Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons, by James Lovegrove | review by Rafe McGregor

Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons by James Lovegrove

Titan Books, 408pp, £11.75, October 2020, ISBN 9781789094695

Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902 and then published as a novel (or, more accurately, a novella) by George Newnes the following month. The tale is probably the best known of all the Sherlock Holmes stories and is certainly one of the most filmed, with big and small screen adaptations stretching from 1914 to 2016 at the time of writing, including retellings in both BBC One’s Sherlock (2010-2017) and CBS’s Elementary (2012–2019) series (The Hounds of Baskerville in 2012 and Hounded in 2016 respectively). I think it may also be the narrative about which I have written the most, in terms of number of publications: a review of one of the sequels, David Stuart Davies’ The Tangled Skein (1995) in TQF24 (2008); an article for Crime and Detective Stories (2008) in which I propose an alternative solution to the case; a review of SelfMadeHero’s graphic novel in TQF29 (2009); a chapter in Josef Steiff’s Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy (2011) in which I suggest that the novella is primarily a work of horror rather than crime; and a short story sequel, “The Wrong Doctor”, first published in TQF50 (2015) and reprinted in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 20 (2016) and The Adventures of Roderick Langham (2017). The reason for my fascination – or perhaps I should say fixation – is my interest in crossover between crime and horror fiction (particularly, but not exclusively, the occult detective) and my agreement with Christopher Frayling’s claim that The Hound is one of the four great Gothic horror stories of the first century of the genre, alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In the chapter for Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy I examined both the creative context of the novella, which was originally intended to be a supernatural story co-authored with Bertram Fletcher Robinson, and the narrative itself to show that the mystery plot is underpinned by tropes much more common to the horror genre.

Theaker's Quarterly Awards 2018: the winners!

As announced in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #62, these are the winners of the Theaker's Quarterly Awards 2018. Voting was open to the public from February 11 to 25, and people could vote for as many items as they wanted in each category. Items were eligible if they had appeared in or were reviewed in the previous four issues of the magazine. Here are the results!

Audio

• 1st John Wyndham: BBC Radio Drama Collection, by John Wyndham et al. (BBC Worldwide)
• 2nd Children of Eden, by Joey Graceffa and Laura L. Sullivan (Simon and Schuster Audio)
• 3rd The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi (Audible)

Books

• 1st Pirate Utopia, by Bruce Sterling (Tachyon Publications)
• 2nd I Am Providence, by Nick Mamatas (Night Shade Books)
• 3rd Metronome, by Oliver Langmead (Unsung Stories)

Comics

• 1st Adventure Time: Marceline Gone Adrift, by Meredith Gran and Carey Pietsch (Boom! Studios)
• 2nd X-Men: Legacy by Simon Spurrier, Tan Eng Huat and chums (Marvel)
• 3rd The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga, by Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, Larry Mahlstedt and chums (DC)

Events

• 1st Eastercon 2017: Innominate
• 2nd Into the Unknown: a Journey Through Science Fiction, curated by Patrick Gyger (Barbican)

Films

• 1st Star Wars: The Last Jedi, by Rian Johnson (Lucasfilm et al.)
• 2nd Blade Runner 2049, by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green (16:14 Entertainment et al.)
• 3rd Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (Disney)

Music

• 1st Humanz (Deluxe), by Gorillaz (Parlophone)

Television

• 1st Sherlock, Series 4, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (BBC One)
• 2nd Westworld, Season 1, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and chums (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• 3rd Legion, Season 1, by Noah Hawley and chums (FX)

Issue of TQF

• 1st Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #59, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood
• 2nd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #58: Unsplatterpunk, edited by Douglas J. Ogurek
• 3rd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #60, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood

TQF cover art

• 1st Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #60, art by Howard Watts
• 2nd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #59, art by Howard Watts
• 3rd Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #61, art by Howard Watts

Fiction from TQF

• 1st Bound for Glory, by Allen Ashley (TQF61)
• 2nd Man + Van, by David Penn (TQF59)
• 3rd The Lost Testament, by Rafe McGregor (TQF60)

Congratulations to all the winners! To claim their prestigious Theaker’s Quarterly Awards trophy, winners should email a postal address to us at theakersquarterlyfiction@gmail.com.

