library lore

There is of course a vast library's worth (probably several libraries' worth) of pastiche 'Lovecraftian' and 'Sherlockian' books, and my strong suspicion has always been that the larger the quantity the poorer the quality. This suspicion has not abated since the explosion of self-published books popping up on Amazon and the like. And apart from anything else, how much of it does anyone actually need? Does anyone read them all? Are there individuals out there who only read books featuring Sherlock Holmes stories? Is there an avid Cthulhu fan who gets everything - everything - that purports to be an untold tale of HPL's Elder Gods? Perhaps. In fact, probably.

The only collections of non-HPL 'Lovecraftiana' I think I'll ever need is Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and its 80s sequel New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos and I have been dipping into both recently. 

The original Tales was edited by August Derleth and published by Arkham House (though I was familiar with its 80s UK reprint by Grafton and its colourful painting of a horrific totem-squatting monster devouring a naked lady. Schoolboys notice these things). The edition I'm currently reading was published by Del Ray in the 90s and has a new introduction and the addition of about six 'newer' stories hailing from the 70s. The last story in this new collection goes rather out of its way to announce "look, we like sex and nudity!!" and seems to my mind emblematic of a certain strain of post-HPL Cthulhu fiction, though the plot itself is actually a good one. New Tales was edited by Ramsey Campbell, with an intelligent introduction by him where he states that although Cthulu fiction can be flexible in style it needs to reflect the sense, present in Lovecraft, of cosmicism, of the larger, and likely unknowable, forces acting against (or despite) the human characters.

As for non-Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes tales, this is a different matter altogether. Do writers emulate or attempt to emulate ACD? Do they give us tales narrated by other characters? Do they try for humour? Do they insert science-fictional, horror or fantasy elements? Do they approach the stories as detective mysteries or political commentary or character pieces or [etc etc]? 

No one anthology of Sherlockian stories seems to agree, which their editors usually argue is the point. I find this has made the whole field of pastiche fiction difficult to engage with, though a handy standby over the years has been The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes published by Night Shade Books. It was one of the first Sherlock Holmes books, of any kind, that I ever bought, after my interest was kindled following the Robert Downey Jr film (and unusually it is definitely RDJ and Jude Law's Holmes & Watson that are the model for the cover painting!). A problem with Holmes fiction is that writers often get small details wrong - such as Watson using words like "trashcan" and "surreal" - and those are instances from this book. But with stories by writers as varied as Stephen Baxter and Anne Perry, and stories including 'The Adventure of the Lost World' which entertainingly crosses Holmes with Doyle's other fantastic creations, the book has more hits than misses.

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