Ron Weighell
THE irregular casebook of sherlock holmes
Ron weighell
MMXVIII
The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Ron Weighell First ZAGAVA® edition published and edited by Jonas J. Ploeger in the spring of 2018 Text: © by Ron Weighell Cover- and frontispiece illustration: © by Daniele Serra Text set in Minion Pro Titles set in Roadway Design and typeset by Jan-Marco Schmitz All rights reserved. www.zagava.de ISBN 978-3-945795-13-2
foreword 9 The Case of the Fiery Messengers 25 The Shadow of the Wolf 55 The Curse of Nectanebo 87 The Sect of the Salamander 119 The Black Heaven 163
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On a hot, sunny day in the summer of 1990, my wife Fran and I entered the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church in Buckfastleigh, in Devon, seeking out the grave of Squire Richard Cabell. We were on holiday in the area, and for anyone with an interest in local legends and the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it would have been unthinkable not to seek out what some locals referred to darkly as ‘the Sepulchre’, or ‘the Penthouse Tomb.’ Squire Cabell, a Royalist landowner, had been notorious for his cruelty, devotion to Devil worship and possibly even the murder of his wife. After his death and burial, it was said that a pack of phantom hounds were seen howling at his grave, and hunting over the Moors. When reports that he was haunting the area began to circulate, the local populace paid for a roofed structure with iron bars to be built over his grave in an attempt to trap him in. If they 11
were putting their faith in the banishing power of iron, it apparently failed, for a glowing emanation was subsequently seen emerging from between the bars. In 1909, Conan Doyle visited the area and was told of the Cabell legend. This, and the spectacularly atmospheric nature of the Moors, convinced him that there was a Sherlock Holmes story to be fashioned from them. The coachman who drove him around happened to have the memorable name of Harry Baskerville. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Doyle got the coachman’s permission to use his name, and The Hound of the Baskervilles was born. Buckfastleigh Church had been a place of weird legend long before Cabell was buried there. It was told that Satan fought to prevent the Church being built in the first place. There are extensive caves under the whole area, and Cabell’s tomb apparently lies directly above a subterranean stalagmite in the form of a grotesque winged monster. Body snatching was practiced in the graveyard, which was still the scene of magical rituals in recent times, centring on the Cabell tomb. Hardly surprising then that we were making our way to see it for ourselves. As I was taking a couple of photographs of the sepulchre, a family approached the nearby Church and attempted to get in. Despite the increasingly irate attempts of the very large husband, the door handle refused to yield. We heard him grumble that it was locked as they left. The Cabell tomb was our main interest, but we have always loved looking round churches—in fact old buildings of any kind—so Fran, never willing to give up easily, could not resist going straight over and trying the handle. The door swung open without effort. Somewhat surprised, we went in and wandered around. I took a few more photographs, including one looking down the central Aisle towards the altar, before we left. In those days a roll of film had to be dropped off at the local chemist on return from holiday to be developed, and collected some days later. The results were interesting to say the least. 12
One of the shots of the Cabell tomb had an intruder in the form of a tall, thin column of light in front of the bars, uncomfortably like that reported ‘glowing emanation’. No such ‘fault’ had ever happened with that camera before, and never occurred after. The real shock came, though, when we examined the interior shots of the Church, and found that in the one looking down the central aisle, there appeared to be a kind of ruddy-brown mist hanging in the air midway between the lens and the altar. It was possible to make out with the aid of a magnifying glass that the shape seemed to be a smiling face with a beard and long hair; literally a Laughing Cavalier. It was not conclusive, of course. Rather it resembled one of those examples of simulacra, where a face can be made out where it should not be. The only way of making absolutely sure that we were not misinterpreting a natural phenomenon would have been to go back to the Church and check. Unfortunately Buckfastleigh is a long way from our home in Hampshire. We promised ourselves that if we were ever in the area again we would go back to