Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [3]
Hitchcock’s Three Investigators (okay, Hitch himself is off the hook since he didn’t write a one of them) were probably my first exposure to slightly scary mysteries. Well, at least some of the covers were sort of scary. One that had a glowing disembodied head on it had to be safely put away before the lights went out in my bedroom each night. My thanks to those fine folks at Scholastic Books (the same fine folks who, if memory serves, were inexplicably responsible for making me aware of Sawney Bean while I was still under ten years of age) for messing with my young mind! Right about the same time, through a chunky paperback book found in my school library, Greek myth popped into my life with Jason and the Argonauts, which in turn led to a far too early reading of Homer’s Odyssey. Jason, Hercules, and the clever Odysseus became early heroes. My sense of heroic fantasy, heroes and their heroic deeds, was forming, although a strange fear of cannibals was lurking in there somewhere too. Thank you again Scholastic. At about the same time I also had my first brush with Sherlock Holmes. I found myself reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles, but at the time I didn’t find it terribly engaging and didn’t finish it. Anyhow, that Greek myth interest was further fuelled when Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts turned up on television. Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation gave magical life to creatures that had previously only existed in my imagination. In short order I was begging to be taken to see his Sinbad films (for the record, Kali has always been my favorite Harryhausen creation), which indirectly took me back to Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad. Now that was the mother load for skewing this kid’s idea of fantasy. It was the most magical thing I had ever seen, and it had the best villain ever in Conrad Veidt’s Jaffar! He made
Tom Baker’s Prince Koura seem like a boy scout by comparison. What kid wouldn’t want to be Sabu?
So with a major itch for heroic fantasy, I did what most geeky kids would do, start reading comic books and developing the first stages of ‘collector’s mania’. The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Tomb of Dracula, the Uncanny X-men, and on and on went the list of Marvel comics. Stan Lee had a lot to answer for when he had the idea to infuse the tired superhero books of the 1950s with the soap opera antics of romance comics. Can you say addiction? I knew you could. It was all the perfect fodder to fuel my fascination with heroic fantasy figures. It also led me to discover the world of pulp heroes in a roundabout way. At the time, the mid-1970s, Marvel was producing a line of black and white magazine sized comics and amongst them was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Incidentally, there was also a two-part adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles in Marvel Preview, which was my second brush with Sherlock Holmes. The pictures helped, but I still wasn’t terribly impressed. Through that Doc Savage magazine I discovered the near perfect heroic fantasy character. Doc Savage combined the best of everything I’d encountered up to that time. He was built like a hero from Greek myth, with bronzed skin and freaky gold eyes, blessed with a brilliant mind, surrounded by a band of lesser heroes, each with their own scientific specialty and had adventures that almost always had a huge fantasy element. Suddenly used bookstores entered my life as part of the quest to accumulate as many of the Doc Savage paperback reprints that I could get my hands on. It became an all-consuming passion. I must have been driving my poor parents nuts with my obsession, but they thought reading was good for me (can’t imagine what they would have made of the Bond books or John Norman’s Gor series I was also reading at the time) and so indulged me in my interests. I can vividly recall successfully convincing them to drive me some 300 kilometers north just so that I could scour the virgin territory