The Fifth Principle in Brief—Holmes' Anonymity

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Principles of Pastiche"—at the bottom here and work their way up.

My fifth principle of my pastiche writing might seem counter-productive to both writers and readers who are in tune with the commercial Sherlock Holmes market: 

"Insofar as Holmes was never recognized or identified by the principal characters of Book One, early on I decided to take that idea of anonymity and run with it, increasing his anonymity with each successive book, thereby intensifying the irony, so that by Book Three even some die-hard Holmes gamers might not even recognize him."

What would be the purpose of this strategy? In my mind, this ploy adds another level of mystery to my novels. "Hey wait a minute," a reader might ask,  "if this is a Sherlock Holmes novel, where is Sherlock Holmes?" Nonetheless, any Holmes fan with a modicum of background on the detective should, in Books One and Two, at least, home in on him fast enough.  

Book Three might be a bit more difficult for those for whom a modicum is not sufficient. A tiny bit of special knowledge is here necessary, but even that is spelled out in black and white in front of God and everybody at the start of the book; however, human nature being what it is, I imagine there will be those who will wonder about Holmes even after they've snapped the book shut.

This may be a good spot to summarize possible reactions to my five principles, and then to ask the inevitable question.  There is no doubt that eyebrows will raise when these principles are seriously considered. Why on earth would a sane writer saddle his Holmes stories with:

•  Characters and scenes from a author long dead and remembered only by specialists and  a handful of enthusiasts?

•  Voluminous literary claptrap that no normal person could possibly care about?

•  An emphasis on the non-linear, non-cause-and-effect philosophical issue of the nature of Fate?

•  A thematic point of view that takes notions of causality to a level that infer participation in human affairs by some sort of cosmic... "participator."

•   A hero who is not even identifiable in the normal scheme of things? 

The natural question, then, is: Why have I gone out of my way to write three Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels that may be somewhat more difficult to negotiate than the thousands of sons and daughters of The Seven-Percent Solution that have been published in the last 40+ years?

Pinterest

And here is my answer:  Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, said, "It's only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged." At heart, then, my "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy is a kind of literary set of Russian nesting dolls or, if you prefer, a bookish Rubik's cube designed for those who enjoy sifting through exfoliates, that is to say, through the wide variety, a virtual panoply, of millennia- and centuries-old lost 
manuscripts that I have serendipitously unearthed and carefully annotated over 30 years. I am thrilled to say that my instincts have been right to the degree that there are more than enough readers who "get" what I've done, and who thoroughly enjoy what I've done, to make my heart sing.

In conclusion, I post here a passage that can be found in the right sidebar of this blog as a sort of addendum to this whole blog, as it is 100% pertinent to this post about Holmes' anonymity on one hand as well as the series theme "Holmes Behind the Veil" on the other. I call it "The Back Cover Blurb That Wasn't":

The three novels comprising MX Publishing’s new Sherlock Holmes series Holmes Behind the Veil differ from most other Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels in that the character of Holmes is muted rather than prominent. Not once in the 900 pages that form the three novels is Sherlock Holmes ever recognized or mentioned by the principal characters—only in occasional asides, a few speculative remarks from the editor. That in itself would be sufficient cause to use the phrase “behind the veil” with respect to this series. But, beyond this obvious aspect, the three stories deal with themes long considered mystical and transcendent throughout the fifty or a hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens existence on this planet, themes very often considered so other-worldly that they are historically set at arms length, distanced from the prosaic and perceived as “behind the veil,” themes such a death, time, reality, divinity, fate, holiness, and God, as well as myths, legends, and folklore, all of which are fundamental to the essence, or fabric, of this Holmes Behind the Veil series.
 
The first book in the series has already been released and is available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK. 

Next: In my next post, #6, I’ll provide some insight into the writing and purpose of Book One of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy: Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

The Fourth Principle—Elfin Coincidence

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Principles of Pastiche"—at the bottom here and work their way up.

I started my third post about the role of Fate in my fiction by saying that it would be difficult to pin down. This next principle may be harder still: 

“It’s my intent to convey a sense of my conviction that there is in reality an attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil' and that the key to knowing, or relating to, that consciousness is G.K. Chesterton’s remark: 'There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.'”

