THE WOLD
NEWTON UNIVERSE
Part XI
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The Legend
of El Borak By
Rick Lai The Return of Nikola's
Step-Brother By
Rick Lai The Trail of the Feathered
Serpent By
Rick Lai The
Life and Times of Steve Harrison By Rick Lai Men Without
Names By
Matthew Ilseman Murder
Magnetism: Four Case Studies By Matthew Ilseman Doc Savage: Through the Circles of Wold By Art Bollmann The Shadow Through the Circles of Wold By Art Bollmann The
Great Old Ones and the Collins Family By Frank Schildiner The
Man of Bronze: Doc Savage in Print and on Film By John A. Small The
Greystoke Chronicles: The Adventures of Tarzan in Print,
on Screen, and on the Stage By John A. Small
According to Win Eckert’s "The Dynasty of Fu Manchu," the man who Dashiell Hammett
called the Continental Op was in all likelihood John Smith
brother to Denis Nayland Smith. The Op was a survivor of the Titanic.
After the disaster, he cut off all communication with his family
and joined the Continental Detective Agency. When Dashiell
Hammett began publishing his adventures, his name was kept
secret. Later, when he struck off on his own he went by the
pseudonym Brad Runyon. The question remains why all the secrecy?
There is no certain answer to this question.
Perhaps he had a falling out with his family, but we might never
know.
What nevertheless remain are the simple facts:
John Smith died during the Titanic tragedy and was
reborn as the Continental Op. The stories tell very little of the
Op’s private life. While this may be seen as an attempt to
obscure his identity, the simple truth is that he really had
none. He dedicated himself to his job. It became his life. He did
not interact with others outside of work much. He had friends,
but mostly they were other operatives. He most certainly did not
get involved with his client’s lives.
Except once.
In the 1920s, the Continental Detective Agency was
approached to find some valuable shipments that were stolen from
the
The Op was sent to find the manuscript. He started
by interviewing the workers on the loading dock. These included
an Italian immigrant who I will not name. This dock worker was
known to have been involved with minor crime.
It seemed that the dockworker had been involved in
the heist. The basic idea was that they were going to sell the
code to Fascist Italy. The Op confronted the dock worker with
what he knew. The dock worker reacted hostilely and a fight
almost broke out before they were interrupted by the dock
worker’s sister. The sister prevented the fight. She was
then able to convince the Op to let her brother go if her brother
was able to provide him with the manuscripts. The Op agreed and
his involvement would have ended with the return of the
documents, except for one thing.
Something about the Sister caused the Op to want
to see her again. Soon they began a romance and within a month
they were married. Nine months later a son was born to them. What
they named him I will not tell you. Also he would never use the
surname of Smith.
Tragedy struck not long after the birth of his
son. When the FBI attempted to arrest one of the spies, a man
named Russo, a shoot out between the G-men and the spy ensued.
The spy was killed. The spy’s wife swore revenge. Instead of
blaming the G-men who killed her husband, Ms. Angelina Russo
blamed the man who had given the information to the FBI. She
planned not kill the Op, but to kill the person he cared about
most. The Op returned from work one day to find his wife
murdered. While it would make good fiction if the Op was the one
who brought Ms. Russo to justice, he did not. Though he began his
own personal investigation, the police found Russo first. She was
arrested and eventually executed for the crime.
The Op then chose to give up his son. What became
of the child? Well, in the seventies, a series of books about a
private investigators who has many similarities to the Op. Like
the Op he chose not to reveal his name to the public. He was
called the Nameless Detective and his life was chronicled by Bill
Pronzini.
There are many similarities between the two. One:
they are both good detectives. Two: they have same basic physical
type: both somewhat out of shape. Three: Both live in
Nameless was raised by his uncle, the dockworker,
and his wife and was told that he was their son. It was not a
happy childhood. Although the aunt loved him like he was her
biological child, the uncle was not a terribly good father. He
was involved in more than a few shading doings, but worse he was
a drunk and abusive to his family. This was possibly due to his
uncle’s resentment of the Op.
Either hereditary trumped environment, or Nameless
willed himself to become somebody better than the man who raised
him. Does Nameless know about his heritage? He might. Nameless is
well known to be a collector of pulp magazines where his
father’s exploits (along with many other famous detectives)
were published. Perhaps he began the hobby seeking to learn more
about his true father, or perhaps not. Either way took the pulp
heroes as his models and, though he would deny it, he himself
became a hero.
Appendix A
Nameless has worked with or at least met several
other literary investigators. The most recurrent of these is
Sharon McCone. Nameless has worked with her on several occasions.
In the book Doubles, Nameless meets her at private
investigator convention and works with her to solve a murder. He
also runs into Brock “The Rock” Callahan, whose life
has been chronicled by William Campbell Gaunt, and Miles Jacoby,
whose cases were chronicled by Robert J. Randisi. At the same
convention, McCone runs into Wold Newton family member Kinsey
Millhone. In Twospot, Nameless works with San Francisco
Police Department Lieutenant Frank Hastings from Collin
Wilcox’s series.
Appendix B
The Op did not let Hammett publish an account of
these events. A contact at The Continental Agency managed to slip
me the Op’s personal notebooks. These were then verified by
News Paper accounts of the murder and subsequent trial.
Nameless true name is not hard to find out. I
merely searched old
Nameless Book Series by Bill Pronzini
Continental Op series by Dashiell Hammett
"The Dynasty of Fu Manchu" by Win Scott Eckert
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
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All rights reserved. The text of these articles is ©2008 by the author, Matthew Iselman. No copying or reproduction of these articles or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the authors.
Wold
Murder Magnetism follows several principals:
When a murder is committed, the person possessed by murder magnetism will find himself drawn to the crime. He might take a cruise only to find someone murdered on the ship. Or his car might breakdown in a rain storm near a Gothic manor where the murder may happen.
This happens to the person repeatedly. Otherwise it might be mere coincidence.
The person usually has to solve the murder himself. While he may be a professional, often he is not. The four subjects studied here include: a cowboy who wants to be a detective, a mystery writer, a private investigator, and Japanese high school student.
In this article, I present four cases of this.
The oldest is the case of Gustav “Old Red” and Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer. The Amlingmeyer brothers were two cowboys in the 1890’s whose lives are presented a series of books and short stories by Steve Hockensmith based on manuscripts by Otto. Their lives were unremarkable until one night on a cattle drive they read Dr. John Watson’s account of “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League.” Or rather Otto read it to Gustav who was illiterate. This turned out to be a life changing event for the brothers, particularly Gustav. While lacking in education, Gustav was nevertheless highly intelligent. It struck him that Holmes’s deductive techniques was not something one had to go to school to learn. Gustav was so impressed that he began to idolize Holmes and decided to become a detective. This would seem a forlorn hope, but soon enough one of the other trail hands was killed seemingly by Indians. Gustav deduced that was not the case and caught the real killer.1 This itself would be unusual. What was truly astounding is that they kept running into mysteries.2
It is unknown if it was Gustav or Otto (or possibly both) who was affected murder magnetism. The Amlingmeyer brothers rarely separated. It seems probable that it was Gustav since in most cases it is the detective that is drawn to the crime scene.
