Review of Three Madmen & more

Earlier this week, I read and reviewed Titan Books' reissue of Philip Jose Farmer's short novel THE PEERLESS PEER, in which Sherlock Holmes and John Watson encounter John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, a.k.a. Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.  That led me to reading a small group of related stories written by diverse authors over a long span of time.  Starting with:


89. His Last Bow by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from the Sherlock Holmes collection His Last Bow.  I've been trying to read the Holmes stories in order, so who knows when I would have actually hit this story in the proper sequence (2013, anyone?) but the lead protagonist of Farmer's novel is the bad-guy from this story in which Holmes "finally" "officially" retires. The story is notable as one of the few that Watson does not narrate. I actually found that this built the tension surrounding WW1 German super-spy Von Bork -- which of the people surrounding the spy is actually Holmes, that master of disguise? Is it the Ambassador? The housekeeper? The informant?  I felt like Doyle really kept me guessing and Holmes revealing himself was the high point of the story. Von Bork is no Moriarty in the minds of Holmes fans, but he's still portrayed as an effective foil for Holmes. I'd like to see a real matching of wits between them.

90. The Adventure of the Three Madmen by Philip Jose Farmer, from The Grand Adventure.  When Farmer initially wrote The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, it was a limited edition hardcover, and the Burroughs estate approved of the use of Tarzan. But when Dell released a mass market paperback version a short time later, the Burroughs estate rescinded their approval and told Farmer the story could not be reprinted until the Tarzan copyright expired in 1999... which also precluded Farmer including the story in his "best of" anthology The Grand Adventure in 1984. Rather than write a brand-new novella, Farmer simply reworked "Peer" into "Madmen," replacing Tarzan with another "jungle lord" -- Mowgli, now all grown up and a member of the British peerage himself.  The rework works surprisingly well. Most of the text is the same down to key bits of dialogue, but there are differences (Tarzan arrow-skewers a cobra about to attack Holmes; Mowgli talks the snake into  leaving Holmes alone, to name one example). Regardless of which Jungle Lord features, the story still moves along at that brisk pulp-adventure pace Farmer loves. One thing I did notice here even more so than in the Tarzan version: Holmes' behavior is quite erractic, and his transition from "I believe the man is a fraud" to "I believe he is entitled to his title" is a bit too abrupt. Those tend to be my only complaints in this fun story.

91. Jungle Brothers, or Secrets of the Jungle Lords by Dennis E. Power, from Myths for the Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer's Wold-Newton Universe.  Reading "Peer" and "Madmen" back to back reminded me of this excellent essay reconciling the two versions and giving valid logic for how both could have happened simultaneously.  Power picks out the hints in both manuscripts and puts the pieces together: Watson, at the behest of Tarzan and Mowgli, wrote two versions of the story in order to muddy the waters for anyone trying to track down or connect them. I'm actually a bit surprised, knowing that Titan Books will soon be issuing new Holmes novels under the previously reprint-only "Further Adventures" banner, that they didn't ask Power and Win Scott Eckert to combine the narratives as Power suggests in this essay.  I also like Power's closing thoughts about the existence of a "southeast Asian Wold-Newton family" resulting from a different meteor strike.

92. After Kong Fell by Philip Jose Farmer, from The Grand Adventure.  While I was rereading "Three Madmen," I thought it was high time to reread Farmer's neat little tale about a grandfather reminiscing about the primal experience of his childhood: seeing Kong escape from the theater, rampage across Manhattan, and eventually fall from the Empire State Building. In typical Farmer/Wold-Newton fashion, there are cameos by The Shadow and the ESB's most famous resident, Doc Savage.  This is a wistful, nostalgic tale built out of watching reruns of the original  King Kong movie on local NY television in the 70s and 80s (back when Channels 5, 9 & 11 were WNEW, WWOR and WPIX and unaffiliated with any major national network. Yes, kids, this was before FOX and The CW!)


Bonus Content! Here's a photo of these interconnected books:

Review of The Peerless Peer

Book 40: The Peerless Peer (The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes #13) by Philip Jose Farmer, isbn 9780859681201, 139 pages, Titan Books, $9.99

(Original 1974 paperback publication: The Adventure of the Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer, 128 pages, Dell, $1.25)

The Premise: (from the back cover): "Sherlock Holmes and Watson take to the skies in quest of the nefarious Von Bork and his weapon of dread... A night sky aerial engagement with the deadly Fokker nearly claims three brilliant lives... And an historic alliance is formed, whereby Baker Street's enigmatic mystery-solver and Greystoke, the noble savage, peer of the realm and jungle lord, team up to bring down the hellish hun!" The Titan Books edition also included an afterword on the "Wold-Newton" concept by Win Scott Eckert, and a preview of Kim Newman's Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Ubervilles.


