Book Review: CAESAR NOW BE STILL

TITLE: Caesar Now Be Still

AUTHOR: Frank Schildiner

253 pages, Belanger Books, ISBN 9798326602428 (hardcover, paperback, e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Frank Schildiner’s Caesar Now Be Still is the first book of what I hope will be many novels and stories featuring New York City Detective Wilson Hargreave. If the character’s name sounds familiar, you are probably an avid Sherlock Holmes reader. Hargreave is mentioned in the Holmes canon just once, referenced by the Great Detective in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” as a friend of Holmes among the police in New York City. No details of Hargreave’s career or life, no hint of how he became friends with the world’s most famous consulting detective, just a mention that Hargreave had often made use of Holmes’ knowledge of London crime and had now returned the favor. From this small mention, Schildiner crafts a character with a background that spans the US, the UK, and France, with time spent on both sides of the law, who has a moral code that invites mockery mixed with grudging respect from his peers and enemies alike. And while he doesn’t seem to have many friends, he does have obnoxious coworkers and dangerous enemies to spare. Hargreave’s history is revealed slowly throughout the course of the book – it’s not always pleasant but it explains a lot about the man he is when this book takes place. I found him an intriguing and personable main character (the first-person narration may have helped with that), flawed and scarred and tragic in some ways, but also noble and hopeful.

Fans of Sexton Blake, Sherlock Holmes, and Solar Pons, as well as fans of historical crime novels are sure to enjoy this book as much as I did. Grittier than the standard Holmes or Pons fare but with the same sense of justice the Great Detective’s adventures usually possess. The author seamlessly melds several mystery/crime sub-genres in this book: there’s the Holmesian mystery aspect (while Hargreave may work for the NYC police department, he is clearly treated as more of a consultant by peers and higher-ups who disdain the methods Hargreave learned from Holmes), the brutal crime aspect (so much blood and viscera at the crime scenes), the noir aspect (complete with instigating rich female client and various femme fatales), and the historical aspect (1890s New York City on full display, including all of the gang fighting and corruption). Other hands attempting such a mash-up of tones might have been less successful, but Schildiner knows his genres and knows this period of NYC history very well. It all comes together smoothly and to a highly satisfactory conclusion that leaves the way open for future adventures.

Long-time Schildiner readers will not be surprised there are also tons of easter eggs involving a plethora of literary and historical figures of the time. Schildiner weaves these references throughout the book effortlessly, never marring the pace or tone of the book. With as many as I recognized, I’m sure I still missed some that more astute readers will have picked on.

I am an enthusiastic fan of Frank Schildiner’s work across genres, and I do think this might be the best book he’s written yet. Belanger Books should be commended for bringing it out, and are encouraged to continue the series. Highly recommended.

Sunday Shorts: Two Bibliomysteries

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Today’s Sunday Shorts takes a look at two entries in the Bibliomystery series from The Mysterious Bookshop. The central conceit of the Bibliomysteries is that every story in the series involves books in some way. Thirty-nine individual stories have been issued so far.

The Gospel of Sheba (Bibliomystery #18) by Lyndsay Faye is a wonderful Sherlockian mystery that only peripherally features the Great Detective and his Boswell. The central character is A. Davenport Lomax, a well-regarded but under-paid sub-librarian at the London Library. Because of his prodigious researching skills, Lomax is approached by a patron who believes he’s been in contact with a cursed book, which the librarian then investigates. Is there a mundane explanation for why most people who touch this book become gravely ill, or is there something more supernatural afoot? We all know Holmes’ adage that “ghosts need not apply,” but plenty of Holmes pastiches feature supernatural elements so I won’t spoil that reveal at all here. In general, I enjoy Lyndsay Faye’s Holmes pastiches and this one is no exception. Faye introduces the mystery, builds tension, and reveals the truth with perfect timing and detail. But the mystery of the Gospel of Sheba itself is only part of the whole story. Rather than give us another Holmes adventure narrated by Watson, Faye gives us an epistolary short story (a style I love), the events cobbled together through letters, notes, and journal entries by Lomax, his absent Opera-star wife Colette, and their young daughter. The author paints a picture of a family at a crossroads, caught between Lomax’s low-paying job and Colette’s not-quite-stellar opera tour, and the reader gets to piece together what the characters are not saying in these documents which is also fun. I was as interested in how Lomax and Colette would resolve their family tension for the good of their child as I was interested in the mystery of the cursed book. Holmes and Watson do put in a delightfully droll appearance towards the end of the story that had me almost chuckling.

