Afterword
BY WIN SCOTT ECKERT
Sherlock Holmes lives!
Or at least he still might live, as Philip José Farmer points out in his Foreword to The Peerless Peer, noting that there is no record of the Great Detective’s death. Farmer observes that the idea that Holmes lived, and still lives, thrives with an almost “religious belief” among his followers. Farmer slyly omits that he’s one of the true believers, but it’s clear he is.
It is fortunate indeed that Watson’s manuscript survived. As Farmer relates, the good doctor’s battered tin dispatch-box had been removed from the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co. at Charing Cross before the bank was bombed in World War II. It was stored for a time in Holmes’ cottage near the village of Fulworth on the Sussex Downs, and thereafter, in the 1950s, came into the possession of the seventeenth Duke of Denver.
As everyone knows, the seventeenth Duke was better known as Lord Peter Wimsey, also an amateur detective of no little note, and a distant relative of Holmes. Lord Peter’s cases were chronicled in a series of novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers.
In 1973, the Duke of Denver authorized Farmer to edit Watson’s manuscript for publication, and The Adventure of the Peerless Peer saw print the following year in a limited edition from Aspen Press. The Dell mass market paperback was issued in 1976, at which point we may suppose that Farmer was contacted by the Jungle Lord. As I’ve noted elsewhere,1 Farmer had been under some pressure from the Ape-Man since the publication of his biography Tarzan Alive (Doubleday, 1972).
Farmer already knew of the Jungle Lord’s deception (described in The Peerless Peer), or deduced it, based on his “An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke” which took place on September 1, 1970. Or else he knew it from the extensive research which formed the basis of his Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke. Or both. At that time, the Ape-Man persuaded Mr. Farmer to suppress certain details, such as his impersonation of his late cousin.
In 1974, when Watson’s lost Peerless Peer manuscript was released and revealed that Sherlock Holmes had discovered the impersonation back in 1916, the Ape Lord was apparently not overly concerned. Perhaps an expensive and limited edition hardcover novel was not perceived as harmful. In addition, in late 1974, the Lord of the Jungle authorized Farmer to edit and publish memoirs in which he freely admitted to the deception (“Extracts from the Memoirs of ‘Lord Greystoke,’” Mother Was a Lovely Beast, Philip José Farmer, ed., Chilton, 1974; Tarzan Alive, Bison Books, 2006).
However, the 1976 Dell paperback, inexpensive and widely available, was another matter altogether. The Lord of the Jungle, acting through a series of trusted middlemen, used his influence to have the book suppressed. Farmer received a friendly warning letter from the Jungle Lord, now residing in parts unknown under an assumed name. (Farmer was not surprised at this, since the Ape-Man had indicated in their 1970 interview that he would soon fake his death and disappear.) The Jungle Lord had had enough of Farmer exposing his secrets to the public at large. Presumably he also wasn’t terribly pleased with his fellow Duke, Lord Peter, for making Watson’s manuscript available in the first place.
It can hardly matter, some thirty-five years later, if the truth about the Jungle Lord’s impersonation is noted here, especially in light of the fact that the Ape-Man was not entirely successful in suppressing The Peerless Peer back in 1976; that he himself admitted it in his “Memoirs”; and that he approved of its recent republication in the collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (Christopher Paul Carey, ed., Subterranean Press, 2008).
Nonetheless, Farmer must have remained somewhat abashed by the Jungle Lord’s rebuke. Perhaps he was also a bit sensitive to the Jungle Lord’s constantly shifting positions on the matter. For his collection The Grand Adventure (Berkley Books, 1984), Farmer rewrote The Peerless Peer as the novella “The Adventure of the Three Madmen,” replacing the Ape Lord with Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli. In his introduction to the rewrite, Farmer claimed that he had abandoned the pretense that Watson had written the original manuscript and that he (Farmer) was merely the editor. Now Farmer “admitted” that he was the “true author” of “Madmen.” In fact, the reverse was true; he was using misdirection to cover for his former indiscretions.2
By 2008, the Lord of the Jungle and his family had long-since faked their deaths, and the secrets revealed in The Peerless Peer were ancient enough history to cause no harm to the nobleman and his relations.3The novel was reprinted — once again in a limited edition.4 Now, for the first time in thirty-five years, Watson’s account is widely available in this new trade edition from Titan Books.
Sherlock Holmes, in the course of his lengthy career, encountered Count Dracula (numerous times), Doctor Who, Allan Quatermain, Arsène Lupin, Professor Challenger, the Phantom of the Opera, Raffles, Doctor Fu Manchu, Fantômas, the Time Traveller, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, the Invisible Man, Father Brown, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hercule Poirot, Sexton Blake, Harry Dickson, the Domino Lady, the Men from U.N.C.L.E., various Lovecraftian menaces, and The Batman (to name but a few noteworthy crossovers). He even battled the Martian Invaders.
And of course, in the case recorded as The Peerless Peer, he met that feral nobleman raised by “great apes.”
But when Farmer edited Watson’s account, it became clear that this exploit was not a mere crossover between two great men of their time. Holmes and Watson also ran into many other important personages during the events chronicled in The Peerless Peer.
One of Holmes and Watson’s fliers in Peer is “Colonel Kentov.” Kentov would later be known as the pulp vigilante The Shadow. In the pulp novel The Shadow Unmasks, it was revealed that The Shadow’s real identity was that of aviator Kent Allard. Allard had also flown, and worked as a secret agent, for the Tsar during the Great War. During that time he had also been known as the Black Eagle and the Dark Eagle. As Farmer points out, one of The Shadow’s many aliases during the 1930s and ’40s was Lamont Cranston.
It’s also worth noting that Holmes and Watson are conducted to Colonel Kentov’s plane by a young Russian officer, Lieutenant Obrenov. In 1946, Farmer had chronicled a rather amusing World War II incident in Germany between a Colonel Obrenov and a U.S. officer, Colonel O’Brien.5 Lieutenant Obrenov is killed in The Peerless Peer, but the Colonel is undoubtedly a relative.
When Holmes and Watson meet with Mycroft, the latter introduces young Henry Merrivale, who works at Military Intelligence and is quite accomplished in the art of detection. Sir Henry Merrivale went on to solve many mysteries from the 1930s through the 1950s. These cases were recounted by “Carter Dickson” (a pseudonym for John Dickson Carr).
Just before Mycroft summons him, Doctor Watson is sharing a brandy with a young friend, Doctor Fell. Doctor Fell is Gideon Fell, who would also go on to a lengthy career as an amateur detective from the 1930s through the 1960s. His cases were also recorded by John Dickson Carr.