Here is a scattershot approach:

When I was in high school, I was a misfit. I liked to read, particularly science-fiction. I was not athletic and teased for that reason. I didn’t wear the same clothes as the other guys. But neither was I an especially good student, mainly C’s with the occasional B.  I was shy, and by definition avoided girls, though I was terribly fond of a couple, and girls, of course, ignored me. I had three salvations: Two were the library and astronomy.

When I was 16, I was a profound atheist. I’d ponder the enormity of the universe, the countless beings on our infinitesimal earth, and so forth and there was only one solution. There was no God, and the universe was infinite and eternal. I found this viewpoint rather poetic and serene and many a night found me standing in the front yard staring up into the sky and taking in the countless stars, while my rational mind reminded me that I saw only a few thousand at most while there were hundreds of billions in our galaxy and billions of galaxies besides. There was no room for anything except a logical universe. And the distances!  The closest star was 4.2 light-years away, that’s 24 million million miles, or 24,000,000,000,000—the closest!

Proxima Centauri
(NASA)

A moment ago, I said I had three salvations; besides the library and astronomy, I could write, and two of my English teachers in my senior year were most impressed by the quality and originality of my essays and poems. For Mr. Siringer, I’d write longish perfectly structured essays on why there was no alternative to an infinite, Godless universe, and for Mr. Thornton, I’d write the poetic equivalents, for example:

To Proxima Centauri

I can’t see you, but I know you’re there,

twenty-four million million miles from me

and Mom and Jack, our helping hand—

Four-point-two light-years from me

and those piglets cuddled by the sow

in the pen over there by the barn.

I know you’re there; the astronomers say so.

I can’t see you because you’re too faint.

But I can see your cousins Betelgeuse and

Rigel and Sirius and thousands of others.

And you know what…?

They twinkle.

And sometimes, when nobody’s looking, I wink back.

I know you’re there. The big book on the shelf

in my bedroom says so. But you’re not alone.

There’s another star you dance with named Alpha.

Around and around you dance, forever and ever.

In the field, of corn-stalks grow tall towards the sun,

almost touching the sky. Maybe they know you’re there, too.

Maybe they’re trying to shake your hand or say hello.

Mom doesn’t know you’re there.

She’s afraid of the stars.

She stays in the house at night.

I’m not afraid, though.

Often-times, Jack and I sit on the fender

of the old truck and look up.

That’s all;

We don’t talk.

You do all the talking for us.

Copyright  © 1963, 2017 Thomas Kent Miller

Following high school, my life circumstances did not allow me to continue on to college, and so for a decade I worked at mailroom jobs, messenger jobs and the like. One day I was driving and reached the top of a hill in San Francisco. I happened to be thinking just then that I really needed to get my act together and go back to school. The very instant that those words crossed my mind, as I was looking down at the intersection a block away, two delivery trucks crossed paths for an instant, one with the big word THOMAS (Thomas English muffins) and the other MILLER (High Life beer). In other words, the instant that I was telling myself I should go back to school, my name appeared emblazoned on the sides of two big trucks just where I was sure to see them, for only a couple of seconds to be sure. But that impressed me.

Seeing my name on the trucks was fun, but that in itself hardly bears scrutiny even as a coincidence. But the fact that the names happened to appear juxtaposed at the instant I was thinking about doing something that could ultimately affect my life impressed me mightily. In short order I was applying to junior college, which was the beginning of my higher education and the launching of my career as an editor and writer.

When thinking about that moment, and its affect on my life, I wondered about all that had to happen in order to bring those two trucks together at that instant. Any number of factors would have had to come together: the daily lives and moods of the drivers of the two trucks and their families, their delivery schedules, the traffic patterns, the consumption of beer and English muffins in the area, my own schedule and life events that put me at the top of that hill at that precise moment, ad infinitum. The number of things that had to happen in advance of that moment were countless and beyond calculating…yet they did happen and I did see my name writ large in the intersection below, and because of that moment my life changed for the better, I returned to school, got my degrees and began my career.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung studied this sort of phenomenon and gave it a name: synchronicity. During the last several years, there have been countless self-help books on the subject, several attaining best-seller status, so there is really nothing new about this topic.