The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove (Titan Books) | review by Rafe McGregor

I’ve recently made several comments on the evolution of Sherlock Holmes from the cold criminal investigator who calmly rejected supernatural explanations of even the most outré circumstances created by Conan Doyle to a character who is probably most accurately called an occult detective in the twenty-first century. In my review of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride in TQF55, I mentioned that Holmes and several others who cross the threshold of 221b Baker Street are more akin to superheroes and supervillains, giving the series very much of a fantasy feel, and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) was served with a deliciously strong steampunk sauce. I recently responded to an article in The Conversation on the decline in the popularity of Doctor Who by noting that Doctor Who and Sherlock have become increasingly close in the last couple of decades and Steven Moffat is one of many writers who have written either official novels or screenplays for both the doctor and the detective. In my review of Simon Kurt Unsworth’s The Devil’s Detective in TQF56, I mentioned “the many failed and few successful attempts to combine Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos” of late, and the subject of this review is James Lovegrove’s contribution to precisely that subgenre – a contribution that is by and large successful. The subgenre was launched with Michael Reeves and John Pelan’s Shadows Over Baker Street: New Tales of Terror! in 2003. Re-reading my somewhat scathing review in TQF24, I stand by most of what I wrote (though not my dismissal of Neil Gaiman’s “A Study in Emerald”). One of my main criticisms of this volume was that there had been little or no effort to recreate the atmosphere of Victorian or Edwardian London in most of the stories. The shadows are, after all, over Baker Street, not Angell Street or Clinton Street. James Lovegrove’s shadows are, as his title suggests, in Shadwell (the district between Whitechapel and Limehouse), and he has paid close attention to both the historical setting and the original Holmes stories such that the few anachronistic turns of phrase he uses are insufficient to distract the reader. It’s the relationship between old and new where Lovegrove’s contribution to literary pastiche is revealed at its most ambitious and most promising.

Sherlock, Series 4, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (BBC One) | review by Rafe McGregor

Like Conan Doyle, who famously tired of his creation, the BBC seem curiously reluctant to represent Sherlock Holmes on the small screen. Compare Sherlock, which began in 2010, with CBS’s Elementary, which began in 2012: the former has a total of thirteen episodes across four seasons (I’ll use the American term to distinguish an individual season from the series as a whole); the latter is, at the time of writing, in its fifth season and will have aired a total of 109 episodes by the time this review is in print. In addition to the British tendency to disguise mini-series as series, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat seem intent on frustrating our enjoyment of the Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) and Martin Freeman (Watson) partnership in a way that Robert Doherty does not with Jonny Lee Miller (Holmes) and Lucy Liu (Watson) in Elementary. Season 1 ended with Holmes and Watson about to blow up, season 2 with Holmes’ faked suicide leaving Watson bereft, and season 3 with Holmes exiled to certain death. Ominously, the final episode of season 4 is called “The Final Problem” and it is telling that Doyle’s story of the same name – his half-hearted attempt to kill off Holmes after 26 episodes – is the only original case to have inspired two of the TV adaptations.

Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (2entertain Ltd) | review by Rafe McGregor

Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction may seem an unlikely venue for a review of the first full-length Sherlock special, shown on all small screens and some big screens across the UK on New Year’s Day 2016. Three mini-seasons (of three episodes each) and one mini-special (of just over seven minutes) in, however, the world of Sherlock is already brim-full of superhuman beings. The eponymous protagonist refers to himself as “a high-functioning sociopath” (one of the series’ most-repeated phrases, suggesting sociopaths are usually low-functioning), but his superpowers include: reading an entire life history in a glance, disarming sword-wielding assassins without breaking a sweat, destroying international crime syndicates single-handedly, successfully masquerading as an extremist in Karachi, riding a motorbike safely at breakneck speed, instantly recovering from consuming vast quantities of Class A drugs… and returning from the dead. His nemesis, supervillain Moriarty, has his own list of powers: controlling Cockney serial killers, Chinese secret societies, and Eastern European paramilitaries; breaking into the Tower of London, the Bank of England, and Pentonville Prison simultaneously; resisting “enhanced interrogation” indefinitely… and returning from the dead (which is what the special is all about). Even Mycroft, whose powers are intellectual rather than physical, can follow his brother’s clandestine footsteps across Europe, masquerade as a Serbian soldier without detection, and take charge of a Tactical Firearms Command team. In fact, poor old Watson is the foil to at least four superhumans as “His Last Vow” (season 3, episode 3) reveals that Mrs Watson is a (semi-retired) super-villain-turned-hero, able to fire a handgun with one hundred percent accuracy, pass through multiple layers of physical security without trace, evade the joint efforts of NATO’s intelligence services, instantly access information beyond the combined capacity of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ… and waltz in a wedding dress. All of which to say that the BBC’s Sherlock is very much a mix of genres, alternating between detective stories in an urban fantasy setting and high fantasy in a tragic clash of good and evil – not to mention regular dashes of comedy.