Perhaps, one of the best known cases of murder magnetism is the
life of Jessica Fletcher.3 Fletcher was a best-selling
mystery writer who routinely ran into murder. Her hometown of
Cabot Cove had the highest murder rate of any town that size in
the
What the show did not portray very well was the effect that this
had on her psyche. She began to believe that she somehow caused
the murders. She even considered suicide. Fortunately, she
rejected this notion, but decided to spare her beloved Cabot Cove
and move to
The third case is that of Adrian Monk, 5 best known as
the obsessive-compulsive detective. Monk is perhaps unique in
that he was a professional crime-solver. He deals with murder all
the time: First, as a homicide detective on the
When on vacation with his nurse Sharona Fleming (a very distant relative of James Bond’s biographer), her son, Benjamin, sees a murder committed at the hotel they are staying at. Monk, of course, ends up having to solve the case. When on a plane (despite his severe phobia of flying) with Sharona to visit her aunt, Monk deduces that another passenger has committed murder. Soon after that, Sharona’s sister is framed for murder committed during a play Monk was attending.
Once, when riding with Natalie Teeger (who became his assistant after Sharona quit) to pick up her daughter, he witnesses a Chinese Triad hit. He is then moved to a cabin by the Witness Protection Program. He is not their long before he solves yet another murder.
Natalie at first is somewhat upset and tells Monk he has “bad karma.” Later, she realizes that is good thing because otherwise the crimes would go unsolved. This seems to suggest that murder magnetism is some sort of balancing force in the universe. It draws the person best suited to solving the crime to the crime.
The final case is that Kindaichi Hajime.7
While not well known in the west, Kindaichi is a famous teenage
detective in Japan.8 He is the grandson of one of
Kindaichi was, for lack of better term, a slacker. He did not put much effort into his studies and was wrongfully considered not very bright. The truth was that he just did not have the right motivation. This changed when his friend Nanase Miyuki corralled him into helping the school drama club rehearse at a secluded old hotel. Soon a series of murders are committed by an unknown individual who pattern himself after the infamous Phantom who haunted the Paris Opera. Kindaichi proves his worth by solving the crimes.
This, as you probably figured out, was not an isolated incident. Not long after this case, Kindaichi and Nanase travel to a friend’s wedding in a village shaped of all things a Star of David. They soon become involve in another series of related murders involving cut up mummies and a town secret. It became a regular occurrence for Kindaichi to encounter some mystery when he leaves town. Not only that, his high school was soon plagued by a murderer known as “The After School Magician.” The name probably sounded more ominous in Japanese.
For the most part, Kindaichi solved the cases and apprehended the murderers, though usually after a high death toll. Not always, Kindaichi’s nemesis Takato Yoichi10 eluded him, as did the criminal known as the Gentleman Theif,11 and then there was a hit man who specialized in faking natural causes that he was never able to identify.12 Still, he was only human.
Kindaichi took the murders he encountered and the often tragic events that surrounded them fairly well. While surrounded by traumatizing events, Kindaichi’s easy going attitude seems to have kept his life somewhat happy. It appears that he might have as auspicious a career as his grandfather.
Appendix
While murder magnetism seems to affect a number of people, there is a rarer condition that I like to call monster magnetism. This condition is similar to murder magnetism except instead of being drawn to a mundane crime; the person is drawn to the supernatural. One major example of this is Carl Kolchak. Carl was a reporter who investigated supernatural cases. Though lived in variety of different cities (because of repeatedly being laid off) he would routinely encounter supernatural phenomenon.13 He encountered vampires, werewolves, immortal serial killers, zombies, and other nightmares.
1. A letter describing their first case was written by Otto to Holmes himself. It can be read on www.stevehockensmith.com . It was originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Three other cases were published in its annual Sherlock Holmes issue (strangely, EQMM has repeatedly made the error of listing them under Fiction in the table of contents.) Two longer manuscripts by Otto have been published as Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track.
2. Hockensmith has hinted that in one of his later cases, yet to be published, Gustav met his hero Holmes.
3. Her cases were adapted into TV series, Murder, She Wrote.
4. The population of Cabot Cove has since dwindled with a large chunk of the population moving to safer towns.
5. The subject of the biographical television
series Monk.
6. A competing detective, who will remain
Nameless, said of Monk, “He’d be the most sought after
P.I. in
7. A manga, Kindaichi Case Files, is based on the cases he solved.
8. He seems to have filled the void of teen detective Kudo Shin’ichi who disappeared about the time Kindaichi’s career began.
9. Kindaichi Kosuke’s biographer is Yokomizo Seishi. Interestingly enough, Kindaichi Hajime has a friendly rival in police superintendent Akechi Kengo a distant relative of Akechi Kogoro (first appearing in the volume Death TV.) He also has also worked with Edward Columbo, who is the nephew of the famed L.A.P.D. detective (in the volume House of Wax).
10. Takato Yoichi would coax people in committing murder in hopes of creating a perfect murder that Kindaichi could not solve.
11. The Gentleman Thief turns out to be a female thief who is a master of disguise. While a name is never given, it is quite possible that it was Mine Fujiko the rival/paramour of Arsene Lupin the III.
12. It is believed that the case was
suppressed by
13. One would think that Kolchak would be drawn to the Hellmouths in Sunnydale and Cleveland. While he has been to both cities, strangely he encountered no paranormal phenomenon.
Bibliography:
Holmes on the Range series by Steve Hockensmith
Murder, She Wrote TV series
Monk TV series
Kindaichi Case Files manga by
Yozaburo Kanari and Fumiya
Sato
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
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All rights reserved. The text of these articles is ©2008 by the author, Matthew Iselman. No copying or reproduction of these articles or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the authors.
Wold
(pron. “wold”). An open tract of country; term derives
from the Anglo-Saxon “wald”, as in “wald
forest”, which applied originally to wooded (q.v.) parts of
the country.
Wooded
(pron. “wooded”). Covered in wood (q.v.).
Wood
(pron. “wood”). A collection of more or less densely
growing trees; a stretch of country supporting such growth.
Wodehouse
(pron. “Woodhouse”). Surname of the Earls of
Woodhouse
(pron. as though “Wodehouse”[2]).
A house or shed in which wood for fuel is deposited; or in
heraldry, a variant of Woodwose (pron.
“wd’wos”), being a wild man (q.v.) of the woods
sometimes found as a supporter on coats of arms.[3]
Wildman
(pron. “Savage”). Resident of New York tracing descent
from eighteenth-century visitors to Wold (q.v.)
‘Somewhere on earth, as we know, there exists the Complete
Concordance to Wodehouse’ wrote Auberon Waugh in February
1979. ‘It was the life’s work of Geoffrey Jaggard, and
already extended to over 350,000 words when he published this
handbook [Wooster’s World, published 1967] twelve
years ago [......] One day, no doubt, some learned or
philanthropic foundation will pay to have it all
printed’—and indeed, this prediction has come true in
more recent times. I once stumbled across the volume of the
complete Concordance covering the Golf stories, flicked through
it, and on brief reading found it a somewhat dull listing of
characters and in which stories they might be found.
Not so Wooster’s World. Just as Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary
is perhaps best considered as literature and as a book of
quotations than as an accurate guide to the usage and origin of
words, so too should Geoffrey Jaggard’s volume devoted to
the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves stories and to the members of the
Drones Club. In 1968 Jaggard followed up with Blandings the
Blest and The Blue Blood: A Companion to The Blandings Castle
Saga of P.G. Wodehouse, LL.D., with A Complete Wodehouse Peerage,
Baronetage and Knightage, a volume covering not only the
Blandings Castle stories but setting out to list every monarch,
duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron, and baronet, and right
down to the merest knight, mentioned by P.G. Wodehouse anywhere
in his works. It is not as complete as it might be (even Homer
nods); there are a few pieces of material duplicating rather than
expanding on entries in Wooster’s World; but both
books are, nonetheless, a joy from end to end.