Nevertheless, it, and similar coincidences, proved so vital in my life that it was not possible for me to leave the subject out of my pastiches. Here is another specific example. Fast forward. The year was 1978. I was living alone in a small apartment near San Francisco. On a lark, I picked up a dictionary, closed my eyes, opened the book to a random page, and pointed. When I opened my eyes, my finger was pointing to the word “forgiven”. “Hmmm,” I said to myself, “Let’s say it’s me that’s being forgiven. Who’s forgiving me?” I shut my eyes again, flipped, pointed, and opened my eyes and saw that my finger was pointing to “Mary”. I have been mulling over that one for 40 years!

The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life

To the degree that, among other things, Mary became the central figure of Book 2 of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” trilogy.

But the main upshot of all this is the simple incontestable awareness that while the fabric of the enormous universe with all its stars and galaxies and enormous spaces seems, most likely rightly, to be devoid of consciousness, which is how I began this essay, nonetheless there is something, somehow, somewhere that is able to take the time out of its busy schedule to arrange an unending panoply of matters to help me—one mere tiny person on this tiny speck of a planet—to decide to go back to school. 

It so happened that I noticed and took seriously this juxtaposition of three things—two trucks and my thoughts; I am of the opinion that, per Chesterton (author of the Father Brown mystery series), it may well be that these sorts of thoughtful "comings together" are strewn about, yet "people reckoning on the prosaic may be perpetually missing them.”

Whether readers of my books notice this or agree with this or contest this, I felt it was my duty—my service, if you will—to share this observation.

The first book in the series is already released and is available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.


Next:   Post # 5 will discuss my decision to make Holmes mainly anonymous in my books.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

The Third Principle—Fate as a Character

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Principles of Pastiche"—at the bottom here and work their way up.

This Third Principle of my pastiche writing is a bit harder to pin down, both for me to put into words and perhaps for my readers to glean, than the first two. Shall we start at the beginning? I often find that a good strategy.

The principle states: “My stories are intended to illustrate the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, ironic, and roundabout manner in which Fate can sometimes work.”  My goodness, that’s an ambitious, perhaps pretentious mouthful. Yet, I chose those words for good reasons:

• curious

• illusive

• patient

• ironic

• roundabout

Do any of those descriptor words have any relevance to ordinary dictionary definitions of “fate” such as these:

(1) Something that unavoidably befalls a person  (2) The universal principle or ultimate agency by which the order of things is prescribed; the decreed cause of events (3) That which is inevitably predetermined; destiny.

“Unavoidably,” “ultimate,” “prescribed,” “decreed,” “inevitable,” “predetermined.” None of these dictionary words seem especially harmonious with my own selections of “curious,” “illusive,” “patient,” “ironic,” “roundabout.”

The words I’ve selected have a sense of involvement, participation, deliberateness, changeability, and fluidity about them, as though there was some purposeful agency at work, while the dictionary words, by definition, pun intended, seem set in stone.

Let me share an example from my fiction, and then I will try to make sense of this apparent disconnect. In The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series, Allan Quatermain is given a task to do by a goddess figure he happens to encounter in the middle of the Ethiopian desert. He listens, determines that everything he has heard is utter nonsense and makes up his mind that the requested task is also nonsense, and true to his obdurate skeptical nature, doesn’t so much decide to ignore said task, but goes about his life forgetting any of the surrounding circumstances had ever happened including the requested task.

And so it stands for a number of years, but there comes a time when events, companionship, timing, etc. line up so that he really has no choice but to remember and relate the story or adventure, of which the nonsensical task is merely a part, to two gentlemen over brandy and a roaring fire. He does so verbally, off the cuff with no sense of permanence or of fulfilling any particular task. However, it so happens that one of his companions enjoys both writing and a good tale and sets down the entire story in detail and eventually sends his manuscript as a souvenir of their delightful evening to the other gentleman, at whose home it is misplaced, languishing for 34 years in a wine cellar, until it is loaned to another party who also loses track of it, and soon that record of Quatermain’s tale is packed away and forgotten in a university library basement for 70 more years. Finally it surfaces at an auspicious time when its contents can be better appreciated, Quatermain’s task becomes generally known, and it starts a chain reaction that changes the world for the better. In other words, Quatermain was given a task to do, and eventually a century and a quarter years later, he fulfills it, indirectly to be sure, but fulfills it nonetheless.