My Rating: 4stars


My Thoughts:  From the beginning of Titan Books' series of reissues of classic Holmes pastiches and crossovers, I'd been wondering if they would manage to secure the rights to finally reprint Farmer's 1974 classic teaming Holmes and Tarzan.  Granted, the original story penned by Farmer is relatively slim at 128 pages. As compared to most of Titans' reissues it's more novella than novel. Still, it's good to see the story back in print in a widely-available format that doesn't require fans to scour used bookstores or pick up pricier limited edition anthologies from specialty presses.

For fans of Farmer and his "Wold Newton" concept, this book is pure gold. Any Wold-Newton-connected story, whether by Farmer or Win Eckert or anyone else, is a treasure-hunt: how many casual references to other fictional characters can you find? As expected from the man who built the original Wold-Newton Family Tree, Farmer drops plenty of names in these pages. He also carefully closes the connection between Holmes and Greystoke that he first outlined in his Tarzan Alive: that Holmes' "Adventure of the Priory School" involves the Greystokes, with Watson changing the family's name to Holdernesse in the published version to protect the family name and prevent public scandal.

For fans of fast-moving pulp fiction, the book is pure gold as well. Even when the main characters are completely at rest (for instance, during long hours of air travel), the book still zips along. There are no long drawn-out descriptive passages (except, curiously, when Watson is describing the aircraft they are riding in). Holmes' mission is to stop Von Bork; the encounter with Tarzan only helps move that mission along. There aren't any secondary stories or side-trips; the longest lull in the action is the short breather towards the end where the Holmes-Tarzan connection is spelled out by the Great Detective.

As far as the "extras" in this edition go: Win Scott Eckert is perhaps THE torch-bearer for the Wold-Newton concept now that Farmer has passed away; along with folks like Christopher Paul Carey, Eckert has been completing unfinished Farmer novels and writing stories that fill in "missing pieces" of the Wold-Newton family tree. Eckert's essay "puts the pieces together" for those who are not as well-versed in the published careers of Tarzan and Holmes, explaining most of Farmer's off-hand references to other characters and clarifying things like "the succession of ducal titles" that is so important to the Greystoke/"Holdernesse" line of succession. Eckert also explains the connection between PEER and "The Adventure of the Three Madmen," and nods to Dennis E. Powers' great essay reconciling the two stories. For anyone interested in knowing more about Wold-Newton scholarship, Eckert's Afterword to PEER is a great place to start.

My only regret is that Titan didn't include "Three Madmen" in this volume. Rounding out the book with Farmer's alternate take on the story, and Powers' essay, would really have made it a complete package.

So there you have it: a rollickin' good adventure that doesn't take very long to read, and a great essay to follow it up? What's not to love?

Catching up on short story commentary

I've fallen way off the pace on my "a short story per day" goal, but here's the latest batch, a bit of a mixed bag of sources and genres.

62. Going For A Beer by Robert Coover, from the March 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.  It reads like flash fiction -- if it's over 1,000 words it can't be by much since the story is one magazine page long -- and I'm afraid to say I just didn't get it. A whole life squeezed into one page, it seems to be a treatise on how fast life goes and how we don't really notice or remember most of what we do, but I couldn't figure out if all of this was really happening, or if it was the main character's fever dream after too much beer and a bad one night stand. And I found that, ultimately, I really didn't care what happened to the main character.

63. Silver Blaze by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. I've got a goal of reading all the Holmes stuff in the next year or so (minus the stories I read last year), so I'm picking up the next short story collection. Silver Blaze is a horse-racing related mystery. The titular horse goes missing two nights before a big race, and the trainer is killed. Holmes and Watson come to investigate. I was actually invested in this and was gratified that I figured out the "who" before Holmes revealed it, although I got there a little differently than he did.

64. Fang and Sting by Win Scott Eckert, from The Green Hornet Chronicles  Win Eckert crafts another bit of extended Wold-Newton universe fun, putting the Hornet in a difficult situation: an Asian mastermind is framing the Hornet for crimes he is committing, and claiming to be partnership with the Hornet. Britt Reid and Kato have to figure out who the mastermind is, where to find him, and how to stop the crimes and somewhat clear the Hornet's name. There's also a nice bit at the end that fills in what I suspect is a question that has long bothered Hornet fans. I'm not as well-versed on the Hornet's history as some are, but I appreciated the little nod.

