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quick reads

After a long time spent away from an active participation in 'organised fandom', of any kind, I thought I'd dip my toe back into it by trying out some recent publications. The Lovecraft Annual for 2023 is the first of the Annuals I've read in a long time but I quickly found myself losing patience with all the footnotes and references from/to previous published articles. Nothing wrong with that? Well all of them seem to refer back to S.T Joshi and most of them are articles that can only be found in obscure (dare I say 'eldritch'?) fanzines from another continent 40 years ago (i.e early 80s issues of ' Crypt of Cthulhu' , whatever that might be!). This may feel like quibbling. Joshi is, after all, pretty much the world's foremost HPL scholar. But surely there are other viewpoints out there which essayists can rely upon to back up their arguments? The most accessible article was one on the world of HPL t-shirts, which I was surprised to find is an extre
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"Start her up, Watson"

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The Holmes stories are linked forever with the Victorian age, but those written in the early 20th century sometimes surprise the reader with little details that snap you out of the eternally Victorian atmosphere with which we often come to them. The most obvious of these is 'His Last Bow' . Published after the outbreak of The Great War, but set on its immediate eve, it's the detail of the motor cars that always make me jump. Motorcars! In a Holmes story! There's already a "huge 100-hp Benz car" (Baron Von Herling's) blocking the lane to Von Bork's place. And here comes Watson and (a disguised) Sherlock Holmes trundling along... in " a little Ford" . Where they have acquired this vehicle is not known, but its size is again emphasised when Von Bork sees "the lights of a small car come to a halt" - and later, after the success of their mission, when Von Bork's trussed-up bulk is "hoisted [..] into the spare seat of the littl
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romancing the Stone

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or, "Any regrets, Negretto?" 'The Mazarin Stone' isn't so much an entry in the Holmes canon as a great big monster truck ploughing its way through established precepts of the Great Game. Dorothy Sayers famously said you have to play that Game with all the straight-faced solemnity of a cricket match at Lord's but taking this story on its own terms as a 'Watsonian record' is impossible - its actual effect is that of an out and out comedy. Nothing about it makes sense. Nothing about it fits with established canon. From the sudden appearance of a bow window at 221b, and a 'magic door' connecting it to Holmes' bedroom (??), to the the very first appearance of Billy the page, introduced to us by Watson's familiar "You don't change, either" as if he's an old stalwart, it's all of a muddle. And although there is a precedent for a story narrated in the third person ( 'His Last Bow' ) at least that one had the char
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try Holmes' Continental Tours!

I've never been especially good at Geography - it was one of my worst subjects at school and there are a great many places I should probably be able to point to on a map but can't. When reading a Holmes story I rarely need geographical knowledge - Doyle (or Watson) is usually pretty precise. 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax ' however puts my head into something of a spin. It will embarrass me to admit out loud but, reading this story, I'd always assumed Lausanne to be a city in France - looking up details in 'The Canonical Compendium' (Clarkson, Calabash Press, 1999) I was surprised to see it in fact is in Switzerland. I suspect what's always thrown me is the mention of Montepellier (where the titular Lady is said to have fleed from) and also Holmes' disguise with which he surprises Watson - "an unshaven French ouvrier " complete with handy cudgel. (were there many such Frenchmen to be found loitering in Victorian Swiss cities?
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the criminal Dr Watson!

As an update to my previous post : although wanting to read the canon this time round without annotations, I quickly looked up CHAS in the Annotated and found a yet further crime committed by the 'heroes' of the story: Battery Watson says of their escape:  " I felt the hand of the man behind me grab at my ankle; but I kicked myself free". We later learn this was the under-gardener of Appledore Towers, an entirely innocent man; and very aggrieved he must surely have felt at being kicked (assaulted!) by the fleeing Dr Watson!
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the criminal Sherlock Holmes!

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One of the reasons I rebel against the strict rules of 'the Great Game' these days is that there are a great many instances in the Holmes stories of Watson laying various people (including himself) open to charges of serious breaches of the law, such that if they were indeed genuine historical records would have seen the stories' characters most likely flung in jail. Doyle wrote a good deal of biographical prose but never at any point did he casually reveal that he let a murderer go free or that he did a spot of breaking & entering on occasion. Sherlock Holmes himself, perhaps surprisingly, comes off the worst in this regard - and it is something of a surprise to say the least that the world's foremost exponent of criminal detection puts his foot in it a great many times. Doyle seems to play with this - 'Charles Augustus Milverton' begins with the 'realistic' framing device of having Watson say that names, places and even the decade of this case have
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HPL Dictionary Corner: Dunwich special!

A bumper crop of Lovecraftian erudition in 'The Dunwich Horror' : Where something is "teratoligically" impossible, 'teratological' means   " abnormal in growth or structure" (w hich certainly fits the Whateley offspring). If something (Wilbur Whateley's skin for example) is "cilated" this means it's covered in microscopic projections which look like hairs. "Acherontic" fear is meant to evoke something "as dark and dismal as the river Acheron" , the 'river of fear', in Hades (akin to the river Styx). And last but by no means least: "eldritch" ! One of those words which HPL uses frequently, and very famously, though I only really know it through usage and context. Sure enough, it simply means "weird and sinister or ghostly" .
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