the church and check for anything that might explain the strange form; but we never got the chance to. In 1992, a fire, starting in the region of the altar, gutted Buckfastleigh Church. The heat was so intense that the Norman font was shattered to pieces. There was speculation, unproven, that Satanists had been responsible for the fire. What we had experienced would have to remain tantalisingly unproven. The whole episode—an atmospheric location heavy with legend; apparently supernatural events, and the unexplained destruction of a clue that could have solved a mystery—was somehow strangely resonant of the tales of Conan Doyle and his great creation. I had discovered the Sherlock Holmes books in my local library when a youngster, a major event in my imaginative life. In fact these stories played their part in taking me from children’s to grown-up literature. I began to collect battered second-hand copies of the redclothed volumes. Even then my first love was myth, legend and the supernatural, but the Holmes stories spoke to me from the first, with their brooding atmosphere, and of course their moody, introverted, 13
drug-using and brilliant hero. Once I had fallen under their spell, my expectations of the genre were changed and enriched forever. As I later discovered when I began to collect anthologies of the supernatural, Conan Doyle was also an accomplished writer in this genre too, and though Holmes, like Poe’s August Dupin, employed a rigidly analytical working method, Doyle clearly knew the value of Gothic atmosphere and images of primal dread too well not to employ them. The breathless pursuit of a sinister quarry through all-enveloping fogs or over haunted, treacherous Moors; a struggle for life on the edge of a waterfall; ancient coded documents that lead to the corpse of a trapped treasure hunter; vigils in clammy crypts and dark cellars; a tattooed dwarf armed with a deadly blow-pipe; a sinister genius like a spider at the centre of his web; the haunting tones of a flute, and death delivered by a poisonous snake; the fatal sting of an aquatic horror that lurks in a rock pool; a woman who lifts her veil to reveal what remains when the face is torn away; a long-dead relative concealed for nefarious reasons in the family tomb; the lastgasp rescue of someone about to subjected to premature burial, sharing a coffin with a decaying corpse. If such plots and characters from the Holmes stories were described to someone unfamiliar with them, that person would be fully justified in concluding that they were gleaned from works of horror and the supernatural. In fact they are Gothic in the deepest and best sense of the word. The first inspiration for Holmes might have been the penetrating deductions of Dr Joseph Bell, with a subtle infusion of August Dupin, but one wonders just how popular and enduring the Canon would have been without those potent elements traceable to the horror tradition of Maturin, Lewis and Poe. Holmes took on a greater significance in my life when I moved to Southsea, and I found myself travelling almost every day past the site of Bush Villas where Doyle wrote the first stories in the Cannon, or walking home across the Common where he had played in goal for Portsmouth football team! 14
‘The Case of the Fiery Messengers’ was the first Holmes story I attempted, though it did not even feature the great detective when I first thought of it. When the late lamented Richard Dalby asked me for a story either of Detection, Mystery or the Supernatural for his 1990 Michael O’Mara anthology Mystery for Christmas, I decided it would be an interesting challenge to come up with something that combined all three in one. Years before, in a non-fiction piece on M R James and the occult for Rosemary Pardoe’s ‘Ghosts and Scholars’ entitled’ Dark Devotions’, I had hinted darkly that there was more to be learned about links between this distinguished scholar and Aleister Crowley. My intention was to follow this up quite soon with a piece of fiction which would be revealed as that sinister ‘something’. John Dee, of course, had close connections with King’s College Cambridge, and not only had M R James and Aleister Crowley been there at the same time, but they both had a great interest in the Elizabethan Magus. It was a gift to a writer with my interests. A potentially good leg-pull was spoiled by the fact that more and more time elapsed, during which I wrote a variety of stories, but not that one. When pondering Richard’s invitation, the long- ignored plot came back to mind, and it occurred to me that if James enlisted the aid of Sherlock Holmes to solve a mystery involving a Dee manuscript and demon-guarded treasure, I could fulfil the aim of a story combining Detection, Mystery