Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ see the appeal in bringing Conan Doyle’s and Lovecraft’s conclusions to bear on one another. In other words, blending their universes offers the chance to “shake up” the unflappable Sherlock Holmes at last, and/or the opportunity to bring a calming reason to Lovecraft’s bleak and terrifying nightmares. Furthermore, as Lovecraft’s stories are far more popular today than they were during his lifetime, especially within science fiction circles, writers who wish to write a Holmesian story feel comfortable in invoking Lovecraft’s mythos, knowing they are safe in assuming some knowledge and familiarity on the part of readers.

      Exemplar Works

      One example of a key Holmesian-Lovecraftian work is P.H. Cannon’s Pulptime: Being a Singular Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Kalem Club, as if narrated by Frank Belknap Long, Jr (1984). This mystery involves Lovecraft himself as a character, as well as his writer friends who formed the “Kalem Club” (including award-winning author Frank Belknap Long), and Harry Houdini. Added to this blending of historical figures is the Great Detective himself: elderly, but instantly recognizable.

      2003’s Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror!, edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan, draws attention to this phenomenon by collecting some of the most compelling short stories that place Holmes in Lovecraft’s universe. Science fiction and detective fiction author Barbara Hambly in “The Adventure of the Antiquarian’s Niece,” for instance, pairs Holmes and Watson with Carnacki the Ghost Finder to traverse the landscape of several of Lovecraft’s stories, most notably “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) and “The Rats in the Walls” (1924).

      Perhaps the single most famous Holmes-Lovecraft mashup also appears in Shadows Over Baker Street; it is Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald,” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Locus Award for Best Novelette, both science fiction honors. This piece relocates Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” to the darker world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu tales.

      The formula continues to yield new works. Christian Klaver’s The Adventure of the Innsmouth Whaler (2010), for example, puts Holmes and Watson on a case directly related to Lovecraft’s story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1931). It is not uncommon to see Lovecraft-inspired works in the pages of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine; the two lead stories in the June 2012 issue of The Lovecraft eZine are Sherlock Holmes stories.

      The pairing even has leapt beyond fiction. The adventure game Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, developed by Frogwares for Microsoft Windows in 2006, follows Holmes and Watson as they investigate mysterious disappearances linked to the Cthulhu universe. After drawing a worldwide audience (and winning GameSpot’s “Best Use of a License” Award in 2007), a remastered version appeared in 2008. It earned not only popularity, but a rating of M (Mature 17+)—the first Holmes-related game to do so.

      Sherlock Holmes and Other Science Fiction Media

      Sherlock Holmes has made himself as comfortable in other forms of science fiction media as he has in novels and short stories. A thorough review of his appearances demands a separate study, but a quick overview proves the point.

      Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who

      The world’s longest-running science fiction television series, the BBC’s Doctor Who (1963-present), has spawned several tie-in publications that feature Holmes. Andy Lane’s novel All-Consuming Fire (1994) teams Holmes and Watson with the Seventh Doctor against Azathoth (one of the figures from Lovecraft’s mythos). Two years later, in Paul Cornell’s novel Happy Endings, Holmes and Watson are brought forward in time to attend the wedding of the Seventh Doctor’s companion, Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, to Jason Kane. One of the novels in the Faction Paradox series, itself a spin-off to Doctor Who, is Kelly Hale’s 1994 Erasing Sherlock, in which a doctoral candidate goes back in time, posing as a housemaid in 221B Baker Street in order to study the young consulting detective.

      Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek

      Holmes’s presence in “the final frontier” is, thanks to Nicholas Meyer, Star Trek canon. Holmes fans know Meyer first and foremost as the author of three pastiche novels, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974, which was adapted to film in 1976, with Meyer’s screenplay), The West End Horror (1976), and The Canary Trainer (1993). Star Trek audiences know him an uncredited co-writer for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), a credited co-writer for Star Trek IV: The Journey Home (1986), and the co-writer and director of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991).

      The parallels between the rational Holmes and Star Trek’s logical science officer, Mr. Spock, became a running theme in Star Trek fan discussions and fan works almost from the first appearance of Trek on U.S. television in 1966. The fact that actor Leonard Nimoy, who brought Spock to life, also portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the documentary short Sherlock Holmes: Interior Motive (1975), and again in the 1975-1976 Royal Shakespeare Company’s U.S. production of William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes, invited further comparisons. As Nicholas Meyer told Ryan Britt (as cited in “Sherlock Holmes and the Science Fiction of Deduction”), “The link between Spock and Holmes was obvious to everyone. I just sort of made it official.”

      Meyer made it official in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. During a scene in which Spock puts forth his own deductions, he quotes directly from Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” (1892) and credits Holmes as a forefather: “As an ancestor of mine once said, ‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

      Star Trek: The Next Generation paid homage to both Holmes and the Holmes-Spock (and, by implication, Spock-Data) by having the android Data develop a taste for Holmesian roleplaying. Complete with deerstalker and pipe, Data faces off against a holographic version of Professor Moriarty in the episodes “Elementary, My Dear Data” (1988) and “Ship in a Bottle” (1993).

      Sherlock Holmes and Other Television

      Holmes has starred in other science fiction television fare, as well. For example, the made-for-television CBS movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) features Watson’s present-day descendant Jane discovering a cryogenically frozen Holmes and reviving him. Perhaps the best example of the science fictional “updating” of the Holmes canon stories is the 1999-2001 animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, a co–production by DiC and Scottish Television. Each episode revisits classic adventures, with a twist: the year is 2104. Sherlock Holmes, frozen for years, has thawed and returned to his detective work, joined by a robotic Watson and a descendant of Inspector Lestrade. Professor Moriarty is represented in this future by one of his clones.

      The BBC’s Sherlock

      The most faithful and sophisticated reimagining of Holmes at present, and arguably one of the best adaptations of the Holmes canon at any time, the BBC’s Sherlock (2010-present) displays a keen science fiction sensibility. This is to be expected, considering that co-creator Steven Moffat is also the head writer and executive producer of Doctor Who, and co-creator Mark Gatiss has written for and guest starred in Doctor Who, adapted for television and starred in H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (2010), and performed in the live television remake of the science fiction classic The Quatermass Experiment (2005), among other genre-related accomplishments.

      Although the series has displayed many science fictional characteristics since its debut (thoroughly exploring and exploiting contemporary technology, from blogs to mobile phones to government surveillance equipment), the second-series episodes “The Hounds of Baskerville” and “The Reichenbach Fall” (2012) qualify as science fiction proper. The former updates the Gothic fear of a spectral hound, recasting it in terms of conspiracy theories surrounding genetic experimentation at the Baskerville military research base to create a “luminous” super attack dog. Sherlock, John, and Lestrade uncover a conspiracy regarding “H.O.U.N.D.,” СКАЧАТЬ