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BAKER STREET BROWSINGS: BOOK REVIEWS, by Kim Newman

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. by Leslie S. Klinger, Norton, $75.00/£35.00

Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years, ed. by Michael Kurland, St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.95

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As the title The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes indicates, this Norton edition is not the first time that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories have been published in annotated form. Editor and annotater Leslie S. Klinger admits that the hundred-pound gorilla of the field is the late William S. Baring-Gould, whose The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1967) remains one of the most battered and consulted volumes in my library (any writer considering a Victorian British setting should have this — it’s full of good stuff like hansom cab fares and ladies’ fashions). Norton’s handsome set, two thick volumes in a sturdy case, even looks like my John Murray edition of the Baring-Gould, down almost to the weight of the paper and the smell of the ink. There are, however, significant differences between Klinger and Baring-Gould; devo­tees will have no cause to retire their old Annotated and replace them with the New one, though they will need both sets.

Baring-Gould gets all four novels and the 56 short stories into his two (sometimes one) thick volumes, while Klinger saves the four book-length adventures (need I specify? — A Study in Scar­let, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear) for an as-yet-undelivered third. Baring-Gould was far more interested in providing the real-world dates for the fic­tional events of the stories and arranged the stories in (debatable) order of internal chronology (he places The Sign of the Four after ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, which Doyle plainly did not intend). Klinger arranges them as Doyle did when collecting the stories into his five collections, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. As usual, even simple decisions aren’t definitive: ‘The Cardboard Box’ appeared in the Strand magazine run of the Memoirs and the first im­pression of the British edition of the collection, but was dropped from the American and most subsequent British editions (per­haps because of its relative gruesomeness), but the story opens with an especially neat if irrelevant bit of deduction (‘You are right, Watson, it does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute’) which was lifted probably by Doyle and pasted into the book publication of ‘The Resident Patient’.

Baring-Gould reproduces the type from the Strand, and notes differences between original and subsequent editions; Klinger usually relies on copy from the Strand but set in an easier-to-read font, also pointing up occasions where misprints or errors have been corrected. Norton present the notes in pur­plish-crimson, which makes it easier to distinguish between Doyle and Klinger, though this doesn’t extend to introductory and supplementary essays (on things like guns, gambling and deadly snakes, all attached to stories which highlight these topics). It’s easy to understand why Norton and Klinger have led with the short stories rather than the novels — of the four, only Baskervilles isn’t strangled by its lengthy backstory — but Holmes and Watson, and their world, were introduced in the first two novels, which were written and published before the first set of stories and might well have been the beginning and the end of Holmes. The stories may show a certain decline in quality as the series progresses, with one or two ‘remakes’ of successful earlier tales (long-running TV series tend to do the same thing), but there are unmemorable efforts early on (‘A Case of Identity’, the third story, is much less impressive than the rest of the Ad­ventures) and gems late in the day (‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ has most of the old snap). Re-reading the entire oeuvre in one go isn’t advisable, but pulling the book down and sa­vouring the tales one a week or a month is a hugely reliable pleasure — they ‘play’ very well read aloud, and parents of children slightly too old for babyish books find them a wonderful excuse for melodrama (it’s rarely remarked, but Doyle is a fond, funny prose-writer and gets a lot of laughs in performance).

The shared approach of Baring-Gould and Klinger is that both proceed from the premise that Holmes and Watson were real people, and that Watson’s manuscripts were prepared for publi­cation by Doyle. Doyle started this when he wrote in self-re­flective moments as Holmes comments on Watson’s published versions of his cases or Mycroft mentions that Sherlock has become more famous thanks to the publicity accorded by his ‘Boswell’, though he couldn’t have foreseen how out of hand it would get. This means that there are two types of annotation: firstly, footnotes that explain or elucidate references that might have been obvious to the original readers but with time have become obscure, or sometimes references of matters of British ge­ography, politics, culture or language Americans have never quite fathomed (eg: explaining what the Serpentine is, something as familiar to British readers as, say, a reference to Golden Gate or Central Park would be to Americans); and, secondly, attempts to rationalise ‘errors’ made by Watson (or Doyle) or to uncover the true identities of characters Watson is supposed to have disguised to avoid scandal (royals, politicians, society folk, etc). The first are helpful, the second are fun — though nearly a century of this sort of thing has, I think, tended unfairly to downgrade the real achievements of Doyle, who is often presented as clumsy, slap­dash or evasive.