and the Supernatural. Although I was still then working long hours as a Carpenter, The Case of the Fiery Messengers was the first story to which I managed to devote a length of time equivalent to that expected of a professional writer. I took the background research to the point where even ‘bit-part’ actors are authentic. Even the nosy undergraduate Wimbush who wanders in and exchanges a few words with Holmes and James in the Chapel has the name of an actual contemporary of Crowley at King’s, and is listed alongside him in the College Yearbook. Richard required only one change to my text. With his effortless knowledge born of years in antiquarian book collecting, he suggested that the publisher that Dr Watson pretends to represent 15
should be changed to David Nutt, because their booklists from the period meant that they would have been more likely to publish the work in question! As a result of the publication of ‘The Case of the Fiery Messengers’, I was asked to produce a Holmes story to be printed as a booklet for members of the famed Sherlock Holmes Society called The Northern Musgraves, to be distributed at their ‘Aspects of Holmes’ weekend in 1992. To understand what an honour I felt this to be, you must know that Honorary Members of this society have included such distinguished screen avatars of Holmes as Douglas Wilmer, Peter Cushing, and Jeremy Brett! I was not a member, so the daunting task of reading the work aloud at the Weekend fell to a brave volunteer in the form of Mark Valentine. Wishing to spare his throat, I produced a somewhat truncated version of a tale which I called ‘The Tarn Lodge Mystery’. The editors of the booklet, distinguished Sherlockians David Stuart Davies and Kathryn White, suggested changing this to the less pedestrian ‘The Shadow of the Wolf’. This seemed an excellent idea to which I readily agreed. On the day, Mark evidently created a literal cliff-hanger by ending the reading abruptly with Holmes and Watson confronting their adversary on the icy roof. The members would have to wait to discover the end, he said, for themselves. The opportunity to publish a full-length version of this tale would come eight years later, with the appearance of the Calabash Press collection, ‘The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes’. When Christopher and Barbara Roden invited me to write more Holmes stories for a complete book, I decided early that I would use as an authority a work that I have always admired, Sherlock Holmes, a biography of the World’s first Consulting Detective, written by Sabine Baring Gould. I had already referred to one of his books in my library when I drew information from his Curious Myths of the Middle-Ages in that James article, and his Book of the Werewolf had also long been in my collection. Indeed, 16
pleasurable browsing over this latter work, and another on the same subject by Montague Summers, had first given me the idea for the lycanthropic theme of ‘Shadow’. Baring Gould’s account of Holmes in Tibet encouraged me to create an encounter with the elusive ‘Mountain Man’, and to make such experiences amid the snows of the Himalayas the reason for his tormented state at Tarn Lodge. One of the most enjoyable bonuses from the publication of this collection was reading the wonderfully silly speculations on line about the supposed inspiration for elements in certain stories. The opinion was expressed that I had made Holmes a gifted fencer in ‘The Sect of the Salamander’ after seeing Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Young Sherlock Holmes’, and that the idea of the Egyptian setting for ‘The Curse of Nectanebo’ had been taken from a recent Hollywood version of ‘The Mummy’! Whatever my faults as a writer, pinching ideas from Tinseltown is not one of them. As every true fan will know, Watson mentioned that Holmes had fenced at College in ‘The Gloria Scott’, and paid tribute to the excellence of his swordsmanship in both ‘The Five Orange Pips’ and ‘A Study in Scarlet’. His ability at Singlestick is referred to in the same account, and demonstrated in ‘The Illustrious Client’. For the gentleman who needed to defend himself, these two branches of the martial arts were frequently taught together. Holmes as a master of second intention should surprise no one. As for the Egyptian setting for ‘Nectanebo’, again no filmic influence was necessary. I have long been deeply interested in the country, explored it from top to bottom and back again, and always found the two royal Nectanebos—known sorcerers believed in ancient tradition to be the same man magically reborn—to be truly fascinating. I had always felt, too, that Holmes—who apart from his swordsmanship could ride and box—was well qualified for an adventure a little further out of his comfort zone, buckling some swash in the desert. Only after I had described him donning Arab costume and riding at the head of disparate tribes he had combined against a common enemy did I realise the full implications, and added the somewhat 17
