Bedside Book of Early Sherlockian Parodies and Pastiches , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Charles Press

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152 pages

English

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More parodies have been written targeting Sherlock Holmes than anyone else dead or alive, fictional or real. James M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, started it all back in the early 1890's and Sherlockian parody has been coming out regularly ever since, right into the age of the internet. While Sherlock's creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived, close to 400 appeared in Britain and America. In these early parodies, Sherlock is off on the wrong track in the great Coleslaw mystery, struggling with the disappearance of the President's Whisker, rescuing that damsel in distress, Elsa Lohengrin, and even delving into the spirit world---and much more.Mark Twain, the Mr. Dooley of Finley Peter Dunne, Kenneth Grahame's Ratty of The Wind in the Willows, John Kendrick Bangs, Bret Harte, Ring Lardner, C. K. Chesterton, and O. Henry all contributed to this early Bedside collection. Sherlock turns up at Wellseley College and Yale, Hades and The Garden of Eden, Peoria and the Oklahoma Territory, in the trenches of War I and often in his familiar Baker Street hangout.Sherlockian Charles Press began collecting these early lampoons as a hobby after retiring from Michigan State University. He is the author of two Sherlockian monographs, Parodies and Pastiches, Buzzing Round Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Looking Over Sir Arthur's Shoulder, and "When Did Arthur Conan Doyle Meet Jean Leckie?" in The Baker Street Journal.

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	11 juin 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781780926315
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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A BEDSIDE BOOK OF EARLY SHERLOCKIAN PARODIES AND PASTICHES
Charles Press, Editor

Publisher Information
First edition published in 2014 by MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2014 Charles Press
The right of Charles Press to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.
Cover design by www.staunch.com

