Good Night, Mr. Holmes Part 43

"But she could not love him."

"I am in hopes that she does."

"And why in hopes?"

"Because it would spare your Majesty all fear of future annoyance. If the lady loves her husband, she does not love your Majesty. If she does not love your Majesty, there is no reason why she should interfere with your Majesty's plan."

"It is true. And yet- Well! I wish she had been of my own station! What a queen she would have made!" He relapsed into a moody silence, which was not broken until we drew up in Serpentine Avenue.

The door of Briony Lodge was open, and an elderly woman stood upon the steps. She watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped from the brougham.

"Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I believe?" said she.

"I am Mr. Holmes," answered my companion, looking at her with a questioning and rather startled gaze.

"Indeed! My mistress told me that you were likely to call. She left this morning with her husband by the 5:15 train from Charing Cross for the Continent."

"What!" Sherlock Holmes staggered back, white with chagrin and surprise. "Do you mean that she has left England?"

"Never to return."

"And the papers?" asked the King hoa.r.s.ely. "All is lost.

"We shall see." He pushed past the servant and rushed into the drawing-room, followed by the King and myself. The furniture was scattered about in every direction, with dismantled shelves and open drawers, as if the lady had hurriedly ransacked them before her flight. Holmes rushed at the bell-pull, tore back a small sliding shutter, and, plunging in his hand, pulled out a photograph and a letter. The photograph was of Irene Adler herself in evening dress, the letter was superscribed to "Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To be left till called for." My friend tore it open and we all three read it together. It was dated at midnight of the preceding night and ran in this way: MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES:.

You really did it very well. You took me in completely. Until after the alarm of fire, I had not a suspicion. But then, when I found how I had betrayed myself, I began to think. I had been warned against you months ago. I had been told that if the King employed an agent it would certainly be you. And your address had been given me. Yet, with all this, you made me reveal what you wanted to know. Even after I became suspicious, I found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind old clergyman. But, you know, I have been trained as an actress myself. Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives. I sent John, the coachman, to watch you, ran upstairs, got into my walking-clothes, as I call them, and came down just as you departed. Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was really an object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then I, rather imprudently, wished you good-night, and started for the Temple to see my husband. We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call tomorrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Very truly yours, Irene Norton, nee ADLER.

"What a woman-oh, what a woman!" cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. "Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?"

"From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty," said Holmes coldly. "I am sorry that I have not been able to bring your Majesty's business to a more successful conclusion."

"On the contrary, my dear sir," cried the King; "nothing could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire."

"I am glad to hear your Majesty say so."

"I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward you. This ring-" He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger and held it out upon the palm of his hand.

"Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly," said Holmes.

"You have but to name it."

"This photograph!"

The King stared at him in amazement.

"Irene's photograph!" he cried. "Certainly, if you wish it."

"I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I have the honour to wish you a very good-morning." He bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set off in my company for his chambers.

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable t.i.tle of the woman.

GOOD NIGHT, MR. HOLMES.

READERS GUIDE.

"Perhaps it has taken until the end of this century for an author like Douglas to be able to imagine a female protagonist who could be called 'the' woman by Sherlock Holmes."

-GROUNDS FOR MURDER, 1991 To encourage the reading and discussion of Carole Nelson Douglas's acclaimed novels examining the Victorian world from the viewpoint of one of the most mysterious woman in literature, the following descriptions and discussion topics are offered. An author interview, biography, and bibliography will aid discussion as well.

Set in 1880-1890 London, Paris, Prague, Monaco, and New York City, the Irene Adler novels reinvent the only woman to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes as the complex and compelling protagonist of her own stories. Douglas's portrayal of "this remarkable heroine and her keen perspective on the male society in which she must make her independent way," noted the New York Times, recasts her "not as a loose-living adventuress but a woman ahead of her time." In Douglas's hands, the fascinating but sketchy American prima donna from "A Scandal in Bohemia" becomes an aspiring opera singer moonlighting as a private inquiry agent. When events force her from the stage into the art of detection, Adler's exploits rival those of Sherlock Holmes himself as she crosses paths and swords with the day's leading creative and political figures while sleuthing among the Bad and the Beautiful of Belle Epoque Europe.

Critics praise the novels' rich period detail, numerous historical characters, original perspective, wit, and "welcome window on things Victorian."

"The private and public escapades of Irene Adler Norton [are] as erratic and unexpected and brilliant as the character herself," noted Mystery Scene of Another Scandal in Bohemia (formerly Irene's Last Waltz), "a long and complex jeu d'esprit, simultaneously modeling itself on and critiquing Doylesque novels of ratiocination coupled with emotional distancing. Here is Sherlock Holmes in skirts, but as a detective with an artistic temperament and the pa.s.sion to match, with the intellect to penetrate to the heart of a crime and the heart to show compa.s.sion for the intellect behind it."