Hoodoo Harry (Bibliomystery #33) by Joe R. Lansdale is a Hap and Leonard story, and I think it’s the first Hap and Leonard story I’ve ever read (yes, I know. I’m embarrassed too.). It definitely made me want to read more. The story starts with a bang – Hap and Leonard run off the road by an out-of-control bookmobile driven by a scared child – and doesn’t let up. Even the quiet personal moments have momentum. The duo learn that the bookmobile and its former driver (the Hoodoo Harry of the title) have been missing for several years, and that there are several corpses stored in the vehicle’s waste compartment who might be children who have gone missing locally. Naturally, they investigate. They discover numerous suspects along the Bookmobile’s original route, some more potential than others. The conversation scenes with the suspects walked that wonderful line between giving too many hints and not giving enough, and also gave me what I think is an excellent sense of who Hap and Leonard are as individuals. The suspects also felt like well-rounded individuals and not just convenient placeholders in the search for the truth. The story is narrated by Hap, in a very down-home-folksy style that I found engaging; if he narrates the books I suspect I’ll enjoy them when I finally get around to reading them. I also didn’t feel like I was missing anything – if there were nods to other installments in the series in the dialogue or narration, they weren’t obvious in a spoilery way. I do feel like I need to give people a content warning, though: while there’s nothing truly graphic, there is discussion of child torture and murder.

Note: The stories in the Bibliomystery series are written exclusively for The Mysterious Bookshop by a string of great mystery, crime, and thriller authors. The store issues them in limited edition hardcover versions but also in very affordable slim paperback volumes (usually priced $6.95), and so far there have been two hardcover compendiums. Me being me, I love buying the individual stories because of the “trade dress” of the series. The stories fall into the novelette range in terms of word-count.

Series Saturday: The Blood-Thirsty Agent

This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

In Cynthia Ward’s action-packed novella series “The Blood-Thirsty Agent,” Lucy Harker is a dhampir – a child born of the sexual union between a vampire and a mortal. In this case, Lucy’s mother is the famous Mina Harker, and her natural father is Dracula, Lord of the Vampires. The time is the early 1900s and the action ranges from cabin suites on the Titanic to the trenches of World War One to the Hollow Earth, allowing the author to work in winks at, and pastiches of, some of her (and my) favorite adventure characters of the time period.

The Adventure of the Incognita Countess introduces us to Lucy, her family, and her unique role as an agent of Her Majesty’s Secret Service under the direction of the man called “M.” As a dhampir, it is Lucy’s job to protect the Empire from vampires and other supernatural creatures. But her assignment on the Titanic is of a more mundane nature: bodyguard for an American carrying secret plans back to the President. Things take a more pulp/supernatural turn when Lucy encounters the beautiful Clarimal Stein, who has a secret of her own: she is the vampire Mircalla Karnstein. They also run afoul of a German “science hero” up to no-good.

Incognita Countess sets the tone for the series and gives us a good sense of the alternate history these characters live in: a world where Titanic is powered by secret heat-ray technology Britain has reverse-engineered from the Martian invasion of several years before and where the Germans are intent on stealing that technology. There’s a pulp-weird-science, almost steampunk vibe to a world that otherwise is recognizable as our own, and the stories are as fast-paced as a classic Doc Savage or Shadow tale. The novella length suits each adventure perfectly, but especially in this first book – after all, Titanic was only on the seas for so long before that iceberg hit; the impending doom of the ship (which the reader is aware of but the characters are not) lends an immediacy to Lucy’s triple missions (protect the American; find out what the Germans are up to; kill the vampire).

