BotM Feb 2018: SHERLOCK HOLMES in THE SIGN OF FOUR by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BotM Feb 2018: SHERLOCK HOLMES in THE SIGN OF FOUR by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Mel Mudkiper: Jan 19, 2012; At this point, Mudman abruptly ends the conversation. He usually insists on the last word.

The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum

bitch

# ? Feb 22, 2018 19:45

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 11:19

mllaneza: Apr 28, 2007; Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Anyway, Need Suggestions for Next Month!

Yann Martel's The High Mountains of Portugal ! I found it to be wonderfully surreal, brilliantly imaginative, and deeply insightful.

# ? Feb 23, 2018 00:12

anilEhilated: Feb 17, 2014; But I say fuck the rain.; Grimey Drawer

Have we done Lincoln in the Bardo yet? It is staring at me accusingly everytime I turn my Kindle on.
Also it's supposed to be both relatively simple and good.

# ? Feb 25, 2018 20:25

Franchescanado: Feb 23, 2013; If it wasn't for disappointment
I wouldn't have any appointment; Grimey Drawer

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Anyway, Need Suggestions for Next Month!

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

or

Black Boy by Richard Wright

# ? Mar 1, 2018 15:32

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

o hshit poll time

time to ~read~ :sigh:

# ? Mar 1, 2018 16:34

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

We'll be moving on to next months' book soon but this thread won't close so feel free to continue Holmes-related discussion as you will.

Just don't take it too far:

quote:

ichard Lancelyn Green, the world�s foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes. The archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story �The Hound of the Baskervilles.�

The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them no one had been able to write a definitive biography�a task that Green was determined to complete. Many scholars feared that the archive had been discarded or destroyed; as the London Times noted earlier this year, its whereabouts had become �a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B Baker Street,� the fictional den of Holmes and his fellow-sleuth, Dr. Watson.
Not long after Green launched his investigation, he discovered that one of Conan Doyle�s five children, Adrian, had, with the other heirs� agreement, stashed the papers in a locked room of a ch�teau that he owned in Switzerland. Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the ch�teau without his siblings� knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack�giving rise to the legend of the curse. After Adrian�s death, the papers apparently vanished. And whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an impenetrable web of heirs�including a self-styled Russian princess�who seemed to have deceived and double-crossed each other in their efforts to control the archive.

For years, Green continued to sort through evidence and interview relatives, until one day the muddled trail led to London�and the doorstep of Jean Conan Doyle, the youngest of the author�s children. Tall and elegant, with silver hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties. (�Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body,� her father had written of Jean when she was five. �Her will is tremendous.�) Whereas her brother Adrian had been kicked out of the British Navy for insubordination, and her elder brother Denis was a playboy who had sat out the Second World War in America, she had become an officer in the Royal Air Force, and was honored, in 1963, as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace. Green had almost as great an interest in her father as she did, and she began sharing her memories, as well as family photographs. She asked him to return, and one day, Green later told friends, she showed him some boxes that had been stored in a London solicitor�s office. Peering inside them, he said, he had glimpsed part of the archive. Dame Jean informed him that, because of an ongoing family dispute, she couldn�t yet allow him to read the papers, but she said that she intended to bequeath nearly all of them to the British Library, so that scholars could finally examine them. After she died, in 1997, Green eagerly awaited their transfer�but nothing happened.

Then, last March, Green opened the London Sunday Times and was shocked to read that the lost archive had �turned up� at Christie�s auction house and was to be sold, in May, for millions of dollars by three of Conan Doyle�s distant relatives; instead of going to the British Library, the contents would be scattered among private collectors around the world, who might keep them inaccessible to scholars. Green was sure that a mistake had been made, and hurried to Christie�s to inspect the materials. Upon his return, he told friends that he was certain that many of the papers were the same as those he had uncovered. What�s more, he alleged, they had been stolen�and he had proof.