About This Book Good Night, Mr. Holmes, the first Irene Adler novel, opens in London with Sherlock Holmes and Watson discussing the events of "A Scandal in Bohemia" and especially the woman at the center of that first Sherlock Holmes short story, the American diva Irene Adler.

Often rated the favorite Sherlock Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia" is recommended reading, or rereading for a discussion of Good Night, Mr. Holmes, which retells the Doyle story from Irene's point of view, not Watson's. The novel also embellishes on the events in the story and presents the characters in a different light, especially Irene Adler, who has been revived and reinvented as a fully fleshed out leading lady in her own right.

Interview with Carole Nelson Douglas Q: You were the first woman to write about the Sherlock Holmes world from the viewpoint of one of Arthur Conan Doyle's women characters, and only the second woman to write a Holmes related novel at all. Why?

A: Most of my fiction ideas stem from my role as cultural observer in my first career, journalism. One day I looked at the mystery field and realized that all post-Doyle Sherlockian novels were written by men. I had loved the stories as a child and thought it was high time for a woman to examine the subject from a female point of view.

Q: So there was "the woman," Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes, waiting for you.

A: She seems the most obvious candidate, but I bypa.s.sed her for that very reason to look at other women in what is called the Holmes Canon. Eventually I came back to "A scandal in Bohemia." Rereading it, I realized that male writers had all taken Irene Adler at face value as the King of Bohemia's jilted mistress, but the story doesn't support that. As the only woman in the Canon who stirred a hint of romantic interest in the aloof Holmes, Irene Adler had to be more than this beautiful but amoral "Victorian vamp." Once I saw that I could validly interpret her as a gifted and serious performing artist, I had my protagonist.

Q: It was that simple?

A: It was that complex. I felt that any deeper psychological exploration of this character still had to adhere to Doyle's story, both literally and in regard to the author's own feeling toward the character. That's how I ended up having to explain that operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna. It's been great fun justifying Doyle's error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing. My Irene Adler is as intelligent, self-sufficient, and serious about her professional and personal integrity as Sherlock Holmes, and far too independent to be anyone's mistress but her own. She also moonlights as an inquiry agent while building her performing career. In many ways they are flip sides of the same coin: her profession, music, is his hobby. His profession, detection, is her secondary career. Her adventures intertwine with Holmes's, but she is definitely her own woman in these novels.

Q: How did Doyle regard the character of Irene Adler?

A: I believe that Holmes and Watson expressed two sides of Dr. Doyle: Watson; the medical and scientific man, also the staunch upholder of British convention; Holmes the creative and bohemian writer, fascinated by the criminal and the bizarre. Doyle wrote cla.s.sic stories of horror and science fiction as well as hefty historical novels set in the age of chivalry. His mixed feelings of attraction to and fear of a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him to "kill" her as soon as he created her. Watson states she is dead at the beginning of the story that introduces her. Irene was literally too hot for Doyle as well as Holmes to handle. She also debuted (and exited) in the first Holmes-Watson story Doyle ever wrote. Perhaps Doyle wanted to establish an unattainable woman to excuse Holmes remaining a bachelor and aloof from matters of the heart. What he did was to create a fascinatingly unrealized character for generations of readers. Unfortunately, male writers, screenwriters and directors ever since have hypers.e.xualized Irene Adler as the stereotyped romantic interest for Holmes rather than his victorious opponent. In both recent film incarnations, Irene Adler was shown as the mere tool of Moriarty, Holmes's archenemy. Rachel McAdams in the two Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes films was a pert, larcenous vixen. The British TV series Sherlock portrayed her via Lara Pulver (apparently naked in one scene,) as a lesbian dominatrix who only "beat" Holmes literally, with a whip. Not her wit.

Q: Do your protagonists represent a split personality as well?

A: Yes, one even more sociologically interesting than the Holmes-Watson split because it embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. As a larger-than-life heroine, Irene is "up to anything." Her biographer, Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh, however, is the very model of traditional Victorian womanhood. Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women's restricted roles then and now. Narrator Nell is the character who "grows" most during the series as the unconventional Irene forces her to see herself and her times in a broader perspective. This is something women writers have been doing in the past three decades: revisiting cla.s.sic literary terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.

Q: What of "the husband," G.o.dfrey Norton?