65. Zorro's Rival  by Win Scott Eckert from More Tales of Zorro Likewise, I'm not as well-versed on the history of Zorro as some. (One of these days, I intend to read that collection of original Zorro stories by Johnston McCulley that's been sitting on my bookshelf for ages.)  Once again, Eckert puts together a really fun story about Zorro meeting El Halcon, who also seems to be working for the benefit of the downtrodden people Zorro usually helps. There are the usual Eckert Wold-Newton winks and nods; I'm sure I didn't pick up on all of them. Eckert captures all of the chivalrous derring-do we associate with Zorro thanks to the tv series.

66. If Only To Taste Her Again by E. Catherine Tobler, from Historical Lovecraft.  I was intrigued by the concept of the anthology: extending the themes and background of Lovecraft's Chthulu Mythos beyond early 20th century New England. I found out about the anthology through Tobler's LJ (greygirl ) so I read her story first. Set in Ancient Egypt, it hits all the right Lovecraftian notes: a hapless human who slowly becomes aware of the creeping oddness and insanity surrounding him, lots of sensory detail and that feeling that reality has shifted under the narrator's, and the reader's, feet. Returning from a diplomatic mission to a far-away land, the narrator knows that something is not right with the gifts he has brought back for Pharoah Hatshepsut but can't quite vocalize what is wrong. This might be one of my favorite "new Lovecraft" stories ever.



67. The Yellow Face by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.  Watson starts out this tight little story by noting that it describes one of the few times when Holmes' deduction about a case was wrong. A married man comes to Holmes for advice on the gap that has grown between him and his wife. The hints are all laid out in the man's story, to the point where I (who have never read this story before) called the conclusion ... and yet Holmes gets it wrong. Perhaps Doyle was trying to prove something about his character, but it seems odd to me that this relatively simple case is one of the few where Holmes is wrong ... he not only makes deductions based on what's he's told without investigating in person but  he also ignores his own oft-stated maxim about not jumping to conclusions before all the evidence is in. I have to say, while I liked the story's flow, I took no joy in outsmarting The Great Detective.

68. Jefferson's West by jaylake , from Boondocks Fantasy. For this anthology of "urban fantasy gone rural," Jay Lake goes not just rural but remote and historical. What if there was more to the Lewis and Clark expedition than just finding the west coast? What if at least one of the team leaders had a secret agenda? And what if President Jefferson had a premonitory dream about it?  Lots of what-ifs that could fill an entire novel. Lake gives us an intriguing story and strong character work in both Lewis and Clark. I won't spoil the twist, but I can say I didn't see it coming (despite well-laid hints) and was pleasantly surprised. I'd actually love to see Jay turn this into a novel (if he hasn't turned into a longer story already).

69. Things To Know About Being Dead by Genevieve Valentine from Teeth: Vampire Tales. Valentine gives us the tale of a young girl who dies in a car crash and comes back as a vampire, as per the traditional Asian myths about where vamps come from and how they behave. This is a side of vampire lore we don't see often -- the focus is usually on the European version.  The main character's voice is authentic, and her confusion and anguish really comes through ... as does the personality of her grandmother (despite having very little dialogue) and the other major character who appears. A quiet but really satisfying story for the lead-off spot in an ellen_datlow & Terri Windling anthology.

70. Herman Wouk Is Still Alive by Stephen King, from the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic.  Right after I read this story, I tweeted: "Devastating. Beautiful and Horrific."  And days later, I stand by that. You know from the get-go that this is a story about a car accident, and you're pretty positive you know how it's going to end. But the short journey to that place is emotional and beautifully rendered.  The story also has a bit of that old "road disaster tv movie of the week" feel -- we meet several characters whose lives will intersect at the fateful moment, but King puts his own emotional stamp on the trope. And, for those who say "I can't read King  because I'm not into supernatural stuff," this is one of his stories that has not even a hint of the ghosty-vampy stuff. It's just a good, solid, punch-to-the-gut story that I can't stop thinking about.

4 Story reviews

A mixed bag of genres, before I start my usual "Month of Horror" reading:


287. The Fall of the Moon by Jay Lake, from the October 2010 issue of Realms of Fantasy. In a world that seems to be in the future of our own (based on the use of certain words and the way characters refer to what used to be), a young man realizes that the insular, despondent life of his family's village is not all there is -- and that taking a risk (even if it is a risk prophecied by a book he finds under a bed) to see what's beyond the horizon is better than staying miserable. Jay Lake's short tale of Hassan and the boat he builds is rife with great details that reveal a world turned extremely dangerous (ocean tides bring in a flood of rodents, but also a flood of predators), but Hassan himself is what propels the story to its open end. Well done.

