Why I Wrote “A Man Named Baskerville”

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A Man Named Baskerville by Jim Nelson

[Note: The following is adapted and compressed from the afterword to A Man Named Baskerville. It reveals some details from the book. It also contains spoilers to the book it was inspired by, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.]

Years ago, while traveling Japan via its Shinkansen bullet train, I found myself without a book to read. An ebook reader I’d installed on my phone came with a free sample to whet the reader’s appetite. That book was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of the earliest Holmes short stories. (I explore this incident in greater detail in my 2016 post “Sherlock by Train.”)

The collection stands as a record of a remarkably creative streak. So remarkable, if Doyle were to have stopped writing after its publication, we would still be talking about his literary creation and storytelling prowess. The titles of the stories within are as familiar as the books of the Bible: “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Perhaps the only missing short story title of comparable infamy is “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” published in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes a mere two years later. In toto, they represent the height of Doyle’s powers and inventiveness.

None of this inspired me to write A Man Named Baskerville. As exciting and inventive as a great Sherlock Holmes story can be, never have I entertained the question that has dogged countless other producers of Doyle homages and pastiches: Could I write my own Sherlock Holmes story? Honestly, the thought has never crossed my mind.

After consuming the first collection in a rush of reading, I used the opportunity of a brief train stop and some free wireless Internet access to download more Sherlock Holmes books for our continued journey. I had read a little of Doyle’s work before, and never found much interest in it. They were too Victorian for my tastes, too concerned with Empire and upright decency and British morality. My California upbringing, and the plain-speaking tastes I inherited from my parents, led me to the hardboiled school of Chandler, Hammett, and Cain. Nathanael West’s grotesqueries and William Gibson’s cyberpunks are a better fit for me than Holmes’ Irregulars.

On that train ride, my interest in Sherlock Holmes kindled. Holmes may not have walked Chandler’s mean streets, but he did present a more compelling moral force than I’d sensed before. As with the hardboiled school, Holmes time and again must balance his own sense of justice against the British legal system’s notion of the same. Doyle wrote for an audience who would understand those boundaries implicitly. A hundred and ten years later, I viewed Holmes’ sense of justice through a different lens. This came to a point when my reading reached The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The book was first serialized in 1901, ten years after that auspicious run of early short stories. Doyle had killed off Holmes in “The Final Problem” (1893) hoping to rid himself of the literary creation upstaging all his other work. An appalled public demanded more stories featuring Holmes, and publishers increasingly pressured Doyle to satisfy the market’s cravings.

Inspired by a trip to Devon and its local folklore of wisht hellhounds roaming the countryside at night, Doyle produced The Hound of the Baskervilles. To avoid what we today call “continuity problems,” he retroactively dated its events to October 1888, three years before the publication of his earliest stories. This places the story square in the middle of the Autumn of Terror, when a serial killer dubbed Saucy Jack terrified London, while, across the Atlantic, the Empire of Brazil was warily beginning its dissolution.

One overlooked quality of Doyle’s writing is that his knack for concise storytelling in the short form executes equally brilliantly in the longer form. I’ve seen adept short story writers get fouled up when they attempt to tackle the novel. The pacing and breathing cadences that permit a runner to win the 100-meter dash do not sustain when attempting a marathon. Yet Doyle’s economical style holds up with Hound, making for dazzling quick cuts between crucial scenes, and exposition that does not lead the reader to impatiently flip ahead. Doyle had a gift for paring down prose to its vital emotional and informational elements without stripping it of that uniquely English sense of mood and atmosphere. One also sees in Hound Doyle’s assiduous control of pacing. The early chapters draw out their eerie scenes, while the closing chapters barrel headlong toward the conclusion. The movement becomes so breathless at the end, it takes pure inference on the part of the reader to detect scene changes.

Readers either love or hate this no-nonsense approach to storytelling. Either way, the final output of his opus on the moors is consistent with this quality, and obviously has held the public’s interest for well over a century.

None of this inspired me to write this book, either. I grew to admire Doyle’s writing while traveling by bullet train, but I never craved to imitate it. The first fourteen chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles served to reaffirm my growing estimation of the man’s talents, but not to pick up a pen.

