Oct 27, 2012
It's our Halloween show!
With Victorian and Gothic influence in a number of
the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Canon can be great
fodder for the mysterious, occult and spooky elements of Halloween.
Certainly The Hound of the Baskervilles, "The Adventure of
the Devil's Foot," "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier," or "The
Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place" have elements that can make a
reader's hair stand on end.
But the most direct link with Halloween as we know it today (other
than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lot No. 249" - the
original mummy story) has to be "The Adventure of the Sussex
Vampire." Sherlock Holmes himself was a bit dismissive of the
supernatural in this case, saying "Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What
have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their
grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy."
But our guest on this episode, Les Klinger (a guest on Episodes
31 and 32,
when he spoke about the Guy Ritchie / Robert Downey, Jr. movies and
his role as Warner Brothers' consultant on the set) is no stranger
to Dracula. He has written The New Annotated
Dracula and has been an influential in the
Dracularian movement. As we discuss the intersection of Holmes and
Dracula, Les helps us understand the evolution of vampire
literature and Dracula-influenced media.
In the discussion, Les alludes to other influential fictional works
in the movement such as
I Am Legend, In the Shadow of
Dracula, and Anno Dracula by Kim Newman,
who is the Distinguished Speaker at the2013 Baker Street Irregulars Weekend. In
addition to the popular work, Les noted that there is a scholarly
vein of work (pardon the pun) in the field that brings more
seriousness to the practice, albeit less fluid and constant than
Sherlockian scholarship. But we kept coming back to the
intersections of Holmes and Dracula, in all forms: written, film
and stage, and how each have their cycles of popularity that are
typically driven by a single piece of work each time.
We had a number of listener comments from you regarding Episode
46 ("Elementary, My Dear CBS) that included very visceral
opinions about the Jonny Lee Miller / Lucy Liu show, as well as
some traditional and fanciful ideas for Canonically-inspired
Halloween costumes.
For our Gas-Lamp this episode, we welcome a very special guest for
a chilling reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." We won't spoil
it by telling you who it is; you'll have to tune in yourself to
hear it.