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of interpretations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which the vampire and his victim, Mina Murray Harker, fall in love. (See Francis Ford Coppola’s film version, in which Mina is the reincarnation of Dracula’s lost love, or the novel Dracula the Undead by Bram’s nephew Dacre Stoker as just two examples.) Ward, to her credit, goes in a different direction: Dracula forced himself upon Mina and she only found out she was pregnant after the vampire had been defeated. There is no love lost by any of the characters for Lucy’s natural father; it’s pretty clear our lead character is the product of supernatural rape and that she’s never encountered her natural father. I find this choice far more interesting, and Lucy’s feelings about her conception far more compelling, than yet another story in which Dracula and Mina are in love and have children.

Lucy is an outsider to society, pretending to be many things she is not in order to survive and serve the realm: she pretends to be the child of Mina and her first husband, Jonathan Harker; she pretends to be a normal mortal when in fact she has tremendous power thanks to her dual heritage; she pretends to be an upstanding heterosexual woman when she isn’t. And she struggles with having to hide so much of who she is under a veneer of late Victorian societal norms.

In each book, Lucy finds herself questioning something she’s been taught as not just true but TRUE: in Incognita Countess, it is the truism that vampires are emotionless creatures capable of pretending to have feelings but in fact having no humanity at all. In The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum, it is the “fact” that being anything other than heterosexual is a sin. And in the upcoming The Adventure of the Naked Guide, it is the concept that England’s colonial expansions are a force for good in the world while Germany’s encroachment on the sovereignty of other nations is an abomination. In each novel, it is encounters with other characters that force Lucy to reevaluate her world-view, starting with the seemingly emotional vampire Clarimal Stein. And in challenging Lucy’s worldview, Ward challenges the reader’s as well. Like the authors she’s influenced by (Burroughs, Stoker, Doyle, Verne, among others), Ward couches social commentary – social criticism – in the folds of pulp adventure tales.

I also find it interesting that all three of Lucy’s adventures occur in places removed from “normal” society, and spaces to which access is tightly controlled in one way or another: the guest-rooms and deeper sections of Titanic; the trenches and other side of the enemy line in World War One western Europe; and finally the world at the center of the Earth which Edgar Rice Burroughs named “Pellucidar.” Ward never shows us Lucy in everyday society – the closest she comes is interacting with humans aboard Titanic, but even there she’s dealing with a heightened and claustrophobic version of everyday society. The settings are not “normal” because our heroine is not “normal.”

As mentioned, Ward also works in tributes to her influences. We do eventually get to see Mina Harker. Lucy’s stepfather, the “M” who heads the Secret Service, is quickly revealed as Mycroft Holmes so of course there are mentions of her step-uncle and his partner-in-business. There’s technology derived from the Martian invasion chronicled by H.G. Wells. On Titanic, Lucy spends several scenes talking to Lord Greyborough, who is rumored to have been raised by apes. And of course, there’s the upcoming third book’s trip to Burroughs’ Pellucidar, with mentions of several characters from that series. There may have been more subtle nods that I missed, but the big ones are plainly obvious and totally enjoyable. None steal the focus from Lucy herself, but in playing off of them we get to see more of Lucy’s personality and internal struggles.

I hear that the fourth Blood-Thirsty Agent novella, due out later this year or early the next, will be the last. If so, I’ll be sad to see the series end just as I feel I’m really getting to know Lucy and Clarimal. All good things do come to an end, but I hope that we’ll get to see more of Lucy’s upbringing and meet more of her stepsiblings before the end.

In the mean-time, I highly recommend The Blood-Thirsty Agent series to fans of alternate history, steampunk, pulp adventure, vampires in love, and LGBTQ representation in genre fiction. Published by indie Aqueduct Press, the novellas can be purchased in print or ebook form:

·         The Adventure of the Incognita Countess

·         The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum

·         The Adventure of the Naked Guide [forthcoming]

Sunday Shorts: Three Holmes Tales

Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.

Since my most recent book review was about the first adventures of a Holmes pastiche/stand-in named Solar Pons, and since I’ve been trying to make my way through accumulated magazine back-issues to clear them out of my apartment, I thought I’d make three Holmes tales by authors other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the subject of today’s Sunday Shorts.

Even before most of the Holmes canon entered Public Domain, authors have published further adventures of the Great Detective and his friends. Some had authorization from the Conan Doyle Estate and some didn’t. For many years now, the revived Strand Magazine has published Holmes tales by other authors. As with novels and short story collections written about Holmes, the stories in the Strand come with various levels of quality, creativity, and respect for the canon. These are three I particularly liked; two of them are even connected to stories written by Conan Doyle himself, and all three are narrated by someone other than Doctor Watson (two by Holmes himself, a rarity in the original canon).