A: In my novels, Irene's husband, G.o.dfrey Norton, is more than the "tall, dark, and das.h.i.+ng barrister" Doyle gave her. I made him the son of a woman wronged by England's then female-punitive divorce law, which Conan Doyle opposed. So he's a "supporting" character in every sense of the word. These novels are that rare bird in literature: female "buddy" books. G.o.dfrey fulfills the useful, decorative, and faithful role so often played by women and wives in fiction and real life, only he really is "a superior man" of his time. Sherlockians anxious to reunite Adler and Holmes have tried to oust G.o.dfrey. William S. Baring Gould even depicted him as a wife beater in order to promote a later a.s.signation with Holmes that produced Nero Wolfe. What an unbelievable violation of a strong female character's psychology... a scenario that made Irene Adler a two-time loser in her choice of men and a m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t to boot. My protagonist is a world away from that notion. Incidentally, the plot point that Irene and G.o.dfrey must be wed before noon is a totally fictional element used to convey urgency.

Q: Did you give her any attributes not found in the Doyle story?

A: I gave her one of Holmes's bad habits. She smokes "cigarettes." Smoking was an act of rebellion for women then. And because Doyle shows her sometimes donning male dress to go unhampered into public places, I gave her "a wicked little revolver" to carry.

Q: Essentially, you've recreated Irene Adler as not merely an ornamental woman but a working woman.

A: My Irene is more a rival than a romantic interest for Holmes, yes. She is not a logical detective in the same mold as he, but as gifted in her intuitive way. Nor is her opera-singing a convenient profession for a beauty of the day, but a pa.s.sionate vocation that was taken from her by the King of Bohemia's autocratic att.i.tude toward women, forcing her to occupy her mind with detection. Although Doyle's Irene is beautiful, well dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes.

I like to write "against" conventions that are no longer true, or were never true. This is the thread that runs through all my fiction: my dissatisfaction with the portrayal of women in literary and popular fiction-then and even now. This begins with Amberleigh-my post-feminist mainstream version of the Gothic-revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970s-and continues with Irene Adler. I'm interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.

Q: How do you research these books?

A: My theatrical background since grade school educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays and trying to write "Hollywood" to make a film of my favorite novel so I could play the little girl in it when I was eight. (A film of Through the Desert was ultimately made decades later in Poland.) My mother's book club meant that I cut my teeth on Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dumas, and d.i.c.kens.

In doing research, I have a fortunate facility of using every nugget I find, or of finding that every little fascinating nugget works itself into the story. Perhaps that's because journalists must be ingenious in using every fact available to make a story as complete and accurate as possible under deadline conditions. Often the smallest mustard seed of research swells into an entire tree of plot. The corpse on the dining-room table of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was too macabre to resist and spurred the entire plot of the second Adler novel, The Adventuress (formerly Good Morning, Irene). Stoker rescued a drowning man from the Thames and carried him home for revival efforts, but it was too late.

Besides using my own extensive library on this period, I've borrowed from my local library all sorts of arcane books they don't even know they have because no one ever checks them out. The Internet is a treasure house of specifics and photographs.

Q: You've written fantasy and science-fiction novels, why did you turn to mystery?

A: All novels are fantasy and all novels are mystery in the largest sense. Although mystery was often an element in my early novels, when I evolved the Irene Adler idea, I considered it simply a novel. Good Night, Mr. Holmes was almost on the shelves before I realized it would be "categorized" as a mystery. So Irene is utterly a product of my mind and times, not of the marketplace, though I always believed that the concept was timely and necessary.

For Discussion 1. Did you know the Conan Doyle story that this novel expands upon before reading this book? Or after? How are the two pieces similar, and where do they differ?

If you've only read the novel, are you interested now in reading the Conan Doyle story? Why did the author pluck the particular character of Irene Adler from this series of stories for revival a hundred years after the story involving her was published? If you know the Holmes stories well, are there any other women characters who'd lend themselves to their own novels. Whom would you pick?

2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "killed" Irene Adler in the same story that introduced her. Yet readers are forever intrigued by this woman who was the only one to fascinate the monkish Holmes, as well as outwit him. Why would the author have done that? Conan Doyle gave Irene both beauty and brains, but he didn't make Holmes both handsome and brilliant. Does this make such a "perfect" woman character less believable? Less likeable? Does she show any failings in this novel?

3. The Drood Review of Mystery observed of Chapel Noir: "This dark tour de force proves by its verbal play and literary allusiveness that Douglas wants neither Irene nor herself underestimated in fiction. More important, she wants women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world."

Why do you think the author chose to give Irene her own "Watson" to narrate the novel? How does Nell Huxleigh echo or contrast Dr. Watson? Does using a traditionally restricted Victorian woman as the narrator make you more aware of any Victorian remnants in the upbringing and lives of contemporary women?

Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels. This element is absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell's strictly conventional views affect those around her? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene's pragmatic philosophy? Why are Irene and most readers so fond of Nell despite her limited and self-limiting opinions? Is there a bit of her in all modern women still? Are women still expected to monitor matters of morality in contemporary families and lives? Have modern women broken out of the s.e.xual double standard, and is there a price?

4. What do you think of the major men characters in this novel: Sherlock Holmes, the King of Bohemia, and G.o.dfrey Norton? What att.i.tudes to women does each embody? Why did Conan Doyle make Holmes so "allergic" to women? Is he saying that intellectualism is purely masculine? He made Watson something of a ladies' man who has consorted with the women of "three continents" and has two or possibly three wives over the breadth of the stories. Why are modern readers, and some writers, eager to give Holmes a romantic interest? Do they see him as incomplete? Do they want to see this somewhat misogynistic man succ.u.mb to female power? What does he have in common with Mr. Spock from the Star Trek universe? Can you think of other difficult and compelling characters in modern storytelling on the page and onscreen? What is their mythic appeal?

For Discussion of the Irene Adler Series 1. Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from cla.s.sic literary or genre novels to reevaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the copyright contest over The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's reimagining of Gone with the Wind events and characters from the African-American slaves' viewpoints? Could that novel's important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the cla.s.sic work generally familiar to most people? What other works have attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

2. Douglas has said she likes to work on the "large can vas" of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multivolume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twenty-first century too short? Is long-term, committed reading be coming a lost art?

3. Douglas chose to blend humor with adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times, or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What other writers and novelists use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

4. The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and the Continent, artist-tradesman and aristocrat, as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

5. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modern genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late nineteenth century produced not only Dracula and Doyle's Holmes stories and the surviving dinosaurs of The Lost World, but Trilby and Svengali, The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde among the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery, and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Bunson, Matthew E. Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. New York, NY: MacMillan, 1994.

Coleman, Elizabeth Ann. The Opulent Era. New York, NY: The Brooklyn Museum, 1989.

Crow, Duncan. The Victorian Woman. London UK: c.o.x &Wyman Ltd, 1971.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes. Various editions.

Mackay, James. Allan Pinkerton: The Eye Who Never Slept. Edinburgh, Scotland: Mainstream Publis.h.i.+ng Co., Ltd., 1996.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

www.carolenelsondouglas.com.

Carole Nelson Douglas is the award-winning author of 60 novels in the mystery/thriller, science fiction/fantasy and romance/women's fiction genres. She currently writes the long-running Midnight Louie, feline PI, cozy-noir mystery series (Catnap, p.u.s.s.yfoot, Cat on a Blue Monday etc.) and the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, noir urban fantasy series (Dancing with Werewolves) set in imaginative variations of Las Vegas: contemporary and paranormally post-apocalyptic.

Carole was the first author to make a Sherlockian female character, Irene Adler, a series protagonist, with the New York Times Notable Book, Good Night, Mr. Holmes. She has won Lifetime Achievement Awards from RT Book Reviews for Mystery, Suspense and Versatility and was named a Pioneer of Publis.h.i.+ng. She's also won several Cat Writers' a.s.sociation first-place Muse Medallions. Carole has e-published (www.wishlist.com) shorter fiction.

A daily newspaper reporter, feature writer and editor in St. Paul, she moved to Fort Worth to write fiction fulltime and was recently inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

ALSO BY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS.

"Her fine Sherlockian novels and her Midnight Louie books have turned her into a genuine mystery star. Pick one up and you'll see why."-Ed Gorman, founder of Mystery Scene magazine The New York Times Notable IRENE ADLER Series.

Good Night, Mr. Holmes... The Adventuress... A Soul of Steel... Another Scandal in Bohemia... Chapel Noir and Castle Rouge (Jack the Ripper duology)... Femme Fatale...Spider Dance The MIDNIGHT LOUIE Feline PI series.

Catnap... p.u.s.s.yfoot... Cat on a Blue Monday... Cat in a Crimson Haze... Cat in a Diamond Dazzle... Cat with an Emerald Eye... Cat in a Flamingo Fedora... Cat in a Golden Garland... Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt... Cat in an Indigo Mood... Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit... Cat in a Kiwi Con... Cat in a Leopard Spot... Cat in a Midnight Choir... Cat in a Neon Nightmare... Cat in an Orange Twist... Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit... Cat in a Quicksilver Caper... Cat in a Red Hot Rage... Cat in a Topaz Tango... Cat in a Sapphire Slipper... Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme... Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta... Cat in a White Tie and Tails... Cat in an Alien X-Ray The DELILAH STREET, Paranormal Investigator series.

Dancing with Werewolves... Brimstone Kiss... Vampire Sunrise... Silver Zombie... Virtual Virgin.

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