The Joys of Binge Reading

Liese Sherwood-Fabre has a fresh angle on Sherlock Holmes, featuring Holmes as a wily adolescent saving his family from disaster, acclaimed by critics for its deep understanding of Holmes’ life and times.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today on Binge Reading we hear about what happened before Sherlock Holmes became the world’s greatest consulting detective, when scandal rocked the Holmes family.

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All the links to books and topics discussed in this episode can be found in the show notes on The Joys of Binge Reading website, www.thejoysofbingereading.com.

Links In This Episode:

Early Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_(1939_film_series)

Arthur Conan-Doyle, The Captain of the Polestar: https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Polestar-other-stories/dp/B09B1TYK9X

Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes: https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/character/mycroft-holmes#

Murder She Wrote TV show: https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/character/mycroft-holmes#

Saving Hope, Liese Sherwood-Fabre: https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Hope-Liese-Anne-Sherwood-Fabre/dp/0998411213

The Daughters of Yalta: https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780008299736/the-daughters-of-yalta-the-churchills-roosevelts-and-harrimans-a-story-of-love-and-war/

The Bombay Prince, Perveen Mistry series: https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/fiction/popular-fiction/The-Bombay-Prince-Sujata-Massey-9781761065248

Where to find Liese Sherwood-Fabre:

Website: www.liesesherwoodfabre.com

Email: liese@liesesherwoodfabre.com

Facebook: @liese.sherwoodfabre

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.
But now, here’s Liese.

Introducing Liese Sherwood-Fabre

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Liese, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Sherlock Holmes mysteries

Liese Sherwood: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be on your podcast. I don’t know what time people will be watching this, but for me it’s late afternoon and for you it’s early morning, so I’m very pleased that we were able to get together.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right, and we’re on almost opposite sides of the globe. You’re in Virginia, are you?

Liese Sherwood: No, I’m in Dallas, Texas.

Jenny Wheeler: I’m in Auckland, New Zealand, so it’s the miracle of modern technology.

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Isn’t it? I do hope someday to make it there. I understand it’s an incredible place to visit.

Jenny Wheeler: People say so. We love it. Liese, you’ve delved into Sherlock Holmes’ world in a great deal of detail with three highly praised non-fiction books about his life and times and now four mysteries about Sherlock when he’s a young man, before he gets into his stride as a detective, before fame struck. Where did this fascination with Victorian life and Sherlock Holmes begin?

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: That’s a good question. People ask me and the first thing I would say is that I recall Sherlock Holmes and knowing about Sherlock Holmes since I was little. When I was growing up there was a show on in the afternoons after school that was called Dialing for Dollars. They would show old movies. They would also make random phone calls to people, and if you could give the count and the amount – they never asked me, although I always knew it – you could win money.

Hooked on Sherlock watching old movies

I would watch the show and they had on a lot of the old Basil Rathbone movies. That is my earliest recollection of Sherlock Holmes, but I also remember cartoon characters who would wear the deerstalker and carry a magnifying glass. I knew he was a detective. I really didn’t get into Sherlock Holmes until I was much older. I do recall reading The Captain of the Polestar, an Arthur Conan Doyle story which is not a Sherlock Holmes, when I was in high school, but I don’t remember reading that much Sherlock Holmes until I was older.

Of course, later on came the movies and other television shows, but what really got me into it was one day I was on the treadmill, and when you’re on the treadmill you can let your mind wander around. I started thinking about Sherlock Holmes for some reason, and I thought, how did he become Sherlock Holmes?

A little bit of research told me that there wasn’t much in the original books about Sherlock’s childhood or how he grew up. There are just a few clues. We know that his ancestors were country squires, that his grandmother was the sister of Vernay, who is a French portraitist. He had a brother named Mycroft and a few other little details, and nothing else. I thought, this is a really blank slate that I could play with.

My first thought was how did Sherlock Holmes become Sherlock Holmes? What if it was his mother? The pat answer would be his father and I thought, no. What if it was his mother, because his mother was this brilliant woman, but she’s frustrated and confined in the Victorian world.

What was Sherlock’s mother like?

Women weren’t expected to do much more than raise children and keep house. But the women were also in charge of their children’s education to a certain age until the boys were sent off to school, and so she could easily be the one who groomed her children and helped them with their intellectual abilities. That’s where the whole thing started.

The non-fiction books came because as I was writing these books and I was researching, I discovered that I needed to learn a lot. The first thing I had to learn was what is a country squire? That was how I started doing the research. Then I started sharing that research through essays. There is a network of Sherlock Holmes societies across the world. There was one in New Zealand I used to share my articles with, for their newsletter. Unfortunately, the person who had been in charge of that passed away, but I still share with about fifteen different societies across the world.

Then because not everybody is in a Sherlock Holmes society, I thought other people and writers, who might not be writing Sherlock Holmes but might be writing about Victorian England, might be interested in this information as well. That’s why I published it. Those just came out before the books did.

Jenny Wheeler: That raises the question – going one step further back. Why did you start thinking in terms of writing mysteries before you even got to the Sherlock Holmes stage? Were you already having ambitions to be a fiction author?

An early talent for story telling

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Oh, yes. I always tell people – and this is in my bio – that I knew I must have a little bit of talent. I’m not sure how much, but I thought I had a little bit of talent in the second grade because I got an A+ for my little story about Dick, Jane and Sally’s ruined picnic. I thought I must have a bit of talent for storytelling.

I didn’t do much with it. I did some things in high school, but I didn’t start writing seriously until I was living in Mexico and I started reading Isaac Asimov’s science fiction books. I bet, if there’s anybody else out there who’s ever been a writer or is thinking about being a writer, they have probably read something and said, I could do this better, or I can do this, and probably did.

That’s what I did. I said, I can write a science fiction story. I had an idea and I stayed up late at night and wrote it after I put my children to bed. I sent it off to Isaac Asimov Science Fiction magazine, and it came back almost immediately, being rejected. I wasn’t really discouraged. I was rather encouraged to know that I could finish a project like this, and also I needed more work. I needed to learn more about creative writing.

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I would encourage anybody who is interested in doing that to check it out. I don’t know what the educational system is like in New Zealand, but here there are what’s known as community colleges which offer classes to the public. I took Creative Writing classes. I took them so much that they told me I couldn’t take them anymore.

Jenny Wheeler: Getting back to your series – Sherlock is 13 or 14. He’s verging into teenage hood, although perhaps in Victorian times they did have a different way of looking at childhood, so quite possibly at 13 or 14 they were already regarded as young men.

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Well, there was never an expectation that you should act like a child, I don’t think. Not as much as here. His father as a country squire was a magistrate and he would have expected his son to behave as a young gentleman. Being out in the country, he didn’t have as many experiences with other people until he went to school.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s clear even by the way he relates to the young girl, the maid, that he is extremely courteous and very aware of the social distances between them. He has to act in a very proper way, not even putting his hand on her arm, that kind of thing. He’s very aware of the rules of society in those days, isn’t he?

What Conan Doyle told us – and what he didn’t

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Yes, and his father is constantly reminding him of it. And his mother sometimes too.

Jenny Wheeler: You said in your story that his mother was brilliant. Do we know anything about Sherlock Holmes’ mother in real life?

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Conan Doyle never mentioned the mother’s name. I came up with that. But he said that Sherlock’s grandmother was the sister of Vernay. If it had been the father that was somehow related to Vernay, you would expect to see Vernay somewhere in the name, and so looking genealogically, I decided it had to be the mother’s side. His mother had to have a French background.

You have to go back to Vernay’s grandfather. They were all artists and his grandfather married an English woman, last name of Parker. There is a belief that one reason Vernay was so popular in England is when the British would do their grand tour they would go to the Vernay galleries or they would visit Vernay because they had somebody they could speak English with. His wife was there.

Jenny Wheeler: In the first book, the one you open with, and it is sometimes available for free to people – I don’t know if it’s always, but occasionally you can get it as a free book – his mother is accused of a crime. We won’t do too much of a spoiler, but that’s how Sherlock first gets called home from Eaton. There is this big family drama going on and his mother is in trouble.

The Holmes family gets into scandals

Each one of the books involves some family member getting into trouble with the law in one way or another. The book we are looking at now is called The Adventure of the Purloined Portrait and it takes the Holmes family to Paris and to that link with the French family and the art world. Tell us a bit about the premise for this book.

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: Sure. For one thing, I was worried about having too many murders in the village where they live. I don’t know if it ever got exported to New Zealand, but there was a TV show called Murder She Wrote.

They lived in a small town called Cabot Cove, and every time somebody came to town you knew they were either the murderer or they were going to be accused of murdering somebody, or the victim. They had a murder rate that was way out of whack for their population.

I thought, I’ve got to get them to other places besides this village. Paris is a good place. We know that there’s some reason they’re going to Paris. Sherlock’s mother makes it clear. She has been uneasy since book three and he knows something’s going on but he doesn’t know what.

A ‘Bohemian’ lifestyle with arty roots

The first night they find out there’s this sketch that was done of her as a teenager that’s compromising, and she is there to try to resolve this issue. She gets a cop, gets the sketch and it’s immediately stolen. The person who made the sketch originally was one of her former suitors, and he is killed right in front of their eyes. He’s run over by a carriage. That’s the beginning of the book.

Jenny Wheeler: They pay for that sketch, don’t they, so they are basically held to ransom to get it back. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Mrs. Holmes has had a slightly scandalous past which she’s carefully buried so that nobody, I don’t think even her husband, knows the full story about it. Tell us about that, without giving away too many spoilers.

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: As you can imagine, her family was in the artistic world and so you have a more bohemian lifestyle than you might imagine for a staid Victorian British family. She had a different upbringing than what she would have found in the States, and she was a little bit of a rebel.

There was a time in another book where she smokes a cigarette and she appears quite skilled at it. She tells her son, don’t tell your father that I smoked this cigarette. It’s a nasty habit. It’s something you shouldn’t take up. Of course, we all know he does later.

Looking at Sherlock’s Victorian world

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve mentioned your nonfiction books about the life and times of Victorian England. What do you think might be the most difficult thing for people to grasp about the world that Sherlock lived in? When they’re looking at the stories or the films or reading the books, is there something that’s particularly difficult for contemporary audiences to grasp or understand?

Liese Sherwood-Fabre: I think when reading the stories there is usage of words that people aren’t familiar with anymore. My favorite one is slopshops, because it might sound like something pigs would be involved in or something. It’s actually ready-made clothing. It’s a store that sold ready-made clothing.

One of my essays was on clothing and where one got clothing. Clothing in the slopshops was primarily for sailors. They sold a lot of it in the US. They exported a lot of their ready-made clothing to the United States at that time.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting because it very much resonates. I do historical mysteries set in 1860-70s California, and the most recent one I did was slightly more focused on San Francisco. I was doing a little bit of research about San Francisco and that’s exactly what they said about San Francisco – that they had these stores with very poorly made clothing, which were mainly for sailors.

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Liese Sherwood-Fabre – Young Sherlock