• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 763 0

of Edmonton’s used bookshops. I eventually managed to accumulate about 102 of the paperback reprints, before moving on to another obsession, but not before reading Phil Farmer’s curious Doc Savage bio Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and being introduced to the inbred wonders of his Wold-Newton family tree. Suddenly there was a thread, however tenuous; tying together all these fantastic fictional heroes, and look, there on a low branch is that Sherlock Holmes guy again. I also discovered The Avenger, The Spider and, of course, The Shadow! Like Doc Savage, I first encountered The Shadow in comic books, although the fact they were published by DC bothered me no end! Still, Denny O’Neil’s stories and more importantly Mike Kaluta’s unsurpassed artwork did the trick. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” became my catchphrase. Rarely got an answer to that one, but what did I know about ‘evil’ or ‘the hearts of men’? I was a twelve year old kid and The Shadow was cool. So cool that when I spotted him in a book called The Private Lives of Spies, Crime Fighters, and Other Good Guys by Otto Penzler, and discovered there were films with The Shadow, I simply had to have it! While The Shadow chapter was pretty thin, I was introduced to a whole new genre that captured my imagination, however fleetingly. The detective in print and film had entered my life … and there was that Sherlock Holmes guy again. I can recall being quite taken with a photo of John Barrymore as Holmes holding a gun on the grotesquely featured Gustav Von Seyffertitz as Moriarty, but little else.

Unfortunately my detective interest was immediately sidetracked by another book, Alan Frank’s The Movie Treasury: Monsters and Vampires with a garish cover image of Christopher Lee being staked. Suddenly I wanted to see monster movies, and lots of them. Happily every Saturday afternoon there was a Creature Feature program on television to feed that particular craving. More importantly it had the added benefit of sending me back to the literature. I ended up reading Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The House on the Borderland, Carnacki the Ghost Finder, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and who knows how many horror anthologies edited by the late Peter Haining. My interest in fantasy had shifted away from the bright and shiny, clean cut heroes of childhood and drifted down the dark gaslit alleys of the macabre. Comic books grew less important and gave way to somewhat more esoteric reading materials. Yup, you guessed it; puberty had begun to work its own peculiar magic! Sexual repression seemed to be the order of the day as my fantasy worlds began to take on a distinctly Victorian tinge. It seemed to me that the era was simply one big heavily populated playground for monsters, madmen and murderers, and thanks to Hammer Films on television, apparently they all looked an awful lot like either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing.

While my reading interests went all over the map at that point, bloody 80’s horror, trashy true crime thrillers, Herbert’s Dune series, Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, and God knows what else, the concept of an almost homogenous Victorian nightmare world remained firmly lodged at the back of my mind. My teen years came to an end and on a fateful day in 1986 I found myself in a comic shop. Browsing the racks I was drawn to the brightly painted image of Sherlock Holmes standing in a graveyard. It was the cover of the first issue of Renegade Press’ Cases of Sherlock Holmes. The text was Conan Doyle’s “The Beryl Coronet”, but it was accompanied by the wonderfully atmospheric black and white artwork of Dan Day. Was that Peter Cushing’s face staring out at me? Yes, it was, although in the next panel it was Basil Rathbone’s, and in the one after that John Barrymore. Hmm, that Victorian playground concept was flashing back into my mind so I picked it up, went home and read it. Here was that Sherlock Holmes guy that I kept running across, but