Writing in the New Century – Stop to Think How Lucky We Are!

Here we are, well into the 2000’s, and a thought occurred to me today. It’s so simple that it’s silly to think it. But I was remembering what it was like to write a story twenty-five years ago, and wondered if everyone really appreciates how much easier we have things now.

I am not a professional writer, although I really enjoy writing, and the need to create bubbles up in me on a regular basis. My favorite thing about being a Civil Engineer is to design something. My creative streak is also shown by the fact that I spent the first two years of my first degree in college as a piano major, before switching to business management, and even now, I almost can’t walk through our living room without stopping and playing something on our piano.

I discovered the joy of writing by wanting more stories about my book heroes. Back when I was eight, I discovered an incredible series of mysteries, The Three Investigators, that ignited my love of reading, with no looking back. I can still read that series today, as they are so well written.

(Here are a couple of links: http://www.thrillingdetective.com/3investigators.html and http://threeinvestigatorsbooks.homestead.com/ )

But I’m not writing to plug those books. I mention them to explain that, soon after reading the books in that series that were in existence up to that time in the early and mid-1970’s, I desired more tales about those characters. So I used my dad’s typewriter to write my own, not realizing that I was dipping my toes into the world of fan-fiction. But there was no internet then, and no computers. There was no uploading stories for others to read. This was old school. I typed the stories on real paper, with errors that had to be typed over or covered with Liquid Paper. And then they were just for my own enjoyment, and maybe for just a few others as well.

I produced several “books” featuring more stories about The Three Investigators and my other favorites at the time, The Hardy Boys. I still have them, and they look just like you would imagine. But creating them gave me a taste for writing. I learned that something doesn’t get written if you don’t sit down and do it. And I became addicted to the feeling of starting with literally nothing, and coming out the other side with something that didn’t exist before. I’ve explained elsewhere about my writing process, wherein I start writing, usually without a plan or outline, and go into the zone where I’m just transcribing what I hear in my head. I can crank out a few thousand words in very little time, which explains why my emails (and even this blog entry) can get so long so fast. After a good writing session, which usually lasts four hours or more if I can find the time and prepare myself for that kind of pain, I come back to the world, slightly sore, and with all of my coffee gone, even though I don’t remember drinking it.

I’ve written a lot for other things as well over the years. My first real job out of college (the first time I got a degree) was as a Federal Investigator with an obscure – and now eliminated – government agency. A sizeable chunk of the job was writing reports about our investigations. True, in the early days some of this was dictated on cassette tapes so that others could type them up, but it was still about organizing information. Later, when I went back to school to become a Civil Engineer, I insisted on being the report-writer for various group projects, partly because I only trusted ME to do it right, but also just because I liked writing.

The reason I thought of putting all this down is that I was emailing a friend yesterday, and we happened to discuss an unpublished novel that I wrote, back in the early 1990’s when I was still a Federal Investigator. That got me thinking about my experience writing that book, versus how I write now.

In those days when I was an investigator, I had to travel a lot, for long chunks of time. The agency where I worked wanted to make sure that they got their money’s worth when they sent me on a trip, so I was usually somewhere far from home for anywhere from three weeks to three months at a time, or longer. I really didn’t like being away from my wife and baby son, and I resented it quite a bit. On some of the trips, I was working in an office instead of in the field, and I was able to really use a computer, albeit a primitive one, for the very first time. I had access to early word processing programs, and sometimes I would sit at my work desk and surreptitiously tap out little short stories. I learned that I can write much better on screen than by longhand. I still have those short stories, and one can see how I would play with using italics or bold, since one certainly wasn’t able to do that on a typewriter.

One day, when I was stationed in Albuquerque for a couple of months – very far from my home in Tennessee – I impulsively stopped at a Walmart and bought a typewriter and some paper, and then took it back and sat down in my hotel room and started writing a novel. And that managed to keep me busy during the evenings and weekends for the rest of my time there. I would finish a hundred pages or so, and then mail them home for my wife to read. She liked it, and so I was motivated to keep going.

The thing ended up being 600+ pages, and was very Ludlum-esque. The plot made the assumption that the Agency for which I worked, during those final days of the Cold War, had been infiltrated by a group of blackmailers who had access to all the information that we routinely obtained during our investigations. They were using it to assist some deep-cover Russian cells, all centered around the Oak Ridge nuclear facilities, near where I still live and then worked a great deal. Of course, one of the heroes of the book was an honest investigator within the agency, coincidentally someone like me, who saved the day.

I finished the book, but never thought of publishing it, since it was written more to be a cathartic exercise than to change careers in order to become a professional author. A year or so later, the Agency where I worked was eliminated, and I was allowed to keep my old briefcase. It became the repository of the massive manuscript, and it now rests under a bed.

I pulled the manuscript out a few months ago, and it is certainly very dated. People who have read it have told me that it’s good, but it’s certainly a product of its times, and if it were ever published, it would have to be a period piece. For instance, there is a character who works for a shadowy government agency that is able to use a thing called The World Wide Web to check information about people! Radical!

But getting back to the purpose of this whole essay: When I looked at this old manuscript from around twenty-five years ago, all the work that went into it came flooding back. Typing each page on paper was so much more of a chore, as one had to be so careful to set down exactly what you wanted to say, since backing up or rearranging paragraphs or inserting words or even deleting chunks as you went along was a massive pain.