They even expand, legitimately, upon the canon. Jaggard notes in
the Introduction to Wooster’s World:
I have never met the Master; but when he heard, as long as 1952, what I was about, he not only bore the blow with fortitude but was kind enough to write, both then and through the ensuing years, with the most heartening encouragement, as well as elucidating, from time to time, such minor problems as the change in Psmith’s Christian name.
and
in the Preface to Blandings the Blest:
In this way, e.g., the Alcester and Malvern marquessates were
established.
Thus, in Blandings the Blest it is revealed that Lancelot
‘Toppy’ Topham, a character simply identified in the
novel The Old Reliable as a ‘lord’, is
specifically a viscount.
Another member of the titled classes whose biography is expanded
upon by Jaggard is Lord Peter Wimsey, the nobleman-amateur
detective whose cases are described in print by Dorothy L.
Sayers. Wimsey’s is one of the many names for which there
are entries in Blandings the Blest because characters or
episodes in Wodehouse’s stories evoked or recalled or
referred to them: they were not themselves characters whose
doings he chronicled. For example, amongst the ‘Vintage
Royalty’ we find
King
Lear: the old gentleman’s rollicking gaiety is frequent
extolled, and there are wistful references to an England blessed
with so equable a climate as that of his time (passim) [.]
In
other words, when this mythological king of Britain is mentioned
in Wodehouse, it is in reference to Lear as portrayed in
Shakespeare’s play on the subject. Lear does not himself
appear on Wodehouse’s stage. Wimsey, similarly, is mentioned
in Wodehouse in a literary context: for example, in Joy in the
Morning:
“[....] Haven’t you read any detective stories?
Ask Lord Peter Wimsey what an alibi amounts to.”
“Or Monsieur Poirot,” I suggested.
“Yes, or Reggie Fortune, or Inspector French, or Nero
Wolfe. I can’t understand a man of your intelligence falling
for that alibi stuff.”
Wolfe,
incidentally, also has a brief entry in Blandings the Blest,
and fellow-detective Sherlock Holmes is cited in both books.
However, their entries are basic—Wimsey’s however, is
developed by Jaggard, who expands upon the incidents in which
Wimsey is referenced by incorporating information direct from the
pen of Sayers: thus, in Wooster’s World:
Wimsey,
Lord Peter Death Bredon: younger b. of his Grace the Duke of
Denver. Res. 100A Piccadilly, W. Is conjectured by Freddie
Widgeon as wondering what to make of a kid’s frock, no kid
inside it, floating on the river (Young Men in Spats).
Boko Fittleworth is advised by Nobby Hopwood to consult Lord
Peter on the dubious value of an alibi, or alternatively to refer
to Reggie Fortune, M. Poirot, Inspector French of Nero Wolfe (Joy
in the Morning).
In Blandings the Blest:
Wimsey,
Lord Peter Death Bredon: y.s. of the late Duke of Denver and
brother of the present holder of the title; speculation on his
conjectural views of a kid’s frock, no kid inside it,
floating on the river. Res., Duke’s Denver; 110a Piccadilly,
W. (Young Men in Spats, Joy in the Morning).
Wodehouse has no need to mention the Denvers, or Wimsey’s
home address. But Jaggard does so, thereby in a sense treating
Wimsey on a par with Wodehouse’s own protagonists: such as,
Marshmoreton,
the Rt. Hon. the Earl of: John Marsh, 7th Earl, s. his f. the
6th E. as head of a family with Hampshire estates and
associations for many centuries. [.....] Heir, Viscount Belpher
[..]. Club, Athenaeum; Res., Belpher Castle, Hants. (A Damsel
in Distress).
Implicitly, Jaggard seems to be saying that the worlds of Wimsey
and of Wooster are one and the same. If one can visit Belpher
Castle, then one can also visit Duke’s Denver (or at least
get a bus down Piccadilly).[5]
That being so, I began to consider whether it was possible to go
beyond Geoffrey Jaggard’s initial work, and see what other
Wodehouse characters and families appear to have an existence
that may be extended beyond the corpus. There may be six
degrees of Kevin Bacon, but far less for almost anybody in a
Wodehouse story: following that tradition, therefore, the reader
must therefore not be surprised when, having read about a person
in this article, they find them popping up again later on.
I
should point out here that I am restricting myself, however, only
to those Wodehouse characters bearing titles, beginning at the
top of the tree with one of the crowned heads of Europe.
THE
EX-KING OF RURITANIA
The impoverished former monarch of this central-European state
was first described in print by Evelyn Waugh (father, of course
of Auberon; Frank Muir noted in 1990 that four generations of
Waughs have been devotees of Wodehouse’s work[6],
and I would not be surprised if this list is now longer), in his
novel Vile Bodies.[7]
The ex-King is presented as a morose, black-bearded European
exile, whom we meet on 10th November 1927[8],
at a gathering held at the Cavendish Hotel, Duke Street, London
by its proprietress, Rosa Lewis (Rosa Lewis is named ‘Lottie
Crump’ and the hotel becomes the Shepheards Hotel, Dover
Street, in the novel, but although Evelyn Waugh denied that he
had based the character on her she still banned him from the
premises). The ex-King spends his time remembering the halcyon
days, such as they were; his happiest memory seems to be that
whereas he was merely deposed and exiled, his Prime Minister got
thrown out of a window.
The works of Evelyn Waugh resemble that of Wodehouse in some
limited respects. The two authors were writing at the same time,
arguably about the same eras, with their protagonists in the same
social class. Like Wodehouse’s characters, many of
Waugh’s know each other and the same names recur throughout
his books. We find, too, that his work is subject to a
concordance, although Waugh’s World: A Guide to the
Novels of Evelyn Waugh by Iain Gale (introduction by Auberon
Waugh, of course) skips Evelyn Waugh’s historical novel Helena
on the grounds it is historical, whereas Jaggard does not disdain
Wodehouse’s little-seen William Tell Told Again. In Cocktail
Time, published in 1958, Wodehouse describes how Lord
Ickenham’s brother-in-law Sir Raymond Bastable QC, in an
extended fit of pique, pens a book very much in the strain of Vile
Bodies.
Thus it seems somehow fitting that, subsequent to his appearance
in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, the character of the ex-King was
picked up by P.G. Wodehouse.[9]
In “All’s Well with Bingo” Wodehouse refers to
1920s press reports, the society columnists having spotted His
Majesty the ex-King of Ruritania staying at the Hotel Magnifique
in Nice with other titled nobility including Their Serene
Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Graustark[10];
presumably Their Serene Highnesses were paying His Majesty’s
bill. The ex-King’s presence is noted once more in “The
Rise of Mina Nordstrom”, this time as a party-guest of the
wife of a Hollywood mogul during Prohibition.[11]
Most of the time, however, the reader finds the ex-King employed
as the intimidating doorman of Barribault’s Restaurant in
London, although on occasions His Majesty’s ‘prejudice
against hobnobbing with the proletariat weaken[s]’, one time
enough for him to pass the time of day with William Galahad
Lister: Bill
asked
the ex-King if he was married, and the ex-King said that he was.
Bill then said that he himself ought to have been by now, only
the bride hadn’t turned up, and the ex-King said he doubted
if a bit of luck like that would happen once in a hundred years.
This
passage in Full Moon, incidentally, seems to confirm that
Wodehouse and Waugh were writing about the same man, since in Vile
Bodies it is briefly noted that the ex-King has not been
fortunate in his choice of a spouse, the ex-Queen being confined
to an asylum at the time.
