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.

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