The boom in such stories triggered by the success of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival of the William Gillette play, Sherlock Holmes, and Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution, gave the world many less-than-stellar stories that the world could have survived without. To cite but one example, one author’s effort at Watsonian narrative voice included the line, “It was the beginning of that season the English so appropriately called winter.” But there was gold amid the dross, especially Edgar Award winner Rick Boyer’s first crack at the Canon, 1976’s The Giant Rat of Sumatra.
Holmesians reasonably differ about the most intriguing of the adventures Watson never published, but for many, these lines in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” stand alone:
“Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,” said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. “It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”
Boyer was neither the first nor the last to attempt to flesh out this reference, but many agree that his novel is the best. His rodent of unusual size is responsible for a series of deaths in London and elsewhere that may be connected with a kidnapping in India. Chapter One, “The Tattooed Sailor,” opens in the best Canonical tradition—“The summer of 1894 was hot and dry and without noteworthy cases or events, save for the mysterious disappearance of Miss Alice Allistair which threw the Kingdom into shock and sorrow.” Boyer’s especially good in raising the hairs on the back of his readers’s necks, as in a scary sequence set in some dark woods where the monstrous creature may lurk. His Watson writes, “Never shall I forget the eerie spell which came upon me when I finally realized that I had been staring at Henry’s Hollow for the previous ten minutes. Even as I write these words, I can once again feel the tremor of excitement that comes when witnessing something unique and grand.” And as in the best stories, canonical or not, Boyer manages to touch the heart as well as the mind, doing so here in his account of a devastating fire on the docks, and the lives it claimed. “To call it fire would be an injustice. A slice of Hell, fetched up and planted on the river bank, would be a better description.” (Boyer’s Giant Rat has recently been reprinted by Titan Books as one of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series).
But excellence alone is not enough to make a pastiche screen-worthy. Boyer’s Giant Rat combines deduction and action in a manner reminiscent of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the most-filmed of the original 60, and the presence in the story of a monstrous creature only makes it more appealing. (Cave canem nocte: as readers of my first column know, successfully translating the demon dog of Dartmoor from the image conjured up on the page onto the screen has been difficult at best, and a scary enormous rodent might be even harder to pull off.)
A possible supernatural element is also present in another candidate worthy of the big or small screen, “The Secret of Shoreswood Hall,” by Denis O. Smith, inspired by the legend of the Monster of Glamis, purported to be the hideously-deformed member of the nobility who was kept locked up in a hidden room. Smith is for my money one of the five best pasticheurs ever, despite his undeserved obscurity, even among Sherlockians, a status that will change, hopefully, with the 2014 publication of his The Mammoth Book of the Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. In his four volumes of The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Smith demonstrated facility at both the Watsonian voice and the Holmesian brilliance, and was nimble enough to even emulate those Canonical stories that did not center on a corpse, a much more difficult challenge. His “The Adventure of the Willow Pool” is also a candidate for adaptation—it centers on an army captain, “who, on his return from the war in Afghanistan, is ignored and shunned by friends and acquaintances in his home village—where he has been liked and respected all his life.” As with “Shoreswood Hall,” “Willow Pool” is distinguished by clever, sophisticated plotting, a baffling puzzle that gives Holmes ample opportunity to impress, and spot-on characterizations.
2011 saw a lot of hype about Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, inaccurately called the first pastiche ever authorized by the Conan Doyle estate. But despite that puffing, Horowitz, best-known stateside for his Foyle’s War TV series, delivered. A year after Holmes’s death, Watson finally brings himself to recount events that “were simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print… it is no exaggeration to suggest that they would tear apart the entire fabric of society.” That foreshadowing sets the bar high for the cases of The Man in the Flat Cap and the House of Silk, but Horowitz clears it, making it look easy, and leaving many hoping for another pastiche from his pen. He pulls off a variation of one of the most difficult opening scenes from the Canon—Holmes’s seeming to read Watson’s mind, this time commenting, “Influenza is unpleasant, …but you are right in thinking that, with your wife’s help, the child will recover soon.” There are many scenes that cry out for a visual interpretation to supplement Derek Jacobi’s standout audiobook. And Horowitz’s skill set means that producers need seek no further for a screenwriter.
The late Barrie Roberts made a name for himself with nine novel-length pastiches published over a 13-year period. Sherlock Holmes and the Man From Hell (also a recent Titan reprint) uses a reference from the Canon to a matter involving a Lord Backwater as the springboard for a suspenseful mystery. What could be more evocative than a message received before a murder reading, “The man from the Gates of Hell will be at the old place at 6”? And that outing was no fluke; Roberts is one of the only authors, in my opinion, to succeed at a witchcraft-themed pastiche; Sherlock Holmes and the Harvest of Death features a plotline that offers ample bandwidth for the creative director to inspire fear with visual effects and a spooky soundtrack.
Speaking of visuals, is there a master-criminal more florid than Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu? Fortunately, those who like their pastiches pitting Holmes against an evil mastermind can have their tastes sated by Cay Van Ash’s Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984). Fu Manchu’s traditional nemesis, Scotland Yarder Nayland Smith has disappeared, and Smith’s medical sidekick, Dr. Petrie, turns to Baker Street for help.
Planting Holmes square in the midst of a ghost story inspired by a well-known Henry James story was a stroke of genius on the part of Donald Thomas in his Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly. Time and again, Thomas has proven that he deserves a spot in anyone’s top ten of all-time best pastiche writers, and his latest, Death on a Pale Horse, his first novel, gives Holmes a new potent adversary in a truly epic and continent-spanning case.
Want more suggestions, Mr./Ms. Director?
Carole Buggé also does ghosts justice in 2000’s The Haunting of Torre Abbey, involving the spirit of a murdered monk. Fans of David Pirie’s inspired Murder Rooms series, with the real-life inspiration for Holmes, Dr. Joseph Bell, brilliantly-portrayed by the late, lamented Ian Richardson (covered in detail in my column, The NonSolitary Cyclist in SHMM 3) will surely hope that his The Dark Water—another witchcraft-themed outing will someday hit the small screen, somehow with a lead not overshadowed by Richardson.
Like your Holmes films to feature travel beyond familiar London scenes? Then Michael Hardwick’s Prisoner of the Devil, which plausibly injects Holmes into the Dreyfus Affair, would appeal.
John Taylor has added to the audio universe with two CDs of new stories—The Unopened Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, featuring spine-tingling radio plays such as “The Horror in Hanging Wood” that tore a man to pieces, and the Benedict Cumberbatch-narrated The Rediscovered Railway Mysteries and Other Stories, highlighted by “The 10.59 Assassin,” Taylor’s most challenging puzzle. (And Taylor has an untold tale of his own; reliable sources suggest that the intriguingly-titled Sherlock Holmes: The Museum of the Impossible may yet become a reality.) “The Horror in Hanging Wood” especially cries out for film treatment.
Finally, as an on-scream adversary for the Master, Jack the Ripper is at least second only to the Napoleon of Crime. Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman’s off-beat but effective Sherlock Holmes: The War of the Worlds opens with an authors’s note commenting that the first Holmes-Ripper movie, A Study in Terror, was the only film they saw “in which the magnificent speed of Holmes’s thinking [was] brought to life with full effect.” That quality was also to the fore in the second Holmes-Ripper screen treatment, Murder by Decree, which suggests that Lyndsay Faye’s Dust and Shadow, an extremely