All my descriptor words fit perfectly this scenario, and yet there is no doubt that these events as described are all random, haphazard, unpredictable, and seem to avoid any normal standard criteria for cause and effect. Quartemain was given a task, and despite his every effort, conscious and unconscious, to undermine the task, it eventually bubbles to the surface and affects the whole world.

The successive events (or lack thereof) unfold having very little to do with any conscious human agency. Yet, Fate is, in modern parlance, almost like a computer program running in the background.

Both Books 1 and 3, describe similar mechanisms, turns of fate if you will, a little less so for the former, a little more so for the latter.

I mentioned in Posting # 1 that reading H. Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist affected me deeply; there was a mysterious something permeating the novel that I found refreshing and illuminating something that I had never encountered before in all my reading (up till then). After reading a half dozen more Haggard novels, I was able to put my finger on that quality. It was that Haggard successfully made Fate as palpable a character in The People of the Mist as any of its “flesh and blood” characters. It seemed to me that that story did not come alive solely due to characterizations or plot developments (admittedly both quite strong) so much as they did to turnings of Fate.

So is it any wonder that I would include “turnings of fate” as important elements of my pastiches. It doesn’t hurt that I totally subscribe to such turnings, not so much as fiction plot devices, but as fundamental to human life on this planet. It’s clear enough that, like Haggard, I have a mystical side, a cosmic view that mandates me to expect the unexpected. Haggard biographer Peter Berresford Ellis touches on some of this: “Haggard’s concern with man’s ambiguous status in the universe, a universe of chance and change, and his probing towards an elucidation of purpose....”

1894 First British Edition

Here is what so enthralled me about The People of the Mist. Two brothers come to find that the estate they called home is to be taken away; Leonard loses his chance to marry Jane Beach due to his declining fortunes.  He and his brother go to Africa to start a new life, where their lot is bitter. They are far from civilization trying to mine gold. As Leonard’s brother lies dying, the last words out of his mouth pertain to trusting the woman who is coming. Quickly a woman comes begging him to go with her to a lost land to help rescue her mistress. Leonard and his dwarf sidekick Otter take up the challenge and there follows 300 pages of wonderful adventure. He rescues the woman, Juanna by name; they marry and return to England. Once back, he learns that Jane Beach, who had spurned him, was able to will his estate back to him before she herself died. It turns out that if he had waited a bit longer following his brother’s death, he would have learned of this by message through the agency of her attorney’s messenger, and his life and fortune would have been totally different. As it stands, he is married to Juanna and they live on an estate that is his by virtue of the good graces of his first love, a fact that Juanna cannot forget. In other words, he had endured a fearful adventure and rescued and married a woman all by virtue of wrongly interpreting the “Delphic oracle”-like last words of his brother, which led him to material success but also to a stoic sorrow and a never-to-be-truly-bridged emptiness between he and his wife.

These moments correspond in some respects to the real events in Haggard’s life. In 1891, six years after he had indisputably attained the position of one of the world's most successful writers, his only son died of measles at the age of 11 when Rider and his wife were in Mexico. One can only imagine Haggard's grief and reactions on every level. Where was the sense there? What was the point of attaining the absolute pinnacle of success only to have all joy extinguished forever? All this only convinced him of the cruel workings of destiny and the underlying futility of life, views that couldn’t help but infuse The People of the Mist, the second book he wrote after the loss of his son and which was, as you recall, my introduction to Haggard. It was the sense that results and conclusions are not always wrapped nicely and tied up with pretty string. This was a new concept for me, and one I learned was a constant in Haggard’s writing.

