8: The Special Title Page of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life

This eighth post no doubt will present far more information than most readers of my Lighthouse Blog will ever care to know. Nonetheless, I feel this explanation is important, as it covers an area once common but now long forgotten, and therefore might easily go right over the heads of many readers.

In posting No 2 , “The Second Principle—The Apparatus”, I called attention to the manner in which Nicholas Meyer and his publisher, E.P. Dutton & Co., chose to present Mr. Meyer's first groundbreaking Sherlock Holmes pastiche in 1974 as "Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. as edited by Nicholas Meyer." This pseudo-attribution was in itself groundbreaking, and the pattern of  “authorship” deflection was quickly adopted by many other pastiche authors, for example, Loren D. Estleman and Frank Thomas.

When writing my first Holmes/Haggard pastiche, I, too, made the decision to present the book as being "From the Journal by Leo Vincey, Esq." in emulation with myself shunted over into the role mere “editor.”

I then decided to take this intentional authorial misdirection to the next level by designing the very first page of CRUCIBLE—i.e., the title page—in a manner that not only tipped my hat to Doyle and Haggard, but also to that whole magical period of 19th Century romance book publishing. I decided to make the title page extra special.

Pick up most any book published during the last 20 years of the Victorian era and first half decade or so of the Edwardian (give or take a few years) and you will notice on the title page a publishing convention that was utterly commonplace  at that time. Centered under the author's name there was invariably (set in very small type) a listing of some of the author's other works. For example, I have in front of me an 1880 printing of Ben-Hur and the title page looks something like this:

BEN-HUR

A TALE OF THE CHRIST

BY

LEW WALLACE

AUTHOR OF "THE FAIR GOD"

Similarly, the 1887 pressing of Jess by Rider Haggard rendered its title page thus:

JESS

BY

H. RIDER HAGGARD

AUTHOR OF

'KING SOLOMON'S MINES'  'SHE, A HISTORY OF ADVENTURE'

ETC.

And, lastly, not to make too fine a point on it, here we have the cover page from an 1891 volume:

THE HAUNTED STATION

AND OTHER STORIES.

BY

HUME NISBET,

AUTHOR OF

"BAIL UP!" "THR DIVERS," "THE BUSHRANGERS'S SWEETHEART,"

"THE JOLLY ROGER," "THE SAVAGE QUEEN," &c., &c.

So when it came time to fashion a title page for CRUCIBLE, nothing at all would do except an emulation of this convention.

BUT there was more! After all, not only was CRUCIBLE "set down" by Dr. Watson, but the nature of what he was recording was far different than any ordinary Sherlock Holmes adventure. It was the "record" of a heretofore untold adventure by the great Allan Quatermain. In fact, it was a tale actually "told" by Quatermain and Watson's role was mainly that of a "stenographer." Thus there was no getting away from the fact that my title page would "one-up" Meyer's and necessarily have two "authors"—Allan Quatermain and John H. Watson, M.D—as well as list myself as "editor." Of course the great fun here is that whereas The Seven-Per-Cent Solution sported one nonexistent fictional author on its formal title page, my book's title page would list two nonexistent fictional authors, plus me in a flagrantly false role. How cool was that? Remember this was 1988, and these concepts were relatively new.

When you added it all up, all the parameters, intentions, tributes, and emulation that needed to be contained on that very first page—the title page—of The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life; or, The Adventure of the Rose of Fire, the illustration shows what the final result was. I was rather proud of myself. I was not aware that anyone else had had the temerity to buck modern publishing conventions to such a degree:

•    A long title

•    A long subtitle

•    Two nonexistent authors, plus a misrepresented “editor”

•    Six lines of supplemental text of a bibliographical nature that was briefly in vogue a whole century and a quarter ago, but by 1910 had largely disappeared.

It should also be noted that for the first 30 years of my writing career, my byline read "Thos." rather than "Thomas". This was to accentuate the "Victorian quality" of all my writing. And during all that time I would explain my reason for doing so as follows:

 
'“Thos.” is an old-fashioned abbreviation of “Thomas,” just as “Wm.” is a shortened version of “William,” “Robt." is short for “Robert” and “Jos.” for “Joseph.” Abbreviating names was common in centuries past due to the relative rarity of paper and the consequent necessity of cramming as many names as possible onto documents such as shipping manifests and parish registers. I chose “Thos. Kent Miller” as my byline since most of my writing has an old-fashioned feel or sensibility because it consists mainly of pastiches of Victorian characters both real and imaginary.'

However, I've frankly grown tired of having to constantly explain myself, and so in 2016 I chose the path of least resistance.

I’ve gone to the trouble of explaining all this in advance of the MX's September 2017 publication of  The Great Detective at the Crucible of Life, because without doubt few if any of my readers would likely notice the title page. I can speak from experience since the book has been around for 15 years. My “cleverness,” as described lovingly above, has not once been noticed, or at least the end product has never once been mentioned to me nor recognized in print—not even by the one-would-hope literate book reviewer for Publishers Weekly, who had absolutely no clue of what I was attempting and dismissed the book outright. That was the day I was knocked off of my cloud back into reality!

But I was not nearly done; rather than capitulating, I dug my heels in deeper, entrenched still further, with the result eleven years later being Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time.

Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series from MX—The Great Detective at The Dawn of Time—will be available September 19. Book 1, Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World, is already available, and Book 3, The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time, will be available on November 20 from online bookstores and marketplaces everywhere, including Amazon USA, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon UK.

Post # 9 will briefly discuss world-renowned landscape painter Frederick Church and the Hudson River School of 19th century landscape painting as invoked in Book 2.

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