Over the next few days, he approached members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, one of hundreds of fan clubs devoted to the detective. (Green had once been chairman.) He alerted other so-called Sherlockians, including various American members of the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only group that was founded in 1934 and named after the street urchins Holmes regularly employed to ferret out information. Green also contacted the more orthodox scholars of Conan Doyle, or Doyleans, about the sale. (Unlike Green, who moved between the two camps, many Doyleans distanced themselves from the Sherlockians, who often treated Holmes as if he were a real detective and refused to mention Conan Doyle by name.)
Green shared with these scholars what he knew about the archive�s provenance, revealing what he considered the most damning piece of evidence: a copy of Dame Jean�s will, which stated, �I give to The British Library all . . . my late father�s original papers, personal manuscripts, diaries, engagement books, and writings.� Determined to block the auction, the makeshift group of amateur sleuths presented its case to Members of Parliament. Toward the end of the month, as the group�s campaign intensified and its objections appeared in the press, Green hinted to his sister, Priscilla West, that someone was threatening him. Later, he sent her a cryptic note containing three phone numbers and the message �please keep these numbers safe.� He also called a reporter from the London Times, warning that �something� might happen to him.

On the night of Friday, March 26th, he had dinner with a longtime friend, Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that �an American was trying to bring him down.� After the two men left the restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car behind them.
The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn�t pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/13/mysterious-circumstances

quote:

A leading authority on Sherlock Holmes took his own life in a way meant to suggest that a rival had murdered him, it has been claimed.

Richard Lancelyn Green, 50, a prolific author and collector of memorabilia relating to the fictional detective, was found garrotted on his bed by police in March after trying to stop a �2 million ($A5.1 million) auction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's papers.

The coroner returned an open verdict but friends and relatives of Mr Lancelyn Green claim the evidence suggests he took his own life in a manner that would implicate a US rival.

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, James Gibson, who co-edited the first comprehensive Conan Doyle bibliography with Mr Lancelyn Green in 1983, concluded that his colleague had "wanted (his death) to look like murder", and that he had set up a trail of "false clues".

Mr Lancelyn Green's body was found on March 27 with a shoelace tied around his neck and a wooden spoon, used to tighten the noose, still entangled in the cord.

In the weeks leading to his death, he had expressed concern that a forthcoming auction of Conan Doyle's papers at Christie's consisted mostly of items that the author's daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle, had left to the British Library. Mr Lancelyn Green, a former chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society, wanted access to the papers to research a biography of Conan Doyle.

Mr Gibson said that the more curious elements of the evidence - which had revived talk of a Conan Doyle "curse" - could be explained by Mr Lancelyn Green's suicide. He told The New Yorker: "He had to have used (the wooden spoon) to tighten the cord. If someone else had garrotted him, why would he need the spoon? The killer could simply use his hands. I think things in his life had not turned out the way he wanted. This sale brought everything to a head."

Before he died, Mr Lancelyn Green had made several telephone calls to friends and journalists claiming an American whom he did not identify was pursuing him. He feared his opposition to the auction could result in his death.

Although "the American" is not named in The New Yorker, there has been speculation among Holmes enthusiasts that Mr Lancelyn Green was becoming increasingly paranoid about Jon Lellenberg, a policy strategy analyst in the office of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and a respected author of books about Holmes.

He was in London to see the Sherlock Holmes Society in the week that Mr Lancelyn Green was most erratic.

https://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Death-of-Sherlock-Holmes-expert-not-so-elementary/2004/12/13/1102787013572.html

# ? Mar 7, 2018 17:06

ConfusedUs: Feb 24, 2004; Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!

Strangled himself with a shoelace and a wooden spoon, huh?

I'm no expert (and perhaps this is the point), but that sounds a lot like my favorite line from Mystery Men:

"He fell down an elevator shaft. Onto some bullets."

# ? Mar 7, 2018 17:23

Wheat Loaf: Feb 13, 2012; by FactsAreUseless

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The Holmes stories then got big successful and spawned zillions of imitators of varying quality.

The most interesting one to me is Sexton Blake. Blake first appeared in 1893 or so, pretty much immediately after Conan Doyle killed Holmes off. He was a fairly generic Holmes rip-off for a while whose stories ran the gamut from straightforward detective stuff to Rider Haggard style "Darkest Africa" adventure stories, handled by an array of authors, many of them working under pseudonyms. He was the star of story papers like Union Jack and The Sexton Blake Library (which ran continuously from 1915 to 1968).