Something else that is so much easier now is researching a simple little fact. For example, in the manuscript from the early 1990’s, there are a number of story locations that are set all around the U.S., reflecting places where I had been sent to work in those days. I included several maps within the novel, and seeing them made me remember how I would have to pull out an old atlas and pore over it in order to get descriptions sort-of close to correct.

Contrast that to right now, when I’ve been working on several new things, including a new Sherlock Holmes novel. I started it a few weeks ago, and it’s approaching 40,000 words, and progressing nicely, thank you very much. Yesterday, I needed to have Holmes and Watson travel to a place in Essex. I simply pulled up Google Maps, zoomed in until I found just where I wanted, looked at the satellite view to see the actual layout, and then did a street view as well. I looked up a few village names, picked one I liked, and typed my description into a Word document. I moved some things around, backspaced to replace a highlighted misspelled word, inserted a phrase or two in the middle of a sentence here and there, and then kept on going. Twenty-five years ago, I would have had to stop and go find a book (or books), and fudge in the description in a vague way so as not to show that I had never actually seen the place.

So, do we realize just how easy we have it now? There are so many more people that currently write than three were in the olden days. Realizing and commenting on this is certainly not new or profound. But if we still had to write on typewriters, would we even write at all? Could any of us do what the pulp writers did, back in the day, churning out thousands of words per week on old manual typewriters? And just imagine what those same people could accomplish now if they had access to modern computers.

It boggles the mind, but I just know that I’m thankful to be able to have the opportunity to create something, and that it’s certainly a lot easier than it used to be!





©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


*************************

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

William Gillette's Sherlock Holmes Film

Last night I watched the world television premiere of Sherlock Holmes, the 1916 film of the William Gillette play. I first read the original play, upon which the film was based, way back in 1980, when I was fifteen years old. It was included in Sherlock Holmes: The Published Apocrypha, edited by Jack Tracy. In that book’s introduction to the play, Tracy explains how Doyle had himself written a Holmes play during the period in the late 1890’s when readers still presumed that Holmes was dead, since the last they’d heard about him was that he had perished at the Reichenbach Falls, following a battle there with Professor Moriarty in “The Final Problem”.

Doyle’s play needed serious work, and it was recommended that William Gillette, a famous American actor-manager and playwright, take on the task. Gillette proceeded to heavily rewrite Doyle’s initial effort, and in The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Dickson Carr states that Doyle’s play was “so thoroughly re-written into another play that nobody knows what the original play was about.” (A search for Doyle’s lost play might be a worthy quest, to see how much it adds to the Canon, or how much it confuses things, as he did with another one of his other plays, Angels of Darkness.)

Gillette’s first version of the play was destroyed in a fire. He re-wrote it, and included a curious new ending, where Holmes places a bust of himself in the window of the Baker Street sitting room, tempts Professor Moriarty into firing an air gun at it, whereupon he is captured. Note that this ending was written in the late 1890’s, several years before Doyle recorded a similar stratagem in “The Empty House”. A version of the play with this ending was performed in France, but otherwise the original ending was restored, taking place in Watson’s office.

Gillette finally met Doyle face-to-face in 1899. Jack Tracy relates the story of how Gillette traveled to England and disembarked from the train in full deerstalker and associated regalia. He walked up to Doyle, pulled out a magnifying glass, examined Doyle, and pronounced his conclusion, “Unquestionably an author.” Doyle loved it, and after that, the Englishman and the American were instant friends.

The play itself debuted in Buffalo, New York on October 23, 1899, almost exactly 116 years from its first appearance on American television. It went on to become Gillette’s signature masterpiece, performed by him over 1,300 times during the next several decades, and also by several other touring companies in the United States and Europe. At different times, the play was revised, and there are several published versions floating around out there, each with small variations from the others. (I have a few in my collection, and it's interesting to read and see the differences.)

In 1916, Gillette’s tour stopped in Chicago, where he filmed a very long (for that time) version of the play, his only appearance on screen. (He also made a later performance of the play on American radio, but only a fragment of this broadcast survives.) According to Jack Tracy, the 1916 film was not considered a success. After watching it on television, I can somewhat understand. I’ve read several versions of the play on multiple occasions over the years. I have a bootleg copy of the Frank Langella HBO revival, have seen a DVD of a portion of yet another revival, and have listened to several different radio versions of the play, one famously starring Orson Welles. Additionally, I’ve seen (and read and own the script of) another play, Sherlock Holmes and the Jersey Lily, which lifts a major portion of Gillette’s work (without credit, as far as I can tell.) Each version of the original reflects the clever and fast-paced dialogue written by Gillette.

Unfortunately, in the film version there is very little dialogue that is transcribed. We see a great deal of speaking done by the actors on the screen, but hardly any of what they say is actually related to us. Fortunately, most of the actors do behave naturally, with very little exaggerated movement, especially during conversations, as so often seen in silent films. I believe this is a credit to Gillette, who was an early proponent of natural and realistic acting. Many members of his touring company recreated their roles in the 1916 film, and no doubt they were encouraged by Gillette to act naturally as well.

Gillette’s influence on Holmes cannot be underrated. Paget first showed Holmes in the deerstalker, but Gillette popularized that look in front of thousands of theatre-goers over the decades. Gillette gave him a trademark pipe that didn’t appear in the original stories, and he put some famous words in Holmes’s mouth that weren't there before. He also put a lot of money in Doyle’s pocket. He helped keep interest in Holmes alive, and these efforts no doubt helped encourage Doyle to begin relating new Holmes adventures in 1903, just a few years after the Gillette play began. And finally, while England saw Holmes as portrayed by Sidney Paget, the U.S. saw him as Gillette, thanks to the art of Frederic Dorr Steele, who based his Holmes directly on Gillette’s unmistakable visage.

