Sherlockian Pastiche and Unwrapping a Mummy: Guest Post by Jeri Westerson

First, get yourself a several thousand-year-old dead guy, invite all your friends over to watch you unwrap him from his bindings, then grind him into a powder and everyone gets to go home with a powdered mummy souvenir. Fun times!

Well, that was the premise behind the Victorian “Egyptomania” fad. Not only did they scramble all over themselves to get the latest piece of ancient Egyptian sculpture, canopic jar, statue, vase, stylized wallpaper and curtains, but they also wanted that mummy. And mummies were a dime a dozen in Egypt —or gold Egyptian pound a dozen, I suppose—even though it was technically illegal to sell and take these artifacts out of the country. (If you’ve ever been to the British Museum in London, you can’t swing a statue of Bastet without hitting a mummy.)

And besides the proliferation of séances and spiritualism in general, this fascination with all things Egyptian was a fad that would take them right up to the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, where it would only flare up again.

So when I set out to write my own Sherlockian pastiche (“Holmesian” for all my Brit fans out there), I wanted them to have that taste of the sensationalism of penny dreadful stories that were popular at the time. Such titles as Varney the Vampire in the Feast of Blood were pretty much de rigueur for the day. The first book in my An Irregular Detective Mystery series, THE ISOLATED SÉANCE, introduced my own characters, Tim Badger, the former Baker Street Irregular who aged out of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars, and his black friend from the East End, Ben Watson (no relation to Doctor Watson). The two opened their own detecting agency under the patronage and watchful eye of one Mister Sherlock Holmes. Their first client of any real substance was the manservant of the universally disliked Horace Quinn and is accused of his murder during a locked-room séance. There is the woo-woo element of the supernatural of the story, something that even Doyle did not shy away from in his stories, mostly including The Adventure of the Creeping Man, The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, and The Hound Of The Baskervilles. But unlike the sensational writers of his day, he only made it look as if it were supernatural, and gave Holmes the logic and intelligence to disprove it, even though Doyle himself was a rabid spiritualist and believer in séances…and, it must be said, fairies.

In my latest book in the series, THE MUMMY OF MAYFAIR,  my detectives are hired as security for a mummy unwrapping party given by an illustrious surgeon, when Badger and Watson make a rather grisly discovery.

Not only am I having a whale of a time climbing out of the medieval and Tudor milieu, but delighting in the research into the late Victorian period. Oh, and the props! I can get the real deal from the Victorian period to display at my book events, not all those medieval and Tudor reproductions. For instance, ask me about castor sets when next you see me. Okay, never mind, I can’t stand it. I’ll just tell you about them now. Watch old movies carefully, whether they are depicting Victorian times or contemporary 1930s or 1940s times set in England or America. Look at the kitchen or dining room tables. There will be a castor set on them. A silver carousel of glass containers that consisted of salt and pepper, oil and vinegar (or sometimes sugar shaker) and a mustard pot with spoon. These everyday items—and no one would really ever mention them in an inventory because they were so common to every table—lasted from the seventeenth century all the way to the early 1950s. And their remnants can be found in your everyday restaurant that has on your table a salt and pepper shaker in a wire container with a stalk to pick it up with, that might also have your ketchup, mustard, and sugar packets in it. 

Yes, this kind of thing excites the heck outta me. But I digress.

Weren’t we talking about mummies? 

The first man to unwrap a mummy for entertainment purposes was surgeon Thomas Pettigrew (1791-1865). It happened in front of a group of doctors in 1821, perhaps to give the affair legitimacy, but by the 1830s it was for the shock value of ordinary folk. He began with an introduction and lecture, then unrolled each layer of linen bandages, revealing amulets secreted there during the mummifying process. In fact, Alexander Hamilton, the 10^th Duke of Hamilton (not that Alexander Hamilton) hired Pettigrew to mummify him when he died, and bury him in a genuine Egyptian sarcophagus that he had acquired to donate to the British Museum, but kept it for his own purposes and was indeed, mummified and interred in it in 1852. Now that’s dedication to one’s hobby. 

In any case, it was the ultimate in society street cred to be invited to one of these affairs, and they were many. And your powdered mummy? That was a throwback to medieval curatives, a medicine used in the Middle Ages as the latest snake oil. Despite advances in medicine throughout the long Victorian period though, Victorians also believed that a tincture made with powdered mummy was a cure-all. (Mmm. Just a little musty-tasting but great when added to my laudanum!) 

So what could be better than this setting to place one’s mystery, only to have it widen the circle of suspects to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, to smuggling, and more murders that all involve Egyptomania…with Sherlock Holmes popping into the action now and again to set our young detectives on the right path with maddening hints? 

Incidentally, never did I imagine writing Sherlock Holmes! I was used to the medieval and now the Tudor period with my King’s Fool Mystery series. It would have been intimidating to write an entire book about Holmes. Better that I concentrate instead on these two young men from the East End who observe Holmes from their point of view and stumble through their cases, even with their own Boswell to write up their adventures, a female reporter (based on a real female reporter of the time) who at first rankles them with her less than flattering articles, and then comes to know them and then to admire their resourcefulness. The books have a lot of humor, heart, a little romance, and moments of pathos. 

I treat the Doyle canon as I treat other historical periods. As if it were real. Don’t deviate from the history. Just include it in the lives of my characters, real or fictional. And so it is the “what if” of my characters coming in contact with Doyle’s characters. What would be natural? Would the reader believe my characters’ reality alongside Doyle’s reality? That’s the fun of a pastiche, I’ve discovered. Blending them as a whole, writing it from the point of view of two blokes, not from the perspective of the Great Detective himself, but as an affectionate complement to it.

 

Jeri Westerson is the author of the King’s Fool Mysteries, with Henry VIII’s real court jester Will Somers as the reluctant sleuth, her fifteen-book complete Crispin Guest Medieval Noir series, and several other historical and paranormal series. The second in her Sherlockian An Irregular Detective Mystery, THE MUMMY OF MAYFAIR, is available now.