The Alternative Sherlock Holmes: Pastiches, Parodies and Copies

Review 1: The Alternative Sherlock Holmes by Peter Ridgway Watt & Joseph Green, has a breadth of scope which is admirable, but sadly leads to a lack of depth.

The book attempts to categorise the stories under very broad chapter headings:

Watson's Unchronicled Cases and Their Pastiches: which deals with stories based on the untold stories mentioned throughout the canon.

Period Pastiches: Stories set during the time period covered by the canon, and in roughly canonical locations.

Non-Period Pastiches: Stories that take place in a time and/or place outside of the canonical span.

Friends, Relations, and One Enemy: Stories about other canonical characters, or descendants of Holmes.

Parodies and Impostors: Parodies and Characters whose names are wordplays on Holmes'.

Copies and Rivals: Other golden age detectives.

This is probably as good a set of distinctions as you'll get - any attempts to categorise more specifically, inevitably end up in hundreds of different categories, mostly with only have one story in each.

The main fault of the book is its uncertainty over how to deal with the stories. Each gets a basic title/author introduction, followed by what is referred to a number of times throughout the book as a "review" but which is in reality, at best, a synopsis. These are printed in a reduced typeface, which seems to suggest that they are quotes from somewhere, although no indication is given as to whether this is the case, or where that somewhere might be. These vary in detail from those which give away the entire story to those that seem to be rather irrelevant, and give no information at all. The "review" of Edward Hanna's The Whitechapel Horrors, for example, reads: "Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, Holmes has to tackle these awful murders in London's East End." No mention that these awful murders are the work of Jack the Ripper, which would seem to be fairly central to the object of the book, or that Holmes is used by Hanna as a device for exploring the various solutions offered to the Ripper mystery, rather than an attempt to solve the mystery.

Also lacking throughout are opinions or evaluations of the stories, beyond the fact that all science fiction stories are ipso facto appalling, and that Val Andrews is quite excellent (there is a distinct Anglo-centric bias to the book - we sense that English pastiches are more acceptable than American ones).

The first chapter is the best organised, grouping stories based on the same unchronicled case together, and also grouping the cases together under the canonical story in which they were mentioned. This gives a good basic insight into the different spins that have been put on the tales, and an indication of which titles have sparked off inspiration in the most writers.

The second and third chapters are arranged by publication date, which would be interesting if some attempt was made to analyse trends in the market, but unfortunately in many cases becomes simply a listing of titles and authors (Perhaps the authors have included stories that they have not read themselves for the sake of completeness). A more formally structured catalogue presentation would have been more appealing, and more useful - a listing arranged by author (or even title) would have made the book more accessible.

The Non-Period chapter suffers most from this publication chronology approach. A chapter dealing with Holmes in other historical periods is surely crying out to have its material organised by the period that the stories are set in. Again this chapter also suffers from the anti-science-fiction stance of the authors. If one is writing an account that by its nature deals in large part with that particular genre then an interest in the topic on the part of the writer, might make it more enjoyable for the reader. At the very least an objective overview of the subject would be preferable.

A further setback of this format is that authors' works are split up. A structure that considered individual authors over the entire span of their works would also have been a more interesting approach. Instead, here we have individual books by the same author being mentioned many pages apart from each other, and even in separate chapters. Michael Kurland's first Moriarty book, for instance, is mentioned in the Period Pastiches chapter, while the second is in the chapter dealing with other canonical characters. The third, published in 2001, is not mentioned at all.

The parodies chapter is based on the assumption that a parody must, of necessity, have a central character whose name is a burlesque or pun of Holmes' (and is categorised again by publication chronology, and thereafter by the name of the character). This leads to many parodies that feature Holmes under his actual name being included in the pastiche sections, and being referred to as such. Again many of the summaries that accompany the headings are so cursory - merely a mention of the author and the story title in which the character appeared - as to make one wish for a cataloguing rather than the "entertaining narrative" approach of this book, which results in much repetition of the phrase "They appeared in...a short story by..." Again this would have made the information more accessible, while also reducing the number of pages and thus presumably the price.

The structure also makes it seem strange that a book published in May 2003 only includes stories published up to 2001. Surely, with this chronological approach, and particularly bearing in mind the lack of any structure or discussion within each chapter other than a listing of the books published each year with a synopsis, it would not have been terribly difficult, particularly in this electronic age, to add last year's publications onto the end of the appropriate chapters.

At £45 the book is far from being cheap, but presumably cost is controlled by its limited readership appeal, and ultimately it is consideration of that readership that is perhaps lacking. Much of the information here is available in a more useful format elsewhere (most notably the print/on-line/CD-Rom versions of De Waal), and very little information is added to what is already available. The serious collector will already know most of what is here - no research into authors, or the background to the stories is evident, which would appeal to those already interested in the subject - while the breadth and lack of detail hold little of interest for the casual reader - if you haven't read the stories, then an approach that veers between, on the one hand simply telling you they exist, and, on the other giving the ending away, is probably not what you're looking for.