1.       NOTES UPON THE DIADEM CLUB AFFAIR by Lyndsay Faye, from the October 2015 issue of The Strand.  I don’t think I’ve failed to enjoy a Holmes tale penned by Lyndsay Faye (I also keep meaning to read her non-Holmes novels but just haven’t gotten there yet). This one was no exception. It’s a bit light on showing Holmes’ actual deductive abilities, being a more playful tale. Holmes narrates his own meeting with a society fop named Lord Chesley Templeton, who invites him to be a special guest at a meeting of a very special private club. Holmes declines, not wanting to be anyone’s pet monkey, until a letter from Brother Mycroft changes his mind. Holmes and Watson learn more about Templeton, stop a crime, and Watson encounters a Baroness with an interest in writing. Holmes’ disdain for Templeton’s easily-seen-through disguise at the first meeting is set against his own dramatic way of getting Watson to accompany him, just one of several character-driven moments that made me smile. (Fellow fans of Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton Family may find humorous Watson’s implication that the Baroness who cameos ends up basing her most famous character on someone from this tale; I wrote it off as Watson purposefully misguiding readers.)

2.       AN ACTUAL TREASURE by David Marcum, from the October 2017 issue of The Strand. Marcum’s tale is also narrated by Holmes via his own journal entries, and also ties back to a very important case in the Holmes canon, the one in which Holmes and Watson first met Mary Morstan (later the First Mrs. Watson). Marcum brings Inspectors Jones and LeStrade into the story as well as the Baker Street Irregulars (and one in particular named Levi), and while the story is again sort of light on Holmes’ deductive abilities, it provides a very satisfactory follow-up to what happened to the jewels that went missing at the end of that earlier case. Marcum also showcases aspects of Holmes’ personality other chroniclers sometimes overlook or ignore: his patience and paternal feeling towards children, his respect for Mrs. Hudson, the fact that although Holmes always claims not to theorize before all the facts are in he actually does it quite often in the original canon (near the end of this tale, Holmes comments “I had formed seven theories about what might have occurred, and while this wasn’t the most probable of them, it was my favorite.”). There’s even a winking mention of Praed Street, although this is many years before Solar Pons and Doctor Parker will take up residence on that thoroughfare.

3.       LADY HILDA REVEALED by Bonnie MacBird, from the October 2018 issue of the Strand. This is a different king of Holmes pastiche, told in the form of a letter from a society lady to Doctor Watson. Also her husband has long since passed away, “Lady Hilda Trelawny Hope” maintains the fictitious identity Watson gave her when he published Holmes’ “Adventure of the Second Stain,” but strives to correct the good doctor on a number of points regarding how she was portrayed. This could easily have been a poke at officious society types, but instead MacBird gives us an intimate portrait of a woman who could, under other circumstances, have been just as strong a foil for Holmes as Irene Adler, Mary Morstan, or Violet Hunter. It’s a wonderful character piece that expands on the original story without ever making Holmes or Watson look bad.

Review of IN RE SHERLOCK HOLMES

TITLE: In Re: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of Solar Pons (Solar Pons #1)

AUTHOR: August Derleth

288 pages, Belanger Books, ISBN 9781720599623 (paperback, ebook, audiobook)

DESCRIPTION: (from the Publisher’s description): Once again in old London, "the game is afoot." In these pastiches of the Sacred Writings, written when he was nineteen and twenty, August Derleth has recreated the London of Sherlock Holmes. It does not matter that the familiar name has become Solar Pons, or that the familiar Baker Street has become Praed Street — something of the nostalgic charm and fascination, of the remembered quickening of the pulse and the familiar settings of the original London of Sherlock Holmes, has been recaptured in these pages. And what intriguing titles there arc to these twelve pastiches, chosen from among a greater number! Here are "The Adventure of the Frightened Baronet" — about a spectral image of Siva seen at a country estate beyond London; "The Adventure of the Purloined Periapt" — which is the purest of pastiches and perhaps the closest of all the tales in this book to the original spirit; "The Adventure of the Norcross Riddle" —containing some of the neatest deduction in the book; "The Adventure of the Man with the Broken Face" — a tale of "dark waters"; and eight others. "No doubt," writes Vincent Starrett in his Introduction, "we — and by we, I mean those frantic and incurable Sherlockians who, with August Derleth, deplore the paucity of canonical entertainments — should rather have more of the great originals, but we accept the imitations, faute de mieux, to satisfy a normal appetite. And we accept them with enthusiasm. They are the work of affectionate minds and hands. There is no intention to deceive. These stories, and others in their field, are intended only to please. They are nostalgic reminders of vanished days and nights in Baker Street."