With the onset of the 20th century, someone decided to stop beating about the bush and moved Blake into rooms on Baker Street, gave him a streetwise teen sidekick called Tinker, an intelligent bloodhound called Pedro and eventually a Rolls Royce called the Grey Panther. He gathered a coterie of prototypical supervillains like Monsieur Zenith the Albino, a Byronic master thief who established a bit of a following of his own, George Marsden Plummer, a master criminal with the perfect cover of being a supremely skilled Scotland Yard inspector responsible for catching the other master criminals, and so on. He had all these adventures more in line with American pulps than Sherlockiana, where he'd always get conked on the head or tied up in a room slowly filling with water, from which he'd have to make a daring escape; this was coincident with the emergence of Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey originated as her Sexton Blake fanfiction), Allingham, Christie, Marsh et al. and the Golden Age of locked room mysteries and high society detective puzzles and that's what made Blake so popular; whereas Wimsey, Poirot, Alleyne, Campion etc. were intellectuals who outsmarted the villain, he was the action hero who rolled up his sleeves and put the boot in. For a decent stretch, Blake was arguably more popular than Holmes in Britain.

As time went by, he fought Nazi spies in the 40s, communist saboteurs in the 50s and by the 1960s had moved into offices in the City, acquired a beautiful secretary and essentially become James Bond for hire (I've never read any of these stories). Hundreds of people wrote Blake and he appeared in literally thousands of stories in magazines, story papers and novels between the 1890s and the 1970s. He was featured in movies and he had a very popular TV series in the 60s which starred Laurence Payne. But perhaps therein lies the problem. He was around for so long and appeared in so many stories which varied so much in terms of quality that it's hard to develop a definitive picture or profile for the character. He could be a Sherlock Holmes ripoff, a pulp hero, a spy smasher, a super-secret agent and more. He had existed for about 20 years before his most recognisable supporting characters showed up and they eventually phased in and out. With all the other famous detectives, there's some readily identifiable hook. Blake had so many that none became definitive, and thus none of them could ever work.

If you're interested in reading them, it's pretty hard to find the stories. The only good collection there's been was The Casebook of Sexton Blake, published by Wordsworth as part of their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural line for some reason. It's edited by David Stuart Davies, who's a bit of an authority on this era of detective fiction, and collects stories from Blake's golden age of the 1920s and 1930s (I should say it leads off with one of those Rider Haggard "white man's burden" stories I mentioned, which I found a bit of a chore to get through, but it's good after that: there's one very amusing story where Blake has to join the English football team to rescue its honour from a seemingly superhuman continental side).

# ? Mar 9, 2018 00:14

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Wheat Loaf posted:

The most interesting one to me is Sexton Blake. Blake first appeared in 1893 or so, pretty much immediately after Conan Doyle killed Holmes off. He was a fairly generic Holmes rip-off for a while whose stories ran the gamut from straightforward detective stuff to Rider Haggard style "Darkest Africa" adventure stories, handled by an array of authors, many of them working under pseudonyms. He was the star of story papers like Union Jack and The Sexton Blake Library (which ran continuously from 1915 to 1968).

With the onset of the 20th century, someone decided to stop beating about the bush and moved Blake into rooms on Baker Street, gave him a streetwise teen sidekick called Tinker, an intelligent bloodhound called Pedro and eventually a Rolls Royce called the Grey Panther. He gathered a coterie of prototypical supervillains like Monsieur Zenith the Albino, a Byronic master thief who established a bit of a following of his own, George Marsden Plummer, a master criminal with the perfect cover of being a supremely skilled Scotland Yard inspector responsible for catching the other master criminals, and so on. He had all these adventures more in line with American pulps than Sherlockiana, where he'd always get conked on the head or tied up in a room slowly filling with water, from which he'd have to make a daring escape; this was coincident with the emergence of Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey originated as her Sexton Blake fanfiction), Allingham, Christie, Marsh et al. and the Golden Age of locked room mysteries and high society detective puzzles and that's what made Blake so popular; whereas Wimsey, Poirot, Alleyne, Campion etc. were intellectuals who outsmarted the villain, he was the action hero who rolled up his sleeves and put the boot in. For a decent stretch, Blake was arguably more popular than Holmes in Britain.

