6: On Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World

New readers of this blog should begin with the first post—"Introducing Miller's Five Prin-ciples of Pastiche"—and work their way up to read an overview of the writing of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy series.

Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World is the first book of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" trilogy and is now available from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK. An excellent Audible Audio Book version (from a different publisher with a different cover and modified title) is also available at Amazon sites worldwide and all other normal outlets.

While, of course, it is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel (or novella), it is also a sequel to H. Rider Haggard's She: An Adventure. In fact, the adventure it records precedes the action covered in the only heretofore known sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She. Thus, it tells of events that occurred between the originally published adventures.

Its narrator is not Dr. Watson and the principal characters never have any inkling that they are having dealings with the famous great detective.

The manner by which this book came into being is as follows:

First off, the date was September 10, 1983. I had graduated from university the year before and I was working as an editor/proofreader for a nearby textbook publisher. I’d already had a great fondness for Sherlock Holmes for at least a decade, so much so that I named my first gray-tabby kitten Doyle. When Jayne and I first met, it was Doyle's name that proved to be the perfect ice-breaker—“Oh, is your cat named after Arthur Conan or Doyle Drive?”

Sherlock was never far from my mind, and this night in 1983 I was remembering that a few years before an acquaintance and I had been talking while working at the college newspaper, and our discussion turned toward the notion that Jesus is said, in some quarters, to have traveled to India with his brother Thomas after his seeming death on the cross. This thought automatically led me to think of Nicholas Meyers’ ground-breaking novel The Seven-Percent Solution and I realized that the Canon recognizes that Holmes traveled to Tibet in the guise a Norwegian named Sigerson during his Great Hiatus. So I asked myself the natural question under those circumstances: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if Holmes discovered in Tibet that Jesus had in fact visited there?” 

But then I realized that such a tale could not be set down by Watson, as Watson was under the impression his friend was dead. Who then? Well, by that point in my life I was also long under the strong influence of adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard, and I remembered that at the end of his epic novel She: An Adventure, he sent his two heroes, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to Central Asia to search for the reborn Ayesha. 

“I traveled for two years in Tibet . . . and amused myself by visiting Lhasa, and spending some days with the head Lama.”—Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”

  

“We are . . . going away again, this time to Central Asia, where, if anywhere upon this Earth, wisdom is to be found.”—L. Horace Holly in She

It was merely a matter of figuring out a way for them to meet. That was about as far as this idea went. Bringing together all these threads took only a moment in time, and I probably wrote myself a note so as to not forget the idea. Later that night my wife and I retired and went to sleep.

I had a vivid dream, it was as follows: I am

standing on a sidewalk. A big white limousine pulls up in front of me, and James Michener, the best-selling author of Tales of the South Pacific and Hawaii, gets out of the car and shakes my hand, saying “Tom, let me give you this advice: Whatever else you do with it, finish your novel.” Upon awakening, this impressed me so much that I found a small photo of Michener, typed his dream advice as a small caption, glued it together, and framed it as a reminder that I had no choice but to write the novel that I had conceived the night before. Here is a scan of that very framed picture; it’s yellowed over these 33 years, but it's still prominent on my bookshelf within sight as I type this.

Shortly afterward, I needed to decide if the narrator would be Horace or Leo. Thus I began to write the book with Horace relating the events, mainly because he was by far the more literate of the two and besides he matched Watson’s age more closely than Leo. Sometime after I had finished the first couple of chapters, I had a dental appointment. My dentist was in downtown San Francisco, and his office was high in an office building that presented a great view of the San Francisco Bay. The next day, my supervisor came to work after lunch and arbitrarily mentioned that she’d been to the dentist and, also arbitrarily, described the view from the dentist chair. Well, she was describing the exact view seen from my dentist’s chair. Her dentist was in fact my dentist…and his first name was Leo. This coincidence struck me hard. Here I was trying to choose between Horace and Leo when fate stepped in and pressed hard on me the name “Leo”. I took this very seriously and rewrote the first couple of chapters, and it turned out that doing so opened up new possibilities. 
.

Our lives were very busy back then, full of major life events, and it took me four years to write what turned out to be a fairly slim book, a novella rather than a novel. Sometime during that period—probably later than earlier—another married couple and my wife and I took a train up the coast of California for the specific purposes of enjoying a train ride and viewing the rugged coastline. It had been years since any of us had ridden a train. Naturally I brought writing materials, and there came a time when I was hard at work composing on a yellow legal pad the numbered sentences that would comprise “The Gospel of Issa”. I was concentrating and not aware of my surroundings, when someone jostled my elbow and said “Excuse me.” I looked up…right into the face of Sherlock Holmes!  It turned out that that particular train on which we were riding was a “Murder Mystery Train” upon which the local literary mystery club or clubs staged a mystery, and it was the job of its members to find planted “clues” and eventually the “murderer.” At these events, many club members often dressed as their favorite literary detectives to amp up the fun. Well, you can easily imagine how a coincidence of this kind affected me (see "The Fourth Principle—Elfin Coincidence" in this blog).

Here are two examples of Murder Mystery Dinner Train ads

(found via a Google search).

Because I was anxious to finish the book once and for all and also to maintain control over it, I published the book myself as Rosemill House publishers. I’d been involved in the publishing field for a decade by then and knew my way around typesetting, design, layout, wax, printers and their antics, and so forth, and felt I could do the job well myself, and in fact I did, successfully bringing it out at Christmas time 1987, exactly 100 years after Sherlock Holmes came into existence in A Study in Scarlet in Beeton's Christmas Annual magazine 1887. The First Edition of Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World sold for $4.95 and is a nice little trade paperback that I’m very proud of. 

The first 1987 edition.

However, I found that distribution wasn't (and still isn’t) my forté. When in due course, the respected academic/library press, Borgo Press of San Bernardino, California, contacted me and asked if they could distribute the book to libraries with library casing, i.e., hardcover, I was delighted. In fact, it sold well enough that Borgo deemed it a “best-seller.” In subsequent years, the owners of Borgo closed shop, and I did not have the energy to sell the book except by onesies and twosies, and eventually Roof became a valuable collectors’ item. 

Twenty years later, in 2007, Wildside Press, which had absorbed Borgo Press circa 2002, brought out its own printing of Roof, but both versions have long been out of print, while a beautifully recorded Audible book from Wildside is still available.

NEXT:  Post # 7 begins a discussion of Book 2 of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" series, The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life. This is the first of my books that push expectations for Holmes pastiches far far beyond most readers' anticipations. The discussions of my Five Principles of Pastiche below lead up to this point in this blog, and each principle will be explained further with illustrations from Book 2,
The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life.


Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World (Book 1 of the "Holmes Behind the Veil" series from MX publishers is available now from Amazon USA,  Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK and
online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere. An excellent Audible Audio Book version (from a different publisher with a different cover and modified title) is also available at Amazon sites worldwide and all other normal outlets.
.

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