An Introduction
Sherlock Holmes has been the target of parodists and writers of pastiches since November 28, 1891, just four months after the first short story about him appeared in The Strand magazine. And lampoons of Sherlock Holmes have continued up to the present day. During Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, close to four hundred Sherlockian parodies and pastiches were published with many, many more since. (The latest count at Philip K. Jones’ data-base available at Christopher and Barbara Roden’s web-site www.ash-tree.bc.ca/Sherlock.htm is more than 10,000).
As a retirement hobby, I collected the early parodies and pastiches---those published while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was alive and able to appreciate them---if he wished to. A few years ago, I summarized my thoughts about them . [1]
But I have also long thought that some of the best of the less well known parodies and pastiches of that early period deserve to be brought together in one place so the audience of modern Holmesians and Sherlockians may enjoy them. My selections tilt heavily to pre-World War I items, with only a few from the post war period that ends in 1930, the year of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s death.
You will find some of the better known, but other favorites, readily available elsewhere, are not included so we can admit more of the lesser-knowns. Even so there are still enough interesting ones among those unpublished lesser knowns for another full collection.
Vincent Starrett, the revered Sherlockian, argued that every pastiche should also contain bits of parody and such was indeed the case with the pastiches published during Conan Doyle’s life.
We Sherlockians and Holmesians have a confession to make right off. We have adopted a very broad and many would say an outrageously loose way of defining what we call a pastiche. By the standard definition, a pastiche should be an agonizingly tedious attempt to reproduce precisely the style as well as the content of an author’s work. If we followed that formulation, we could count the number of true Sherlockian pastiches on our thumbs, maybe on only one thumb.
What we Sherlockians and Holmesians have come to call a pastiche is often a kind of long parody . The piece need not include Baker Street atmosphere or the turn-of-the-century prose style of Conan Doyle, or even include Dr. Watson. All that is required is some semblance of a plot and Sherlock Holmes. He may be present by name, have a funny made-up name, or be unidentified, but recognizable. Or the piece may just have someone trying to imitate the Great Detective. The author may be Watson, someone else, or the pastiche may be written in the third person. As Cole Porter could have observed---in Sherlockian pastiche---Anything Goes!
So even if what emerges is not really, strictly speaking, a pastiche, we Sherlockians still identify it as such and go on enjoying.
While Conan Doyle was publishing new stories of Sherlock Holmes, writers of pastiches were few in number and understandably were more hesitant about infringing on the Conan Doyle territory. By including a bit of parody, they signaled their efforts were not the work of A. Conan Doyle. These early writers also looked for other ways to distinguish their work from Conan Doyle’s. Some wrote in the third person and at least one didn’t even identify his detective as Sherlock Holmes, except through broad hints. Some of these pastiches were published anonymously and some were only circulated among a close circle of friends. Scholars have even discovered a few that were written but never published.
Sherlockian Parodies differ from pastiches in that they are much more numerous. The authors had the advantage creating something obviously distinct from the Conan Doyle stories and also of having the first crack at the Great Detective. And sometimes along the way they took a few swings at Conan Doyle as well. They were the first to devise all those gimmicks and clever turns of plot. Indeed the first three or four, published in 1891 and 1892, contain a good many of the tricks and treats elaborated on by later parodists.
In making my selections, I’d like to think I chose pieces having the two qualities which many regard as indispensable to good parody and pastiche---humor or light-heartedness, and brevity, or if the piece be long, crispness. But alas! It isn’t true. Others somehow crept in for reasons I can hardly explain.
But I did make sure the items I selected varied from the broad slapstick, through gentle spoofing, to biting humor, with gentle humor predominating.
Some of these parodies and pastiches stay close to the Conan Doyle stories. They lampoon the many idiosyncrasies that flourish there, from Holmes shooting holes in the wall to Watson mentioning unrecorded cases with intriguing names and tantalizing details.
But others mention only a few of what have become the standard Sherlockian traits---the cocaine, the fiddle, and the arrogance of the Great Detective.
Finally, others take little note at all of Conan Doyle or his stories and only borrow Conan Doyle’s central figure for their own singular purposes.
But all contain that single trait that may in time cause your eyes to tire and start skipping, as you read along---those ever present Sherlockian deductions. This is the defining characteristic of the Great Detective. It is why Sherlock Holmes has been such a tempting target for both parody and pastiche---more by far than any other fictional character or living individual.
Parody, like many jokes, is aimed at human frailty, especially at the shortcomings of the high and mighty. And who is more high and mighty in that quality we Homo Sapiens so take pride in, the trait that allows us to lord it over the whole of God’s creation---that quality we like to think of as our special uniqueness---our superior intelligence?
It is Sherlock Holmes who was seen as a thinking machine, who bragged he applied unbiased reasoning to problems. He could tell at a glance what you did for a living and who knows what other secrets he could discern with his keen glance, and his great intellect meanwhile unraveled the most mysterious and complicated mysteries.
A little skepticism, now and then, about this prodigious intelligence is a major theme of Sherlockian parody and pastiche. But, especially in pastiche, a bit of admiration also occasionally seeps in.
One note of warning . Reading parodies and pastiches is a little like eating chocolate nut candy, so tasty, but perhaps it’s best not to gulp down too many all at once. But then it depends on your stomach and your taste.
Diamond Jim Brady took his seat at the table and ate until his stomach touched the tablecloth. His evening meal included several boxes of candy along with his vast helpings meat, fish, and other delicacies. But then he ended his life consulting doctors of urology and internal medicine and left his fortune to establish a facility specializing in this discipline at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, so it’s perhaps best to be a little careful about over indulging.
Remember that the original audiences for these parodies only read them one at a time, with gaps of days, weeks, or months or more, in-between. They would not as you will, be as aware of old formulas or repetitions. Meanwhile, you may be trying to gulp them down one after another . So take care.
Rather than having you face the daunting prospect of a collection of many parodies or pastiches to be swallowed all in one gulp, I have separated them by easily understood categories---Sherlock Stumbles, Sherlock Triumphs, etc. It should be easy to skip about according to your taste.
Or, you might regard this as a bedside book and take the parodies in small gulps, say one or two just before sleep.
An interesting fact emerges. In making my selections, I included as many Sherlockian triumphs as stumbles. Still even when triumphant, the detective and his deductions are often made to look slightly ridiculous .
Special thanks are owed to many anonymous discoverers of a single parody or pastiche, but more is owed to a very few persons who can be credited with stimulating the search for and unearthing many of these early parodies and pastiches.
Foremost among these was Ellery Queen, the pen name for the mystery writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. In 1944 they published a collection of twenty-seven parodies and pastiches as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. But the Queens had inadvertently published elsewhere pieces that they were unaware