What did inspire me to write A Man Named Baskerville? The fifteenth and final chapter of the book it derives from.

All detective mysteries deal in sleight-of-hand. Keeping the perpetrator out of the narrative limelight until the moment the solution is announced is a tried-and-true technique for maintaining the element of surprise. In response, savvy readers have learned to guess whodunnit by evaluating how much “screen time” the author gives the suspects. The most obvious suspect is never culpable. The suspect we’ve read the least about is quite often guilty up to their eyeballs.

First edition cover of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
First edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles

And that’s pretty much the case in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The perpetrator is one we hear precious little about, an absentminded collector of butterflies and moths named Jack Stapleton who lives with his sister (the nineteenth-century equivalent to rooming in your parents’ basement, apparently). He’s not the least elaborated-upon character in the book, but he is pictured as far removed from the crimes and the curse of the Baskervilles. When Holmes and Watson finally suspect his guilt, Doyle spends no time speculating on his motivations in favor of keeping the story moving at a brisk clip.

Doyle knew the reader would eventually demand to know why Stapleton posed under an assumed identity to murder his uncle in such a contrived way, and then attempt the same on his cousin. To sew things up, in Chapter 15, Watson calls on Holmes to explain the background of Jack Stapleton. Holmes launches into fourteen pages of exposition, a matter-of-fact recounting of Rodger’s life from the New World to Devonshire, England.

Much detail is omitted, of course, but Holmes’ reckoning of Rodger’s life is a far more plumbed-out biography than I think any reader expected. After all, Holmes could have simply stated, “He was raised abroad and returned to England to kill his uncle and claim his estate.” Yes, that could be worded more artfully, but Doyle stretched himself to fill in the blanks.

I don’t know why Doyle felt the need to so thoroughly detail Rodger Baskerville’s life. I’m not sure anyone does. In my research for A Man Named Baskerville, I never located a definitive answer to the question. Perhaps in Doyle’s papers, or in a complete treatise on his life and work, an answer may be found. Perhaps it was a modernist faith in the triumph of reason—all things must be explained that can be explained—that led Doyle to stretch himself, much as he uses many pages to lay out the backstory in A Study in Scarlet and some of his short stories.

What I do know is, reading those seemingly superfluous fourteen pages of Rodger’s life struck me as a kind of boggy sinkhole in the tale. It felt Arthur Conan Doyle had wanted to write two books, Rodger’s life story and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unable or uninterested in writing the first, he wrote the latter and included a précis of the former in the final chapter.

Fascinated, I made copious notes of Holmes’ reckoning of Rodger’s life. Later, I transferred and organized them on my computer. A bell tinkled in my mind, a Pavlovian reaction all writers develop: Is there a novel here? I let the idea stew. Holmes’ reckoning might appear a rich vein to mine, but once I started digging, it might yield little more than a couple of small gems.

And how would readers react to Rodger as a main character? Yes, everyone says they like stories about villains—but too often those so-called villains are more like lovable rogues or bad boys with a soft spot. Was I trying to humanize Rodger Baskerville? That’s exactly what a novel does: It humanizes. Would it be a Victorian “Sympathy for the Devil”?

Maybe, I thought, I should just write the damn thing and see what comes out of the keyboard.

I made a private agreement with myself: I would not write yet another pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, of which there are plenty to pass around. The book would be told in Rodger’s voice and not in imitation of Doyle’s Watson. Of course, that didn’t excuse me from the challenges of writing a historical novel, which include diction, grammar, tone of voice, colloquialisms, and historical accuracy. Nor could I write such a book without featuring Holmes and Watson at some point.

Mostly, though, my doubts centered on originality. Certainly someone had executed on this idea since the publication of Doyle’s book. Internet searches yielded nothing of the sort.

It became a secret too juicy to keep to myself: In the final chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle embedded a working outline for a novel—a rousing novel, in my estimation—that had been overlooked for over a century. It took me five years to set aside my private doubts and write it.