288. Twins by C.E. Morgan, from the June 14/21, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. This is one of those stories that I really can't figure out what to say about. I didn't hate it, I didn't dislike it even, but I also can't say I liked it. It's the story of very young twin brothers, one light-skinned and one dark, the progeny of mixed parents. It's told with a focus on the darker, less daring, brother and his interactions with more his more daring twin, their smothering single mother, and their distant father. It's full of physical detail that evokes the industrial area of Cincinnati, an area I've passed through and could picture. But I didn't click with the characters or the point of the story.

289. Torhec The Sculptor by Tanith Lee, from the October/November, 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. I'm going to sound like a broken record if someone goes back and rereads all of my Tanith Lee reviews in succession, but I love how she creates alternate Earths that are just a tweak or two away from our own. Is this story far in our future or in an alternate dimension? I don't know, and I'm not sure it really matters. The story is really about the ephemeral nature of art and the ever-lasting nature of man's pride and his doubt. The title character is an artist who creates, and then destroys. He does not sell collectors. Until the "multinaire" Von Glanz names a price high enough. Torhec and Von Glanz are opposite sides of "playing God," one destroying and one preserving. Or are they really all that different? Great story.

290. Death and the Countess by Win Scott Eckert, from The Avenger Chronicles. Another fun foray into the Wold-Newton Crossover Universe by Eckert, this one centering on Richard Benson, the gray-faced Avenger of the pulp magazines, and his team Justice Inc. They are drawn into a conspiracy in which a mysterious Countess is demonstrating a deadly new weapon to be auctioned off to the highest bidder -- and every major nation on the Allied and Axis sides of the soon-to-be World War Two want to get their hands on it. I won't spoil the fun of figuring out just how many other pulp (and other) literary figures Win manages to reference, since that's half the point of the story. A fun, easy read.

Short Stories

This entry will be a mixed bag, and some of the reviews may be a bit short as I'm trying to catch up before tomorrow's flight home.

271. Better Lessons by Aaron Polson, the June 6, 2010 entry on Every Day Fiction. As usual, I found myself really enamored of Aaron Polson's ability to tell a full story in under a 1,000 words. I can't seem to manage it. This is one of his less SF/Fantasy entries, although there is a slight touch of the fantastic. It's about a street-rat who teams up with a rather personable Macaque to pick pockets among the tourists, and the relationship between the two has a strong effect on the man's life. Well written.

272. The Young Painters by Nicole Krauss, from the June 28, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. I liked this story, but I can honestly say I did not like the main character. The story is really about where writers get their inspiration, and what happens when you draw (perhaps too closely) from the lives around you. The narrator does this several times, and does not seem at all bothered by how her stories and books might affect those from whose lives she has drawn. She directs her story to someone called "Your Honor," and that adds a level of mystery to her tale: is she recounting this as part of a divorce proceeding? As a witness at a trial? Or is she not really directing her words to a judge at all -- is she just pretending to do so while really addressing us? I'm not sure we'll ever really know, and in this particular case, I'm okay with that.

273. Blue Water Djinn by Tea Obreht, from the August 2, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. I will be shocked if this story doesn't turn up in at least one "Best of" anthology in the coming year. It would be eligible for Best American Short Stories 2011, and honestly I think it would also deserve placement in Best American Mystery Stories 2011. A young boy, the son of a hotel owner, watches as the adults around him try to find out what happened to a French guest at the hotel who has gone missing. Jack is both overlooked and overprotected by the adults in whose care he has been left while his mother is off attending a conference; he is able to get close up to the proceedings as long as he does not get close to the ocean. The connection between boy and missing man is implied early on, and I was happy that the story did not go where I almost immediately thought it was going to. Obreht feeds the tension of the story out on a tight line and lets the tide of the story pull you in. One of my favorites of the year, I think.

274. The Landlord by Wells Tower, from the September 13, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. My first impression of the story was that it's about yet another clueless American middle-class business who doesn't know how to do business. I feel like that's a stock character type these days -- the guy who thinks he knows how to make a million but can't manage to manage his own office. In glancing back over the story, I hit on a few key phrases that made me rethink that assessment. The narrator of this story may seem dense and self-absorbed, but he really does understand how his life has spiraled out of control and how it's his own disconnectedness that has cost him not just his business, but his relationships with his daughter, his tenants, and his workers. It's actually a great first person character study, and I can easily picture my friend Dave making this work as a monologue.

