Weird Wednesday

Two not dissimilar self-portraits. The top one is a sketch by James Ensor entitled Demons Teasing Me. It was drawn in 1888. Ensor, of course, is famous for his weird imagery, especially of skulls and masks. The bottom one is by someone less well-known: Charles Doyle, brother of the successful Punch cartoonist and fairy painter Richard Doyle, and father of Arthur Conan. Charles Doyle had early modest success as an artist (also painting fairies a lot, and illustrating, rather badly, A Study in Scarlet) but struggled with alcholism and depression. He painted the above watercolour, simply called Memoir: A Self-Portait, in Montrose Asylum at about the same time as Ensor's sketch (the exact date is unknown). Clearly he, too, felt himself to be teased by his own personal demons. His middle name, incidentally, was Altamont - as in riot.

Monstrous Monday

Huge, horrible, underwater creepy-crawlie illustrating the second of the two parts of The Lord of the Dark Face, a short sequel to The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only is the horrid earwiggy thing enormous and armed with scary pincers, it can shoot out killer volts like an electric eel - lucky that poor fish got in the way of the blast or our heroes would have been done for. I'm thinking of reproducing the instalments of The Maracot Deep and The Lord of the Dark Face in book form. All I have to do is scan them, set up a print-on-demand account and find a way of letting people know it's available - but the latter bit is the hard bit.

The Prof is back

Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger returns for the last time in a two-part story, The Disintegration Machine. Here he is displaying his usual good temper on the front of the Strand Magazine, January 1929.

The Maracot Deep x 2

Two more illustrations from Conan Doyle's Atlantean adventure novel The Maracot Deep, serialised in The Strand in 1927-28. In the first a lobster monster clamps down on the diving bell and in the second an Atlantean lady bobs up to the surface in a big glass aqualung-type thang.

The Maracot Deep

Colourful front cover to the October 1927 edition of The Strand Magazine plugging the first instalment of Conan Doyle's The Maracot Deep. Another Atlantis story - there were a few of these in The Strand in the twenties for some reason - and not a patch on The Lost World. There's bound to be a few good illos from it, though.

Farewell, Mr Holmes

April 1927, The Strand magazine opens with an atmospheric frontispiece to Shoscombe Old Place - and look, Sherlock's wearing a deer-stalker. You didn't see that very often. I reckon the illustrations by Frank Wiles for the last few stories were far more responsible for the image we have of Sherlock Holmes, taken up by Basil Rathbone etc, than the original, more celebrated, ones by Sidney Paget. Who would have guessed, though, that this would be the last Holmes story ever to be written? Conan Doyle died three years later and never revisited his most lucrative creation.

Oddly enough, though, the previous month The Strand held a competition (see above) inviting readers to choose what they considered the dozen best Sherlock Holmes stories - the person whose selection most closely matched that of Doyle himself won £100. Although the selection could only be made from the four volumes of short stories already in print, with the series then running exempt, there was clearly no idea in anyone's heads that Holmes's adventures had come to an end.

Doyle's selection was not an easy one to guess. There are some odd choices, such as The Empty House, and many of the classics you might expect are absent. I think Doyle was keen to offer a selection throughout Holmes's history, since he was aware of the general (and not entirely fair) criticism that his stories post-Reichenbag Falls weren't as good as those which had preceded his hero's putative demise. Indeed, in the explanation he offers for his choice of stories, Doyle states that he wished he'd been able to include The Lion's Mane, since he considered it one of his very best. Personally, I think The Lion's Mane the poorest of the stories, so there you go. I was pleased to see The Devil's Foot in his list, though, because that is one of my favourites.

The winner of the competition succeeded in getting 10 of the 12 stories right (I bet Empty House and Reigate Squires weren't in his choice). Doyle's selection was, in the order he gave them: Speckled Band, Red-Headed League, Dancing Men, Final Problem, Scandal in Bohemia, Empty House, Five Orange Pips, Second Stain, Devil's Foot, Priory School, Musgrave Ritual, Reigate Squires.

Back cover, front cover

Back of the September 1926 edition of The Strand with the front cover of the October edition opposite. Particularly striking cover on the October issue - that's Steve Dixie threatening Sherlock from The Three Gables.

But I find the Rinso ad fascinating too with its strict demarcation of the gender roles - He goes out to work, She stays at home and does the laundry. Note too how much older he looks than her - but that's a commercially important male fantasy, one that was upheld in films, I've noticed, way into the 60s and occasionally beyond. It was seen as perfectly normal that a young woman in her early 20s should find attractive men in their 40s or 50s.

In the advert the chap is announcing: 'What I want is a fresh, happy-looking wife on a Monday evening. And that's what Rinso gives me' - by saving her labour and making sure she's still keen to make him his dinner. He continues: 'I don't understand how any man can bear to see his wife struggling with old methods, and aging in the process...' She must remain 'fresh', you see. And hey, she's not even capable of choosing her own washing powder - even that, according to this ad, should be left up to the men folk.

Spooky Sunday x 2

Two full-page illustrations for Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist. In the top picture, a man sees the spirit of his mother at a seance; below it the psychic investigators encounter a 'dark soul' in a haunted house, a malevolent shadow that swoops down on them from the upper storey. They are from the September and October 1925 editions of The Strand respectively.

The Land of Mist

Cover of the July 1925 edition of The Strand Magazine - the first instalment of Arthur Conan Doyle's novella The Land of Mist, 'starring' Professor Challenger. The magazine still tended to use a uniform template for its covers at this point, so departures like this really stand out. The girl's outfit is so much of its time - her scarf's design looks like its been inspired by Clarice Cliff pottery.

Important notice

At the end of the articles in the June 1925 edition of The Strand is this full-page 'teaser' announcing the commencement the following month of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist, the third of his Professor Challenger novels after The Lost World and The Poison Belt. Doyle had fully established his spiritualist credentials by this time - the infamous 'Coming of the Fairies' article about the to-modern-eyes obvious fakes The Cottingley Fairies - had appeared five years earlier in The Strand's December 1920 issue, for example. The Land of Mist saw Doyle further his campaign for credibility of his beliefs by introducing them into a work of fiction using established and popular characters. It's not an entirely successful story but I'm hoping the illustrations will be good. I shall save beginning the next volume till tomorrow - and then I'll find out.

New Sherlock Holmes Serial!

Just thought I'd shove this up. It's one of the Strand Magazines I bought for more-than-was-sensible last year, one of the 'loose' copies that hasn't been bound up into volumes like the majority. This is such a corker I leave lying on top of one of the piles to help convince me it was money well spent. It's the September, 1914, edition featuring the opening instalments of the last of the long Holmes stories, The Valley of Fear. Lovely to see Holmes, in colour, on the front.

Alas I can't reproduce the full-page colour illustration from which it's taken without squashing the mag on the scanner, but it's one of the iconic Holmes images and helps make this particular copy one of the most sought-after Strands. It's not in perfect nick - it's missing its back cover and is a bit scuffed round the edges, but it's not bad. Individual issues from this period don't survive well.