Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches II by Bill Peschel

Author:Bill Peschel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Bill Peschel
Published: 2016-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

The Asbestos Society of Sinners

Lawrence Daniel Fogg

Setting your story in an underworld populated with historical figures has been popular since Dante. John Kendrick Bangs (1853-1931) wrote two books playing with the idea, and Lawrence Daniel Fogg (1879-1914), an English-born U.S. reporter, followed his lead with The Asbestos Society of Sinners. To sooth Bangs’ feelings, if they needed to be, Fogg secured his blessing and dedicated the book to him. This excerpt, featuring a cigar-smoking Sherlock, was reprinted in a 1999 chapbook by mystery bookseller and Sherlockian Otto Penzler.

I was in the region of Outer Darkness to which the dead are banished to await the judgment. All about me was a misty blackness so oppressive that one felt as if wedged between mountains. My feet sank in the soft earth, composed of those good intentions with which I had helped to pave the road to Hell. Voices of other days seemed to sound in my ears; out of the shadowy mist forms of ghostly men and women emerged and then were lost to sight, swallowed up in the darkness.

Perceiving a glimmering light in the distance I hastened toward it. A phantom house barred my path, but I flitted through it as though it were not. A pale twilight now made objects discernable and I breathed more freely, for I no longer stumbled over the good resolutions, which, being broken, blocked the pavement.

A troop of specters surrounded me and tried to stop my progress. Shades though they were, their attentions were annoying and I tried to brush them aside. My hands passed through shadows and the phantoms laughed in derision.

“What’s the news?” they cried again and again.

I hadn’t come to Hades to be interviewed, and knowing from the inside some of its perils, I declined to relate what the upper world was doing. This enraged the shades, who gathered about me threateningly. Just then one of my companions on the Styx yachting trip came to my aid. His appearance seemed to inspire the specters with terror, for they all fled. The newcomer was talkative.

“Did you recognize in the leader of that band our old friend, Diogenes?” he asked.

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