Yes, it was exhilarating to liberally borrow from a master’s synopsis and expand it into this novel. No, having said synopsis to work from did not make my job any easier.

When I planned A Man Named Baskerville, I failed to see how a man with Rodger’s background would not bring to Dartmoor one or more Central or South American dialects along with his impeccable upper-class English accent. He would also bring with him a rich and varied New World culture as his starting point of reference.

Once in England, around his neck would be the weight of several albatrosses: His father’s suspicious exile; his “ethnic” upbringing and foreign tongue; his lack of secure income; his marriage to a dusky woman most un-Anglo-Saxon. Only his upper-crust accent would save him. It would work in the British Isles like a charge card with no spending limit. After all, he didn’t merely fool the English into thinking he was one of them; he fooled them into thinking he was better than most of them.

Freud’s narcissism of small differences is an underappreciated observation of the continuing human condition. As long as people lift themselves up by cataloging their differences with outsiders, there will always be Rodger Baskervilles walking among us.

That’s why I wrote A Man Named Baskerville.

A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE reviewed at My Murmuring Bones

A Man Named Baskerville by Jim Nelson

Viktorija over at My Murmuring Bones reviews A Man Named Baskerville as one of the last legs of the Escapist book tour. She offers an enthusiastic review of the book, and I’m more than grateful for it:

Nelson’s style is convincing and engaging, and places his novel firmly shoulder-to-shoulder with the Sherlock Holmes canon. The attention to detail and careful references to the established course of events are striking, and the character of Baskerville is portrayed with startling humanity. By far best of all is the way Baskerville refers to Holmes and Watson, and those passages are delightful to read.

This well-researched, carefully crafted, and absorbing read will delight mystery aficionados and Sherlock Holmes fans, and would very likely give Doyle himself immense joy, not least of all for the treatment of his storied detective. “It’s time someone said it,” he would surely exclaim.

I’m blushing! Check out the full review is at My Murmuring Bones, along with Viktorija’s other reviews of books and film.

Interview and review of A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE at FanFiAddict

A Man Named Baskerville by Jim Nelson

The final stop of the A Man Named Baskerville tour is at FanFiAddict, where they’ve graciously published an interview and book review.

The 8 out of 10 review by Victoria Gross is wonderful and offers a lot of grist to consider:

Having a villain as a protagonist is a bold choice. I found myself almost rooting for Baskerville as he continued to make questionable choice after choice. I was still in his corner after LITERALLY MURDERING PEOPLE. I don’t know what that says about me as a person, but it definitely cements the fact that Nelson is a damn good writer. It also posits Sherlock as a kind of dimwit (and if you love Benedict Cumberbatch as I do, it was hard to swallow—at first) which is certainly an interesting take on the famed sleuth. His deductive reasoning had holes and it wasn’t something I was used to seeing in representations of the character. I found it as almost a Wizard of Oz moment, the proverbial pulling back of the curtain to reveal that the Wizard is only a man.

In the interview with Justin Gross, I discuss the making of Baskerville and what led me to write it in the first place. One example:

Were there any specific challenges with writing A Man Named Baskerville? Or, did you find anything to be easier?

The most significant challenge was writing in the style of the nineteenth-century British, as well as researching language, technology, and history, so as to be true to the time and place. As the book is told in Rodger Baskerville’s voice, I didn’t have to imitate Arthur Conan Doyle, but I did use The Hound of the Baskervilles as a primary source for so many things, including diction. I also did a considerable amount of research into more esoteric topics, especially the British peerage system and the baronet title, subjects very important to Rodger.

Was anything easier here than my other books? Actually, it was the character of Rodger that made one thing easier: He’s an audacious fellow, and quite confident. In my other books, the main character would often have to think through doing something outrageous or daring. Not Rodger! He’s the kind of person who barrels into a situation and bluffs his way out of it. That made for some fun chapters.

Thank you Victoria and Justin!

A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE book tour starts now

The A Man Named Baskerville book tour is underway! As the above graphic shows, the tour is making stops at several spots around the book-reading web. I’m working with Escapist Tours, who have been an able hand in putting together all the finishing touches.

