A Soul of Steel (57 page)

This time Godfrey and the two women are present at a sidewalk café in Paris when a man in ragged Oriental grab cries, “Miss Huxleigh” and faint’s at Nell’s feet. It becomes clear that the man is not only from a family far above Nell’s station, the Stanhopes, for which she was once a governess, but has been poisoned. The puzzle of Quinton Stanhope’s history as a spy and his quest to save a certain English “Dr. Watson” from imminent death draws the trio back to London, even though Irene and her husband Godfrey are presumed dead in an Alpine train crash. The case has the trio again brushing shoulders with Irene’s new friend, actress Sarah Bernhardt and with sinister forces new and old. They will cross investigations with a certain consulting detective from London who is making an international name for himself, Sherlock Holmes.

FOR DISCUSSION OF THIS BOOK

  
1
.
This title is taken from how the King of Bohemia refers to Irene Adler when discussing her with Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” He tells Holmes: “She has a soul of steel; the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men.”

Watson, though, calls Irene Adler an “adventuress.” In
Good Night, Mr. Holmes
, the first Irene Adler novel, Holmes challenges Watson’s use of the word.

“How unfair it is that enterprise is called a harlot when it wears a female face... You call her an ‘adventuress’ as well. Two centuries ago the word designated a woman who lived by her wits. Today it has been debased to describe a woman who lives by her willingness—especially in regard to men of influence and wealth. I believe you misjudge Madam Irene there.”

In all male-written Holmes post-Doyle books and films Irene Adler is portrayed as a “Victorian vamp,” Douglas points out, “a woman of easy virtue.” Most scenarios got rid of Godfrey Norton as soon as possible. In Douglas’s books, Irene is not unworldly, but she’s a happily married woman. Why did Douglas do that? Does that change the level of Holmes’s estimation of her?  Does that make any romantic element between the two more or less likely? What would you call their relationship now? Rivals? Frenemies?

2
.
 In the series, Irene Alder has disdained to use her stage glamour to seduce and mistress wealthy men, which makes her atypical of the time’s performing sisterhood Where does her personal morality come from? Is it pride in making her way with her art and talent alone? Lillie Langtry, the Prince of Wale’s one-time mistress, went on the stage afterward, but she was no actress. To be an opera singer would require years of study, wearing costumes that could weigh as much as sixty pounds and projecting the voice to the far corners of massive European opera houses... without a microphone. Is this loss of this career because she must keep up the pretense that she is dead a blow! How do her investigations use the ploys of her former profession? Has she now become writer, director and actor of her own life? 

   
3
.
 In this novel, Nell’s duties and horizons expand into doing actual detective work. Is she successful at it? Given her strict moral upbringing, can she justify pretense and untruth for the important end in saving a man’s life? She also finds an early draft of “The Scandal in Bohemia” and learns of Sherlock Holmes’s use of the cocaine needle and his high opinion of Irene as
“the”
woman. She also revisits the scene of her earlier employment and meets people she is fond of. How could these elements affect Nell’s future role in the Norton household?

   
4
.
  Nell has never cherished romantic ambitions, seemingly content as a spinster, although she’s very fond of Godfrey, and vice versa. What does meeting Quenton Stanhope again do to her equilibrium? Now that he is “beyond the pale” of his own class, can she accept her early admiration as the youthful “crush” it was and enter into a more mature relationship with him? Is he the man for her?

  
 
5
.  Doyle made Irene Adler bright, beautiful, and daring... and promptly killed her in the literary sense, for the story that celebrates her also introduces her as “the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” Douglas had to resurrect her and explain the apparent death to continue her story, and her relationship to Sherlock Holmes. Does the fact that Irene Adler is an renaissance woman—intelligent, artistically gifted, courageous—make her less appealing? Is she any less or more extravagant in her gifts than Sherlock Holmes?

Do readers resent in women what they accept in men? Do women particularly do this to other women? Is that why Nell Huxleigh, the more conventional recorder, is a reader favorite? And why Watson is regarded with more affection if not admiration than Holmes? Do superheroes whether Holmes or Adler, Batman or Xena the Warrior Princess, need sidekicks we can identify with to humanize them? What other superheroes does our culture offer? How many are women as opposed to men? Do you have any?

FOR DISCUSSION OF THIS SERIES

1
.
 Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to re-evaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the copyright contest over
The Wind Done Gone,
Alice Randall’s reimagining of
Gone with the Wind
events and characters from the African-American slaves’ viewpoints? Could the novel’s important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the classic work generally
familiar
to most people? What other works have attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

   
2
.
  Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels, including the time’s anti-Semitism. This is an element absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell’s strictly conventional views affect those around her? She not only embodies the limited lives of “proper” Victorian women, but she despises anything “French” to a ridiculous degree. The English and the French have a centuries-long history of mutual dislike, but why is Nell so xenophobic? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene’s pragmatic philosophy? Why is Irene (and also most readers) so fond of her despite her limited opinions?