My research indicates that the ex-King was the illegitimate and
posthumous son of ‘Black’ Michael Elphburg, Duke of
Strelsau, by his mistress Antoinette de Mauban. Black Michael was
the younger son of King Rudolf IV of Ruritania, by His Late
Majesty’s second, and morganatic, marriage. It was King
Rudolf’s elder son, by his first marriage, also named
Rudolf, who was to and who did succeed to his father’s
throne, but that did not stop Michael from intriguing against his
brother with a view to seizing power himself. His
failure to do so, and the events that lead to his death, were
chronicled by English tourist and Wold Newton Family member the
Hon. Rudolf Rassendyll in his memoir The Prisoner of Zenda,
edited by Anthony Hope.[12]
Antoinette was filled with grief at the news of her
beloved’s death, for which she blamed herself, and went into
seclusion in France, ‘for which gossip found no difficulty
in accounting. Did not all the world know of the treachery and
death of Duke Michael?’ According to Rassendyll’s
narrative, Bertram Bertrand (poet, and Paris correspondent of The
Critic) had long been in love with her but his desires had
been thwarted by the presence in her life of Black Michael. With
the Duke’s death, it was the opinion of George Featherly at
the British Embassy in Paris—a mutual friend of Bertrand and
of Rudolf Rassendyll—that Bertrand might supplant Black
Michael in Antoinette’s affections, and Rassendyll’s
narrative appears to imply that the gossip in Paris was that this
had indeed happened, and very quickly at that. My own theory,
though, is that she had gone into seclusion in order to give
birth to her lover’s posthumous and illegitimate son, and it
is this that was meant by the reference to the gossip of the
time.
Considering the dates in question and the physical appearance of
the men involved, such a child must be the prime candidate for
being the ex-King of whom Wodehouse and Waugh wrote, the latter
of whom noted that the child had as godfather none other than the
Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand. This indicates that the
European royal houses recognised that he was of royal descent,
despite his being unable to claim a position in line to inherit
the Ruritanian throne. Ruling in Ruritania at this time was
Rudolf V, and on his death in 1891 his cousin (also his widow)
Queen Flavia succeeded to the throne.[13]
She reigned until 1940, when she was killed by the invading
German army in the Second World War. During the First World War,
too, Ruritania had been occupied by Germany: this was, on both
occasions, much to the satisfaction and enthusiasm of much of the
population. In the earlier conflict, Flavia had been captured and
imprisoned by the forces of the Kaiser in a castle in the Harz
Mountains in Germany, and it was only after the armistice of 1918
that she was reinstated on her throne.[14]
We know that her young cousin was claiming to be the former King
of Ruritania during the 1920s, so it seems plain that, assuming
for the moment that he was not a mere pretender to the throne, it
must have been after Flavia was imprisoned but before her
restoration.
I submit that the natural choice for a young European aristocrat
living in exile in England in 1914, would have been to join the
British Army or join the Royal Navy. It is a historical fact that
on the Eastern Front, the Russians recruited a Czechoslovak
Legion from prisoners of war who had served in the armies of
Austro-Hungary but who were prepared to turn against their
Emperor in the hope of establishing independence for their
homelands. My belief is that the young Elphburg recruited
ex-patriot eastern Europeans from the armies of the Allied Powers
on the Western Front and formed them into regiments who undertook
a perilous sea-voyage to the Baltic in order to join up with the
Czechoslovak Legion.
In 1917 Communist Russia and newly-independent Ukraine exited the war following their agreement with the powers of the Triple Alliance, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Communists agreed to evacuate the Czechoslovak Legion from Europe via Vladivostok, but it is not impossible that some of the troops might have crossed the lines and fled westward, and kept on their campaign against Germany and Austria. I believe that this is what Black Michael’s son did, and that at the war’s end he was able to march his troops into Ruritania as a liberator, and more importantly as his father’s son. Black Michael had been much-loved by the people of Ruritania before his death and disgrace, and many of those who had supported the Germans might have sought to re-establish their patriotism by changing sides and welcoming the young Elphburg to his ancestral home, and by making him—illegitimacy and morganatic marriages aside—King.
He cannot have ruled for many months. The snippets that Waugh
gives us in Vile Bodies suggests he sat on his throne
uneasily; he was impoverished, even before he was overthrown, and
his cabinet and supporters consisted of a number of shifting
alliances. The Paris Peace Conferences of 1919 did not find in
his favour, and restored Queen Flavia to her throne (possibly as
a result of investigation by Sherlock Holmes[15]);
thus the King became the ex-King, and went into exile once more
in Europe and America.
It would appear that some of his family stayed behind. During the
1970s, the post-World War Two Communist regime was rather
exceptionally liberal, and tourists visiting the Castle of
Elphburg would find that the castle’s custodian was State
Employee no. 23642 Mr Michael Elphburg. Technically an Archduke,
had titles not been abolished, Michael was understood by many to
be the next in line for the defunct throne. It appears that there
were other Elphburgs living in Ruritania at the time,[16]
although neither Michael nor they had any royalist ambitions of
course, and since Flavia’s next heirs were thought to be
members of the Austrian and German royal houses[17]
the remnant Elphburgs must have been the children and
grandchildren of the exiled ex-King. Michael Elphburg was
undoubtedly the son of the ex-King, and since his father
was also named Michael it seems unquestionable that the
ex-King’s name was Michael too.
Nowadays, of course, there is a King in Ruritania once more,
although he is not of this line. Unexpectedly there turned out to
be an heir directly and legitimately descended from Queen Flavia
herself. Nonetheless, there are hints that General Michael of the
Ruritanian Army, himself one of those who brought King Karel
Rassendyll Elphburg to the throne, might be a descendent of
ex-King Michael.[18]
I should point out that I do not agree with Jaggard’s belief
that the ex-King of Ruritania was that individual encountered by
Lord Uffenham in 1955 (Something Fishy). Dressed in the
uniform of a Ruritanian Field Marshall, and employed in arranging
taxis for Barribault’s clientele, this individual is no
aristo' but an unsophisticated prole; vehemently pro-Labour,
anti-Fascist, and specifically anti-aristocratic in his political
views and voting habits. It seems likely that this is not the
ex-King at all but some more humdrum lackey who has had the good
fortune to inherit his predecessor’s comic-opera state
uniforms. In the late 1940s, Barribault’s doorman was
dressed in the uniform of an Admiral of Ruritania (Spring
Fever), despite that country being inland.[19]
Whether this was the ex-King himself or his left-wing successor
cannot be confirmed but, like as to what song the Sirens sang or
what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, it is
not (as the poet Browne observes) beyond all conjecture.
VISCOUNT
TOPHAM
Little more needs to be added to Jaggard’s entry in Blandings
the Blest to describe the present peer:
Topham,
the Rt. Hon. Viscount: On the other hand (said Bill)
don’t overlook the fact that if you marry Topham,
you’ll have half-a-dozen imbecile children, saying
‘Absolutely, what?’ all the time in an Oxford accent.
Lancelot, Viscount Topham, known to his friends as
‘Toppy’, is a minor character in the Hollywood-set
novel The Old Reliable, appearing as a likeable and
wealthy young man who is both short of money (because of
then-current laws about how much could be taken out of Britain;
back home he was stagnant with the stuff) and brain (significant,
that: see below). He is a houseguest of a widow named Mrs Cork,
who was formerly the silent movie star Adela Shannon.