Throughout the week, several well-known book reviewers and bloggers will be discussing Baskerville. I’ll post here as the tour stops along the way, and what these great and generous readers have to say.

If you’re curious, learn more about A Man Named Baskerville here. It’s my take on the classic Sherlock Holmes novel retold from a brand-new perspective. As I like to say, I peered into the Arthur Conan Doyle book and realized there was another book within the book—another story waiting to be told.

And if you’d like to read A Man Named Baskerville, consider signing up for the giveaway: I’m raffling off one digital edition of the book at the conclusion of the tour. To sign up, just follow this link.

Now available: A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE

Cover of "A Man Named Baskerville" by Jim Nelson

IT’S HERE!

He took on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and he lost. Now he wants revenge.

In 1888, Sherlock Holmes slayed the spectral hound haunting the Devonshire moor, thereby laying to rest the curse of the Baskervilles once and for all. The perpetrator escaped into the night and was presumed drowned, consumed by the murky bog…

In truth, the criminal mastermind survived the night to nurse his wounds and plot his revenge against Sherlock Holmes.

A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE recounts the life and times of Rodger Baskerville, exiled heir to the esteemed family’s fortune. His journal records his adventures from the Amazon rainforests to the beaches of Costa Rica to Victorian England, where he attempts to take his rightful place at Baskerville Hall. Along the way, he peels back the layers of family secrets and scandals untold in Dr. Watson’s account of the demonic hound haunting the Baskervilles.

Most of all, he describes a Sherlock Holmes unlike the legendary detective you think you know.

A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE retells the infamous Arthur Conan Doyle mystery in a way you’ve never read before. It’s a sizzling new take on a classic hailed as a masterpiece of the English language, named one of the most influential books ever by the BBC and Le Monde, and beloved by Sherlock Holmes fans worldwide for over a century.

It’s a rousing adventure, from start to finish! What’s more—it’s a Sherlock Holmes story unlike any you’ve read before.

A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE is now available for Kindle download! Order it now for the new release price of 99¢! And the book is FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Coming soon: A MAN NAMED BASKERVILLE

Cover of "A Man Named Baskerville" by Jim Nelson

I’d like to tell you about my upcoming novel, A Man Named Baskerville.

The germ for the book comes from a train trip across Japan where I had nothing to read save for a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. From there I read The Hound of the Baskervilles and developed an idea I stored away inside my writing notebook:

What if I told Doyle’s original book from the point of view of the criminal rather than Dr. Watson?

I let this simple idea simmer for a few years before taking up the task. The result is my latest novel, due for publication this March.

To offer a taste, here’s my current back cover blurb:

He took on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and he lost.

Now he wants revenge.

In 1888, Sherlock Holmes slayed the spectral hound haunting the Devonshire moor, thereby laying to rest the curse of the Baskervilles once and for all. The perpetrator escaped into the night and was presumed drowned, consumed by the murky bog…

In truth, the criminal mastermind survived the night to nurse his wounds and plot his revenge against Sherlock Holmes.

A Man Named Baskerville recounts the life and times of Rodger Baskerville, heir to the esteemed family’s fortune. His journal records his adventures from the Amazon rainforests to the beaches of Costa Rica to Victorian England, where he attempts to rejoin his family and take his rightful place at Baskerville Hall. Along the way, he peels back the layers of family secrets and scandals untold in Watson’s account of the demonic hound haunting the Baskervilles.

Most of all, he describes a Sherlock Holmes unlike the detective you think you know.

A Man Named Baskerville retells the infamous Arthur Conan Doyle mystery in a way like you’ve never read before. It’s a sizzling new take on a classic hailed as a masterpiece of the English language, named one of the most influential books ever by the BBC and Le Monde, and beloved by Sherlock Holmes fans worldwide for over a century.

A Man Named Baskerville is a Victorian-era novel of crime and suspense about what may be the least-understood criminal in the Sherlock Holmes canon. As Holmes said of him, “We have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel … He is a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and a murderous heart.”