If one watches the film closely, one might see what I called “The Curious Case of G. Watson”, wherein the nameplate on Watson’s doorway in the final quarter of the film is strangely marked with the name G. Watson. This is a curious mistake to make in 1916, when the film was made – Watson’s name, John H. Watson, was surely much more well-known by then. A similar but less serious error was in Gillette’s original play, when he referred to Professor James Moriarty as Robert, but that was perhaps forgivable, since at the time Gillette wrote the play in the late 1890’s, Moriarty had only even been mentioned in one Canonical story, “The Final Problem”. In this case, the G. Watson should have been caught.

I also noticed another interesting thing about the film. I've long heard that, until the Rathbone Hound in 1939, every Holmes film to that time had been filmed in its present day, showing automobiles, etc. (This was certainly true for later films featuring Clive Brook, Reginald Owen, Arthur Wontner, and so on.) However, this film from 1916 appeared to use only horse-drawn vehicles and mostly-period costumes. (I did see Miss Faulkner's ankles once or twice, which – it’s true – might have been a little more 1916-ish, rather than 1890-ish.) But one could make the case that this was actually the first to be filmed in period, pre-dating the “first time” from the first Rathbone film.

I've pre-ordered the DVD of this film, to be released in November 2015, and look forward to watching it again. I enjoyed this a lot better than most of the silent Holmes films in my collection, and I think part of the credit goes to the music. I’ll need to find out some more about that . . . .

I should mention that Gillette has appeared in a number of Holmes pastiches. These include:

The Adventure of the Eminent Thespian by Val Andrews. Holmes encounters Gillette while he is investigating a theft of the Crown Jewels.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/086025268X?keywords=sherlock%20holmes%20eminent%20thespian&qid=1445261442&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

“The Old Senator” by Steven Hockensmith, contained in Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. In this story, Holmes is on tour with the Sassanoff Shakespearian Company in the United States, as theorized in Baring-Gould’s chronology. The story is in the form of a letter by Gillette to his brother, dated September 27, 1879, relating how he helps Holmes solve a mystery, and how his father becomes convinced that acting can be an acceptable profession. (Of course, this is set just a few days before the old senator’s death, and doesn’t fit exactly with Baring-Gould’s chronology.)
http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-The-American-Years/dp/B005ZOBMY4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335137038&sr=1-1'

Gillette is a peripheral character assisting Holmes in both “The Adventure of the Agitated Actress” Daniel Stashower in Murder, My Dear Watson . . .
http://www.amazon.com/Murder-My-Dear-Watson-Sherlock/dp/0786712449/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335137672&sr=1-1

. . . and The Adventure of the Pandora Plague by Lee A. Matthias.
http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Houdini-Adventure-Pandora/dp/0910937044/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335137554&sr=1-1


A truly special collaboration between Holmes and Gillette is Daniel D. Victor's full-length novel The Astounding Murder at Cloverwood House

https://www.amazon.com/Astounding-Cloverwood-Sherlock-American-Literati/dp/1787055736/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1614014141&sr=8-1

Additionally, the story has been adapted by Roger Johnson, BSI, (from Edith Meiser’s 1935 radio script) as “The Strange Case of Miss Alice Faulkner”. One can listen to it at the Sherlock Holmes Society of London website, where further information may be found, including mention of additional radio performances of the play by Carlton Hobbes and Norman Shelley in 1953, and more recently a California production with D. Martin Jarvis in the role of Holmes. http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/the-strange-case-of-miss-alice-faulkner/

As mentioned earlier, the gas chamber scene is shamelessly lifted from Gillette’s play and used as a substantial portion of the second act of Sherlock Holmes and the Jersey Lily by Katie Forgette. I got to watch this play on stage a few years ago, and was thrilled to see how effective it worked live. I had always read about the gas chamber scene, and about Holmes’s trick of leaving the cigar burning as a decoy in the dark, and it really worked!
http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Case-Jersey-Lily/dp/B002LMEE98/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335137215&sr=1-1

Several years ago, a graphic novel appeared, retelling Gillette’s play, Sherlock Holmes: The Painful Predicament of Alice Faulkner by Bret M. Herholtz. He used Gillette’s play, with minor changes, and brought it to a whole new audience.
http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Painful-Predicament-Faulkner/dp/1934985171/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335137186&sr=1-1

Many people know what Orson Welles adapted Gillette’s play as part of his Mercury Theatre on the Air (September 25, 1938), and it’s not too difficult to find copies of the broadcast. The script itself is available online at: http://m.genericradio.com/iphone/show.php?id=8VCGXSKAOS

More recently, the California Artists Radio Theatre recorded one of the alternate versions of Gillette’s play, with David Warner as Holmes. It’s available on CD at:
http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Selecting-Ghost-California/dp/1589261844/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445261996&sr=1-1&keywords=sherlock+holmes+and+selecting+a+ghost

And in “The Adventure of the Tired Captain” by Bob Byrne, contained in Curious Incidents, Doyle meets Gillette in autumn 1901, and they solve a mystery, allowing the police inspector to believe that Gillette is actually Holmes. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HL6XPI?keywords=curious%20incidents%20prepolec&qid=1445263547&ref_=sr_1_2&s=books&sr=1-2

Last but not least, even more about this has been written by my friend Bob Byrne in several entries of his blog, “The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes” – Go check them out:

https://www.blackgate.com/2014/10/06/the-public-life-of-sherlock-holmes-the-first-great-holmes-gillette/

https://www.blackgate.com/2015/10/12/the-public-life-of-sherlock-holmes-frederic-dorr-steele/

https://www.blackgate.com/2015/06/01/the-public-life-of-sherlock-holmes-magnifying-glass-pipe-and-deerstalker/



©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


*************************

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

The Sherlockian Party of the Season - and You're Invited!