Half
a century or so before Lancelot inherited the title, His
Excellency the Lord Topham was Her Britannic Majesty’s
Ambassador to the Kingdom of Ruritania. The Ambassador
relinquished the position in 1888, after representing Queen
Victoria at the coronation of King Rudolf V of Ruritania. One of
the great hosts of the late Victorian age, Lord Topham’s
house-parties numbered such interesting persons as Sherlock
Holmes and Rudolf Rassendyll, although Lord Topham’s poor
eyesight meant that he could never actually recognise any of his
guests.[20]
By his will, his house at Grosvenor Square was left in perpetuity
to the Ruritanian people; in later years, following a slight
breakdown in diplomatic relations between Britain and Ruritania,
it housed the Ruritanian Minister to the United Kingdom.[21]
One of Lord Topham’s daughters appears to have married into
the Hatt family, although information is obscure. Whatever the
truth, one of the products of the union was the
(unfortunately-named) Topham Hatt, the celebrated railwayman and
engineer. Having learned his trade under William Stanier at the
railway works at Swindon, Topham Hatt was appointed to a
directorship of the North Western Railway Company in 1914, in
which capacity he was responsible for significant extensions to
the railway system and, notably, the design and construction in
1915 of a bridge linking the Island of Sodor to mainland England[22].
In 1936 he was appointed Managing Director, and subsequently at
privatisation in 1948, Controller of the North Western Railway.
He was also created a baronet, and it can well be said that much
of the current prosperity of Sodor can be credited to his careful
development of the island’s railway and associated industry.[23]
Sir Topham Hatt, 1st Baronet, married Jane Brown, and their son
was Sir Charles Topham Hatt, 2nd Baronet. Sir Charles, who like
his father trained under Stanier and who ultimately succeeded his
father as Controller, was instrumental in stopping the Beeching
cuts from affecting Sodor. He and his wife Amanda had two
children, Sir Stephen Topham Hatt, 3rd Baronet, the current
Controller of the now-privatised North Western Railway on which
his own son Richard also works, and Bridget Amanda Hatt.[24]
Leaping back further in history, we will find in the late
eighteenth century a Lord Topham in the company of none other
than the Prince of Wales (later King George IV), as the then
viscount was one of Prinny’s foppish cronies. Lord Topham,
known to his friends as ‘Topper’ (in the same way that
the present peer is nicknamed ‘Toppy’), did not live to
enjoy the trappings of his position in society very long, and he
died only a few years after his succeeding to the title, his
death occurring in mysterious circumstances possibly connected to
the existence of Revolutionary French agents at large in England.
Supposedly both Lord Topham and his close friend Lord Smedley
were members of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and in light
of Sir Percy Blakeney’s presence on Lord Topham’s
cousin Edward’s property at Wold Newton around three in the
afternoon on Sunday 13th December 1795, this seems probable.
However, we have it on the authority of the Comptroller and
Governor (‘butler’) of the Household of the Prince of
Wales that Topham was not in fact a member of the League at all;
thus there is still a mystery surrounding his lordship’s
death.[25]
However, it is interesting to note that the present Lord Topham
is as lacking in brain as his ancestor appeared to be—it is
absurd to think that idiocy as an acquired trait is heritable,
but nevertheless it is an attractive notion.[26]
Not only that, but both men were acquainted with men named
Smedley. Smedley Cork, the brother-in-law of Adela, is no English
gentleman but a thwarted Broadway impresario. According to The
Old Reliable, ‘Toppy’ became a guest at Adela
Cork’s residence after she lured him away from a rival
hostess, but I wonder if it is at all possible that she met him
through her brother-in-law.
It remains to be seen whether the rich American Desborough
Topping of Spring Fever is also descended from Lord
‘Topper’.[27]
The father of Lord ‘Topper’ seems to have been created
1st Viscount Topham in 1745, for services undertaken that year
against the Jacobite insurgency. His brother Francis Topham LLD,
Master of Faculties and Judge of the Prerogative Court of York,
is perhaps more familiar in creative mythographical circles as
the father of Edward Topham, soldier, caricaturist, dramatist,
journalist, publisher, sportsman, magistrate, litigant, and (as
mentioned before) landowner in the vicinity of Wold Newton in
Yorkshire.[28]
EARL
OF WINDERMERE
During the twentieth century the Earldom of Windermere became
extinct. My research has at yet failed to determine very much
about the origins of the title, or whether it is associated with
the place of the same name (Lake Windermere, being like so many
of the other large bodies of water in the Lake District, in that
is not technically a lake), despite the roles played by several
Earls in English literature.
Rosie M. Banks was a romantic novelist of the early twentieth
century, who was responsible for
a
series of narratives in which marriage with young persons of an
inferior social status was held up as both feasible and admirable
[......] They make very light, attractive reading.
Here
is an excerpt from one of her novels, The Woman Who Braved All:
‘What
can prevail’ - Millicent’s eyes flashed as she faced
the stern old man - ‘what can prevail against a pure and
all-consuming love? Neither principalities nor powers, my lord,
not all the puny prohibitions of guardians and parents. I love
your son, Lord Mindermere, and nothing can keep us apart. Since
time first began this love of ours was fated, and who are you to
pit yourself against the decrees of Fate?’
The earl looked at her keenly from beneath his bush
eyebrows.
‘Humph!’ he said.
This particular novel becomes of moment in The Inimitable
Jeeves, my copy of which at least is inconsistent as to
whether the earl is Lord Mindermere or Windermere, but the latter
identification seems to be the correct one.
An earlier Lord Windermere is much the more famous, and again is
the central character of a (much more literary) work of
literature, Oscar Wilde’s scandal-play Lady
Windermere’s Fan.
According to Philip José Farmer’s narrative The Other
Log of Phileas Fogg, in 1867 a French valet named Jean
Passepartout (a leading character in Jules Verne’s factual
novel Around the World in Eighty Days) was engaged for a
time by a Lord Windermere. Mr. Farmer’s book was based upon
what purports to be the journal of Phileas Fogg, as written in an
alien language and as translated by Phileas Fogg’s
great-nephew, the noted linguist of the University of Oxford, Sir
Beowulf Clayton, Bt. The diaries, of which in fact only a third
could be understood, purport to describe a conflict between alien
races hidden amongst mankind, and were it not for the dubious
reliability of some of his other statements I would be inclined
to echo David Vincent Jr’s statement that ‘The Other
Log of Phileas Fogg is a fraud.’[29]
One of my concerns is that although Mr. Farmer has been forced to
speculate about the motivations of and communications between
Fogg, Passepartout and others, he nevertheless has been able to
publish details of Passepartout’s employment history and the
secret purposes behind them (and the results thereof); but it
does not seem that Fogg would necessarily have known about them,
or had reason to enter them in his private journals.
If the account is true, it appears that Passepartout worked for
Lord Windermere as cover for investigating potential links
between his lordship and the Capelleans, and found none. Mr.
Farmer does however state ‘that some of the things he had
uncovered could be, probably would be, used by the Eridanean
chief to the advantage of the race’. It would be instructive
to know what dark secrets Lord Windermere possessed, and how they
might be used, but to my knowledge Mr. Farmer has not seen fit to
reveal or has been unable to reveal or himself does not know,
what they were.
The earliest Lord Windermere that I have been able to trace is
unlikely to be the first to hold the title, as there appears to
be nothing in his character or background to warrant deserving
marks of royal or political favour in his own right. Lord
Windermere was a noted collector of chinaware during the early
nineteenth century, buying from one of the early Duveens as well
as from the founder of that family who would become the
Duveens’ great rivals, the Mortdecais. The memoirs of
Carolus Mortdecai Van Cleef[30]
also at least implies that Lord Windermere was one of the titled
customers of John Jorrocks MFH, tea-grocer of Great Coram Street,
of whom his friend R.S. Surtees has written.[31]
Although there are no more Lords hereditary of Windermere
nowadays, the title almost lives on. In 2001, the former Member
of Parliament David Clark was created Baron Clark of Windermere,
of Windermere in the County of Cumbria, and currently sits in the
House of Lords as a life peer on the Labour benches.[32]
SIR
RODERICK GLOSSOP, C.H., F.R.C.P.
