Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10. Arthur Conan Doyle
the secret to immortality thanks to his bees and a Moriarty who has stolen H.G. Wells’s time machine. As Moriarty travels into the future to assassinate world leaders and create chaos, the deathless Holmes (along with equally immortal John Watson and Mycroft Holmes) is there to meet him. Their conflict extends not only into future centuries, but into space itself as humankind explores the universe and colonizes the planets.
Nebula and Hugo Award winner Vonda N. McIntyre offers a more Earth-bound tale in her short story “The Adventure of the Field Theorems” (first published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit in 1995). In fact, this narrative hits very close to home, as it has Arthur Conan Doyle himself consider the mystery of crop circles along with Holmes and Watson. Scientist Stephanie Osborn brings Holmes into the present day through her ongoing “Displaced Detective” series (including The Arrival and At Speed in 2011 and The Rendlesham Incident in 2012). In these novels, a modern-day female physicist discovers the alternate reality in which Holmes is doomed to die at Reichenbach Falls, rescues the detective, and brings him into our universe to share her high-tech adventures.
Several collections of Holmesian science fiction showcase how noted genre authors use Holmes in their works. Among the best of these are Sherlock Holmes through Time and Space (1984), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg, and Charles Waugh; Sherlock in Orbit (1995), edited by Mike Resnick and Martin Greenberg; and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2009), edited by John Joseph Adams.
Sherlock Holmes in the World(s) of H.P. Lovecraft
Writers and readers of Holmesian science fiction seem to agree that the Great Detective appears especially at home in the universe of one author in particular: H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraftian Holmes pastiches—or is that Holmesian Lovecraft pastiches?—form an impressive literary presence of their own.
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Why H.P. Lovecraft?
H.P. Lovecraft was a U.S. author of so-called “weird fiction” whose writings are recognized today as formative works in the development of contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is perhaps best remembered as the father of the “Cthulhu Mythos,” a shared universe of stories to which many writers contributed, inspired by the premise of Lovecraft’s 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu” and his related writings. “The Call of Cthulhu” suggests that alien creatures once ruled the Earth and in the future will awaken from their current slumber to reclaim their dominion. The insignificance of humanity on this indifferent cosmic stage threatens the sanity and lives of those people who are sensitive enough to perceive it.
At first blush, the otherworldliness of Lovecraft’s vision might not seem a fitting subject for Holmes’s skeptical attention. As Holmes himself says in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1924), “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us.” No Great Old Ones from outer space, one might say, need apply.
There are, however, excellent reasons why so many authors have felt compelled to invite Holmes into Lovecraft’s world(s). For one thing, the setting fits. Conan Doyle and Lovecraft were contemporaries; Lovecraft outlived Conan Doyle only by seven years. Lovecraft was an enthusiastic Anglophile, as well, and fancied himself a Victorian gentleman by nature, if not in circumstance. Thus Lovecraft’s writings reflect a certain flavor, a mood created by gaslight and shadows and veiled peril, that complements the tone of the Holmes canon well.
The message of both the Holmes stories and Lovecraft’s work also agrees in principle: the universe is knowable. Conan Doyle’s Holmes reaches his conclusions via the science of deduction. Lovecraft likewise constructed the body of his tales on the skeleton of the hard sciences. A serious study of astronomy, in particular, informed his mechanistic materialist views and led to the cosmic outlook of his fiction. The two authors drew different lessons from the comprehensibility of the world around them, however. The universe is knowable, Conan Doyle seems to tell readers, and is that not reassuring? We may find order in the apparent confusion. On the other hand, Lovecraft implies that the universe is knowable… but understanding it might drive one mad. (It bears repeating that Lovecraft’s protagonists are often sensitive, thoughtful, curious scholars and researchers and investigators, all of whom suffer from the desire to know—not unlike Sherlock Holmes himself.)
Many readers 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.
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