I use the term "Turnings of Fate” repeatedly in this essay. If Fate turns, that would belie notions of inevitability and predetermination. Fate was the utterly unpredictable yet underlying engine that moved The People of the Mist's plot forward, not so much any ordinary human agency. The same can be said about Haggard’s She: A History and most of the Quatermain novels. I use the word Fate to label events or instances unrelated to the apparent action or motivations or cause and effect that we observe in the novel, yet of absolute consequence to the resolution of the novel in fictional terms and to the book's theme or message in broader philosophical terms.

The first book in the series is already released and is available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.

NEXT:  The fourth principle overlaps to some degree with all of the above, but holds its own as a separate principle:  “It’s my intent to convey a sense of my conviction that there is in reality an attentive, deliberate consciousness 'behind the veil' and that the key to knowing, or relating to, that consciousness is G.K. Chesterton’s remark: 'There is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.'”

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

The Second Principle—The Apparatus

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Principles of Pastiche"—at the bottom here and work their way up.

Recall that I’m writing this blog and these individual posts to help certain potential readers come to terms with my unconventional pastiche style before they buy or commit, or even open, my books. Those strongly expecting a linear plot with Dr. Watson calmly recording a remarkable Holmes thriller with Holmes at the top of his deductive game—which I dare say accounts for perhaps 98% of the endless tsunami of Holmes pastiches that have been published during the last 40 years—can only be hopelessly disappointed.

This second post, then, describes the second of my five fundamental principles that I used over 30 years while crafting the three books of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” series. Recall that the first principle was that my books drew as much from H. Rider Haggard as they do from Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.

The second principle stated that pseudo-prefaces, introductions, framing devices, footnotes, and scholarly asides would not be peripheral to my work, but have the uttermost prominence. To put this into perspective, during a period of 14 years, I crafted Book 2 and especially its front matter slowly and carefully and made a multitude of conscious, very deliberate decisions.

Now that that is stated, there’s no point beating around the bush: while Book One’s front matter amounts to 12 pages, on a par with the seminal works of Nicholas Meyer and Loren D. Estleman, Book Two sports a contents page with the following list of front matter, amounting to 66 pages:

Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Editor’s Note to the Fourth Edition  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

Editor’s Note to the Third Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Editor’s Note to the Movie Tie-In (Second) Edition . . . . . . 17

Preface: “The Prodigious Phone Call” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Foreword by John H. Watson, M.D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Record of A.Q.’s narration concerning certain

     adventures that unfolded in east Africa during

     the early part 1872, as set down by

     John H. Watson, M.D. Feb. 1881. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  53

Introduction by Allan Quatermain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

I     ALLAN’S UNWANTED GUESTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  66

The reaction to this approach has mainly fallen into two clear camps:

On one hand, in 2005 the staid industry journal Publishers Weekly blew it all off without a moments hesitation, saying simply, “After a lengthy introduction that explains how the manuscript of the present tale came to light, the main narrative….”

On the other hand, several reader reviews back then were quite positive, seven giving it five stars. I am especially fond of this classic from one “Golden Fleece”:  “The true joys of this book lie in its tendencies toward the epistolary. Quatermain has an epic adventure in which he crosses paths with our itinerant hero Holmes; however, Quatermain's narrative is actually ‘revealed’ several times over in the course of the document's existence…In other words, the real story lies in the front material and the editor's notes to the text. Not reading this material does the reader a terrible disservice. I found the book to be very entertaining and difficult to put down… This little exfoliate especially provided me gratification as I sifted through its many layers because of its qualities as a ‘lost’ story that is discovered and revealed through happenstance and vision.”

These then are the facts; we now come to the point where I need to justify this approach.

1974

Following the successful publication in 1974 of Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution, the then-novel apparatus of pseudo-front matter used to increase the over-all verisimilitude of his work, as well many other pastiches published in that period, touched my soul. I loved it. By its very nature, the existence of this material was the epitome of irony. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to create a false provenance that seemed real but clearly was not, being after all affixed to a work featuring well-known clearly fictitious characters. That irony made my heart sing. And when done right, this sort of front matter intrinsically told a story of convoluted mystery and of intertwining fates, laying out why and how cause and effect, ever patient, ordained that the manuscript would be hidden, found, and/or travel. Unashamedly following in the shoes of Meyer, Loren D Estleman did this quite well in his two Holmes crossover tales featuring Dracula and Dr. Jekyll, as did Umberto Eco in the untitled preface to his own Sherlockian pastiche The Name of the Rose.  Switching genres for a moment, I found Michael Crichton used this devise to great advantage in his many science thriller novels.