cheeky suggestion that he had anticipated, and perhaps smoothed the way for, another great English adventurer. Another element I wove into ‘Nectanebo’ is a charming real life episode in the lives of the legendary Egyptologist Sir E A Wallis Budge and Dorothy Eady, known as Omm Sety. It is part of a story worthy of classic fantasy. At the age of three, Dorothy fell down a flight of stairs, suffered ‘brain concussion’ and was pronounced dead by a doctor, who went to get a nurse to prepare the body. They returned to find Dorothy sitting in bed eating chocolates and playing. But from that day she was often found crying and complaining that she wanted ‘to go home’. Coming upon a picture of the Egyptian temple of Abydos, she identified it as the home she longed to return to, but was confused that it looked so old and ‘broken’. She also wondered why her garden was no longer visible. On a visit to the British Museum she had to be dragged round, quite bored, until they entered the Egyptian rooms, when she ran off and she kissed the feet of every statue, and had to be dragged from a glass case containing a mummy, shouting ‘these are my people’. At the age of ten this intense child was spotted by Wallis Budge returning again and again to the Egyptian rooms. He asked her what particularly interested her. She replied ‘hieroglyphs’. Budge, no less than Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the time, said in that case he would teach her. The old scholar gets short shrift nowadays from the ‘young Turks’ of latter-day Egyptology, but I wonder how many of them would find the time to give free lessons to a ten year old just because she seemed deeply interested in their subject? She quickly proved an exceptional student. Stunned by the child’s ability to accurately translate ever more challenging passages of Hieroglyphics, he asked how she could learn so rapidly. She explained that she was not learning. She had known the language long ago, but had forgotten it. He was helping her to remember. In adulthood Dorothy Eady had the distinction of being the first woman to join the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. Returning to her ‘home’, the temple of Abydos, she identified a nondescript 18
area of desert as the location of her lost garden. Excavation revealed the remains of a temple garden. Her whole life was thenceforth dedicated to the care and preservation of the precious structure where she claimed to have once worshipped. It is not difficult to understand why these two very different characters should have won my admiration. The least I could do was give them the chance, under assumed names, to meet Sherlock Holmes. The Sect of the Salamander is the one story that actually has no supernatural content at all, though it has a fair share of strangeness. Some have gone so far as to call it the least believable story in the collection. I don’t know about that; believability has never been the main concern when my daemon moves me. I do know, though, that for anyone who has travelled extensively throughout Italy, the idea of a local group who believe passionately that their town or city should be recognised as the Nation’s Capital will be far from unbelievable. One of the charms of that glorious country is that everywhere you go even the smallest village believes that everything they do and produce is the best in Italy, and that the world revolves around them. The existence of a cult ruthlessly committed to making ‘The Lion City’ once more the centre not only of Italy, but of an Empire, is to me all too likely. This story allowed me to pay tribute to another of my heroes, the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, who was equally a master of exquisite metalworking on the biggest and smallest scales. A desk-size copy of the bronze that is central to the story, Perseus holding aloft the head of Medusa, has pride of place in my collection, but sadly is far removed from being by the hand of that master. Incidentally, the unorthodox fencing move used by Mentoni on the young Holmes was actually a speciality of my own fencing teacher, and my throat often had the bruises to prove it! The plot of ‘The Black Heaven’ was evolved from Arthur Machen’s unsettling experience of finding characters from his works apparently turning up in real life, a mystery that seemed to me to be just up Holmes’s street! I combined this with the punning similarity between two Latin terms long related to the Holy Grail, as we will see. 19