Sir Roderick Glossop, the eminent loony-doctor and for many years
one of several banes of Bertie Wooster’s life, was probably
born in the late 1860s, and attended Eton College.[33]
In adult life he married firstly the elder of the Blatherwick
sisters[34]
and by her had a daughter, the muscular Girton-educated Honoria
Jane Louise, and a son, Oswald.[35]
Following Lady Glossop’s death, Sir Roderick married Myrtle,
the Dowager Lady Chuffnell.[36]
Sir Roderick possessed a brother, who is known to have been an
absent-minded professor-type. Despite devising the formula for a
popular brand of headache pills, he left no substantial fortune
to his son Hildebrand as the nature of his contract gave all the
rights in his concoction to his employer, Runkle’s
Enterprises.
Hildebrand, known to friends as ‘Tuppy’, went in for
practical jokes, his most celebrated being to challenge
fellow-members of the Drones Club to swing from ring to ring
across the club swimming-pool whilst fully-dressed: Tuppy would
in the meantime loop back the final ring so the unfortunate
competitor had no choice but to allow himself to fall into the
water. Bertie Wooster has recorded[37]
that Sir Arthur ‘Pongo’ Jermyn escaped being one of
Tuppy’s victims in this manner as his anthropoid appearance
allowed him to stretch further than most (however, Jermyn’s
death in 1913[38]
seems to have occurred too early for him to have been a
contemporary of Bertie and Tuppy, the former’s claim to be
in a position to reveal the true reasons for Sir Arthur’s
death notwithstanding: this probably points to the swimming-pool
trick not being original with Sir Roderick’s nephew). A
number of Jeeves-and-Wooster novels revolve, at least in part,
around Tuppy Glossop’s on-off engagement to Bertie
Wooster’s paternal cousin Angela, and at the close of Much
Obliged, Jeeves their marriage was imminent, after L. P.
Runkle was ‘persuaded’ to make enough money over to
Tuppy for him to marry on, in token of his father’s work.
During the 1970s there was a Miss H. Glossop working on the Jersey
Evening Post. In 1974 she was given an exclusive by the
perpetrators of a Black Mass held at the ancient monument La
Hogue Bie, the purpose of which was to discourage a rapist whose modus
operandi suggested a connection with Satanism. Amongst those
involved was the Hon. Charlie Strafford van Cleef Mortdecai[39]
(subsequently the third Baron Mortdecai), coincidentally a
great-grandson of that Carolus Mortdecai van Cleef mentioned
earlier[40],
and a probable descendent of Sir Percy Blakeney as well.[41]
Some years later a Mrs. Honoria Glossop, having studied religion
and mythology at university, was appointed Professor of
Comparative Religions at William Morris University in East
London. I believe these two H. Glossops are identifiable, and
that her parents were Tuppy and Angela.
It was on a cruise that the Professor had encountered the
dashingly-handsome Richard ‘Ricky’ Glossop. Ricky must
be the son of Oswald Glossop, and thus Honoria’s cousin (it
is probable that their meeting was a re-encounter rather than the
first time they had come across each other). Honoria and Ricky,
who was a few years her junior, fell in love and were married.
They lived happily together for ten years, despite the sad fact
that Honoria was unable to bear children. Significantly, their
lifestyle was supported by a substantial amount of money
inherited by Honoria from a family business.[42]
The marriage came to a tragic end when she was murdered. An
account of the trial of her supposed killer and of the discovery
of the true culprit, has been published by the accused’s
defence counsel, Horace Rumpole.[43]
SIR
CUTHBERT WICKHAM, BART.
Of whom Jaggard writes in Wooster’s World:
‘Father
of Roberta’ might be held more than enough for any
man’s epitaph, yet with Roberta in mind we should like to
know more about the deceased Bart. The brio and empressement
of the Mulliners is not evident in her mother. Was it then from
Cuthbert that Bobbie acquired those talents which can even bring
a shudder into the voice of Jeeves?
This
seems most likely, though the novelist Lady Wickham, relict of
the late Sir Cuthbert, is several times claimed by the celebrated
teller of tall tales Mr. Mulliner[44]
as a cousin rather than as a relative-by-marriage. Her chief
talent is that she has any level of control over that
manipulative, fun-loving, chaos-bringing, red-headed atomic bomb
known and feared by right-minded Woosters everywhere as Roberta
‘Bobbie’ Wickham.
The blood of the Mulliners aside, undoubtedly part of
Bobbie’s personality has come down to her from her father,
since he was a direct male-line descendent of George Wickham and
his wife the former Lydia Bennett, who are described in Pride
and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Bobbie’s red hair also may
point to a connection with the Rassendylls.[45]
In his article, Those
Gallant War-Horses: the Steeds, Brad Mengel posits that
Lydia might have been present to see the meteorite strike at Wold
Newton in 1795. At first I thought this was doubtful, considering
the list of witnesses provided by Philip José Farmer in Tarzan
Alive. A Duke and a brace of baronets and other respectable
individuals—although Pride and Prejudice by Jane
Austen admits that Lydia’s sister Elizabeth and
brother-in-law Fitzwilliam Darcy would tolerate her company at
intervals, I cannot see that he at least would be prepared to
bring her into such company. Then I began to reconsider. Baronets
are, after all, typically ‘bad’ as a class, and the
public face of Sir Percy Blakeney was foppish and frivolous, and
his wife (although of respectable background, and possessing
impeccable relatives[46])
an actress, a term that did not shake off its older meaning of
‘prostitute’ till the twentieth century (and which,
indeed, has fallen out of favour once more).
I think that if Lydia was at Wold Newton, then she must have been
a natural choice of guest for Sir Percy, rather than for her own
relatives. It strikes me that the lively, spendthrift semi
scandal-ridden characters of both George and Lydia Wickham would
perhaps have appealed to the outer personality of Sir Percy
Blakeney, and her relatives cannot have objected too strongly to
her joining the party: however much of a snob Darcy was, I am
frankly convinced that there would have been all that much tone
for her to lower. After all, if Brad Mengel finds a hint of that
Wold Newton greatness in Lydia’s descendent the great John
Steed, might we also find a gallon of those hypernormal qualities
sloshing around to no good end inside Bobbie Wickham?
I mean, where else could it all have come from?
THE
EARL OF YAXLEY
Although the immediate family of Bertram Wilberforce Mannering
Phipps Wooster[47]
was untitled, they were a cadet branch of the family of the Earls
of Yaxley. Bertie’s uncle George, however, acquired a
baronetcy, and subsequently (following the deaths of some
intervening relatives[48])
inherited the Earldom as well (Geoffrey Jaggard notes that there
is also a baronetcy combined with the Earldom of Kimberley; P.G.
Wodehouse was a member of a cadet line of this family).
The question arises, however, as to the identity of the heir to
the title of Earl of Yaxley, and it is Geoffrey Jaggard’s
opinion that it is Bertie who is next in line to inherit.