As time went by, he fought Nazi spies in the 40s, communist saboteurs in the 50s and by the 1960s had moved into offices in the City, acquired a beautiful secretary and essentially become James Bond for hire (I've never read any of these stories). Hundreds of people wrote Blake and he appeared in literally thousands of stories in magazines, story papers and novels between the 1890s and the 1970s. He was featured in movies and he had a very popular TV series in the 60s which starred Laurence Payne. But perhaps therein lies the problem. He was around for so long and appeared in so many stories which varied so much in terms of quality that it's hard to develop a definitive picture or profile for the character. He could be a Sherlock Holmes ripoff, a pulp hero, a spy smasher, a super-secret agent and more. He had existed for about 20 years before his most recognisable supporting characters showed up and they eventually phased in and out. With all the other famous detectives, there's some readily identifiable hook. Blake had so many that none became definitive, and thus none of them could ever work.

If you're interested in reading them, it's pretty hard to find the stories. The only good collection there's been was The Casebook of Sexton Blake, published by Wordsworth as part of their Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural line for some reason. It's edited by David Stuart Davies, who's a bit of an authority on this era of detective fiction, and collects stories from Blake's golden age of the 1920s and 1930s (I should say it leads off with one of those Rider Haggard "white man's burden" stories I mentioned, which I found a bit of a chore to get through, but it's good after that: there's one very amusing story where Blake has to join the English football team to rescue its honour from a seemingly superhuman continental side).

Thanks, that's good stuff.

Apart from the very modern stuff like Study in Emerald, I devoured a lot of the Solar Pons stuff when I was younger -- basically an unapologetic Holmes knockoff, but pleasantly unashamed.

# ? Mar 9, 2018 01:44

Wheat Loaf: Feb 13, 2012; by FactsAreUseless

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Apart from the very modern stuff like Study in Emerald, I devoured a lot of the Solar Pons stuff when I was younger -- basically an unapologetic Holmes knockoff, but pleasantly unashamed.

Sexton Blake (and Harry Dickson, "the American Sherlock Holmes") are just the most egregious to me because they're the ones who were actually stated to live in rooms on Baker Street just like Holmes. I'm not as familiar with a lot of the other Holmes copycats.

# ? Mar 9, 2018 09:42

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Wheat Loaf posted:

Sexton Blake (and Harry Dickson, "the American Sherlock Holmes") are just the most egregious to me because they're the ones who were actually stated to live in rooms on Baker Street just like Holmes. I'm not as familiar with a lot of the other Holmes copycats.

If you like that sort of thing, he's worth checking out: written by August Derleth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Pons

quote:

Pons is a pastiche of Holmes; the first book about Solar Pons was titled In Re: Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, Solar Pons has prodigious powers of observation and deduction, and can astound his companions by telling them minute details about people he has only just met, details that he proves to have deduced in seconds of observation. Where Holmes's stories are narrated by his companion Dr. Watson, the Pons stories are narrated by Dr. Lyndon Parker; in the Pons stories, he and Parker share lodgings not at 221B Baker Street but at 7B Praed Street, where their landlady is not Mrs. Hudson but Mrs. Johnson. Whereas Sherlock Holmes has an elder brother Mycroft Holmes of even greater gifts, Solar Pons has a brother Bancroft to fill the same role. Like Holmes, Pons is physically slender and smokes a pipe filled with "abominable shag".[1]

The actual Sherlock Holmes also exists in Pons's world: Pons and Parker are aware of the famous detective and hold him in high regard. Whereas Holmes' adventures took place primarily in the 1880s and 1890s, Pons and Parker live in the 1920s and 1930s. Pons fans also regard Derleth as having given Pons his own distinctly different personality, far less melancholy and brooding than Holmes's.[citation needed]

. . . . The tales in the Pontine canon can be broadly divided into two classes, the straight and the humorous, the straight being more or less straightforward tales of detection in the classic Holmesian mode, while the others�a minority�have some gentle fun, most notably by involving fictional characters from outside either canon (e.g., Dr. Fu Manchu); perhaps the most outstanding example is "The Adventure of the Orient Express", in which are thinly disguised versions of Ashenden, Hercule Poirot, and The Saint.

# ? Mar 9, 2018 14:32

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# ? Apr 25, 2024 11:19

Wheat Loaf: Feb 13, 2012; by FactsAreUseless

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

If you like that sort of thing, he's worth checking out: written by August Derleth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Pons

Have you read Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles by Kim Newman? It's a pretty fun pastiche.

# ? Mar 9, 2018 18:37

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > BotM Feb 2018: SHERLOCK HOLMES in THE SIGN OF FOUR by Arthur Conan Doyle

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