He also has a story of his own to tell, and that’s what A Man Named Baskerville is about.

If you want to be notified when the book is ready, sign up for my newsletter. Not only will you get a message when it’s ready, you’ll have a chance to buy early copies at a reduced price.

Advance readers wanted

I’m currently seeking advance readers. If you’d like to read an ARC (Advance Review Copy):

  • Send me an email at jimbonator@gmail.com with the Subject: line “ARC for A Man Named Baskerville”
  • I’ll send you a link to download a digital copy (in either EPUB or MOBI format)
  • You read it (sooner rather than later)
  • You submit an honest and personal review on its Amazon page when the book is released

And that’s all there is to it.

Note that the advance copy you receive may still have typos, small errors, etc. It will be missing the cover and the usual front and back matter. I’m now using the BookFunnel service to distribute ARCs, which should make it easy to load the book into your e-reader (or read online).

The ARC is not ready at this moment. If you email me, you should expect to receive a copy in the middle of March, about 1 to 2 weeks before the book is published.

Thank you!

Sherlock by train

Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson by Sidney Paget (1860-1908) (Strand Magazine)(Update: The events related in this blog post led to me writing A Man Named Baskerville, now available in Kindle and paperback.)

Last summer I had the great fortune to spend ten weeks in Japan. I traveled by train up and down the islands, from the agriculturally diverse Hokkaido to the richly historical city of Nagasaki at the southern tip of Kyushu. Japan is a fugue of culture, architecture, and landscape. The country never repeats itself, but is stitched together by interlocking themes.

On one leg of the trip I made the key mistake of failing to pack a second book, thinking B. Traven‘s The Death Ship was a hefty enough read until my return to Tokyo. Well, I ripped through The Death Ship in no time (a great novel, by the way) and found myself facing a long stretch of time on Japan’s shinkansen (bullet train) without a thing to read. Even if I understood Japanese, Japan’s trains are not like other systems where you might chance on a discarded newspaper or a light magazine in the seat-back pocket. The Japanese do not leave their detritus behind when they detrain. They even pick up their trash when they exit a baseball game.

Desperate, I searched my smartphone and discovered on my Kindle app The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), the first published collection of Holmes’ adventures. Most of the collection’s story titles are as well-known as books of the Bible: “The Adventure of the Red-headed League”, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, and more. The stories have fallen into the public domain, hence the collection is often the free sample book Amazon supplies when you buy a Kindle or install their app.

Before my trip to Japan, I was never a fan of Sherlock Holmes. I found the Victorian airs and British pleasantries stuffy compared to Holmes’ American counterparts. When I first read “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” at age ten or eleven, I was going through a boyhood codes-and-ciphers phase. By all rights I should have loved the story. Instead I felt a bit let down by its lack of focus on actual cryptanalysis. As I learned on that train ride, Doyle’s stories are often more concerned with a viscount’s ancestry or Tsarist intrigue or preserving the good name of the British Empire than the dead body lying at Holmes’ and Watson’s feet.

All this is to explain that although I’ve read mystery fiction my entire life, from Encyclopedia Brown at the age of seven to the adult pleasures of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (which I reread every few years), on that bullet train ride I was not terribly conversant with the Sherlock Holmes corpus. I’d read The Hound of the Baskervilles a few years before at an acquaintance’s suggestion when I mentioned I’d enjoyed the neo-Gothic Rebecca. Other than some Sherlock Holmes movie spoofs and casual viewing of Jeremy Brett’s BBC series, my exposure to the detective was largely through cultural references and the turns of phrase that have entered our common language, much like someone ignorant in Shakespeare will recognize bits of Hamlet.

Something wonderful happened on that train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto. As these stories of detection and deduction spooled out before me, I realized much of Doyle’s contemporary British audience would have been reading these stories on trains as well. Since he was writing for Strand magazine, Doyle’s audience would’ve picked up a copy at a newsstand before boarding, the Victorian version of buying a thriller at an airport bookstore before a long plane ride.