MY RATING: four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: I’m sure I knew of Solar Pons, as one of the many Sherlock Holmes pastiches I read in middle and high school. But I didn’t really become consciously aware of him, or just how many stories comprise the Pontine Canon, until I started regularly haunting used book stores and participating in various pulp magazine and “Wold Newton Universe” online groups about a decade and a half ago. Whether the Pontine Canon is composed only of the original stories by August Derleth or includes the later stories written by Basil Copper is for more knowledgeable minds than mine to debate; I bought all of the Pons 70s paperbacks I could find in those used bookstores with the intent of reading the whole series once I had them all. What inspired me to finally start (having finally read/listened to the entire Holmesian canon in order a few years ago) is the re-issue of the Derleth books by Belanger Books under the editorship of Pons expert David Marcum. And, more specifically, the offer from the publisher of a free audiobook of this first book in the series in exchange for an honest review.

For those not in the know (and who somehow missed the book description just above): August Derleth created Solar Pons to be the successor to Sherlock Holmes. Pons and his amanuensis, Doctor Lyndon Parker, are very much like their literary predecessors -- Derleth wasn't trying to create something new and daring, but was rather paying tribute to characters who had given him so much joy and for whom new adventures would not be forthcoming (I wonder, did Derleth ever suspect the overwhelming amount of new Holmes fiction that would be written, authorized or otherwise, after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s passing? Did Derleth suspect that there would be more Pons stories written and published beyond his originals?)

The stories in this first collection, therefore, feel very much like Derleth writing Doyle: the stories are short and punchy; Parker spends a few paragraphs in each story talking about Pons’ amazing skills of ratiocination; Pons constantly tries to get Parker to deduce what’s really going on but of course the Chronicler is, if not clueless, at least not as intuitive as his friend. There are detectives and beat cops from Scotland Yard who are impressed by the detective but also a bit off-put by him; there’s a criminal mastermind with hinted-at history that we never quite get enough information about; there are even street-urchin “Irregulars” to help Pons in situations where multiple suspects need to be under surveillance.

It sounds sort of derivative, doesn’t it? And yet … in the reading, it doesn’t feel derivative at all. Derleth’s narrative voice, through Lyndon Parker, is lighter than Doyle’s, less serious but not lacking in tension.  The Pons-Parker dynamic is a bit more playful than that of their predecessors, without sacrificing the mutual respect they have. Pons’ relationship with Scotland Yard is less condescending (although he still pokes at the fact that he can find clues they seem incapable of finding on their own), and so the various officers’ attitude to Pons is more openly respectful. And Derleth doesn’t wait until he’s ready to kill his lead character off to introduce an arch-nemesis: Baren Ennesfred Kroll is mentioned in one story in this collection and actually appears in another. I assume he recurs in later volumes as well.

Steve White’s narration of the audiobook is at its best in the voices of Parker and Pons, who feel distinct from each other (Pons is a little more nasal in delivery, Parker a bit broader-toned). I didn’t always feel like the supporting character voices worked; some felt like the accent was more South African, some felt at odds with the character descriptions (for instance, Parker describes in one story a beautiful young woman as their client, but White’s character voice is more middle-age matronly). But overall, White does a wonderful job keeping the stories tense and exciting, and finding the humor in both Parker and Pons’ lines where appropriate.

This first Solar Pons collection is full of fun mysteries, some more predictable than others, with an engaging lead detective and sidekick. If you’ve read all of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, you’re likely to enjoy this as a follow-up. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series, or listening if Belanger Books brings out more audiobook editions.