Where I live there isn’t a lot of Sherlockian socializing going on. The closest group that I’m aware of is three hours to the west. I rarely travel to a Holmes-related event, but in a few weeks I get to go to one of the biggest and best of the year.

In case you haven’t heard, the launch party for the new anthology The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories will take place in London on October 1st, and I get to be there, for which I’m more thankful than I can express.

There are going to be numerous guests, including representatives of the Conan Doyle family, members of Sherlock Holmes Societies from London, France, and India, Baker Street Babes, people from Stepping Stones (the school that now owns Undershaw), Ben Cardall (“The Deductionist”), folks from BBC’s Sherlock, maybe a few other surprises, and perhaps most important to me, some of the authors from the anthology, all of whom have donated their time, stories, and royalties in order to make this project happen.

I’ve known some of these authors for a while, both in person and by email, and I met the rest as the anthology progressed. A nicer bunch couldn’t be found anywhere, and I’m really looking forward to seeing many of them in person.

And what a great place to meet them! The party is going to be held on the 35th Floor of the Heron Tower, overlooking all of London. I’ve seen pictures taken from the terrace, but I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like in real life. The event location has been donated by Powa Technologies, (publisher Steve Emecz’s day job), and it looks incredible!

As part of the launch event, MX is making the opportunity available to win a ticket to the event, either by attending in person in London, or from anywhere in the world via the web.

Some of the amazing prizes in the competition include:

a) Ten places at the Sherlock Holmes Collection launch, either in person or by web;
b) A signed and framed piece of wallpaper from the set of BBC Sherlock;
c) A set of lessons in deduction from “The Deductionist” Ben Cardall (delivered over Skype, so they are available to all).
d) A hardback set of the new collection;

To enter the competition using Powa’s amazing new PowaTag app for the competition:

Download the ‘PowaTag’ app from the app store, either through Apple – https://itunes.apple.com/app/znap-pay/id584357800 or Android – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mpayme.znap

. . . add your details to the app . . .

. . . and scan this this PowaTag from inside the app:

You can read about PowaTag from the Powa websie: http://www.powa.com/powatag/

It’s going to be an unforgettable night, and I can’t wait. Be sure to enter, and when you win a spot at the party, be sure to say hello!



©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


*************************

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

It’s also about how it looks: A book isn’t just what’s written inside it . . . .

You can’t just judge a book by its cover. Or even by the words inside.

Last week I sent off the files for the three volumes of The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. http://www.mxpublishing.com/search?ssv=mx+book+of+new+sherlock+holmes+stories They’re now in the hands of the publisher, Steve Emecz, who will be arranging the behind-the-scenes parts with the printers that turn all of the hours that people spent writing stories (and that I spent editing them) into something physical.

Coming out of this experience has left me still in a heightened editorial mode. When I read other books now, I see things, and can’t unsee them. (“Where’s that missing comma, Clive Cussler?!?”) There are the obvious mistakes, such as misspelled words and run-on sentences. And then there are small issues, such as missing commas in a series or other punctuation errors. I hope that I caught all of that in the new MX books, but I know that, in over 1,300 pages, a few things will still have slipped through. Have mercy on me.

One thing that is very obvious to me now when I look at books is how things are set up internally. Lately, I’ve been re-reading the Solar Pons stories. Now, I won’t preach here too much right now about how you should read the Pons adventures, because that’s a different topic, but you should. There’s a great deal of information about Pons at my friend Bob Byrne’s website to get you going: http://www.solarpons.com The original Pons stories by American August Derleth were meant as a continuation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The Pons tales are set in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He wears a deerstalker and Inverness, and his adventures are narrated by his Watsonian flatmate, Dr. Lyndon Parker. They are very much in the Holmes tradition. Derleth wrote over seventy Pons stories, and after his death, the series was continued by British author Basil Copper. I’ve also written a Pons “origin” story – “The Adventure of the Other Brother” in The Papers of Sherlock Holmes Vol. II, (Spoiler – Pons is NOT the other brother!) and a new online set of Pons tales, to which I’ve contributed two, will be appearing – hopefully later this year – as edited by Bob Byrne.

Now the reason that I mention this is that, as I’m re-reading the Pons stories, I’m doing so from a number of different editions. The stories (in book format, after some initial magazine appearances,) were originally published by Derleth’s own imprint, Mycroft and Moran, from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. When I was a teen in the late 1970’s, the Pons books were issued in paperback by Pinnacle, and those were the first versions that I bought and read. In the early 1980’s, the stories were edited – with some controversy – by Copper into a two-volume Omnibus hardcover set, issued by another of the late Derleth’s publishing imprints, Arkham House. Finally, a few years ago a big 8½” x 11” two-volume set, reprinting the original versions before Copper’s edits, was issued by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box (BSDB).

