Of Wings Shining in Darkness Penny Dreadful / Granada Holmes Cross-Over Mature 18+ Story Complete

[earthspirits]

 
"Of Wings Shining in Darkness" is my cross-over Penny Dreadful / Granada Holmes Victorian vampire tale - with Jeremy Brett and David Burke appearing as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. It's set at Christmas time in London.

The story is complete on Archive of Our Own. Please note that it's #5 in my Demimonde of Shadows Penny Dreadful Series. 

Link: archiveofourown.org/works/7413997/chapters/16840585

Spoilers: Contains Penny Dreadful Season 3 spoilers.

Ratings / Warnings: The story is Mature 18+ only. Each chapter contains its own ratings and warnings. Please note that at times this is a violent tale, with violence / gore / horror and some battle scenes. There's also allusions to death and vengeance, with survivor's guilt and thoughts of suicide. Some chapters contain strong language and there's a (tasteful) consensual sexual situation.

On "Shadow Woman": Did ACD not create Sherlock?

[graycardinal]

Shadow Woman
John Allen (Allen & Allen Semiotics; $5.99 Kindle)

also: Stylometric Analysis of the Sherlock Holmes Canon

A few posts upstream, cimorene dropped a link into the comments for a Web site (and associated ebook) with a highly controversial premise. The author's thesis is straightforward: he argues that Arthur Conan Doyle neither created Sherlock Holmes nor wrote most of the Holmes stories; rather, Holmes was invented by his first wife, Louise (née Hawkins), who wrote most of the Holmes canon prior to "The Final Problem", and after Louise's death, most of post-Reichenbach Holmes was penned by ACD's second wife, Jean (née Leckie).

This is, to say the least, a controversial assertion. However, Allen is far from your usual conspiracy theorist - a good deal of his argument is backed by analysis of hard data (and he's honest about the limitations of the hard data that's available), and the parts that are more speculative (a) are acknowledged as such for the most part, and (b) extremely interesting in the ways that they look at the pre- and post-Reichenbach Holmesian canon, and the differences in tone and character that Holmes scholars have long recognized without questioning the matter of authorship.

I'm still in the midst of reading Shadow Woman - which I was persuaded to buy by the analysis in the second referenced document, downloadable via free PDF from the author's Web site. Stylometric analysis, very briefly, is a technique whereby a set of texts is examined for the presence and frequency of a carefully selected set of core words (mostly "function words", such as prepositions, articles, etc. rather than "content words") in a given set of works, so that comparisons of the resulting calculations can be used to establish prospective authorship of a body of work. In Allen's case, he ran an analysis on the sixty works of the Holmes canon plus virtually all the rest of the published work issued over ACD's byline, but the technique has also been profitably used to address questions of authorship involving the Federalist Papers published prior to the American Revolution.

I am not enough of a mathematician or linguist to properly defend stylometrics in itself, but Allen's conclusions in that analysis were more than persuasive enough to reel me in for the broader case. (That said, I would be delighted to hear sanguinity 's opinions on the chapter in the stylometrics paper that Allen says only real math geeks should actually read.)  And Shadow Woman does not disappoint: Allen makes a multi-faceted case, resting on three broad premises. The first is that ACD's own words and actions over his medical and literary career establish him as consistently unreliable where facts are concerned. The second is that the very character of the stories written by Louise - as Allen proposes - differs sharply from ACD's stated worldview (and later Jean's), particularly with respect to racism and depth of content. And the third is that ACD and his younger sons went to a fair amount of trouble later on to suppress or dispose of as much documentation of Louise's life as they could.

Does Allen prove his case? As to the first premise, I am persuaded at the least that Conan Doyle was absolutely capable of shading the truth to his own benefit. I would be happier here if Allen had included a separate bibliography of his sources at the back of the book, but he gives more than enough information for interested Holmesian scholars to check and critique his work in this regard.

As to the second: I find myself intrigued on several levels. Allen, I think, is sharper than he realizes in bringing up the early Rex Stout argument that "Watson Was A Woman" (and the reactions to Stout's pronouncement). It isn't innately surprising that no one at the time leapt to the conclusion that ACD might be passing a woman's writing off as his own. But I find myself a bit startled that no one else in this century, prior to Allen, seems to have realized the implications of the argument as Stout framed it. The discussion of underlying racism (or its opposite) in early and late canon is both timely and telling. And Allen is certainly right that (a) there's a lot of subtext in early Holmes, which (b) doesn't fit at all with ACD's consistent insistence that no, there wasn't, isn't, and never will be.

On the third point: at this distance in time, here's where we get into more traditional conspiracy theory (and specifically, into potential misbehavior on the part of both ACD himself and Adrian Conan Doyle). But at the same time, this is also where Allen relies least on pure speculation - there's an extensive and closely detailed study of an original handwritten version of "A Scandal In Bohemia" in which samples of two distinct sets of handwriting appear. There is very clearly something hinky going on with that manuscript, and in light of the rest of the case Allen makes, his theories on the matter are far from unreasonable.

I am not quite ready to say that I accept everything Allen asserts as Gospel; I'm not well-read enough in the real-world biographies to make that judgment at this stage. But I absolutely think he's done a credible job of making a credible case, and one that deserves to be taken seriously by mainstream ACD and Holmesian scholarship.