Translation: ” In the Gleendark castle, Herlock Sholmès and his loyal Ratson are tracking the SIMCA 1000. Find it before them and go see it at a SIMCA car dealership.”

It took us a while before locating the SIMCA car in the picture. Can you see it now ?

I was most intrigued by the ad and wondered why, by all means, Sherlock Holmes name was spelled as “Herlock Sholmès” and Dr Watson’s , as Ratson ?!?

To satisfy my curiosity, I googled about it to find out that it originated upon a copyright issue!

It all began in 1906 when Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) creator of the fictional character Arsene Lupin, gentleman-burglar, wrote a short story titled “Sherlock Holmes arrives too late“ in the Je Sais Tout series, No. 17.  Quite a literary pastiche!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle manifested his opposition of using the name of his internationally known and most popular fictional detective.

So, to bypass this copyright issue, Maurice Leblanc came up with a spelling tweak which consisted in moving the  ”S” from Sherlock to the beginning of  the last name; Herlock Sholmes was born.

Read all about The Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin written by David Drake of Université Paris VIII,  for a more detailed coverage.

The first book from Leblanc featuring both detective was “The Hollow Needle” , but we find a much more involved Sholmès in the follow-up story that bears several titles:

-The Blonde Phantom

-The Blonde Lady

- The Case of the Golden Blonde

( Translated in 1910 to English by Alexander Teixera de Mattos)

Arsene Lupin Vs. Herlock Sholmes, by Maurice LeBlanc

LeBlanc’s creation, gentleman thief Arsene Lupin, is everything you would expect from a French aristocrat — witty, charming, brilliant, sly . . . and possibly the greatest thief in the world.

In this classic tale, Lupin comes up against the only man who may be able to stop him . . . no less than the great British gentleman-detective Herlock Sholmes! Who will emerge triumphant?

Arsene Lupin Kontra Herlock Sholmes Video=================>      

“The strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid….”

(Virginia Woolf – The Common Reader)

In The Book Shop (Wigtown, Scotland)

We’re not of the kind to discriminate against anybody, so let us  share our readings with this old guy relaxing in his armchair, or… is it a “she” ? This venerable person must have a lot of thrilling stories to tell us …

The Book Shop (Wigtown,Scotland)

Indeed, there seems to be a good  number of books devoted to  tales of the supernatural  in Wigtown’s bookshops… but we’re in Scotland !

Perhaps it has something to do with our landscape: seen in the right light (or should that be the wrong light?!) at the right time of year, Scotland’s deep dark lochs, rain-lashed moors and chill Glens covered by slow-moving mists can certainly seem eerie enough. Indeed Scotland’s geography has been providing writers with spooky inspiration for some time now. . .

http://www.scotland.org/about/innovation-and-creativity/features/culture/halloween.html

Typewriter near inglenook in The Book Shop (Wigtown,Scotland)

It would not come as a surprise if we were to hear the sound of this old typewriter in the middle of the night …

By the way, Janice,  since we happen to be in so good a company, let us try to discover more about ghost stories !

J’adore les histoires de fantômes !

M.R. James-Collected Ghost Stories-Introduced by Penelope Fitzgerald and Illustrated by Francis Mosley-The Folio Society-London-2007

On my bookshelves, there are some books of ghost stories that would give great delight to the  ‘amateurs du genre’, just have a look at the covers ! Most of them are anthologies of tales written by  eminent ghost stories writers coming from Great Britain and Ireland.  The Victorian era seems to have been a very prolific time for that kind of literature.  Newspapers and magazines used to publish ghost stories regularly then,  especially at Christmas time.

Christmas Ghost Stories-Illustrated by Peter Suart-The Folio Society-London-2005

Among the most famous ghost stories writers, let us mention first M.R. James who used to tell his thrilling tales to his students in a very stylish manner, the meetings taking place in the old panelled rooms of the University of Cambridge, on Sunday evenings, in the winter terms.

There are also J. Sheridan Le Fanu, from Dublin,  who became a master in  mystery and horror fiction, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, Wilkie Collins, Amelia Edwards…,but there are many others and among them, Scottish authors like Margaret Oliphant whose best known book  is entitled A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen. Her stories include The Open Door and The Library Window.

Ghost Stories-Selected, Introduced and Illustrated by Charles W. Stewart-The Folio Society-London-1997

Nowhere but in Scotland will the writer of ghost stories  find such appropriate settings for his spooky tales : moors, lochs and mountains, ruined castles and abbeys, unique landscapes  and dramatic effects  in an ever changing light. It’s all a question of atmosphere !