1980

Yet, even from the start, the use of this pseudo prefatory material was hardly a given. When it was included, I relished it, but as time went on, writers (and/or their editors) tended to shorten the front matter or eliminate it entirely. This troubled me.

So when, beginning in 1983, I started composing (see Post # 1) Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, which is Book One of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” series, I scrupulously made sure there was sufficient realistic found-document front matter—12 pages.

I was delighted when three otherwise educated, bright people came up to me over the years and asked if the account I recorded actually happened. Naturally, in order for this to have been the case, these individuals of necessity had to believe that Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

It took four years to get Book One ready for press, and by the time it was published, it was all too evident that there was no standard whatsoever by which pseudo-front matter was created, let along attached to various pastiches.

As I spent the next 14 years sculpting what is now Book Two, I was prompted not by commercial considerations so much as by irritation that authors and/or editors chose to ignore the little gems that could and should precede pastiches, and which I so thoroughly enjoyed. A pastiche without some sort of preface, foreword, or introduction was only half written in my view.

Insofar as there was never enough pseudo-front matter for my tastes, I made up my mind to create a pastiche comprising “found documents” that absolutely depended on realistic, detailed and significant front matter, materials laying out a scenario that would be impossible to ignore, and which would be absolutely crucial to the plotting and denouement of the story. The manner I did this was to pretend that the book in its current state had gone through multiple editions with separate introductions prefacing each one. In addition, I felt that the conceit of multiple editions would enhance the novel's verisimilitude in the same manner that Meyer had intended for his "foreword"— but taken to the next level! In other words, the book would pretend to be a serious—almost scholarly—compilation of "found" texts with appropriately detailed explanations of their provenances.

1979

1978

Thus, during the years 1988 to 2002 as I wrote Book Two, its front matter grew not only in page count but in importance to the overall theme and purpose of the book. I put a lot of effort into creating a complex scenario showing how the pertinent documents would be “hidden, found, and/or travel.” All the better to establish “a story of convoluted mystery and of intertwining fates.”

And while I was at it, I decided to incorporate a special, again ironic, touch. When I was in school, I was greatly influenced by the works of some writers who sometimes wrote their fiction as a sort of circle with the ending at the beginning, and it came natural for me to follow suit. Thus the whole point of Book Two is right there on page 8. All the action and the plot and the many twists and turns and quests are resolved on the first page following the contents page. Of course, this is often missed, especially since that “Editor’s Note to the Fourth Edition” seems dry to many readers.  Well, dryness was the whole point.

Yet, here is the penultimate irony. Our culture does not reward interest in front matter, regardless of the nature of the book. Whether starting a book of popular science or an anthology of short stories, readers today simply ignore and skip over the front matter.

And finally, as perhaps a sad commentary on my naïveté, all those years I was writing the book, it never once dawned on me that some readers might find my style daunting. I imagined readers would quickly realize that my second Holmes/Haggard pastiche needed to be approached with other-than-ordinary expectations. Once it was published, however, I learned quickly that many readers, though thank goodness not all as pointed out above, could not relate to the book. It was much too far outside their comfort zone. One lady in my church said to me, "It's rather like a study book isn't it?"  I still cringe when I remember that!  She thought it was a textbook! And to my overwhelming astonishment, the reviewer for Publishers Weekly quoted above simply did not “get” my book any way, shape, or form, despite my believing then and now, that I wrote in a manner that careful readers would understand simply by ignoring preconceptions, by recognizing the multitudinous clues I'd dropped before page 8, and by applying a little common sense.

Therefore, you can easily see why I mentioned to my publisher that there needed to be some way to help readers "get" my approach to our overall "Holmes Behind the Veil" series. Hopefully this blog will aid in pulling off that trick!

The first book in the series is being released in June and available from all good bookstores including Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.

Next: In my next post, I’ll focus on the important yet subtle role of fate in my pastiches.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.