HERE IS THE SECOND OF THE THREE MANUSCRIPTS I inherited recently in a somewhat roundabout way from a distant relative, the late Henry Prothero Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island. As with the first, it was written by Dr John Watson, a man known to millions across the globe as the chronicler of the exploits of his great friend, that pre-eminent Victorian Sherlock Holmes; and like the previous book, published under the title Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, this one recounts an adventure of the world’s first consulting detective which in tone and content is largely at odds with the canon of four novels and fifty-six short stories hitherto published.
As Watson himself said in his foreword to The Shadwell Shadows, that book and its sequels “lay bare all that [Holmes] really did, all that he really achieved over the course of his life. They make up, for better or worse, an alternate history of his career, one that has the benefit of being unimpeachably true.”
Now, some may query that last statement. These three books deal, after all, with subject matter that seems far removed from everyday reality and contradict the ethos of rationalism and empiricism that Holmes customarily brought to his investigations. He was always dismissive of the supernatural. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, for example, he is on record as refusing even to consider the idea that a mother is feasting on the blood of her infant. The thought that vampires might exist provokes nothing but derision from him: “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in the grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.”
Yet The Shadwell Shadows shows him developing a belief in, and then confronting, just the sort of paranormal phenomena to which he gives such short shrift in the quotation above. Similarly this book, The Miskatonic Monstrosities, and the last of the three, The Sussex Sea-Devils, depict a Holmes – and a Watson – aware of the fact that ancient entities of godlike power and hostile intent lurk at the fringes of our world and striving to mitigate the harm and havoc these beings can wreak on human lives.
The trilogy ventures into territory marked out by the famed master of uncanny literature, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with whom Watson corresponded a great deal in his declining years. Lovecraft and several contemporaries – principally Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner and Fritz Leiber – between them codified the nature and lore of what is nowadays called the Cthulhu Mythos. Watson, who by his own admission read some of their output in American pulp magazines such as Weird Tales during the 1920s, seems to have alighted eagerly on their shared preoccupation and found it intriguing and familiar.
This would be because, by then, Sherlock Holmes had spent a lifetime secretly combating various manifestations of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods, with loyal Watson constantly at his side. That is the story that these three books, collectively known as The Cthulhu Casebooks, tell.
There are those who might argue that the evidence points in the opposite direction. Such people would contend that Watson became infected by “Cthulhu fever” and decided, for some reason or other, to reinvent the history of Holmes’s career to incorporate Lovecraftian elements of cosmic horror. Since he wrote the three books very late in life, it has even been suggested that they are the product of a man succumbing to the delusions and confusion of old age; that as Watson’s body was deteriorating, so was his mind. Senile dementia left him prey to fantasies which his younger, fitter self would have had no difficulty rejecting.
I would refute this assertion simply by saying that the writing in the trilogy is as sharp and focused as any he produced, and if anything more honest and impassioned. If Watson was losing his marbles, there’s no sign of it in the novels’ execution.
I would also refute accusations made by various people – in online forums, in reviews of The Shadwell Shadows – that the author of The Cthulhu Casebooks isn’t Watson at all, but me. As evidence I would point them no further than this very book. For one thing, its structure mimics closely that of two of the canonical Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear. It is divided into two parts. The first involves Holmes directly; the second, containing a subsidiary narrative nested within the primary narrative, details past events which illuminate the case he investigates. From a purely forensic point of view, this would surely indicate authenticity. The format is as individual as a fingerprint.
Then there’s the narrative-within-a-narrative itself, which with its high-flown reportage style bears a strong resemblance to the writing of Lovecraft. If this book is my handiwork, then I would be pastiching not just one author but two. Only a very bold person, or a very foolhardy one, would attempt that. Anyone who knows me will be able to tell you that I’m neither of those things.
In my preface to The Shadwell Shadows I tentatively advanced the possibility that Henry Prothero Lovecraft was the trilogy’s true author, and thus the perpetrator of a hoax. In my considered view, though, there is no question that these books are genuinely the work of Watson. It’s an older, wiser, more sombre Watson than readers are perhaps used to, who has gone through more than his fair share of hellish situations and stared too deeply into the abyss, but still the same redoubtable, earnest figure we know from the canon, the sidekick who endured so much ridicule from Holmes because he knew what a privilege it was to be that man’s one and only real friend.
J. M. H. L., EASTBOURNE
November 2017