Post 1: Introducing My Five Standards of Pastiche

Recently I mentioned to my publisher that I felt it was important to alert prospective readers of my “Holmes Behind the Veil” trilogy as to what to expect.  He said, “I think the best way to ensure people ‘get’ your books is to have an interesting and informative blog which introduces and explains the books.”
Clearly I’ve taken him up on that idea. I call this blog Thomas Kent Miller’s Lighthouse because, like a lighthouse, I hope it will alert readers that they are approaching uncharted seas and hazardous shoals. For example fin de siècle authority Mark Valentine says of one of the books, using expressions not exactly typical of book reviews, “we must regard the book as like a curious crystal, which reveals some new dimension as each facet is caught in the light of our understanding.”

In my first posts, I will describe the five fundamental principles I steadfastly used over 30 years while crafting the books. I’ll briefly list them all out here, then use the remainder of this post to explain the first. Then I’ll shed light on the others in more detail in follow-on posts:

(1) My books draw as much from H. Rider Haggard as they do from Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.

(2) The literary conventions of pastiches, such as front matter, framing devices, pseudo-prefaces, footnotes, and so forth have an uttermost prominent place in my work. 

(3)  My stories are intended to illustrate the curious, illusive, exceedingly patient, ironic, and roundabout manner in which Fate can sometimes work. 

(4)  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.” 

(5)  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 3 even some die-hard Holmes gamers might not recognize him.

H. Rider Haggard

Prior to 1973, except for the vaguest of  after-the-fact memories of seeing one or two of his books in my high school library, I was not really aware that somebody named H. Rider Haggard had ever existed. But it was in December 1973, when I was 28, that I chanced to read Haggard’s The People of the Mist (1894). Ironically, the author’s name on the Ballantine Original Adult Fantasy (AKA the “Unicorn’s Head”) meant nothing to me. It was the cover art by Dean Ellis that spoke to me, saying, “Take me off the shelf and look at me carefully.” It was this cover art and the pointed back cover blurb, both redolent of a favorite subject of mine, lost cities and lost races, that persuaded me to buy the book.

Cover by Dean Ellis

This was my first encounter with Haggard, and it affected me deeply; there was a mysterious something permeating that novel that I found refreshing and illuminating. After reading a few more of his books, I finally put my finger on the quality that had so excited me. It was that Haggard successfully made Fate a character in many of his books. It seemed to me that his stories did not come alive due to characterizations or plot developments so much as they did to turnings of Fate.

That said, while a century ago virtually any civilized person in Europe, Asia, and the Americas would have instantly recognized the name of the then-best-selling author H. Rider Haggard, the passage of time takes its due of sad tolls, and Haggard’s notability and notoriety have faded dramatically, unlike his dear friend Rudyard Kipling who maintains a certain relevance: Note that only last year Walt Disney Pictures spent $175 million to remake Kipling’s Jungle Book, succeeding in grossing $1 billion!

When H. Rider Haggard is referenced by today’s literary authorities of adventure and fantasy fiction spanning from 1885 to 1925, he is identified as the author of King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She: A History (1887), both enormous worldwide best sellers in their day, and, indeed, never going out of print to this day and filmed many times. Usually these authorities paint explanations of Haggard in broad strokes, for example, Mike Ashley says that Haggard was “one of the greatest adventure writers who ever lived”; the late author and genre editor Lin Carter said he was the “unchallenged master of the adventure romance”; and Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Press sums up the matter with “The name of no writer is more closely or affectionately connected to adventure fiction than that of Sir Henry Rider Haggard.”

However, when I pulled down that paperback in 1973, I didn’t know any of this, and the more I read Haggard’s works and learned about him and the era in which he wrote, I came to understand that he was not a mere Victorian hack adventure writer, as those descriptions above might lead one to believe. I learned that there was much more driving his fiction than adventure for adventures’ sake. At the root of Haggard and his fiction was a more or less consistent cosmic view that permeates all his writing. I go into detail about this in an essay written for the UK literary journal Wormwood in the Spring of 2013, and which is reprinted as an appendix in Book 2 of the “Holmes Behind the Veil” series. Suffice it to say now that in 1983 when I embarked on my first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, H. Rider Haggard had already been uppermost in my mind for a decade. I remembered a conversation with an acquaintance a year or two earlier that speculated whether Jesus could have been influenced by yogis. I liked the idea, and after some research, learned that there's a strong tradition that Jesus with his brother Thomas (the disciple) traveled to Tibet. That seemed like a great jumping off point. But I was immediately faced with a problem: Since there could be no Watson in Tibet, who would be the narrator of the story, whereupon I remembered that H. Rider Haggard had sent his heroes of She: An Adventure, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey, off to central Asia around the same time in search for the new incarnation of She. Thus, I had Leo Vincey do Watson’s job, and the rest fell into place.

Yet, despite this easy solution, another problem instantly popped up before I’d even set down one word:  Neither Haggard nor any of his 60+ books were uppermost in the minds of readers in the mid-1980s, and I wondered if a certain amount of biographical, literary, or even historical background would be necessary to acclimate readers as they picked up what would eventually become Sherlock Holmes on the Roof of the World. But I decided two things at that juncture: That I should give readers the benefit of the doubt and if concerns sprang up, I would cross those roads when I got to them.

In due course, the book was completed and attained some success for both myself and its distributor Borgo Press. I had so much fun merging the two sagas, making an effort to get the details right, that when it came time to do a second Holmes pastiche, it was a no brainer that this time Holmes would encounter Haggard’s other great and iconic series character, Allan Quatermain. Determining how that would happen was not as easy. All told, it would take me from 1988 to 2002 to write that prequel, as it turned out to be.

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: In my next post, # 2, I’ll explain my decision to use the totally untraditional approach of focusing on front matter to move the story and plot of the two subsequent books forward.


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