The cadences and rhythms of Doyle’s stories almost appear crafted for train reading. The percussion of the shinkansen tracks below and the low whistle of the passing wind was the perfect white noise to accompany a Holmes mystery. More than once I started a story as our train left the station, and by the time Holmes was announcing his solution, we were slowing for our next stop. Obviously Doyle wasn’t timing his stories for bullet trains, but it felt he crafted them with a sense of being read in a single sitting between destinations, whether traveling by steam or horse or electromagnets.

How often does Holmes send Watson scurrying to locate a train schedule to confirm some paramount clue or destroy an alibi? How often does Holmes engage in mysterious research in London before setting off by train first thing in the morning, only revealing the details of his research to Watson on the ride north?

Holmes and Watson call for cabs, hire carriages and watercraft, borrow steeds, follow bicycle tracks, and so on. Freedom of mobility is vital to a Sherlock Holmes story. It’s the core question in “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” and “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”. A horse-and-carriage ride is the central puzzle in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”. The climax of A Study in Scarlet involves, of all things, hailing a cab off Baker Street.

All fiction writers are writing to a perceived readership, whether they acknowledge it or not. This is distinct from a “target audience,” which commercial writers are all too familiar with. (A staff writer for Wired magazine will consciously know her target audience, which is distinct from the target audience for a sportswriter in a Midwestern farming community.) My notion of a “perceived readership” is more personal than a target audience, a writer’s internalization of their desired audience rather than a market demographic.

Some writers write with magazine editors and agents and publishers in mind—people they hope will publish the story they’re crafting. Some writers think of authors they admire or authors they desire to emulate. Some writers are thinking of friends and family whom they hope to impress, or at least earn their respect. Some writers are thinking of the public at large (whatever that abstract concept means) hoping to earn a wide audience.

Unlike “target audience,” it doesn’t mean the writer is actually writing for this perceived reader. The writer doesn’t actually believe only their friends will read their book, or that some big-name writer will pick it up, especially since that big-name writer may be dead. But just as painting a house requires a house to apply the emulsion, a perceived readership in the back of a writer’s mind gives the writer a kind of fuzzy target to aim for without committing to it.

By the time I returned from Japan, I’d devoured three Sherlock Holmes collections. For all the faults and stuffiness, Doyle is a generous writer, one who engaged with his readership and even challenged them a bit, but never denying them their desires. I suspect Doyle (like Dickens) read correspondence from his readers and was sensitive to their criticisms and praise. I don’t think it’s an accident Doyle modeled his first-person narrator as a physician, Doyle’s own intended profession, or that Watson wrote of Holmes’ exploits under the conceit of penning newspaper articles. Not only did it fill the public with the sensation Holmes was alive—many believed so at the time—but Watson’s audience also gave Doyle the house for which to apply the paint.

Doyle’s perceived readership began to coalesce with his target audience, like blurry double-vision sharpening into a single distinct form. I’m not arguing this is desirable or advantageous, but I do think it happened and that Doyle’s writing was the better for it. I also believe this is part of the reason for Sherlock Holmes’ character persisting as a vivid creative construct well into the 21st century. After all, Holmes’ as an individual is not some empty vessel for each generation of readers to pour their own ideals into. His persistence comes from being odd, unique, idiosyncratic, and ripe for reinterpretation.

This connection between author and perceived readership is a direct rebuttal to the 20th century myth of the “walled-off” author, the lone genius in a room with a typewriter penning works of high art unsullied by mammon or mass culture. While Nabokov, Faulkner, and Woolf may not have been writing for money and celebrity—although I think people are too quick to assume such things—I certainly believe all three were writing for a perceived readership, some idealized notion of the reader they wished to attract.

With the rise of ride-sharing like Uber and Lyft, and with the inevitable arrival of driverless cars in the future, we may experience a fresh resurgence of people with additional time on their hands to read. Who knows? Much as digital music led to the renewal of singles, there may soon be a burgeoning market for short stories and story collections, mysteries and otherwise, as people seek a brief form of entertainment while traveling.

What kind of story matches the cadences and rhythms of a self-driving car? And can America today produce writers as sensitive and generous as Doyle?