Good Night, Mr. Holmes (54 page)

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 regard 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 to and fear of a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him to “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. Unfortunately, male writers, screenwriters and directors ever since have hypersexualized Irene Adler as the stereotyped romantic interest for Holmes rather than his victorious opponent. In both recent film incarnations, Irene Adler was shown as the mere tool of Moriarty, Holmes’s archenemy. Rachel McAdams in the two Robert Downey Jr.
Sherlock Holmes
films was a pert, larcenous vixen. The British TV series
Sherlock
portrayed her via Lara Pulver (apparently naked in one scene,) as a lesbian dominatrix who only “beat” Holmes literally, with a whip. Not her wit.

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 three 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, which Conan Doyle opposed. So he’s 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 life, only he really is “a superior man” of his time. Sherlockians anxious to reunite 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. What an unbelievable violation of a strong female character’s psychology... a scenario that made 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. Incidentally, the plot point that Irene and Godfrey must be wed before noon is a totally fictional element used to convey urgency.

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

A:
 I gave her one of Holmes’s bad habits. She smokes “cigarettes.” Smoking was an act of rebellion for women then. And because Doyle shows her sometimes donning male dress to go unhampered into public places, I gave her “a wicked little revolver” to carry.

Q:  Essentially, you’ve recreated Irene Adler as not merely an ornamental woman  but a working woman.

A:
 My Irene is more a rival than a romantic interest for Holmes, yes. She is not a logical detective in the same mold as he, but as gifted in her intuitive way. Nor is her opera-singing a convenient profession for a beauty of the day, but a passionate vocation that was taken from her by the King of Bohemia’s autocratic attitude toward women, forcing her to occupy her mind with detection. Although Doyle’s Irene is beautiful, well dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes.

I like to write “against” conventions that are no longer true, or were never true. This is the thread that runs through all my fiction: my dissatisfaction with the portrayal of women in literary and popular fiction—then and even now. This begins with
Amberleigh
—my post-feminist mainstream version of the Gothic-revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970s—and continues with Irene Adler. I’m interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.

Q:  How do you research these books?

A:
  My theatrical background since grade school educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays and trying to write “Hollywood” to make a film of my favorite novel so I could play the little girl in it when I was eight. (A film of
Through the Desert
was ultimately made decades later in Poland.) My mother’s book club meant that I cut my teeth on Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontës, Dumas, and Dickens.

In doing research, I have a fortunate facility of using every nugget I find, or of finding that every little fascinating nugget works itself into the story. Perhaps that’s because journalists must be ingenious in using every fact available to make a story as complete and accurate as possible under deadline conditions. Often the smallest mustard seed of research swells into an entire tree of plot. The corpse on the dining-room table of Bram Stoker, author of
Dracula
, was too macabre to resist and spurred the entire plot of the second Adler novel,
The Adventuress
(formerly
Good Morning, Irene
). Stoker rescued a drowning man from the Thames and carried him home for revival efforts, but it was too late.

Besides using my own extensive library on this period, I’ve borrowed from my local library all sorts of arcane books they don’t even know they have because no one ever checks them out. The Internet is a treasure house of specifics and photographs.

Q:  You’ve written fantasy and science-fiction novels, why did you turn to mystery?

A:
 All novels are fantasy and all novels are mystery in the largest sense. Although mystery was often an element in my early novels, when I evolved the Irene Adler idea, I considered it simply a novel.
Good Night, Mr. Holmes
was almost on the shelves before I realized it would be “categorized” as a mystery. So Irene is utterly a product of my mind and times, not of the marketplace, though I always believed that the concept was timely and necessary.

For Discussion

1.
  Did you know the Conan Doyle story that this novel expands upon before reading this book? Or after? How are the two pieces similar, and where do they differ?

If you’ve only read the novel, are you interested now in reading the Conan Doyle story? Why did the author pluck the particular character of Irene Adler from this series of stories for revival a hundred years after the story involving her was published? If you know the Holmes stories well, are there any other women characters who’d lend themselves to their own novels. Whom would you pick?

2.
  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “killed” Irene Adler in the same story that introduced her. Yet readers are forever intrigued by this woman who was the only one to fascinate the monkish Holmes, as well as outwit him. Why would the author have done that? Conan Doyle gave Irene both beauty and brains, but he didn’t make Holmes both handsome and brilliant. Does this make such a “perfect” woman character less believable? Less likeable? Does she show any failings in this novel?

3.
 
The Drood Review of Mystery
observed of
Chapel Noir:
“This dark tour de force proves by its verbal play and literary allusiveness that Douglas wants neither Irene nor herself underestimated in fiction. More important, she wants women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world.”

Why do you think the author chose to give Irene her own “Watson” to narrate the novel? How does Nell Huxleigh echo or contrast Dr. Watson? Does using a traditionally restricted Victorian woman as the narrator make you more aware of any Victorian remnants in the upbringing and lives of contemporary women?

Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels. This element is absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell’s strictly conventional views affect those around her? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene’s pragmatic philosophy? Why are Irene and most readers so fond of Nell despite her limited and self-limiting opinions? Is there a bit of her in all modern women still? Are women still expected to monitor matters of morality in contemporary families and lives? Have modern women broken out of the sexual double standard, and is there a price?

4.
What do you think of the major men characters in this novel: Sherlock Holmes, the King of Bohemia, and Godfrey Norton? What attitudes to women does each embody? Why did Conan Doyle make Holmes so “allergic” to women? Is he saying that intellectualism is purely masculine? He made Watson something of a ladies’ man who has consorted with the women of “three continents” and has two or possibly three wives over the breadth of the stories. Why are modern readers, and some writers, eager to give Holmes a romantic interest? Do they see him as incomplete? Do they want to see this somewhat misogynistic man succumb to female power? What does he have in common with Mr. Spock from the
Star Trek
universe? Can you think of other difficult and compelling characters in modern storytelling on the page and onscreen? What is their mythic appeal?

For Discussion of the Irene Adler 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 reevaluate 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 that 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.
 
 Douglas has said she likes to work on the “large can vas” of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multivolume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twenty-first century too short? Is long-term, committed reading be coming a lost art?

3.
 
 Douglas chose to blend humor with 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 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, as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?