I have all four sets, and I’ve been rotating between them as I re-read the Pontine Canon. I didn’t mind Copper’s edits so much, as he arranged all of the stories in chronological order – much like Baring-Gould did in his Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which I admire. Copper also corrected some of Derleth’s misplaced Americanisms in the stories to more correct British usage, which is the main part of the controversy, but when I was younger, I never noticed the difference.

A few days ago, it was time to re-read the Pons story “The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians”, a Christmas story set in 1920. As might be inferred from the title, there are a lot of nods to Charles Dickens within the story. Recently, I had acquired a copy of this tale in Chapbook form from The Mysterious Bookshop. Having his own publishing imprints, Derleth occasionally released his tales in this form, in addition to magazine and book publication. Since I’d just bought this chapbook version, I decided to read the story in that format, and that was when – since I was still in deep editorial mode – I started thinking about the differences in the way things look.

So I have five versions of this story, and none of them are particularly painful to look at. The chapbook is clearly the easiest to read, as it has the biggest and most readable print, and extra pages to spread out over its half-size 8½” x 5½” sheets. The next easiest is the Mycroft and Moran edition, the original book version in which it appeared, (in The Chronicles of Solar Pons.) Next comes the Omnibus version, as edited by Copper. The print is much smaller, approximately 9-point, but it’s still not too unpleasant, and once you get into the story, you don’t notice it. Then comes the big BSDB version, with the stories printed in smaller-type and in double columns. Still readable once you get in the swing of things, but not as pleasant as a smaller and lighter book with standard page set-up arrangements. Finally, in order of decreasing enjoyment, is the Pinnacle paperback version, both because of its aging yellow paper, but also due to the layout on the page, which somehow allows one’s mind to get distracted instead of staying in the story.

I don’t know all the technical reasons for this, but sometimes a book is just hard to read, and I’m not talking about the content. You’ve all had this experience. Something might be one of the best things you’ve ever read, but if it’s unpleasant to look at in a book, the experience is somewhat spoiled. (I’m not talking about e-books here, obviously. If I have a choice, I want something real, although my wife and I disagree on this point.) For example, I’ve been reading Burroughs’ Tarzan books since I was a teenager, but my copies for the longest time were the old Ballantine paperbacks, with yellowish paper (getting yellower and browner every year), and the alleys (the blank space on the outside of a book page) and the gutters (the blank space on the inside near the binding) are miniscule. You almost have to crack the spine of the book to read the print that runs down into the gutters. Additionally, the print is very tiny and hard to read. It’s just too jammed up to enjoy completely.

Compared to this, for instance, are some of the Robert B. Parker Spenser books, especially those from the mid-1990’s, which seem to be mostly blank space. These books have huge alleys and gutters, as well as massive spaces at the tops and bottoms of the pages. (I don’t know if that part has a technical name.) The print is big, the spacing between the lines is widened out, and the short chapters mean lots and lots of new chapter headings, and those headings are a half-page of blank paper every time one shows up. Definitely not unpleasant to read – I can fly through one of those 300-page books in a few hours – but I always have the sense that it’s really a novella that’s been expanded to justify the cost of a full-sized book. (The same thing just happened with the new Harper Lee book Go Set A Watchman. There’s a lot of blank space in that book too.)

When I was setting up the three volumes in the new MX collection, I had to find a balance between readability and discomfort. The alleys and gutters are about three-quarters of an inch, and the spaces at the tops and bottoms of the pages are not too wasteful. The lines are single-spaced, and the paragraphs are indented, and not separated from the previous paragraphs by a space, such as one would find in a technical paper or high school report. (A lot of new authors are paragraphing this way in their books now.)

And the margins are justified, and not a ragged right margin, as is often seen nowadays. When I was ten years old, and trying to write my own Hardy Boys books, I bled inside while trying to get my margins to line up on both sides like the real books, but on an old typewriter, you just cannot line up that right margin. With the invention of word processing programs, justifying the right margin is possible, and all our failed attempts to look justified in the old days are now achievable. (I wish I could get this blog to right justify.) I had a boss who insisted (after being told this by an expensive marketing company) that reading is easier if you don’t justify the right margins, and he would take reports or even letters and unjustify them. I disagree with this thinking. One of the pinnacles of our civilization is that we can now justify any document on our own, without relying on a professional printer to set it up for us. Why wouldn’t you justify your documents?

The font size for the new MX collection is 11, not too big, and certainly not as small as what was being considered at one time (9-point) to cram all of the stories into one fat volume. I used good old basic Times New Roman font, because it looks good on paper when you’re reading it. Too many people aren’t aware that a number of fonts that are designed to look good on a web-page are not made for the printed page, and vice versa. (For instance, cross-bars and serifs are widened or thinned as needed to show up better.)

In the rise of print-on-demand (POD) companies, it would behoove authors to take a look at some bestselling books, and notice how they are set up, in terms of page layout, line spacing, font, and margin justification. Too often the author thinks that just getting the work down on paper is all that’s involved, and then the work is done. The work must be read and re-read and re-read again, looking for mistakes and better ways to say things, and also to make sure that the plot hangs together – no unanswered questions or dead-end threads. Have someone else read it too – you never see your own mistakes, and the more you go over it, the more your brain bridges right over an error. (I’ve read and spell-checked this essay three times, and no doubt there are errors in it somewhere.)

