Philip Farmer - The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - The Peerless Peer

However, the 1976 Dell paperback, inexpensive and widely available, was another matter altogether. The Lord of the Jungle, acting through a series of trusted middlemen, used his influence to have the book suppressed. Farmer received a friendly warning letter from the Jungle Lord, now residing in parts unknown under an assumed name. (Farmer was not surprised at this, since the Ape-Man had indicated in their 1970 interview that he would soon fake his death and disappear.) The Jungle Lord had had enough of Farmer exposing his secrets to the public at large. Presumably he also wasn’t terribly pleased with his fellow Duke, Lord Peter, for making Watson’s manuscript available in the first place.

It can hardly matter, some thirty-five years later, if the truth about the Jungle Lord’s impersonation is noted here, especially in light of the fact that the Ape-Man was not entirely successful in suppressing The Peerless Peer back in 1976; that he himself admitted it in his “Memoirs”; and that he approved of its recent republication in the collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (Christopher Paul Carey, ed., Subterranean Press, 2008).

Nonetheless, Farmer must have remained somewhat abashed by the Jungle Lord’s rebuke. Perhaps he was also a bit sensitive to the Jungle Lord’s constantly shifting positions on the matter. For his collection The Grand Adventure (Berkley Books, 1984), Farmer rewrote The Peerless Peer as the novella “The Adventure of the Three Madmen,” replacing the Ape Lord with Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli. In his introduction to the rewrite, Farmer claimed that he had abandoned the pretense that Watson had written the original manuscript and that he (Farmer) was merely the editor. Now Farmer “admitted” that he was the “true author” of “Madmen.” In fact, the reverse was true; he was using misdirection to cover for his former indiscretions. [18] Interestingly, both Peer and “Madmen” may have been different drafts written by Watson, and each manuscript may contain large elements of the truth, despite the replacement of the Jungle Lord in Peer by Mowgli in “Madmen.” Dennis E. Power has reconciled the two manuscripts in “Jungle Brothers, or, Secrets of the Jungle Lords,” Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Win Scott Eckert, ed., MonkeyBrain Books, 2005.

By 2008, the Lord of the Jungle and his family had long-since faked their deaths, and the secrets revealed in The Peerless Peer were ancient enough history to cause no harm to the nobleman and his relations. [19] In fact, the Ape-Man’s ire had significantly cooled by the late 1990s, enough to allow Farmer to write an authorized entry in the series of semi-biographical novels covering his adventures. Farmer’s The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel was published by Del Rey Books in 1999. The novel was reprinted — once again in a limited edition. [20] It appeared in the aforementioned collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others . Now, for the first time in thirty-five years, Watson’s account is widely available in this new trade edition from Titan Books.

Sherlock Holmes, in the course of his lengthy career, encountered Count Dracula (numerous times), Doctor Who, Allan Quatermain, Arsène Lupin, Professor Challenger, the Phantom of the Opera, Raffles, Doctor Fu Manchu, Fantômas, the Time Traveller, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, the Invisible Man, Father Brown, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hercule Poirot, Sexton Blake, Harry Dickson, the Domino Lady, the Men from U.N.C.L.E., various Lovecraftian menaces, and The Batman (to name but a few noteworthy crossovers). He even battled the Martian Invaders.

And of course, in the case recorded as The Peerless Peer , he met that feral nobleman raised by “great apes.”

But when Farmer edited Watson’s account, it became clear that this exploit was not a mere crossover between two great men of their time. Holmes and Watson also ran into many other important personages during the events chronicled in The Peerless Peer .

One of Holmes and Watson’s fliers in Peer is “Colonel Kentov.” Kentov would later be known as the pulp vigilante The Shadow. In the pulp novel The Shadow Unmasks , it was revealed that The Shadow’s real identity was that of aviator Kent Allard. Allard had also flown, and worked as a secret agent, for the Tsar during the Great War. During that time he had also been known as the Black Eagle and the Dark Eagle. As Farmer points out, one of The Shadow’s many aliases during the 1930s and ’40s was Lamont Cranston.

It’s also worth noting that Holmes and Watson are conducted to Colonel Kentov’s plane by a young Russian officer, Lieutenant Obrenov. In 1946, Farmer had chronicled a rather amusing World War II incident in Germany between a Colonel Obrenov and a U.S. officer, Colonel O’Brien. [21] “O’Brien And Obrenov,” Adventure, V. 115, N. 5, March 1946; Pearls from Peoria , Paul Spiteri, ed., Subterranean Press, 2006. Lieutenant Obrenov is killed in The Peerless Peer , but the Colonel is undoubtedly a relative.

When Holmes and Watson meet with Mycroft, the latter introduces young Henry Merrivale, who works at Military Intelligence and is quite accomplished in the art of detection. Sir Henry Merrivale went on to solve many mysteries from the 1930s through the 1950s. These cases were recounted by “Carter Dickson” (a pseudonym for John Dickson Carr).

Just before Mycroft summons him, Doctor Watson is sharing a brandy with a young friend, Doctor Fell. Doctor Fell is Gideon Fell, who would also go on to a lengthy career as an amateur detective from the 1930s through the 1960s. His cases were also recorded by John Dickson Carr.

Those familiar with American pulp magazines might think that the hallucinating pilot Wentworth is Richard Wentworth, who would later fight supercriminals in Manhattan as The Spider. However, Farmer notes that this mentally disturbed flyer, while in British service, used his half-brother’s surname. Following Farmer’s genealogical researches in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (revised edition, Bantam Books, 1975), this makes the crazed pilot G-8, the Great War hero whose exploits were related by Robert J. Hogan in the purple prose pulp pages of G-8 and His Battle Aces . In fact, Farmer’s researches revealed that G-8 and The Shadow were full brothers, and their half-brother was The Spider.

Leftenant John Drummond is mentioned as the adopted son of the Jungle Lord. This lines up with Farmer’s discovery, documented in the biography Tarzan Alive , that the Ape-Man had an adopted son as well as a biological son. This discovery explains a severe chronological discrepancy in the original novels about the Jungle Lord, in which his son ages ten or eleven years, seemingly overnight, between the third and fourth novels.

Watson mentions Lord John Roxton, referring to him as being “wilder than the Amazon Indians with whom he consorted.” Roxton accompanied Professor George Edward Challenger on the latter’s expedition to the Lost World, in an account written by Edward Malone and edited for publication by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Jungle Lord, Holmes, and Watson locate the lost land of Zu-Vendis, last visited by Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, and the Zulu warrior Umslopogaas. Quatermain’s Zu-Vendis adventure was recounted in Allan Quatermain , edited and published in 1887 by Sir Henry Rider Haggard, Quatermain’s editor and biographer.

Farmer also realized that Watson’s manuscript substantiated some of the genealogical researches he had conducted when writing the biographies Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Doubleday, 1973; revised edition Bantam Books, 1975). Farmer had discovered that the subjects of these biographies were related to each other, and that both were related to many other heroes and villains whose exploits had been fictionalized in novels and short stories by various authors over the years. The almost superhuman nature of these personages’ abilities was traced back to their ancestors’ exposure to the ionized radiation of a meteorite which landed in the village of Wold Newton on December 13, 1795. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet (whose story Jane Austen recounted in Pride and Prejudice ) and Sir Percy Blakeney (also known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, whose tales were told by Baroness Emmuska Orczy) were among those present at the Wold Newton meteor strike.