The Dorset Street Lodger..!?

[KanderGrimm]

I was pleasantly surprised to read Mike's Sherlock Holmes story in a copy of The New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and I wondered if that was his only foray into the gaslit streets of Holmes's Victorian London.
I'm not a Sherlockian, but I do consider myself a bit of a Holmes afficionado and I would definitely like to see another Holmes tribute from Mr. Moorcock.
How about it Mike?

[Michael Moorcock]

At one point I was discussing with Anthony Cheetham the possibility of doing a set of six Holmes stories to make a book. But as was often the case with Cheetham the proposal turned out to be pure bullshit and anyway relations with him broke down somewhat before it could get very far. I doubt if I'd do it now.

[Michael Moorcock]

I think another factor was that I started to develop Sir Seaton Begg and Taffy Sinclair as characters around that time and preferred the flexibility I could get with Begg stuff.

[KanderGrimm]

It's unfortunate that the project fell through. It would have been a sweet one :(
Regarding The Adventure of the The Dorset Street Lodger, did you approach the publisher with the story or did they approach you, with the idea of using a celebrity author in a theme-driven anthology?

[xidrep]

OK. This is a bit weird.

Last night, I dreamt that I was reading a Sherlock Holmes book written by Mike. But I had no idea he'd written a Sherlock story...and then this post this morning. How odd.

It's like when one of my nurses dreamt vividly about vast floods, crashing waves and drowning, woke up and (because it scared her by its vividness) told me about it - last Christmas; the day before the SE Asian Tsunami...

Coincidence, premonition, or Multiversal leakage? :roll:

[Ant]

... one of my nurses ...

Do you mean one of the nurses in your vetinary surgery or one of the medical team that looks after you... ?

"Coincidences like these happen all the time, but we are powerless to do anything about it."

Ciao,
Ant

[Anonymous]

They are one and the same... :P

[KanderGrimm]

The eddies and currents of the Multiverse are strange and varied Perdix. My kids believed for the longest time that Holmes was a real person...and perhaps he is in some alternate universe somewhere. Is he any less real than someone who actually walked the earth a hundred years ago? When we die, we live on in peoples memories and thoughts, and Holmes has been in peoples thoughts for over a hundred years and he will live on even after we are gone. Look at King Arthur and Robin Hood, these characters might have been loosely based on real figures in history (as Holmes was with Dr.Joseph Bell), but they have become real flesh and blood in their own right, just by living on in peoples thoughts and in fiction. It's ironic that fictional characters by virtue of the fact that they can never really die are almost more real than we are.
As for your dream, it could be premonition...or it could be the result of ingesting an underdone potato the night before :scratch:

[KanderGrimm]

[broken link]

Evidently, a distant relative of Michael Moorcock's was an acquaintance of Dr. Watson and the manuscript was found amongst their papers. Holmes and Watson dwelt briefly in Dorset Street while their lodgings in Baker Street were being refurbished.
The story is original to this edition, but I'm sure it's been reprinted since then.

[xidrep]

Kandergrimm echoes a conversation I had just last week (Oh, this tangled skein...!). 'Fictional' characters do indeed exist in their own right: as do fictional locations and events.

Think of this: our knowledge of the places and people of yesterday exist as no more than vivid shadows, in our electrochemically structured memories. Fictional constructs reside similarly. Therefore, fiction and memory (and for that matter, current perception and future prediction) exist with equal material weight.

Yep.

[Anonymous]

Well, there certainly seem to be a lot of fictional characters' parents dropping by at the moment, so it wouldn't surprise me. Which makes me wonder whether these characters then have to choose between the parents they have on the page, or their actual creator (the writer). The problem, of course, is that writers often have to be very cruel to their creations, so I doubt they'd be too keen to meet their "maker".

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to feed one of my creations to a vampire. 8O :(

BrownCrowSeer

[Keele]

was pleasantly surprised to read Mike's Sherlock Holmes story in a copy of The New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and I wondered if that was his only foray into the gaslit streets of Holmes's Victorian London.

Many Barnes & Noble stores in my area have remaindered hardback copies of that anthology. If anyone's interested in reading it, it's probably not too hard to find (if you live in the States at least). I'm a Holmes fan myself, so I'll probably pick it up in a week or two.

[Michael Moorcock]

I might try to pick that up, since I was never sent a copy of the hardback. Didn't even know there was one. I didn't write the story for the anthology. It was first reprinted in Tales From The Texas Woods but I originally wrote it for some friends who had started a hotel in Dorset Street, as a special give-away for their first guests. So the first edition of the book is extremely hard to come by. No doubt some of those guests, who have no special interest in the book, will start to put some on the market one way or another. Always worth checking the thrift shops for that one, I'd say. It's a plain maroon binding. Slim hardback. So essentially that republication (in Mike's anthology) was the third appearance of the story. I'd probably put it in any fresh collection of short stories I publish in future. I HAVE just done a little story (very slight) called The Third Jungle Book. It's Mowgli's final adventure, I'd say... :)

[Ant]

Kandergrimm echoes a conversation I had just last week (Oh, this tangled skein...!). 'Fictional' characters do indeed exist in their own right: as do fictional locations and events.

Think of this: our knowledge of the places and people of yesterday exist as no more than vivid shadows, in our electrochemically structured memories. Fictional constructs reside similarly. Therefore, fiction and memory (and for that matter, current perception and future prediction) exist with equal material weight.

Yep.

Read any Wittgenstein?

MfG,
Ant

[Ant]

was pleasantly surprised to read Mike's Sherlock Holmes story in a copy of The New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, and I wondered if that was his only foray into the gaslit streets of Holmes's Victorian London.

Many Barnes & Noble stores in my area have remaindered hardback copies of that anthology. If anyone's interested in reading it, it's probably not too hard to find (if you live in the States at least). I'm a Holmes fan myself, so I'll probably pick it up in a week or two.

In the UK, you can get the Mammoth pb from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...462211-8652612.

Ciao,
Ant