Hauntings - Tales Of The Supernatural. Edited by Henry Mazzeo. Drawings by Edward Gorey.

Some writers of ghost stories do specialize in the genre but most of them only write a few stories in the course of their literary career. Many great authors have thus tried their hand at ghost stories and with great success, like Charles Dickens ( A Christmas Carol), Walter Scott ( Wandering Willie’s Tale ; The Tapestried Chamber ; My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror) Stevenson (The Body Snatcher ; Thrawn Janet) and of course, Conan Doyle though not in his Sherlock Holmes stories (Lot No. 249).

I hate to disappoint you : this is not a story about Sherlock Holmes. In his entire career, Holmes never encountered a genuine spook, and that’s the only kind allowed in this book. In fact, he went so far as to express complete skepticism in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire : “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish ! What have we to do with walking corpes who can only be held in their graves by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy… This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. No ghosts need apply.” But, if you’ve read The Sussex Vampire, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane, and many more, you know very well that the adventures of Sherlock Holmes are macabre enough to satisfy the most Halloweenish appetites. Holmes himself possesses the brooding intensity and dramatic flair of a Gothic villain, as befits a descendant of Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin.

Henry Mazzeo  (Hauntings – Tales of The Supernatural - “Lot No. 249″)

I would like to make special mention here of George Mackay Brown, the great Orkney bard, not only because he is my favourite Scottish writer but also because he has produced little gems in the ghost stories genre : Andrina, Beliah, Sara, The Drowned Rose, The Interrogator, Mr Scarecrow. But we’ll say more about Scottish ghost stories and ghost stories writers in the additional pages we intend to create in Scotiana.

In the meantime, here are some very interesting books I can recommend to our readers. As I do like to anticipate my readings by going through the contents of my books I’ve thought it could be a good idea to give our readers a list of the stories they are going to find in the following books.

Bonne lecture et à bientôt !

Giles Gordon (ed) – Scottish Ghost Stories (Senate, 1996: Lomond, 2000: originally published as Prevailing Spirits: A Book of Scottish Ghost Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 1976: Panther, 1977: Grafton, 1986.)

Forbes Bramble : Holiday

George Mackay Brown : Beliah

Elspeth Davie : The Foothold

James Allan Ford : A Kind of Possession

Antonia Fraser : Who’s Been Sitting in my Car ?

Clifford Hanley : The Haunted Chimley

Dorothy K. Haynes : The Curator

Angus Wolf Murray : The Curse of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan

Robert Nye : Randal

Iain Crichton Smith : The Brothers

Fred Urquhart : Proud Lady in a Cage

Gordon Williams : The Horseshoe Inn.

Supernatural Tales-Edited and Introduced by Rev. James C.G. Greig--B & W Publishing-1997

The Watcher by the Threshold

The Kings of Orion

Tendebant Manus

No-Man-Land

Fountainblue

The Far Islands

The Outgoing of the Tide

The Wind in the Portico

The Grove of Ashtaroth

The Lemnian

The Green Glen

The Herd of Standlan

Space

The Rime of True Thomas

A Lucid Interval

The Penguin Book Of Ghost Stories-Edited by J.A.Cuddon-1984

The Beggarwoman of Locarno – Heinrich von Kleist

The Entail E.T.A. Hoffmann

Wandering Willie’s Tale  – Walter Scott

The Queen of Spades – Alexander Pushkin

The Old Nurse’s Story – Elisabeth Gaskell

The Open Door – Margaret Oliphant

Mr Justice Harbottle – Sheridan Le Fanu

Le Horla – Guy de Maupassant

Sir Edmund Orme – Henry James

Angeline, or the Haunted House – Emile Zola

The Moonlit Road – Ambrose Bierce

A Haunted Island – Algernon Blackwood

The Rose Garden – M. R. James

The Return of Imray – Rudyard Kipling

My Adventure in Norfolk – A. J. Alan

The Inexperienced Ghost – H. G. Wells

The Room in the Tower – E. F. Benson

One Who Saw – A. M. Burrage

Afterward – Edith Wharton

The Wardrobe – Thomas Mann

The Buick Saloon – Ann Bridge

The Tower – Marghanita Laski

Footsteps in the Snow – Mario Soldati

The Wind – Ray Bradbury

Exorcizing Baldassare – Edward Hyans

The Leaf-Sweeper – Muriel Spark

“Dear Ghost…” – Fielden Hughes

Sonata for Harp and Bicycle – Joan Aiken

Come and Get Me – Elizabeth Walter

Andrina – George Mackay Brown

The Axe – Penelope Fitzgerald

The Game of Dice – Alain Danielou

The July Ghost – A. S. Byatt

The Maze in Traquair House Park - 2006

If you like to be told good stories, go to Scotland. Scottish people seem to possess the art of story-telling. Days are long gone by when people used to gather by the fireside, at the hour of the “ceilidh” but there are many other ways today to listen to the story-tellers !