The possible source of the Grail legends in the early Celtic Church had, after all, been a subject dear to Machen’s heart. The most substantial result of his researches in this field was a text incorporated wholesale into his friend A E Waite’s ‘The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail’. I feel on fairly safe ground claiming that the whole section is pure Machen. On reading Waite’s massive tome, the change from his impressively erudite but sometimes intentionally obtuse language to Machen’s limpid prose is like emerging from an intriguingly populous but turbid tarn into the clear waters of Cybi brook. Given Waite’s staggering scholarship over a wide range of abstruse subjects, his willingness to present Machen’s research with little or no editing or re-writing is, I think, an impressive tribute to Machen’s achievement in Grail studies. ‘The Black Heaven’ takes us into some fascinating realms of folklore and satanic myth. Medieval legend has it that sixty thousand angels made a crown for Lucifer. When the Archangel Michael struck Lucifer down, a gemstone from the crown fell to Earth and was made into the Holy Grail. Hence, the Lapisit exillis, (the name given to the grail in the form of a stone) was fashioned from Lapis ex Coelis, (The Stone from the Heavens). This play on the similarity between the two Latin phrases is an example of homophony, or sacred punning, whereby spiritual truths are conveyed by the use of disparate words or phrases with the same, or similar sounds. It is a practice the dates back at least to ancient Egypt, and still prevents many Egyptologists from having a clue what the texts they translate so literally are really about. Strangely, this is not the only example of homophony that features in this story, though the other came as a surprise to me. The stone that fell from Lucifer’s crown and was made into the Grail in those old tales was given to him, remember, by sixty thousand angels. I made what I thought was a pretty speculative leap for the sake of fiction by linking this with Solinus’s mysterious Hexacantalythos, or ‘sixty stone’ which Machen, in ‘The Three Impostors’, calls Ixaxar. How surprising, then, to find that legend specifically links the stone from Lucifer’s crown with one of the twelve stones, symbolising 20
the twelve tribes of Israel on the Breast Plate of the High Priest, and that this particular stone, which I linked with the stone Ixaxar, is attributed to the tribe Issachar! Ixaxar/Issachar. Not for the first time, the membrane between Machen’s fiction and the ‘real’ world is shown to be intriguingly thin. A case of life imitating art, to be sure, but which art? If my memory is not playing me false, it was Jeremy Brett who speculated, in an interview, that Sherlock Holmes might have read Poe, and therefore could have known of Dupin. In any case, such an audacious idea meets the matter of Dupin’s influence on Holmes head on, and seemed well worth incorporating into The Black Heaven. So Poe is made to become to Holmes what he has always been to me; ‘my dark Plato.’ Conan Doyle may have expressed mixed messages about Poe’s prior creation, but there would surely have been an undeniable appeal to the melancholic heart of the Baker Street sleuth. I understand completely why Conan Doyle kept his detective fiction and his supernatural stories strictly apart. An investigator who solved his mysteries by oracle or vision, though a fascinating premise, would not be compatible with the strict practice of Ratiocination. However, if the supernatural were to intrude only peripherally, no harm would be done to the integrity of the tale of detection. That at least was always my intention. I know it is heresy, but I can’t help wondering whether, when he fell out of love with the Holmes stories, and only returned to them grudgingly, Conan Doyle might have rekindled his enthusiasm, and found new pleasure, by combining his two areas of expertise, producing what would have been pioneering works in a new genre. It would have infuriated many Holmes fans, of course, but it would have delighted not a few, and perhaps the public reaction would have appealed to the ‘pawky sense of humour’ that Conan Doyle obviously shared with Doctor Watson. In any case, these stories were written in the shadow of a great original, and were intended to be a tribute. If the reader gets at least some of the pleasure from reading these tales that I got from writing them, I will be well rewarded. 21
I should take this opportunity to thank Zagava Press for the wonderful job they have done on this edition, and to Daniele Serra for his superb artwork.
Horndean, Hampshire February 2018
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