According to Cyril Northcote Parkinson, Bertie does indeed become
the new Lord Yaxley and settles down (with Bobbie Wickham of all
people!) at Wooster Castle. Jeeves, in Parkinson’s view,
becomes a mere pub landlord.[49]
Jaggard, however, has greater things in sight for Bertie and
Jeeves, and there can be little doubt that his plans have come to
fruition in that other realm which I understand J. Adrian
Fillmore visited in The Incredible Umbrella by Marvin
Kaye:
Everything
points to Bertram Wilberforce Wooster as the senior nephew. If
so, the long-term effects on the destinies of Britain and indeed
of the world at large are quite incalculable. For Jeeves will
surely persuade the young master that it is his duty to take his
seat in the Upper House. And the latent potentialities of a House
of Lords ruled and directed in all its policies by an Eminence
Grise such as the master-mind of Jeeves are as
immeasurable—and a great deal farther reaching—than in
a previous period when both political parties were dominated by
the Fairy Queen.[50]
‘It
beats me why a man of his genius is satisfied to hang around
pressing my clothes and whatnot,’ says Bertie. ‘If I
had half Jeeves’s brain, I should have a stab at being Prime
Minister or something.’
And
the ‘something’ could conjecturally be anything. It is
virtually certain that had Jeeves been valet at No. 10 Downing
Street before the First World War, neither the first nor the
second war would have occurred.[51]
Again,
in Blandings the Blest and assuming, once more, that
Bertie succeeds to the earldom:
The
consequences of such an event would be quite incalculable. We
have already touched [....] on the suppositional results had
Bertie’s manservant elected to take his talents to No. 10
Downing St. It is unthinkable that, if Bertie became eligible for
a seat in the Upper House, Jeeves would fail to persuade him to
take it. Britain’s re-emergence as the Number One ruling
power would follow as the dawn follows the night. We have seen,
in the light opera Iolanthe, a somewhat playful
interpretation of the consequences for the country were a Fairy
Queen to take up residence at Westminster. But a Fairy
Queen’s puissance, though limitless, tends to be directed to
other than worldly issues. Not so those of a Jeeves. The
vicarious takeover of Britain’s domestic and international
economy by such an éminince grise would, without doubt,
precipitate the coming of the millennium.[52]
[1]
Well, otherwise complete. Or largely so, at
any rate. And bearing in mind that Wodehouse was still producing
new material at the time.
[2]
C.f. Jaggard’s discussion of correct
pronunciation under the entry “
[3]
Some of these definitions have been
paraphrased from The Chambers Dictionary.
[4]
Farmer, Philip José, Tarzan Alive.
[5]
In fact, episodes in Jeeves: A
Gentleman’s Personal Gentleman by C.
Northcote-Parkinson, a biography of Bertie Wooster’s
unparalled valet Reginald Jeeves, explicitly link the worlds of
This is a problematic matter in terms of strict chronology, as
Lord Peter’s career as a detective began subsequent to World
War One, during which conflict the embryonic Jeeves-and-Wooster
story “Extricating Young Gussie” was published. In
fact, Northcote-Parkinson’s biography is generally pretty
iffy. Many of the anecdotes recounted are admittedly true, but
they are presented in a distorted manner or in the wrong order.
My research into the life and career of Hercule Poirot suggests
that the encounter between Jeeves and the three detectives
probably has some basis in actual events, and although I am not
entirely clear on what exactly transpired, I believe that the
kidnapping took place during 1931, in a period when Jeeves had
temporarily or permanently left Bertie’s employment.
[6]
The significantly-subtitled The
[7]
The novel concludes with a fictitious world
war, which I believe has perhaps been spun out of the tiny 1920s
conflict fought in the Balkans and spoofed in the film Duck
Soup. See Dennis Power’s article Wold-Gazetteer
for a discussion of the political machinations that were the
basis for this Marx Brothers movie.
[8]
I was able to ascertain the precise year
with reference to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall,
and also Waugh’s World (despite not agreeing with the
author Iain Gale’s dating system).
[9]
The country, but not its king, had also been
mentioned by Wodehouse in “The Long Arm of Looney
Coote” in which it is reported that a schoolfellow of
Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge had been honoured for his work
constructing the new waterworks at Strelsau, the capital of
Ruritania (see the volume Ukridge).
[10]
Graustark, like Ruritania, is a small
monarchy lying in the Carpathians. It features in novels by
George Barr McCutcheon.
[11] “All’s Well with Bingo” may be found in the volume Eggs, Beans and Crumpets; “The Rise of Mina Nordstrom” is a tale of the Mulliners of Hollywood, to be found in Blandings Castle and Elsewhere.
[12]
These events almost certainly took place
in 1888, as in Tarzan Alive Philip José Farmer notes that
Rudolf Rassendyll, ‘soon to make a fateful voyage’,
attended the wedding of his cousin Lord Staveley to the
Honourable Alice Rutherford earlier that year. This union
produced, of course, Tarzan of the Apes. I assume that the word
‘cousin’ is to be taken literally, and that the mothers
of Rudolf and Lord Staveley were sisters.
However, Mr. Farmer was mistaken in asserting in the same book
that The Prisoner of Zenda was based on an insurgency that
took place in
[13]
von Tarlenheim, Fritz, Rupert of Hentzau,
ed. Anthony Hope.
[14]
See After Zenda by King Karel I of
Ruritania, ed. John Spurling. Careful readers will spot a subtle
nod to the ex-monarch.
[15]
There is a reference to Sherlock
Holmes’s involvement in “the intrigue surrounding the
Ruritanian Abdication Crisis” in the short story The
Adventure of the Lost World, supposedly written by Dr. John
H. Watson but actually an inaccurate pastiche penned by Dominic
Green.
[16]
Haythorne, John, The Strelsau Dimension.
[19]
Ibid. This did not stop Cunard naming a
liner after the country—see The Adventure of the
Illustrious Client by John H. Watson, ed. Arthur Conan Doyle.
[20] See The Prisoner of Zenda
and Rupert of Hentzau. That Holmes was one of Lord
Topham’s guests has been mentioned in some accounts of the
detective’s cases that were later hacked to bits and
reassembled by Nicholas Meyer as his novel, The Seven-Percent
Solution.
[21]
Speculation. The Strelsau Dimension
discusses the poor turn-of-the-century relationship between the
two monarchies. In Tenterhooks by Ada Leverson, the
Minister to
[22]
Sodor is a large island lying between the
Isle of Man and
The North Western Railway, has had much good publicity from
children’s books. The Railway Series, penned by the
Rev. W. Awdry and his son Christopher Awdry, are based around the
delightful conceit that railway engines are alive and possess
their own personalities. The Reverend Awdry, who like many
clerics had a great love of trains (something perhaps more
familiar to the reader in the character of Reverend Timothy
Lovejoy in The Simpsons), was also—together with his
brother George, librarian of the National Liberal Club—a
noted student of the island’s history.
[23]
Sibley, Brian, The Thomas the Tank Engine
Man: The Story of the Reverend W. Awdry and his Really Useful
Engines.
[24]
See the entry at Wikipedia
in reference to The
[25]
‘Lord Topper’ features in
“Nob and Nobility”, an episode of the BBCtv series Blackadder
the III, written by Richard Curtis and by Ben Elton (whom, it
must be noted, is the nephew of a very eminent historian). Sir
Percy Blakeney’s presence as an eye-witness to the Wold
Newton meteorite strike is revealed by Philip José Farmer in Tarzan
Alive. Jean-Marc Lofficier suggests a sinister element to
Blakeney’s presence at Wold Newton in his article Will There Be
Light Tomorrow? The History of the Greatest Conspiracy Man Has
Ever Known. Part I: The Conspiracy.
[26] Although there is evidence that physical
hideousness as an acquired trait can, against all scientific
reason, be inherited.