And then, since it’s on the author’s head to do this when dealing with POD companies, lay out your book in such a way that it looks professional. Don’t be afraid to have blank pages before and after the main body of the work, just like the books of old. Think about when you’re holding a book, and what will be on the left-hand and right-hand pages, and adjust accordingly within the file, adding a blank page here or there if necessary to shift things where you want them. Start stories or new chapters on the top of the page, and not in the middle of a previous page. If you need advice setting page numbers or figuring out other technical issues, don’t be afraid to ask. Someone will be glad to help. Check it again and again before you send it off. Finally, if you get a good setup with the margins, paging, and layout the way you like it, save it as a template into which you can copy-and-paste your next book – a piece at a time, so not to mess up your carefully constructed formatting.

If you’re writing a book, remember from your own experiences as a reader, and think about how you want your book to look and present itself, in addition to the actual words inside. It’s like your child, and you want it to make a great first impression!



©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


*************************

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

Connecting Sherlock Holmes to Bloom County - But Just Barely . . . .

As I’ve been finishing up the final editing on The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, with all royalties going toward the restoration of Undershaw . . .

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1229605719/the-worlds-largest-new-sherlock-holmes-story-colle?ref=watched_project_launched

. . . I’ve been overjoyed to be able to visit an old friend, here again after a long absence: Bloom County is back! It’s now appearing at Berkeley Breathed’s Facebook page, with new strips appearing every few days.

https://www.facebook.com/berkeleybreathed

It pains me to think that some of you don’t even know what Bloom County is. Well, keep reading, and you can even see how (or if) I (barely) tie it to Sherlock Holmes.

Many people probably think that my recreational reading is solely concerned with the activities of Mr. Holmes. This isn't the case, as I’ll no doubt explain in other blogs, and a great example of another interest is my enjoyment over the years of Berkeley Breathed’s cartoons. I first found Bloom County in 1984, when I was a sophomore in college and observed friends reading it. I didn’t know who the characters were then. It was like sitting down to watch a long-running television show and figuring out who is who from the context. At that time, there were only a couple of published Bloom County books available for someone like me to catch up on what he’d missed, but I bought them and re-read them endlessly. And I started following the strip in the daily newspaper.

Not long after, I found the latest Doonesbury book and read it as well. I’ve since collected all of the Doonesbury books, and continue to read it to the present, even now in its abbreviated weekend format. I also devoured The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes as well, but to me, Bloom County is and always has been the very best of them.

When I was a junior in college, I started drawing my own cartoon. It was extremely libelous and never published in the school newspaper. Only selected friends and trusted college staff members were allowed to read it. It was 100% popular in its extremely limited market, and for a time I thought I might pursue cartooning. (That was the same vague time when I was switching my major from music to business management, so anything was possible.) Around then, one of the librarians where I worked as a student assistant – and one of my faithful readers – attended a convention and brought back a signed copy of Breathed’s Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things (1985). It’s still a treasured possession.

I spent part of the summer of 1986 staying with a friend in Washington, D.C. While he held down an intern job during the day, I explored the city. I spent several afternoons in the Library of Congress, requesting and viewing microfiche of old issues of the Washington Post, where Bloom County first ran. It was strange to see all of the strips that appeared before the ones collected in the first book. It was almost like a different strip entirely.

During that period, Breathed started marketing character dolls in various poses, mostly featuring Bloom County’s most famous character, Opus. College friends began buying them for me to mark special occasions, and I soon had a shelf full of them in my dorm room. (And I still have them.)

Unfortunately, for a year or so then my mother decided that I apparently liked penguins in general, and I couldn’t get her to understand that Opus was different. I ended up with quite a few little knick-knacks with penguins on them before I could get her to stop. It almost sounds like something that would happen to a character in Bloom County.

I had once been given a little Sherlock Holmes bear, and I discovered that his deerstalker looked much better on Opus. The other day, as I’ve been editing the new Sherlock Holmes collection, I decided to pull him back out of storage to honor the return of Bloom County and the upcoming Holmes anthology, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories:

In 1988, about a month after my wife and I were married, we were in New Orleans for her to attend a conference. As I wandered the city during the day, waiting for her to be liberated, I found another doll, this time of Bill the Cat. That ended up being my New Orleans souvenir, and another early indicator to my wife about what to expect from me.

Mr. Breathed ended Bloom County in 1989, but he returned with Sunday-only comics featuring some of the Bloom County characters, the first being Outland (1989-1995), and then Opus (2003-2008). Throughout that time, he continued to publish collections of the strips, as well as many well-regarded children’s books. Later, IDW began issuing the complete run of all the Bloom County-related comics in really excellent hardcover editions, filling in all the missing strips that weren’t included in the previous collections.

At about the same time a few weeks ago that I learned that Bloom County had returned on Facebook, I also saw that IDW had just published a new book of Breathed’s complete cartoons that had been drawn for his college newspaper. Berkley Breathed’s Academia Waltz has cartoons from 1975-1980, and gives valuable insights to what would become Bloom County, as well as showing where ideas and characters were first tested. It’s fascinating to read this book, and I highly recommend it, along with all the other IDW entries. I’ve just finished it, and I’m continuing right on into re-reading the first of IDW’s Bloom County titles.

http://www.amazon.com/Berkeley-Breatheds-Academia-Profound-Transgressions/dp/1631400762/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439208834&sr=1-1&keywords=academia+waltz

So that’s how I tied Bloom County to Sherlock Holmes – barely. They’re both in my head right now, and I’m currently being visited by the deerstalker-wearing Opus. I think that Mr. Breathed missed out by not putting Opus in a deerstalker long ago, but now that Bloom County is back, and the marketing machine will likely be starting up again, it isn’t too late, especially considering that, while Bloom County has been gone for a while, Sherlock Holmes never left, and he's more popular than ever!



