Victorian 221b

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.

I have been reading a number of pastiches lately, several of which feature female Holmes relatives, and it seems a good moment to make some quick comparisons and contrasts.

Colleen Gleason's The Clockwork Scarab is the first of five YA novels featuring MIna (never "Avermina") Holmes and Evalina Stoker.  Mina is Sherlock's niece and Mycroft's daughter (!); she gets along better with Sherlock, and has inherited and honed the family deductive acumen.  Evalina is Bram Stoker's daughter, here given a family lineage and minor superpowers essentially replicating those of television's Buffy.  "Here" is an alternate steampunk England in which electricity has been found too dangerous to use and thus outlawed as an energy source, and Mina and Evalina subsequently find themselves invited to work for a covert royally chartered investigative service overseen by Irene Adler (!!) out of an office in the British Museum (!!!), and drawn into the schemes of the Ankh, a mysterious figure determined to resurrect the goddess Sekhmet and thereby establish dominion over England (at least).

The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth is the third in a series by Leonard Goldberg featuring Joanna, Sherlock Holmes' daughter via Irene Adler (never seen and virtually unmentioned in this volume).  Holmes himself has been deceased for some years, and by now Joanna is the widow of a Dr. Blalock, the mother of his precocious son (here visiting from Eton), and the wife of Dr. John Watson Jr. (!).  Watson Sr. is still living, Joanna and her family reside at 221b, and the group's present case involves a brilliant cryptanalyst kidnapped by German agents, from whom they are tasked to find and rescue him.

The Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer postulates a younger sister for Sherlock and Mycroft, raised at home by her mother until said mother disappears just as Enola turns fourteen.  Over the course of six slim chapter books (Amazon calls this series YA, but these are shorter and pitched at a younger readership than the Gleason series), Enola runs away from her country home, establishes herself in London, solves several moderately complex mysteries -- including the kidnapping of Dr. Watson -- and effectively runs rings around both Sherlock's and Mycroft's attempts to find her and pack her off to boarding school...a fate which Springer and her heroine persuasively argue would have been almost literally worse than death.

****

I bounced hard off of the Enola Holmes books on the first pass, some years ago -- as I recall, I thought the tone a bit too sermon-like, the pacing slow, and Enola too clever to be believable.  On a second, much more recent encounter, I almost completely changed my mind.  There's definitely an educational agenda here, but it's one that's both worthwhile and more effectively presented than I gave it credit for the first time around.  [It may well also be true that the series was published a few years ahead of its time; Enola's brand of feminism is far less strident now than it may have seemed then.]  And Springer does a superb job of developing her characters -- not excluding Mycroft and Sherlock, who are very much their canonical selves and not (as often happens in alternative Holmesiana) reduced in intellect to allow the author's protagonist to shine more brightly.

By rights, I ought to have bounced off the Gleason series, which is very much alt-Holmesiana and fashionably steam-powered.  But Gleason makes no apologies for the novelty, the world-building is sketched very lightly but logically, and the plotting is admirably brisk.  Not even the introduction of a time-traveling teen from non-steampunk 2016 (!!!!) seriously derails the overall credibility.  This is more action-adventure than deductive exercise (though Mina does pretty well at the latter art), but it's fun in the right ways, and the two leads are excellent foils for one another.

I did bounce off the Goldberg novel, which I cannot recommend (and I am faintly astonished that this series has survived and evidently prospered).  Goldberg is not a bad prose-mimic -- or perhaps he's too skilled a mimic for his own good.  But there is no extrapolation here at all; this is a plain Holmes case through and through, and Goldberg does the absolute minimum in terms of changing the template, to the extent that it complicates the narration considerably.  Joanna is always "Joanna", never "Holmes", and in making Watson's son (and fellow doctor) narrator, Goldberg forces far too many references to "my father" and other circumlocutions in order for readers to keep all the characters straight. Worse still, Joanna's son is also named "Johnny" despite not being a Watson, and to make matters even stranger, Joanna herself is the namesake of one Joanna Blalock, series protagonist in an unrelated series of modern medical thrillers also written by Goldberg. Almost everyone talks in the same general voice, there's much too much conversation and not enough deduction, and aspects of the central mystery take Joanna herself much too long to solve.  This is cardboard Holmes -- and would have been better used as the basis for a straight Holmes pastiche rather than a next-generation yarn.