Incoherent Memoirs

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

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