Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Doctor Moreau

MEDICAL NOTES

In my last book, The Breath of God, I sought to write something of a love letter to supernatural fiction (using the ultimate fictional rationalist to do so). This time my sights were set on the scientific romance, the escapist fun of deluded scientists, mad professors and the monsters mankind does so like to create.

In doing so I have once more raided the work of others so let me take this opportunity to parade the originals, like a man in the dock admitting to his thefts.

My main crime is of course directed at H.G. Wells’ novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. First published in 1896, Wells’ book is thoroughly discussed here and forms the background of everything you’ve just read. While the conceit of Moreau having been in the employ of Mycroft Holmes has no more justification than that it was fun and brought his brother easily into the matter, I hope the idea that Edward Prendick, the original story’s narrator, might lose his mind through his experiences seems a logical enough extension of the original.

When Wells wrote The Island of Doctor Moreau he had a point to make. I have resisted following in his footsteps. The Army of Dr Moreau is not a polemic, it’s a bit of pulp fun. Though it is somewhat depressing to note that, after so many years, I could still have preached had I wished. As a species we haven’t learned our lesson when it comes to the kindly treatment of our fellow creatures. What terrible animals we still are.

The other crimes I wish to take into consideration concern the members of Mycroft’s ludicrous think tank.

Professor Challenger is sure to be well known to most Holmes enthusiasts as he was another creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The aggressive giant lay at the centre of the novel The Lost World, that glorious romp of dinosaurs and lost tribes. The Lost World has inspired many books and movies, not least of all several direct adaptations. Looser offspring include Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies and (a personal favourite) 1969’s The Valley of Gwangi, where cowboys find their way into an isolated biological pocket in Mexico and come face to face with dinosaurs.

My decision to set the action of this book directly after that of the previous volume means that Challenger has yet to have that adventure, hence his scepticism of Professor Lindenbrook’s claim to have found prehistoric animals at the centre of the Earth. Lindenbrook of course comes from Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

Another scientist who would go on to find strange things beneath the bedrock of our planet is Abner Perry (though, as with Challenger, that adventure lies ahead of him in the chronology of this book). Perry, through the funding of his friend David Innes, would soon invent the “iron mole” and the pair of them burrow their way to adventure in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core, the first of his series of Pellucidar novels. I make no bones about the fact that my version of Perry is played by Peter Cushing, as per the movie from Amicus Studios released in 1976, the year I was born! Cushing is a hero of mine and the film continues to brighten up any grey day I chose to screen it in.

The final member of our team is not played by Peter Cushing, nor Lionel Jeffries (though he could easily have been) but rather Mark Gatiss who’s performance as Professor Cavor in the 2010 adaptation of The First Men in the Moon (another book by H. G. Wells, of course) pleased this viewer no end.

They were small crimes, a fun nod of the hat to the books and movies that have entertained this silly dreamer for the majority of his life.

Carruthers is also stolen from another book, though this time it’s one of my own so the sentence should be negligible. He appears in my novel The World House and its sequel Restoration and he fitted so well that I couldn’t resist having him close to hand once more.

Inspector George Mann is a distinctly unsubtle nod of the trilby to the writer of the same name. I featured the countryside detective in The Breath of God and decided he may as well return here as, if nothing else, it will make George smile that he finally gets to have some action.

Everybody else is either the product of my imagination or Doyle’s (though I have cheekily referenced a scene from the Basil Rathbone movie, Sherlock Holmes and The Voice of Terror and Peter Cook’s appearance as Watson’s editor in Without A Clue because once you start it is so very difficult to stop).