©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


*************************

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

Sherlock Holmes Meets Henry James – Two New Stories by Daniel D. Victor and Dan Simmons

I’ll be the first to admit that, while I had heard of author Henry James, I knew very little about him. The first time I went through college, at the normal college age to get a Business Management degree, I took all the general courses that give one a broad base as an enlightened human – literature, the arts, etc. (I was glad to have all under my belt when I went back for a second time to get an engineering degree.)

But, during that first pass through college, Mr. Henry James was not really covered or even mentioned, as my teachers favored Greek tragedies and then a big jump to Germanic Romanticism. (I still have The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann von Goethe stuck in my head – talk about something I’d like to push out of my brain attic. I even hear the way the teacher pronounced it – Vair-ta – as opposed to the way I wanted to say it at the time, the same way one pronounces the name of that wonderful candy – Wer-ther. I can’t look at those now without at least saying once in my head Vair-ta’s Original Caramels.)

But I digress, which ought to be the real name of this blog.

My wife, who has a couple of Master’s Degrees, one in English literature – and I know Henry James was an American – doesn’t have a high opinion of him. Still, I had heard of him, but barely, and that’s all I needed or wanted to know.

Now, however, I’ve recently read two different stories where James interacts with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and I can say that I still don’t need to know anymore, but at least I do know a little bit more, and I’ll tuck that part away in my brain attic for possible future use in a conversation somewhere down the road.

The first story where I encountered Henry James was in “The Adventure of the Aspen Papers” by Daniel D. Victor. This will be published this autumn in Part I of the massive new anthology, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1229605719/the-worlds-largest-new-sherlock-holmes-story-colle?ref=watched_project_launched

When I conceived the idea of putting together this anthology, I combed the shelves of my Holmes collection in order to identify authors that I wished to participate. I had really enjoyed Mr. Victor’s first Holmes novel, The Seventh Bullet, back in 1992. (It has since been reissued by Titan.) I first found it in a bookstore in Baltimore, where I was spending ten weeks as a Federal Investigator, temporarily detailed to that area. Your tax dollars were putting me up in an apartment in a high-rise overlooking the Inner Harbor, and I remember reading and enjoying that book while enjoying the view and wanting to come home.

More recently, Mr. Victor has been writing a series known as the “American Literati” for MX, in which Holmes encounters famous literary figures. In The Final Page of Baker Street, he meets young Raymond Chandler, who serves as one of Holmes’s pages. In the upcoming Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place, he becomes involved in the affairs of Stephen Crane. He is also currently working on another Holmes novel.

http://www.mxpublishing.com/brand/Daniel+D.+Victor

When I asked him to write a story for the anthology, he agreed immediately, and soon sent me “The Adventure of the Aspen Papers,” in which Henry James visits Baker Street in October 1887 to hire Holmes to locate a missing friend who is on the trail of a hidden literary trove. Although not labeled as such, this tale, featuring a visit from the American Henry James, is clearly a part of Mr. Victor’s ongoing “American Literati” series. I hope that, in addition to writing more of the novels, Mr. Victor comes up with a whole volume of more of these short stories, because I’d love to read them. I enjoyed this one very much, and it gives both an interesting case for Holmes and Watson, and also a quick thumbnail portrait of Henry James.

Soon after I received and read Mr. Victor’s story, I obtained another tale about an encounter between Holmes and Henry James. This one, substantially longer, is a 600+ page novel by Dan Simmons, The Fifth Heart.

http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Heart-Dan-Simmons/dp/031619882X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439045451&sr=1-1&keywords=the+fifth+heart

Set in the spring of 1893, Holmes encounters James while doing undercover work for Mycroft during The Great Hiatus. James recalls meeting Holmes several years earlier - not during the events of Mr. Victor’s story. Holmes’s current investigation into a global anarchistic plot has connections to events that took place several years before amongst a group of people living in Washington, D.C. These people are friends of James, and Holmes recruits him to help with the resolution of what occurred before, and also to defeat the current conspiracy.

This book was interesting, although it was padded a little too heavily with factoids about life in 1893. (People who were actually living in those times probably wouldn’t have had conversations where they worked in so many of these things for the benefit of us, the readers – they would have just known it already.) This book presented a different viewpoint of Holmes and his frantic activities during the Great Hiatus. (Those who think that Holmes just sat around in Tibet for a couple of years, contemplating . . . something need to read more pastiches. He was a very busy man during that period, racing all over the world.)

My biggest problem with this narrative is the same thing that happens in some other people’s pastiches: This author, in trying to be clever, takes some noted and established ideas from the Canon and then reveals his own version of “the truth”, when in fact these jarring revelations simply yank one out of the story entirely. I’ll never understand why, if someone wants to work so hard to bring another Holmes adventure to the world, he or she can’t just do so in the way that has made these stories popular for so long. Instead, the writers find the need to inject their own inventiveness.