A good account of the life of Bladud, the mythical founder of the
City of
There seems little doubt in my mind that Bladud, prior to his
taking the cure, fathered the first Baldrick, which name is
clearly a latter-day corruption of ‘Bladud’. We cannot
believe the official versions of the family’s origin:
according to Blackadder—The Whole Damn Dynasty 1485-1917
by Richard Curtis, Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson and John Lloyd, the
first Baldrick was a proto-human called Homo Non-Erectus
which for two obvious reasons barely survived to reproduce. This
would appear to be a joke, and not particularly amusing at that,
and is in any case a recycling of a denial in “The
Blackadder Chronicles” (see John Lloyd’s article
“Blackadder—The Untold Story” in the issue of the Radio
Times for the week of 26 September to 2 October 1987) that Homo
Non-Erectus was the progenitor of the Blackadders.
Baldrick son of Robin the Dung Gatherer (possibly a tanner’s
assistant) from the original BBCtv series The Black Adder
was depicted as quite intelligent, although his contemporary
Bernard Baldrick (see The Whole Damn Dynasty) with whom he
is probably identifiable (see my intended article The Life and
Times (Probably) of The King’s Own Right-Beloved Brother,
Prince Edmund Plantagenet, Duke of Edinburgh), was as thick
as anything, just like all Baldricks since.
[27]
According to Wodehouse at Work to the
End by Richard Osborne, Wodehouse rewrote the UK-based Spring
Fever as a play that ultimately was not produced. The play
was such a heavy re-write, he was then able to turn into a brand
new novel, The Old Reliable, set in the
Having read both novels, I can understand why Osborne thought
that The Old Reliable derives from Spring Fever.
Both have characters on the search of a McGuffin that will bring
them a huge fortune (in The Old Reliable it is the diary
of a
[28] The Dictionary of National
Biography. The entry for Edward Topham also gives some of the
specifics of the Wold Newton meteorite.
[29]
As part of his communications with Dennis
Power, described here.
[30]
The first volume of which was published under
the title of All the Tea in China, ed. Kyril Bonfiglioli.
[31]
See his books commencing with Jorrocks’
Jaunts and Jollities, this first volume being Surtees’s
1838 collection of material originally presented in New
Sporting Magazine (which itself commenced publication in
1831).
[32]
See entry at Wikipedia here.
[33]
In Uncle Fred in the Springtime,
Lord Emsworth recalls having known Sir Roderick at
[34]
Wodehouse, P.G., Carry on Jeeves.
[35]
Wodehouse, P.G., The Inimitable
Jeeves.
[36]
Following the events of Wodehouse’s Thank
You, Jeeves.
[37]
In “The Rummy Affair of Young
Charlie”, ed. P.H. Cannon, in the volume Scream for
Jeeves.
[38]
Lovecraft, H.P., “Facts Concerning the
Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.”
[39]
Bonfiglioli, Kyril, Something Nasty in the
Woodshed (although Charlie is narrator, it may be
demonstrated that his friend Bon was the actual author). Like
Waugh’s Decline and Fall, part of this book (and most
of the follow-up, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery)
is set at
[40]
A partial family tree is described in Mortdecai
ABC: A Kyril Bonfiglioli Reader, edited by Margaret
Bonfiglioli. It also reveals that Charlie’s mother was the
daughter of a duke; considering Charlie’s reaction in The
Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery to what he thinks is the
prospect of meeting the present Duke of Marlborough, it seems
likely that they are first cousins.
[41]
During the course of Don’t Point That
Thing At Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli, Charlie imagines himself as
though he were ‘Captain Hugh Drummond-Mortdecai’ and
‘Sir Percy Blakeney-Mortdecai’; in Tarzan Alive,
Philip José Farmer stated that Bulldog Drummond was a descendent
of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Material related to Charlie’s
accession to the barony is printed in Mortdecai ABC.
[42] In “The Ex’s Are
Nearly Married Off”, a loose adaptation by Clive Exton of Much
Obliged, Jeeves for the ITV television series Jeeves and
Wooster, Tuppy sinks his father’s money into
‘Plumbo-Jumbo’, a device that cleans drains and treats
them so that they cannot get blocked up again in future. On
screen, at least, it is a total disaster.
[43]
Rumpole, Horace, Rumpole and the Christmas
Killer, ed. John Mortimer. Serialised in the Daily Mail,
24, 25 and 27 December 2002. A judge named Leslie Mulliner is
also mentioned.
[44]
E.g. “Mr Potter Takes a Rest
Cure” in
Incidentally, amongst Mr Mulliner’s legion of nephews may be
found the detective Adrian Mulliner, who proves in
Wodehouse’s From a Detective’s Notebook that
Professor Moriarty never existed and was invented by Sherlock
Holmes to cover up the latter’s own criminal works.
[45]
In The Prisoner of Zenda, it is noted
that once in a generation or so, the Rassendyll family produces a
child with a long nose, red hair and blue eyes.
[46]
One of her uncles was the father of Dr.
Thomas Raffles, a nonconformist preacher of phenomenal
popularity; another uncle was the father of Sir Thomas Stamford
Raffles, founder of
For that matter, it has never been satisfactorily explained why
[47]
Bertie’s first appearance in
Wodehouse’s stories was in “Extricating Young
Gussie”, in which he is identified as ‘Bertie
Mannering-Phipps’. Jaggard explains in Wooster’s
World that various inter-marriages had produced a
somewhat-overblown surname, Mannering-Phipps-Wooster, but in the
more modest days of the twentieth centuries the family, like many
other ancient lines, stripped back to ‘their oldest
patronymic, which is
[48]
Such as (we imagine) the Hon. Algernon
Wooster, mentioned briefly as a guest at Blandings in Something
Fresh.
[49]
The public house in question is The
Angler’s Rest, local of Mr Mulliner.
[50]
Jaggard, Geoffrey, Wooster’s
World.
[52]
This probably is not the time to mention
it, but I will anyway, that Peter Cannon notes in his article
“The Adventure of the Three Anglo-American Authors”
(printed in Scream for Jeeves) that Manly Wade Wellman, in
the Baker Street Journal, ‘once argued that Jeeves is
the offspring of Sherlock Holmes and his landlady Mrs.
Hudson.’ Such a relationship is reported to be depicted in Sherlock
Holmes’s War of the Worlds by Edward D. Malone and John
H. Watson, ed. Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman, and Dennis
Power has argued in his article The
Kissable Mrs. Hudson that Irene Adler had actually been
posing temporarily as Holmes’s landlady.
This strikes me as a more credible relationship, although I am
doubtful that it resulted in the birth of Jeeves. Yet, watching
repeats of Star Trek recently, it occurs to me that if we
have learned anything from Star Trek: Enterprise it is
that the calm, measured, reflective, understated tones of Mr.
Spock are not typical of Vulcans in general—but they do bear
a resemblance to those of Jeeves, whose speech Jaggard describes
in Wooster’s World as ‘Augustan English, the
English of Gibbon and of The Times first leader’. In Star
Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Spock appears to cite
Sherlock Holmes as an ancestor. The evidence is shaky—he
could as easily be referring to Arthur Conan Doyle, and an
argument could even be made for Watson—and when one
considers the length of time between the eras of Holmes and Spock
there is no reason to suppose that Spock has any concrete
evidence to back up such a claim if he were to formally state it
(in Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno, the
Grayson family tree only goes back as far as an ancestor who died
in 2045). It might just be a reference to a family legend. What
if intervening generations of Jeeveses passed down Manly Wade
Wellman’s theory to Amanda Grayson and she passed it down to
her son?
I’m not convinced, myself. If Spock is a descendent
of Holmes, it is likely to be through the Great Detective’s
grandson Spencer Holmes, who appears in the novel San
Francisco Kills by Denny Martin Flinn, if only because Mr.
Flinn co-wrote the script for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered
Country.
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