Very occasionally, this game needs to be set aside, and Kling­er is rather better than Baring-Gould at that. His footnotes don’t have that slightly grumpy tone — and he frequently phrases them in the form of questions, not objecting to veracity but to credibility. I often sense that Sherlockians feel a certain frus­tration and resentment that Doyle didn’t care about such things as calendar dates, continuity and dovetailing fictional and real-world events — but he was writing in a period before the evo­lution of that style. He cites names, dates and places to make his fictions seem convincing — as Wilkie Collins had done or Bram Stoker would do — but feels no obligation to make them names, dates and places that can be verified by old maps, newspapers and the Dictionary of National Biography. Baring-Gould comes close to kicking some stories out of the Canon simply because he can’t make sense of the dates, which Klinger never does — he points out when a date given in the text as a Wednesday was ac­tually a Friday but leaves it at that, and adds a chart at the back in a tentative attempt to put the stories in order. Overlooked in this are some things that interest me more than whether Lord Bellinger of ‘The Second Stain’ is supposed to be Gladstone or Salisbury. There are rarely notes that speculate on Doyle’s spe­cific inspirations — these stories came from somewhere, and it might be interesting to learn whether Doyle heard an anecdote or read a news item or chanced across a plot-nugget in general reading and then spun out a Holmes plot.

When we meet Holmes in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, Doyle takes care to reintroduce him for those unfamiliar with the two novels (which, originally, would have been most of the Strand’s readership) but — opening up a whole can of worms that has never satisfactorily been dealt with — he was also stuck with the ending of The Sign of the Four, when Watson leaves Baker Street to get married. Many adaptations of the series relegate Watson’s marriage to a never-was-to-be timelines: both the Jeremy Brett and Ian Richardson versions have Watsons who don’t connect with Mary Morstan and wistfully watch her leav­ing his life, then settling back into bachelor cohabitation with Holmes. The premise of the series, almost sit-com like, depends on Holmes and Watson sharing rooms, with Mrs Hudson mak­ing breakfasts and clients appearing weekly, and Doyle under­stood he had been too hasty in having his characters move on. This is a typical example of an author not knowing as he is writing how his series will develop, establishing things which later need to be revoked or ignored — most blatantly, Holmes’s death in ‘The Final Problem’.

Of course, the lapses and lacunae are useful for subsequent hands.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years, edited by Michael Kur­land, is the latest of many collections of Holmes stories from authors not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It deals with ‘the great hia­tus’, that period between ‘The Final Problem’ and ‘The Empty House’ (which happens to be between the first and second Klinger volumes) when Holmes was thought dead by all the world and away from London on mysterious adventures. What actually hap­pened was this: Doyle decided to kill Holmes and delivered an en­tirely satisfying finale, bringing on a suitable arch-nemesis in Professor Moriarty and having the antagonists perish in a plunge over the Reichenbach Falls, with just enough ambiguity (the bod­ies are never found) to provide a get-out clause or the possibility that Holmes, like King Arthur, sleeps somewhere until England has direst need of him. As soon as the detective was dead, read­ers, editors and publishers were clamouring for his resurrection, and eventually Doyle caved in and — as is often forgotten — turned out The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most famous and best-liked of the novels, establishing that it takes place before ‘The Final Problem’. There was no real reason that this approach shouldn’t have been continued (almost all the stories published after Baskervilles, well into the 1920s, are set in the late Victo­rian/early Edwardian era), but an actual return from the dead was demanded and paid for. Doyle duly delivered ‘The Empty House’, which has to squirm mightily to give an explanation not only for Holmes’s survival but for his absence and (in retrospect) cruel deception of his closest friend.

