What Wiggins Vowed

Corner of Tottenham Court Road, where Watson searches for news of Eliza.

              --The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle

 

What a Fool I Was

 If you're looking for the magical happy ending from My Fair Lady, you won't find it in my novel. Nor will you find it in Shaw's original play, Pygmalion. Instead you will find this:

"This is where the play gets interesting. Once Higgins wins his bet and completes Eliza’s transformation, she is stuck between two worlds. She can’t to go back to selling flowers and she doesn’t want to be Higgins’ secretary — or worse, his wife. At the end of the play, after an enormous battle of wills, Eliza decides to strike out on her own. “If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence,” she declares.

Then, according to Shaw’s final stage directions, Eliza "sweeps out."

This is from an excellent article from The World, which I link to here, because it explains far better than I can. But think of Pygmalion as Shaw's version of Ibsen's A Doll's House. At the end of that play, Nora slams out the door: the slam heard round the world. Now imagine that Nora had come back in the door and given Torvald a big romantic kiss. You'd have never heard of A Doll's House.

But in Shaw's case, everyone conspired against him. The actors, the director of the movie version, and certainly the producers of My Fair Lady, to soften the blow. Think of Eliza's last words in the film before the ending:

"Goodbye, Professor Higgins. You shall not be seeing me again."

Now that is Shaw's sentiment. But Lerner and Loewe had a killer song up there sleeve and a shlocky, if winning, romantic ending to tag on, which directly denies Shaw.

Now, in the ending of my novel...you don't really think I'm going to tell you the ending, do you? To paraphrase Eliza: 

"What a fool, I'd be, what an addle-pated fool."

My Fair Lady--Without You

The Crudest Ideas

 "Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will. For two hours the strange business in which we had been involved appeared to be forgotten, and he was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian masters. He would talk of nothing but art, of which he had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel."

                                            -- The Hound of the Baskervilles

Jan Verhas  (9 January 1834 – 31 October 1896) was a Belgian painter of the Realist school. He wasknown for his portraits and genre paintings often depicting children of the Belgian bourgeoisie.

Sherlock Holmes's ideas about art are put to the test in The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter.

Suffragette Prison

 Holloway Prison, the largest women's prison in Western Europe until its closure in 2016, was famous for housing prominent suffragettes.

                              --The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle

Monsieur Vernet/Mr. Holmes

 

“My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
                         

--Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter

Monsieur Vernet, coming soon in The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter.

Read Between the Lines

This is my interview with Read Between the Lines podcast, where we discuss the book and I spill way too much info about my second book...and my third.

Historical Novel Socirey Review

New review, this from the Historical Novel Society: "...the plot is full of surprises sure to satisfy any Holmes aficionado, and the ending is quite affecting."

"Aside from the philosophical underpinnings of the book, the plot is full of surprises sure to satisfy any Holmes aficionado, and the ending is quite affecting. But to my mind the irresistible charm of the book lies in sentences such as this: “In lieu of shaking his hand, I knocked on Dr. Strachey’s mahogany desktop like an aboriginal drummer sending signals from one village to the next.”

Review: Billy Boyle

 So this is the first of 16 Billy Boyle novels by James Benn, so I can definitely say I'm fashionably late to the party. I'll just keep this short before plunging into the next one, since there are plenty more reviews to choose from. 

I'll just say that if you want to learn the history of W.W. II from an insider's point of view, while simultaneously being entertained by a murder mystery, you probably can't do better than Billy Boyle, Ike's nephew by marriage, who's not too bright but has good instincts, trained by his Boston cop father, and is trying very hard to stay alive --but not so hard that we aren't treated to Benn's specialty, military action scenes so sharp and clear that you're likely to be dodging bullets throughout. till by the end you're just glad to be alive. Highly recommend.

Billy Boyle can be found here on Amazon.

Flat on My Back and Writing in My Head:

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A little bit about a bump along the road for this first book, and the genesis for my third.

"Nevertheless, I woke up, five weeks later, a little fuzzy in the brain. I had the strange impression that I was really Sherlock Holmes and that Sherlock Holmes was actually me, and there would be hell to pay when someone found out."