Without revealing any too-obvious spoilers, I can say that most of the book is very interesting, but I’ll be skipping some parts when I re-read it next time. Simmons makes some general mistakes, such as getting the ending of “The Copper Beeches” wrong, and he makes up an entirely spurious backstory about Holmes’s origins. Simmons does the same thing with Professor Moriarty that Michael Dibdin did in The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, although in this case it’s for a much more noble purpose. He also has taken a female criminal and her assassin son and incorrectly given her the name of a Canonical character, attempting to tear down the reputation of the true figure, and also libelously fictionalizing whole chunks of the book in order to try to create a shocking relationship between the assassin and his supposed father. I’ll mark all of this down as “Incorrect.”

In spite of these parts which try to damage the Canon instead of uplift it, this book for the most part is still enjoyable, although one must read it carefully and with a grain of salt to be aware of the falsehoods. The best part of the book, for me, was Holmes and James’s visit to a certain famed part of a Washington, D.C. cemetery. I’ve previously had no interest in that area, but now I think that I’ll be certain to visit there when I’m next the capital.

Most of this book takes place in Washington, D.C. and New York, with side trips to Connecticut and Chicago. There are a number of other pastiches by other authors set in the spring of 1893 that also have Holmes all over the U.S. during this time, and this story, where Holmes is fighting the anarchist’s intrigue, serves to augment those other stories by explaining why he was in the U.S. then. Some of Holmes’s other adventures in the U.S. during the spring of 1893 are related in the following:

By Philip J. Carraher:
• Alias Simon Hawkes (Four short stories: “The Magic Alibi”; “The Captive Forger”; “The Glass Room”, and “The Talking Ghost”)
• Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Dead Rabbit’s Society
• Sherlock Holmes in New York: The Adventure of the New York Ripper

By Owen Haskell
• Sherlock Holmes and the Fall River Tragedy

By Donald W. Holmes
• Indian River Trilogy (Two short stories: “The Menacing Midden” and “Barker’s Bluff”)

Stories in Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years (edited by Michael Kurland, also a contributor to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories)
• “The Mystery of Dr Thorvald Sigerson” – Linda Robertson
• “The Bughouse Caper” – Bill Pronzini
• “The Strange Case of the Voodoo Priestess” – Carole Bugge
• “Cross of Gold” – Michael Collins

By David Marcum (That’s me!)
• “The Adventure of the Brother’s Request” The Papers of Sherlock Holmes –Vol. II

. . . and also in numerous short stories found on the internet.

All in all, I much prefer Mr. Victor’s tale of Henry James and Sherlock Holmes, but both serve as interesting companion pieces. Read them both and decide for yourself!

More about The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories can be found at:


http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-07-15/largest-ever-collection-of-new-sherlock-holmes-stories-will-raise-money-to-restore-conan-doyles-house

http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2015/07/behind-worlds-largest-new-sherlock.htmlhttp://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2015/07/behind-worlds-largest-new-sherlock.html



©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


*************************

David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM

A new blog has arrived . . . .

Well, it’s time for me to make the next leap into a bold new era.

Having been encouraged for quite a while to create a blog, I finally did so, with some trepidation. Here it is, then, a work in progress, a steep learning curve on public display, a location to pass on news, and also a place to let me, on an irregular basis, review and comment on life and the things that entertain or distress me.

If you’re looking for a Seventeen Step Program to cure you of anything, then I’m afraid that this is the wrong place. However, if you know anything about Sherlock Holmes, you’ll recall that his rooms at 221b Baker Street were reached by climbing seventeen steps. Many a client climbed that narrow stairway, seeking assistance and guidance from the Great Detective. Hopefully people will find something of use here.

My name is David Marcum, and the primary purpose of this blog will be to relate thoughts about my interest in things related to the traditional and Canonical stories of Sherlock Holmes. At other times – and don’t expect something every day or even every week – I may comment on other interests as well. (People who know how much time I spend reading and writing about Holmes may find this hard to believe, but I’m actually interested in many other things.)

In the past, I’ve produced several books that relate new adventures of Mr. Holmes. Currently, I’m in the last stages of editing and completing a new and massive Holmes-related project, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, to be published in the autumn of 2015 by MX Publishing. It’s not too late to get on board by supporting the effort through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1229605719/the-worlds-largest-new-sherlock-holmes-story-colle/description

The three-volume hardcover set will have a total of nearly 1,300 pages, and features participation by over 60 of today’s finest Sherlockian writers, both best-selling and up-and-coming. The royalties from the project will be used to benefit the Stepping Stones School at Undershaw, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former residences that has a strong association with the Holmes stories.

More information about this collection can be found at these links:

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-07-15/largest-ever-collection-of-new-sherlock-holmes-stories-will-raise-money-to-restore-conan-doyles-house

http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2015/07/behind-worlds-largest-new-sherlock.html

http://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2015/08/authors-reflect-on-part-1-of-worlds.html#more

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-giant-donates-stunning-venue-sherlock-launch-steve-emecz

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conan-doyle-estate-backs-record-breaking-collection-steve-emecz

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_16/275-6827942-2232911?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=mx+book+of+new+sherlock+holmes+stories&sprefix=mx+book+of+new+sherlock+holmes+stories%2Cstripbooks%2C708

I will be back with more information about the anthology, along with other future projects, as it becomes available.

It’s been crazy up to now for me to think about blogging, but now that I’m here, let’s see what happens . . . .




©David Marcum 2015 – All Rights Reserved


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David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!

His Amazon Author Page can be found at:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader

and at MX Publishing:

https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM