Bantam Books reprinted three Holmes books in mass-market paperback beginning in 1949 with The Hound of The Baskervilles (Bantam #366). This edition showed sexy bondage cover art by William Shoyer more in keeping with the pulp-style popular at the time than having anything to do with our Mr. Holmes. More on target was Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Bantam #704, 1949) with the cover art showing a traditional battle between Holmes and Moriarty, and The Valley of Fear (Bantam #733, 1950) showing Holmes and Watson.
British paperbacks also offer some wonderful cover images; editions from John Murray and Pan Books are popular with collectors. The Valley of Fear (Pan Book #177, 1951) has cover art by Philip Mendoza that shows Holmes and Watson reading a letter—or secret message! The Return of Sherlock Holmes (John Murray, 2nd printing, 1960) shows Colonel Sebastian Moran using his notorious airgun to try to assassinate Holmes in a scene from “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
In 1956, the Western Publishing Company produced Sherlock Holmes, a nicely done collection of stories that was a give-away from Nestles Chocolate. It also appeared in 1968 in a couple of different formats, but always with the same cover art. It has since become scarce.
Pastiches; Not By Doyle:
The pastiche is a time honored form of literature—in the style of another artist. From the earliest days of Sherlock Holmes the popularity of the Great Detective leads to a plethora of pastiche tales. In the early days, at the turn of the 20th Century, copyright restriction caused Sherlockian pastiches (and parodies) to feature detective heroes with the most unlikely names—Herlock Sholmes, Padlock Jones, Hemlock Coombs, and more. Diehard Holmesians wrote their own tales that continued the adventures, or addressed the dozens of intriguing cases mentioned by Watson in the canon, which had been left untold, or to retell existing stories in new and different ways.
Once the copyright on the Holmes stories expired in the 1970s a floodgate was opened up, and the first book to take advantage of this new reality was Nicholas Meyer’s bestseller, The Seven Per-Cent Solution. The book was a Dutton hardcover from 1974, but what a lot of fans and collectors don’t know is that there was a rare advance reading copy published by Dutton months earlier in illustrated wraps (trade paperback size), with the same David K. Stone cave- art which would appear on the hardcover. Meyer’s book really jump-started the pastiche-writing craze which has become a sub-genre, and some may say a mini-industry, all its own today.
Meyer went on to write two more Holmes pastiche novels but neither attained the success of his first. However, many more writers would step up to fill the breach, some who are well-known names in the mystery, science-fiction, fantasy and even horror fields.
Two of what I consider to be the best and most entertaining Holmes pastiches are mystery writer Richard L. Boyer’s The Giant Rat of Sumatra (Warner Books, 1976) a paperback original and his first book—it tells a tale “for which the world is not yet prepared.” Fantasy author Manly Wade Wellman (with son, Wade) offers a classic in Sherlock Holmes’s War of The Worlds (Warner Books, 1975). This later book is made up of four connected short stories, two originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and two were original tales, making this a first book edition and a paperback original. It tells the story of the Martian invasion of Earth after the H.G. Wells story. It is well done and great fun.
Mystery author Stuart Palmer is also known for two well-regarded and enjoyable pastiche stories in The Adventure of the Marked Man and One Other (Aspen Press, 1973). This slim and uncommon volume was limited to only 500 copies as are many small-press, fan-press, or scion-society items. In fact, some of these more off-trail items are limited to only 221 copies, some even under 100 copies!
Science fiction anthologist and mystery maven Kingsley Amis wrote one pastiche, and it is also well-regarded: The Darkwater Hall Mystery, which originally appeared in Playboy, May, 1978. It was reprinted in 1978 in a slim UK paperback of only 165 copies and is quite rare today; copies sell for hundreds of dollars.
Many famous team-ups appear in Holmesian pastichedom since Meyer began the trend of teaming Holmes with Sig-mund Freud in The Seven Per-Cent Solution. In one of the rarest and most sought after items, Holmes teams up with British secret agent, James Bond! Donald Stanley’s Holmes Meets 007 (Beaune Press, 1967, UK), is a hand-sewn slim booklet published in only 222 numbered copies. It can run you a few hundred dollars, if you can find a copy!
Meanwhile Pulptime by P.H. Cannon (Weirdbook Press, 1984), teamed-up Holmes with real-life horror writer H.P. Lovecraft in a memorable and spooky adventure. You could not come up with two more quirky and extreme characters than Holmes and Lovecraft. Science-fiction author Philip José Farmer teamed up Holmes with another popular fictional character, Tarzan of the Apes. The Adventure of the Peerless Peer was originally published in a scarce and limited edition hardcover from The Aspen Press in 1974, but it is the Dell paperback reprint that made this wonderful book easily available to legions of Holmes fans at an affordable price.
Pastiches that tie-in to hit films or have become hit films are always popular. One of the earliest was A Study in Terror by Ellery Queen (actually written by Paul W. Fairman), a Lancer Books paperback original from 1966. This is the first and best Holmes versus Jack-the-Ripper novel, told by Watson and Queen in alternating chapters and made into a pretty good—some might say better—film than the book.
They Might Be Giants by James Goldman (Lancer Books, 1970) is a quirky film starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward about a judge who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. The paperback edition—the only edition—contains stills from the film and reprints the actual film script and is rare.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is a tie-in paperback to the hilarious Billy Wilder film and was written by UK Holmesians Michael and Mollie Hardwick. It novelized the Wilder and I.A.I. Diamond screenplay and appeared as a paperback original in the UK from Mayflower Books in 1970, and was also a first US edition paperback from Bantam Books also in 1970. The Bantam paperback has the added bonus of cover art by Robert McGinnis from his US poster for the film.
Marvin Kaye is a man who wears many hats as author and anthologist, and he has written one notable pastiche, The Incredible Umbrella (Dell Books, 1980), a first edition paperback that collects his fine stories featuring the fantastical doings of Professor J. Adrian Fillmore (Gad, what a name!). The first two were written as separate stories and appeared in magazines in the 1970s. It is good to have them all collected in one volume.
Kaye is also known for editing three outstanding anthologies of articles, pastiches, and short stories in the Holmesian genre. All three were originally published in hardcover by St. Martins Press and then reprinted by them in trade paperback.
The first is The Game is Afoot (1994), a gem that collects an amazing array of classic and obscure parodies and pastiches together with newer works by popular authors.
The Resurrected Holmes (1996) features all original stories, new cases for which each was ostensibly written by a classic author in that author’s style. Thus we have Paula Volsky’s “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” as if written by H.P. Lovecraft and Carole Buggé’s “The Madness of Colonel Warburton” as if written by Dashiell Hammett. You get the idea; this one is great fun.
The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1998) once again offers original pastiches by major authors, this time presenting cases supposedly surpressed to avoid scandal…or worse. Now the truth can be told! In these three books Kaye and his contributors offer some of the most ingenious and enjoyable Holmesian