Reinventing Mrs. Hudson

Today marks the fifth in my Mrs Hudson Investigates series of books. Death in the harem charts the adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ landlady in Constantinople, at the court of Sultan Hamid II. It’s not an entirely far-fetched premise. In real life, the sultan was a big fan of the Conan Doyle stories, and when the author visited Constantinople on honeymoon with his second wife, he honored them both with medals. Moreover, one of the stories The adventure of the blanched soldiermentions in passing a commission Holmes received from the sultan.

But could I really take Mrs. Hudson to Turkey, as my son’s Turkish in-laws urged me to do? It struck me that there was one place in the city that Sherlock Holmes could never enter, and that was the harem. The seeds of the plot of the new novel were planted.

When I started writing the Mrs. Hudson Investigates stories, I had no idea about turning them into a series. They simply grew out of an exercise I gave students in my Creative Writing class, where I took a small figure from a well-known story and wrote from their point of view, just as Tom Stoppard had done in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. I found that recreating a Victorian voice came very naturally to me, probably because I had been immersed in the literature of the period since childhood. Although there are occasional anachronisms, despite my best efforts.

Mrs. Hudson in the originals is a shadowy figure, usually depicted on screen as a domestic body, who motherly tolerates the whims of her tenant: I’m thinking especially of Rosalie Williams in the excellent Granada adaptations of the stories, with Jeremy Brett in the leading role. as Holmes. But Conan Doyle gives few clues, so for a writer she can be filled in almost any way she wants.

I have made her the widow of her beloved Henry, a middle-class woman with some education and culture (she speaks French and reads books such as the popular works of Mary Elizabeth Bradden). She was about 50 years old in 1895 and was the mother of two grown and married daughters. She is practical, enterprising and good-natured, as evidenced by her tolerance for her hopeless kitchen maid, Phoebe. With gentle feminist leanings, she often laments the position of women in Victorian society and, unlike the coldly rational Holmes, she brings a distinctly feminine sensibility and sympathy for solving mysteries.

So I had written seven stories, but still had to find a publisher! At first I thought so – the literary editor loved them – but eventually she rejected the collection because other people had also considered Holmes’s housekeeper as their central figure. Discouraged, I let the stories lie dormant for more than a year. Finally, I wrote to the editor of the journal of the London-based Sherlock Holmes Society, asking for advice. He suggested I try MX publishing, a company dedicated solely to producing books related to the Baker Street detective.

Four days after I shipped the collection, I received the thumbs up from publisher Steve Emecz, certainly a record. And then I entered the wonderful world of Holmes enthusiasts, whose appetite for stories and books about their hero is seemingly insatiable.

Steve didn’t care that others had written books about Mrs. Hudson. He welcomed it. Anyway, Barry S. Brown’s Mrs. Hudson is very different from mine, a cockney woman who is in fact the real brains behind the detective agency. Meanwhile, Wendy Heyman-Marsaw has put together a collection of recipes in her delectable Memoirs from Mrs. Hudson’s Kitchen.

I find it quite difficult to write short, so it seemed a natural progression to move on to a novel for Mrs. Hudson’s further forays. So far I have taken her to Ireland, Paris and Kent, each time thoroughly enjoying the research involved. For Mrs. Hudson goes to Parisin which she and her sister travel to bring home the latter’s errant son, a wannabe artist, I have her standing shoulder to shoulder with well-known figures from the Belle Epoque, most notably Toulouse Lautrec. For Death in the Garden of EnglandI have studied the fascinating history of the hop harvest, where families from the slums of London’s East End traveled there every year for a month for the grueling work that was a holiday for them. I even visited the Kent Life theme park to experience the harvest for myself.

Death in the harem also required significant research, from studying the biography of Abdul Hamid II to several works on the organization of the harem itself. What the people ate, what they wore – it was a surprise to Mrs. Hudson as well as to me to discover that the ladies of the harem were wearing the latest and undoubtedly very uncomfortable Parisian fashions, dressing themselves, of course, in complete black covered up every time they went out.

In recent years, MX Publishing has also released three volumes of new Sherlock Holmes stories biannually – more than 60 each time! – enthusiastically edited by David Marcum. I contributed fourteen stories to this, nine of which were subsequently collected The Strange Case of the Pale Boy and Other Mysteries. The brief is to write in the style of the canon, nothing escapee or supernatural (Benedict Cumberbatch, eat your heart out). Once again I found it a pure pleasure to reinvent myself as Dr. Watson, where I met Holmes’ arrogance with intelligence and dry humor. David will retire in 2025 when fifty volumes have been met. I don’t know how the multitude of Holmes fans will survive.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hudson’s next adventure is still a gleam in my eye, but embryo-feminist that she is, I think she might stay home this time and venture into the early suffrage movement. Who knows what villains she might encounter there?

(c) Susan Knight

Death in the harem launching on October 16 at the Teachers’ Club Parnell Square, Dublin from 7pm. Everyone welcome.

About Death in the harem:

What’s behind a series of mysterious deaths among the favorite concubines of Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid II? Suspecting a plot against himself, the Sultan has summoned Sherlock Holmes to investigate. As a man, however, the detective is clearly unable to penetrate the exotic closed world of the harem, so he reluctantly enlists the help of his landlady, Mrs. Hudson. Together with Dr. Watson, they travel by Orient Express through Europe to Constantinople, encountering Holmes’ old enemy, Baron Mauterpuis, along the way.

Once ensconced in the harem, Mrs. Hudson must adapt to the strange new world she finds there, full of jealousy and superstition. Holmes has assured her that she is in no danger, but while trying to unravel the tangled web surrounding the concubines’ deaths, Mrs. Hudson uncovers alarming evidence about the Baron, putting her in mortal danger.

The hodgepodge of characters in this riveting novel includes the formidable Abdul Hamid II himself, the sweet young Princess Naime, a menacing eunuch named Bashir, Mrs. Hudson’s lively French maid Madeleine, a Russian diva, a homely English governess, a wicked little boy and a tiger named Guzellik.

MX publications are available directly from https://mxpublishing.com or from Amazon.