As Kurland, author of some excellent novels with Moriarty as the lead, points out in his introduction, the explanation in ‘The Empty House’ won’t do. It was the best Doyle could manage, and the story is rather a good one, but by this time the pleasures of the Holmes canon were less to do with the plot business than with the central characters and their relationship. Readers can believe in the dastardliness of Colonel Moran and all the narrative ele­ments are sound, but Holmes’s treatment of Watson doesn’t square with the character we thought we knew — which is why some have said the post-Reichenbach Holmes is someone else or a fiction (this is an instance of the ingratitude cited above — as­cribing all the vintage Holmes tales to Watson, but blaming Doyle for the lesser stuff). A few of Kurland’s contributors, following Nicholas Meyer in The Seven-per-cent-Solution, simply put it out that ‘The Final Problem’ and ‘The Empty House’ are not 100% ac­curate and set out stories that explain why this is so: Gary Lovisi’s ‘The Adventure of the Missing Detective’ has Holmes take a trip to a parallel world where Moriarty has triumphed and brought about a dystopia by assassinating Queen Victoria and all that travelling-in-Tibet-disguised-as-a-Norwegian business is a cover for a tale that wouldn’t have been believed, while Kurland himself in ‘Reichenbach’ has the whole death-and-return busi­ness a deception on the part of Holmes and Moriarty who are ac­tually reluctant allies on a secret mission for Mycroft.

Others set the veracity or otherwise of Holmes’s account to one side and tell stories that don’t contradict the originals. Mi­chael Mallory’s ‘The Beast of Guangming Peak’ and Carolyn Wheat’s ‘Water From the Moon’ — like Jamyang Norbu’s fine novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes — look exactly to where Holmes says he was (the Himalayas), and spin mysteries in­volving the abominable snowman and the Great Game of im­perial espionage (no one goes for North Africa, where Holmes also says he was). Linda Robertson’s ‘The Mystery of Dr Thorvald Sigerson’, Michael Collins’ ‘Cross of Gold’, Carole Buggé’s ‘The Strange Case of the Voodoo Priestess’ and Bill Pronzini’s ‘The Bughouse Caper’ have Holmes spend time in America (which Holmes doesn’t mention in ‘The Empty House’), presumably be­cause they are Americans and know the territory best. These stories all tie Holmes in with traditions of American detection: Collins works a connection with his own Dan Fortune series (and discerns a socially-committed, left-leaning Holmes), Buggé and Pronzini partner Holmes with San Francisco and New Orleans dicks (one a sceptical hardboiled PI, the other an impressed scien­tific policeman) and Robertson has Holmes-Sigerson solve an ele­mentary puzzle in an interesting locale (Alaska).

The most interesting, if not necessarily the finest, stories take advantage of the hiatus to give us a Holmes through eyes other than those of the hero-worshipping and perhaps naïve Dr Wat­son. Rhys Bowen’s ‘The Case of the Lugubrious Manservant’ has Freud treat an amnesiac who turns out to be a post-Fall Holmes and gives this away in its subtitle (how much more interesting if it had been Moriarty?) and provides a third Freudian analysis of the detective (after novels by Meyer and Keith Oates). Peter Beagle’s ‘Mr. Sigerson’ (which is the finest story here) has Holmes working as a violinist in a mittel European orchestra in an ad­venture recounted by a more sceptical narrator who doesn’t much care for the detective, presenting a mystery of the sort Doyle liked along with an emotional tangle which might have been beyond his range. This is an instance of a pastiche with a point, as much a criticism as a celebration not only of Holmes but of Doyle; almost all the other stories are fun — even indulgent fun like Richard Lupoff’s pulp-reference-packed ‘God of the Naked Unicorn’ — and one or two provide some plot or character meat, but Beagle probes the deepest and hits a nerve.

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Kim Newman is a novelist (Anno Dracula, Life’s Lottery) and critic (Nightmare Movies, Apocalypse Movies). His latest books are Horror: Another 100 Best Books (co-edited with Stephen Jones) and the short story collection Dead Travel Fast. Forth­coming are another collection, The Man From the Diogenes Club, and a study of the UK TV series Doctor Who. He is also working on a BBC-TV documentary about Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Sherlock.