  
 
3
.
  Douglas chose to blend humor with the adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times, or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What other writers and novelists can you think of who use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

   
4
.
  The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and the Continent, artist/tradesman and aristocrat, and as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

  
 
5
.
Chapel Noir,
the series’ fifth novel, makes several references to Dracula through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before his novel actually was published. Stoker is also a continuing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modem genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late-nineteenth century produced not only
Dracula
and Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and the surviving dinosaurs of
The Lost World,
but
Trilby
and Svengali,
The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
and H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
,
The Invisible
Man
and
The War of the Worlds,
some of
the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

Q:
 
You were the first woman to write about the Sherlock Holmes world from the viewpoint of one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s women characters, and the first woman to openly write a Holmes-related novel at all. Why?

A:
 Most of my fiction ideas stem from my role as social observer in my first career, journalism. One day I looked at the mystery field and realized that all post-Doyle Sherlockian novels were written by men. (A Canadian woman had been published with three pastiches under her first two initials and surname.) I had loved the stories as a child and thought it was high time for a woman to examine the subject from a female point of view.

Q:
 
So there was “the woman,” Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes, waiting for you.

A:
 She seems the most obvious candidate, but I bypassed her for that very reason to look at other women in what is called the Holmes Canon. Eventually I came back to “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Rereading it, I realized that male writers had all taken Irene Adler at face value as the King of Bohemia’s jilted mistress, but the story doesn’t support that. As the only woman in the Canon who stirred a hint of romantic interest in the aloof Holmes, Irene Adler had to be more than this beautiful but amoral “Victorian vamp.” Once I saw that I could validly interpret her as a gifted and serious performing artist, I had my protagonist.

Q:
 
It was that simple?

A:
  It was that complex. I felt that any deeper psychological exploration of this character still had to adhere to Doyle’s story, both literally and in regard to the author’s own feeling toward the character. That’s how I ended up having to explain that operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna. It’s been great fun justifying Doyle’s error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing. My Irene Adler is as intelligent, self-sufficient, and serious about her professional and personal integrity as Sherlock Holmes, and far too independent to be anyone s mistress but her own. She also moonlights as an inquiry agent while building her performing career. In many ways they are flip sides of the same coin: her profession, music, is his hobby. His profession, detection, is her secondary career. Her adventures intertwine with Holmes’s, but she is definitely her own woman in these novels.

Q:
 
How did Doyle feel toward the character of Irene Adler?

A:
 I believe that Holmes and Watson expressed two sides of Dr. Doyle: Watson the medical and scientific man, also the staunch upholder of British convention; Holmes the creative and bohemian writer, fascinated by the criminal and the bizarre. Doyle wrote classic stories of horror and science fiction as well as hefty historical novels set in the age of chivalry. His mixed feelings of attraction and fear toward a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him “kill” her as soon as he created her. Watson states she is dead at the beginning of the story that introduces her. Irene was literally too hot for Doyle as well as Holmes to handle. She also debuted (and exited) in the first Holmes/Watson story Doyle ever wrote. Perhaps Doyle wanted to establish an unattainable woman to excuse Holmes remaining a bachelor and aloof from matters of the heart. What he did was to create a fascinatingly unrealized character for generations of readers.

Q:
 
Do your protagonists represent a split personality as well?

A:
 Yes, one even more sociologically interesting than the Holmes/Watson split because it embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. As a larger-than-life heroine, Irene is “up to anything.” Her biographer, Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh, however, is the very model of traditional Victorian womanhood. Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women’s restricted roles then and now. Narrator Nell is the character who “grows” most during the series as the unconventional Irene forces her to see herself and her times in a broader perspective. This is something women writers have been doing in the past two decades: revisiting classic literary terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.

Q:
 
What of “the husband,” Godfrey Norton?

A:
 In my novels, Irene’s husband, Godfrey Norton, is more than the “tall, dark, and dashing barrister” Doyle gave her. I made him the son of a woman wronged by England’s then female-punitive divorce law, so he is a “supporting” character in every sense of the word. These novels are that rare bird in literature: female “buddy” books. Godfrey fulfills the useful, decorative, and faithful role so often played by women and wives in fiction and real fife. Sherlockians anxious to unite Adler and Holmes have tried to oust Godfrey. William S. Baring-Gould even depicted him as a wife-beater in order to promote a later assignation with Holmes that produced Nero Wolfe! That is such an unbelievable violation of a strong female character’s psychology. That scenario would make Irene Adler a two-time loser in her choice of men and a masochist to boot. My protagonist is a world away from that notion and a wonderful vehicle for subtle but sharp feminist comment.

Q:
 
Did you give her any attributes not found in the Doyle story?