Wine brings you...

The year '87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British bark Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case.

—The Five Orange Pips

I am a very big fan of the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It initially starred Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, but near the end of its run Rathbone left the show and was replaced by Tom Conway. The program was sponsored by Petri Wine, and spokesperson Harry Bartell served as the announcer. He gave you three plugs for Petri Wine: at the beginning and at the end of the program, and at a cliff-hanger moment in the middle. But the man’s crisp, clear, smooth voice made it an enjoyable piece of advertising, and often times the final plug would be a bit of a running gag, with Dr. Watson desperately trying to avoid the subject of Petri Wine and Bartell managing to shove the plug in there nonetheless. Take, for instance, the conclusion to The Problem of Thor Bridge:

Bartell: I take you for a very charming gentleman, a wonderful storyteller, and a fine host. [Watson's chuckling, mutters of thanks] Well, you are a gentleman, of the old school... [More mutters of thanks] And you do tell a fine story.

Watson: Well, you flatter me, you-

Bartell: And you are a perfect host. That meal we had tonight was wonderful. And, um, that wine, what kind was it?

Watson: It was Petri wine, and you know it, and I should've known that you were leading up to something. Mr. Bartell, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Petri Wine was one of the many charms of the series, and although there were plenty of other series, no advertiser or host was ever as charming as Mr. Bartell with his Petri Wine— and Mr. Bell of Kreml Hair Tonic frankly creeped me out. By the time John Stanley replaced Tom Conway as Sherlock Holmes, the series really had me lost, and I've only listened to a handful of episodes from this era.

Psycho II

Warning: This book deals with events that began in the 1959 novel Psycho. So if you are unfamiliar with the story, either the novel or the film, please turn away because I will be dealing in spoiler territory.

Much to my misfortune, I have sat through all the Psycho movies. This includes not only the ghastly Gus Van Sant-directed remake, but also the three sequels to the original 1960 film. As you can guess, I’m not a fan of most of these (though I surprisingly enjoyed Psycho IV). They were derivative pieces of schlock that tried to cash in on what the original Psycho was. However, Robert Bloch also wrote two sequels to Psycho. Until now, I’ve never subjected myself to any of them. But I finally decided to take the plunge and try my hand with Psycho II.

In my defense, I was seduced by the plot idea. Psycho II deals with Norman Bates years after the events of Psycho left him psychologically traumatized. He has been institutionalized since, and has slowly but steadily been recovering. Only one day, he snaps and escapes the institution disguised as a nun. His psychologist, Dr. Clairborne, is worried that Norman will go on another killing spree. But his fears are unfounded: Norman’s charred remains are soon discovered in the car he used to escape. It seems that Norman Bates is truly dead… but if that’s the case, who was it who murdered Sam Loomis and his wife Lila, the two people responsible for Norman’s incarceration in the first place?

Psycho

The iconic cover with "cracked" lettering

Life isn’t easy when you’re running a motel in the middle of nowhere. And Norman Bates is doing just that with his life, stuck running the Bates Motel and taking care of his elderly mother, a monster in frilly clothing whose hobbies include psychological torture and preventing her son from having a life away from her. She will go to extreme measures to do this… even commit murder…

… which is precisely what Mother does when Mary Crane comes to the motel, fresh from stealing $40,000 from her employer. Mary is en route to see her fiancé, hoping that the money will help pay off his personal debts and get married sooner. But she decides to drop in at the Bates Motel, where Norman develops a boyish crush on her, even though the years of psychological abuse have left him afraid to so much as touch a woman. Mother doesn’t like this, and so when Mary goes to take a shower, Mother storms into the bathroom:

Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.

A Closed Book

“I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him …”

Thus begins the diary of Frank Cairnes, an author of detective stories under the pseudonym Felix Lane. But this isn’t a notebook in which he will set down the details of a fictional murder plot: he truly intends to find a man and murder him. But what could prompt a sane man to turn to murder?

It turns out Frank had a son named Martie, and a few months ago he had gone into the village to buy some sweets. That was when he got run over by a careless motorist; poor Martie never stood a chance. The police have been unable to trace the motorist responsible for the death, and he never stopped nor reported the accident. That man is the titular beast in Nicholas Blake’s novel The Beast Must Die, and when he is murdered, Cairnes’ journal is found and he immediately becomes the prime suspect. But Nigel Strangeways isn’t convinced…