How we came to focus on Scottish crime fiction rather than on other literary genres I still wonder, but we’re finding new good reasons to follow this road everyday…

The popularity of Scottish crime fiction is striking. Just have a look at the titles being published there regularly! Be it due or not to the very special atmosphere we immediately feel on arriving in Scotland, the country seems to be good ground to generate books focusing on the gloomy side of life and to give birth to dark characters in keeping with this atmosphere.

In Scotland the gothic style flourishes as beautifully as the pricky thistle and that’s seems to be a good environment for crime writing. Give a pen to a naturally talented story-teller endowed with a deep sense of place and a gift for empathy, capable of creating true-to life characters constantly oscillating, in lively dialogues, between dark humour and melancholy along the lines of a plot well put together and you may expect to read soon the best crime story ever written. There seems to be many such writers in Scotland. We’ll try to create, in Scotiana, a gallery of these authors and also to establish a list (one more) of their most unforgettable “creatures” : detectives and criminals as well as ordinary people, “l’homme de la rue” as we say in France…

David Ashton

On our blog, we have already introduced Conan Doyle, Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Sue Walker and Ann Cleeves who is not Scottish but has become famous for her Shetland Quartet. That’s a good beginning. Let’s go on with David Ashton. This writer, who is also an actor, was born in Greenock, near Glasgow, in 1941 . His best known crime books are featuring an Edinburgh detective who is portrayed after a real detective who was famous in Edinburgh in the Victorian era when Conan Doyle was still a student.

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Shadow of the Serpent

Fall From The Grace

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While investigating in the field of Scottish crime fiction I fell upon a very interesting article written by Sandra Dick and entitled “Meet James McLevy – the original n° 1 detective”. It was published in the Scotsman on 30 May 2007. It begins like this :

LURKING in the eerie closes, the crowded, stinking tenements and along the Old Town’s dark, damp wynds, petty crime, debauchery and all forms of human brutality festered. Pilferers, pickpockets, prostitutes, vagrants, robbers and burglars. And, very often, murderers.

It was Edinburgh in the mid-19th century, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, a respected seat of learning and home to the cream of Scottish society.

But, as Irish farmer’s son James McLevy quickly discovered, Scotland’s capital was also a rich melting pot for its vile, lawless dregs. So it was just as well that he was on the case (…)

“I was doing research for a television play about Conan Doyle and came across a passing mention of James McLevy,” recalls David. “I asked at the British Library and after what seemed like a couple of hours this book appeared, a sorry looking thing, falling to pieces and tied up with a piece of dingy ribbon.　

“I opened it up and it was like entering another world. Here was this person with this wild humour which I liked, a kind of grandiose quality, someone who really fancied himself as a philosopher with a big character.”

heritage.scotsman.com/people/Meet-James-McLevy–the.3291136.jp

Officially named on Edinburgh City Police’s payroll records as their ‘number 1′ detective in a team of six, over three decades McLevy was involved in around 3000 cases. ”

The Edinburgh Detective - James Levy

Indeed I have discovered a book about the famous Edinburgh detective…

and there is even a BBC audio.

The book is introduced by Quintin Jardine, a well-known Scottish crime-writer. You will find below the Amazon review of the book.

The Inspector McLevy Mysteries

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Edinburgh has provided the backdrop to stories of detection for almost a century and a half. In the 1860s, a few years before Conan Doyle began his medical studies at Edinburgh University, there appeared a hugely popular series of books with titles including”Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh, The Sliding Scale of Life and The Disclosures of a Detective. They were all the work of one James McLevy, an Edinburgh policeman. The now largely forgotten, McLevy was one of the first exponents of the crime genre and a likely influence on the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Like Conan Doyle, McLevy had an Irish background. He was born in Co Armagh, the son of a small farmer. Largely self-educated, he joined the Edinburgh police force in 1830 as a night watchman before rising up through the ranks to become a detective. The collection of stories in this book are based on some of the 2,220 cases he dealt with in the course of his career, wonderfully evoking the spirit of the city, and the vivid descriptions of its criminal classes as they moved between the very different worlds of the Old and New Towns. It is introduced by Quintin Jardine.

