Those familiar with American pulp magazines might think that the hallucinating pilot Wentworth is Richard Wentworth, who would later fight supercriminals in Manhattan as The Spider. However, Farmer notes that this mentally disturbed flyer, while in British service, used his half-brother’s surname. Following Farmer’s genealogical researches in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (revised edition, Bantam Books, 1975), this makes the crazed pilot G-8, the Great War hero whose exploits were related by Robert J. Hogan in the purple prose pulp pages of G-8 and His Battle Aces. In fact, Farmer’s researches revealed that G-8 and The Shadow were full brothers, and their half-brother was The Spider.
Leftenant John Drummond is mentioned as the adopted son of the Jungle Lord. This lines up with Farmer’s discovery, documented in the biography Tarzan Alive, that the Ape-Man had an adopted son as well as a biological son. This discovery explains a severe chronological discrepancy in the original novels about the Jungle Lord, in which his son ages ten or eleven years, seemingly overnight, between the third and fourth novels.
Watson mentions Lord John Roxton, referring to him as being “wilder than the Amazon Indians with whom he consorted.” Roxton accompanied Professor George Edward Challenger on the latter’s expedition to the Lost World, in an account written by Edward Malone and edited for publication by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Jungle Lord, Holmes, and Watson locate the lost land of Zu-Vendis, last visited by Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, and the Zulu warrior Umslopogaas. Quatermain’s Zu-Vendis adventure was recounted in Allan Quatermain, edited and published in 1887 by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, Quatermain’s editor and biographer.
Farmer also realized that Watson’s manuscript substantiated some of the genealogical researches he had conducted when writing the biographies Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Doubleday, 1973; revised edition Bantam Books, 1975). Farmer had discovered that the subjects of these biographies were related to each other, and that both were related to many other heroes and villains whose exploits had been fictionalized in novels and short stories by various authors over the years. The almost superhuman nature of these personages’ abilities was traced back to their ancestors’ exposure to the ionized radiation of a meteorite which landed in the village of Wold Newton on December 13, 1795. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet (whose story Jane Austen recounted in Pride and Prejudice) and Sir Percy Blakeney (also known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, whose tales were told by Baroness Emmuska Orczy) were among those present at the Wold Newton meteor strike.
The extensive group of related heroes, detectives, explorers, and villains came to be known as “the Wold Newton Family.” Clearly, The Peerless Peer has a place as one of the primary books in Wold Newton mythos. How could it not, when Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, the Jungle Lord, Leftenant Drummond, The Shadow, G-8, Lord John Roxton, and Allan Quatermain are all members of this extended family?
In addition to these, other members of the Wold Newton Family include Solomon Kane (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); Captain Blood (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Monsieur Lecoq; Phileas Fogg; the Time Traveller; Rudolf Rassendyll; A. J. Raffles; Wolf Larsen; Professor Challenger; Arsène Lupin; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; Doctor Fu Manchu and his nemesis Sir Denis Nayland Smith; Joseph Jorkens; Sam Spade; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; Kilgore Trout; Travis McGee; and many more.
There are some other references in The Peerless Peer which solidify it as one of the foremost entries in the Wold Newton series. Watson’s accidental reference to the sixth Duke of “Holdernesse” (rather than “Greystoke”) makes it clear that story is tied to Holmes’ previous case, “The Adventure of the Priory School.” In Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage, Farmer’s reveals that the great-nephew of the sixth Duke from “Priory School” is none other than the Ape Lord himself. And the sixth Duke’s bastard son is the father of pulp hero Doc Savage. Furthermore, “Holdernesse Hall” is actually Pemberley House, from Pride and Prejudice.
The biggest mystery that Holmes solves in The Peerless Peer is that of the Jungle Lord himself. He was legitimately the eighth Duke, but in order to avoid publicity surrounding his “feral man” status, he chose to pretend to be the seventh Duke, his late cousin, whom he greatly resembled. (This becomes a major plot point in Farmer’s and my subsequent Wold Newton novel, The Evil in Pemberley House.)
At this stage a recounting of the ducal relationships is in order. The fifth Duke and the sixth Duke were brothers. The seventh Duke was the son of the sixth Duke. The Jungle Lord’s father was the son of the fifth Duke, but he died before the fifth Duke. Therefore, when the fifth Duke died, the title passed to the fifth Duke’s brother. The Jungle Lord was the grandson of the fifth Duke, and thus was the great-nephew of the sixth Duke. Leftenant John Drummond, the Jungle Lord’s adopted son in The Peerless Peer, was therefore the great-great nephew of the sixth Duke. To put it another way, the sixth Duke was Drummond’s great-great-uncle.
Early in The Peerless Peer, Mycroft reminds Sherlock that he (Sherlock) knew Leftenant Drummond’s great-uncle, the late Duke (referring to the sixth Duke from Watson’s “The Adventure of the Priory School”).
When Mycroft makes this statement, everyone believes that the current duke is the seventh Duke, because the Jungle Lord, the legitimate eighth Duke, is posing as the late seventh Duke (no one knows that the seventh Duke has died). Therefore, since Leftenant John Drummond is described as the adopted son of the current (seventh) Duke, Mycroft should have reminded Sherlock that he (Sherlock) knew the Leftenant’s grandfather, the late sixth Duke.
But he didn’t.
Mycroft describes the late sixth Duke as Drummond’s great-uncle, which is very close to the real relationship as Drummond’s great-great-uncle. Despite Mycroft’s usual precision, one might overlook this slight mistake, presuming that “great-great-uncle” could be shortened in conversation to “great-uncle.”
However, Mycroft’s description of the sixth Duke as Drummond’s great-uncle demonstrates that he knew the truth of the Jungle Lord’s deception and impersonation from the beginning. One can make a mistake or shorten “great-great-uncle” to “great-uncle.” One doesn’t make the mistake of saying “great-uncle” when one means “grandfather” — especially when one is Mycroft Holmes.
Mycroft already knew — before he sent Holmes and Watson on their African adventure — that the Ape-Man’s cousin, the seventh Duke, had died, and that the Jungle Lord, the legitimate eighth Duke, had taken his late cousin’s identity.
The story of how Mycroft came upon that knowledge is undoubtedly a fascinating one.
This revelation also raises the distinct possibility that Mycroft knew, when he sent Holmes and Watson on their aerial trek to Cairo to capture Von Bork, that they could well be blown off course by an impending “storm of the century,” thus calling into question the coincidental nature of their meeting with the Lord of the Jungle.
But that’s another story from the battered tin dispatch-box.
Win Scott Eckert
Denver, Colorado
March 2011
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1 The Evil In Pemberley House, Philip José Farmer and Win Scott Eckert, Subterranean Press, 2009.