A work on this scale cannot hope to be comprehensive, but there are some surprising gaps here. Nicholas Meyer's third pastiche, The Canary Trainer, is noticeably absent, as are all of Frank Thomas's novels (cynics might say understandably so, but they are historically important in a survey of pastiches, being the first series of Holmes novels to be published in the mass market), and Robert Lee Hall's The King Edward Plot. The Pursuit of the Houseboat, the first novel-length story to feature Holmes as a character, gets a only a brief mention (inaccurately) as another book by John Kendrick Bangs which contained a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, under the erroneous title In the Pursuit of the Houseboat and does not appear in the index.

A Sherlockian pastiche-aware proofreader would have been a considerable bonus to the book: typo's are frequent, particularly in titles and character names. OK, it may not be a major problem that Quinn Fawcett's character "Penelope Gatspy" is referred to three times as "Penelope Gatsby" (which every reader of Fawcett's feels she should have been called, anyway), but it still rankles (particularly at that price). There are also occasional awkwardnesses which seem to suggest that the book was cut and pasted from bits and pieces from here and there: the section on John Gardner's Moriarty novels begins "In 1974 John Gardner published the first of his two Moriarty novels The Return of Moriarty", followed by a 5 line synopsis, then "In 1975 John Gardner published The Revenge of Moriarty", and a 3 line synopsis of that. Not strictly incorrect usage of English, I suppose, but still not terribly elegant.

Endnotes to the chapters are also awkward, giving bibliographical data that would have been more useful in the main text, or as footnotes, but more importantly, jumping about all over the place, defying logical structure. The notes on one page of text, for example, are numbered 8, 23, 1, 27 in that order. Call me old-fashioned, but I do like my end-notes to be in the same order as the text, so I can stick my bookmark in the back of the book, and go from one to the next as I get to them in the text, I don't want to have to search through 50 pages of references each time I come to one. These would have been much better presented as a bibliography (the bibliography that is presented as such is rather cursory, listing a few collections of pastiches - but not all those covered in the book, and a couple of reference works).

All that said, this is a good first effort at what is by its nature a fairly unmanageable topic (and there are a things in it which were new to me) and hopefully will lead on to more in depth studies of the genre, dealing with major and minor trends in pastiche-writing, giving more background on the authors. Research into/reading of all the stories listed, or separating out those that have not been read by the authors into an appendix would help too.

In its present form it will probably serve best as a memory-jogger for those who have read the stories, but can't remember what they were about.

Reviewed by: Adrian Nebbett, July 2003

Review 2: There have been essays on the non-Canonical Holmes — Ellery Queen’s introduction to The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1944, Jon Lellenberg’s Sherlock Holmes in Parody & Pastiche in 1978, my own Romancing the Holmes in 2001 — but The Alternative Sherlock Holmes: Pastiches, Parodies and Copies by Peter Ridgway Watt & Joseph Green is the first really substantial survey.

The authors are unknown to me, but they’ve certainly done their homework, helped, I suspect, by Ronald De Waal’s invaluable bibliography The Universal Sherlock Holmes. There’s a lot of stuff mentioned in these 368 pages that was new to me, and more that I know of but have never seen. (Have you read Sherlock Holmes’ Great Canadian Adventure by Jack Batten & Michael Bliss, or The Villars-Manningham Papers by Jay Shakley?)

The book is divided into chapters covering a) pastiche based on Watson’s unchronicled cases, b) pastiche set in the Canonical time-frame, c) pastiche set before or after that period, c) pastiche centred on a character other than Holmes, d) ‘parodies and impostors’, and e) ‘copies and rivals’. Solar Pons is classed with parodies and impostors, despite his creator’s firm statement that parody was not intended. You could call him an impostor, I suppose, but a tribute would be more accurate. At any rate, he receives respectful coverage, though there’s no mention of the posthumous Derleth collection The Final Adventures of Solar Pons or The Original Text Solar Pons Omnibus. Nor of the fact that several of Pons’s best adventures derive from Holmes’s unchronicled exploits.

Inevitably there are omissions. Gerald Frow’s two Young Sherlock novels, Watkin Jones’s The Case of the Scarlet Woman, Sydney Hosier’s Elementary, Mrs Hudson and its sequels, Nicholas Meyer’s The Canary Trainer (though Sam Siciliano’s simultaneous take on the same theme, The Angel of the Opera, is included), and others. There are errors too. Siciliano’s novel is given as The Angel at the Opera, for instance. But The Alternative Sherlock Holmes is a magnificent achievement, and Messrs Watt and Green have done a great service to all serious scholars of the world-wide phenomenon that is Sherlock Holmes. The fact that they like The Adventures of Creighton Holmes, which I remember as really bad; suggests that maybe it’s time to give it another try. At any rate, their praise for my wife Jean’s delightful ‘archy & mehitabel’ pastiches is fully justified. And the mention of my own contribution to the apocrypha is a bonus.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson [District Messenger, 234, August 2003]