275. The Science of Flight by Yiyun Li, from the August 30, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. This story seems to bookend nicely with Nicole Krauss's. In Krauss's story, the main character steals from real life to create her fictions. In Li's story, the main character creates fictions to mask the real life she's embarrassed to tell people about. Zichen's fictions threaten to over-take her much as Krauss's narrator's stories do. Li really captures that sense of getting caught up in a lie that last for years and becomes the truth.

276. The Pilot by Joshua Ferris from the June 14 & 21, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. The main character of Ferris' story is a self-absorbed writer who second guesses every move he makes socially, who reads too much into every word spoken to him (and every silence as well) and who can't bring himself to finish the pilot script he's been working on. Okay, who let Ferris into my own head? There are some key differences between myself and the main character -- I'm not writing a tv script and I'm not a recovering alcoholic. I also don't live in LA and don't get invited to lavish "end of season wrap parties" where I can awkwardly attempt to shop my wares. Another main character I can't say I liked, but that might largely be because of how much of myself I saw in the character.

277. Captain Midnight At Ultima Thule by Win Scott Eckert, from The Captain Midnight Chronicles (published by Moonstone). If I'm being honest, this was not my favorite Win Eckert story. The story had two strikes against it, one my own fault and one the publisher's. For my part, I admit that I know next to nothing about Captain Midnight; I'm far more familiar with other pulp characters and felt through this story that I didn't really know enough about the character to understand why he does what he does. On the side of the publishers, Win's story seems to be the only one in the book that is marred by proof-reading errors -- odd printer's marks and symbols where there should be normal punctuation; it was a bit too distracting. However, on the positive side the contains Win's usual plethora of literary references that cross-connect and build on Philip Jose Farmer's Wold-Newton concept, and that kind of story is always fun to read. Win always makes me feel like a literary detective, trying to figure out what's a reference to a previous work and what isn't. And of course there's a rock-em, sock-em fight and heaps of sexual tension.

278. Captain Midnight Meets Airboy by Chuck Dixon, from The Captain Midnight Chronicles The Eckert and Dixon stories are the reasons I bought this book. Dixon's tale of two classic aviators meeting for the first time had great tension and action, and managed to get into Midnight's head a bit. I don't know how much of a departure Dixon's characterization of Captain Midnight may be from the classic pulp version, but his Airboy is of course dead-on. So good to have him back writing a character he made me love twenty years ago, and plenty of good gun-fighting and old-fashioned pulp fisticuffs as well.

2010 Book 39: Crossovers

Book 39: Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World, Volume 2 by Win Scott Eckert, isbn 9781935558118, 477 pages, Black Coat Press, $30.95

Back in May, I reviewed the first volume of Win Scott Eckert's massive Timeline of character crossovers. I was excited that Volume 2 would be out so soon, and as expected I plowed through it in short order. Volume 1 covered gothic, pulp, crime, mystery and other character crossovers (including a limited number of super-heroes) from pre-history through 1939. This volume covers 1940 through the far future, and has appendices that list books and stories Win opted to not include in the Crossover Universe timeline for a variety of reasons. I liked this particular touch, pointing people to stories he felt were just too hard to reconcile with the relationships and histories originally laid down by Philip Jose Farmer and acknowledging that in many cases the stories are well told (and that for the most part, quality is not the reason some crossovers are excluded).

I did find myself disagreeing on a few points of inclusion or dis-inclusion. For instance, there are a number of times where Win suggests that stories happened, but were greatly exaggerated by the authors who told those stories (a good example: The Day of The Triffids probably happened on the Crossover Earth, but with nowhere near the level of carnage and mayhem the movie ended with) while others are dismissed for similar reasons. But that's the joy of a project like this: my own version of which crossovers to include could certainly diverge from Win's at any point and neither of us is hurt by it. For instance, I would personally choose to include the characters of Arn Munro and Neptune Perkins, from Roy Thomas' Young All-Stars comic series, because of their connections to Philip Wylie's GLADIATOR and Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym, but would note that not every issue of that comic series is automatically incorporated into the CU because of the rule about limiting the proliferation of super-heroes in the CU. But that's just me.

As I said about the first volume, Eckert has done an absolutely amazing job synthesizing over 100 years of meetings between fictional characters to come up with a cohesive storyline in which there is something for everyone, from Conan to Holmes to Batman to Spenser, to Charlie's Angels to Lost to Star Trek. The book is also lavishly illustrated with book and magazine covers featuring the characters mentioned throughout.

True mystery/gothic/horror/sf/pulp/comics/cri

me/literature geeks can't really do without this two volume set.