As a result of our wide-ranging investigations more and more books are piling on our desk everyday, together with lists of authors, biographical notes, literary events calendars and so on and so on… so to get a clearer view of the situation we’ve felt the need to appeal to experts in crime fiction. There are many of them, I can tell you.

The “Daggers” name and Crossed Daggers logo ® are registered Trade Marks of the Crime Writers’ Association.

I’d like to mention first The Crime Writers Association whose prestigious awards are famous all over the world. We are grateful to them for the precious help they kindly gave us, through the intermediary  of a friendly and learned gentleman, Mr Roger Cornwell, who has answered in French to one of our questions :  Le CWA n’a pas de siege social, car c’est une organisation virtuelle. Les membres du comité habite dans des villes differentes. Amitiés !!!

On the CWA website we’ve found very up-to-date and first-hand information about crime fiction and authors. For example, I’ve just learned that on Monday 5 October 2009 Ann Cleeves would be present at the Inverness Book Festival. If only we could be there ! I must confess I have another good reason to like this Association. Didn’t they grant their prestigious CWA International Dagger Award three times in four years to my favourite French crime novelist : Fred Vargas. For those of our readers who could be interested in French crime fiction (but doesn’t such writing go beyond frontiers…) the three books which were granted the prestigious CWA International Dagger Awards are the following ones : The Chalk Circle Man in 2009 (L’homme aux cercles bleus 1991) – Wash this Blood in 2007 (Sous les vents de Neptune 2004) and The Three Evangelists in 2006 (Debout les morts 1995)

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The Three Evangelists

The Chalk Circle Man

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

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The Origins of the American Detective Story

Today, I fell upon another book entitled The Origins of the American Detective Story whose cover did appeal to me at once. The subject seems to be quite interesting and the book has been written by an eminent Professor who is also an award-winning author. From what I’ve learned in the synopsis of the book, LeRoy Lad Panek, who has written a number of books about crime fiction, focuses in this one on two masters of detective stories : Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle. According to him, with Murders in the Rue Morgue published in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe would be the inventor of the detective story as a literary genre and, forty years later, in 1891, with the publication of The Scandal in Bohemia, Conan Doyle would “reintroduce respectability to detective fiction with his emphasis on logic, reason and methodical thinking.” Quite interesting indeed. I will tell you more as soon as this book  will reach my pile of books to read.

It seems as if crime fiction novels and thrillers are gaining in respectability and are no longer considered as books only written to entertain their readers but as a literary genre in themself. Crime fiction and thrillers may also serve to convey some very important messages about threatening dangers … As I keep saying, especially when I’m reading an unforgettable passage of a book by Fred Vargas : ‘un polar c’est souvent bien plus qu’un polar’.

A bientôt!

In fact Mairiuna, it was Prince Alfred, the second son of Queen Victoria ( later King George V ) that started the Royal Philatelic Collection.

His enthusiasm about stamp collecting was shared with his brother, the Prince of Wales ( later King Edward VII) who bought Prince Alfred’s collection just a few years before he died. In turn, he offered same to his son, the Duke of York, who had spent many hours with his uncle enjoying the hobby.

And from one generation to another, the Royal Philatelic Collection is now in the hands of Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth.

By the way, did you know that Great Britain is the only country that does not print it’s name on postage stamps ?

Look carefully…the only way to identify a British stamp, is to find the Queen’s profile adorning one of the corners.

Great Britain Stamps - Folk & Fairy Tales

As you share the same thematic approach to stamp collecting as I do, we both happily undertook a philatelic quest to find as many postage stamps and other philatelic document that relates to Scotland in any shape or form, and I have to tell you Mairiuna..I find  it’s a very thrilling adventure !

Let’s turn another page of our “Scotiana on Stamps” album to view more stamps about Scottish philately.

The Cairngorms… home to five of the six highest  mountains  in Scotland,  all munros .

Quiz Time !  Can you name them ?

Who volunteers to take a guess?

Click on  “Leave a Comment” down below the post and submit   your answers. We will unveil correct answer on the blog.

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This one from Monaco commemorates Sir Athur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, famous fictional detective, who appears in four novels and fifty-six short stories all together.

Arthur Conan Doyle - 2009 - Sherlock Holmes

Mairiuna, since we are in Edinburgh, would you like to walk down the avenue towards Picardy Place where the statue of Sherlock Holmes was erected close to the house where he was born?

Talk soon,

Janice