UNDER A RAVEN’S WING BY STEPHEN VOLK

4/5/2021

Under A Raven’s Wing

Under A Raven’s Wing is unquestionably a work of loving devotion to both Poe and Doyle's Holmes, and every page rings with that love. It also represents an astonishing feat of imagination, bringing out all of Volk’s talents at evoking time and place, together with a literary approach that’s faithful

The Apprenticeship of Sherlock Holmes
In 1870s Paris, long before meeting his Dr Watson, the young man who will one day become the world’s greatest detective finds himself plunged into a mystery that will change his life forever.

A brilliant man—C. Auguste Dupin—steps from the shadows. Destined to become his mentor. Soon to introduce him to a world of ghastly crime and seemingly inexplicable horrors.

Under A Raven’s Wing is Stephen Volk’s latest from PS Publishing, and the core conceit is as simple as it is daring; in the 1870’s, a twenty-year-old Sherlock Holmes, taking a break from his university studies to accompany two of his student friends to Paris, meets Dupin, the detective from Edgar Allan Poes’ Murder In The Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, and The Purloined Letter. They form a friendship, and Holmes, under the tutelage of Dupin (during which he investigates the most intractable and bizarre crimes of the era), slowly grows into his destiny as The World's Greatest Detective.

As core ideas go, I was struck by two immediate thoughts; the first, that it’s obviously one of the best ideas for a set of new Holmes stories that anybody has ever had, and secondly, that I have no idea how one would begin to actually write such an undertaking.

And before we go any further, I guess I should put out my own position with regard to the source material, in the interests of transparency: I love the Doyle canon of Holmes stories, and have read all of them (with the exception of the Valley Of Fear novel) several times (I’m actually doing a Patreon exclusive podcast series on the Holmes canon right now, with friends Jack Graham and Daniel Harper). Poe I am less familiar with, though I have read Rue Morgue and Purloined Letter - I’d describe myself as more of a Greatest Hits Poe fan than a devotee, for sure.

I say that because it’s important to understand the degree to which these stories are a fusion of the Doylian and Poe’s literary style. The framing device means that most of the stories are presented as first-person accounts written by Holmes himself, near the end of his life, and sent as letters to a confidant; as such, the tales are written very much in Holmes’s voice (which is distinct from Watson’s voice, narrator of the original tales); but they also portray a version of the character we’ve not seen before; there’s a vulnerability, a fallibility, to this version of Holmes, a sense of a young man adrift in a strange city, and, whilst still clearly almost supernaturally intelligent, lacking both the confidence and insight of the incarnation we’ve grown to know and (in my case, at any rate) love. It’s true that, despite Watsons’ protestations in the original texts, Holmes was always portrayed as a more passionate and emotional creature than the popular image would suggest; and of course he is also occasionally fallible, especially in the earlier short stories. That said, Volk very much takes this to the next level in these tales, by placing Holmes out of his element, and before he’s even settled on his vocation. This mix of Old Holmes as narrator and Young Holmes as protagonist is fascinating, and Volk weaves the tales with admirable seamlessness, keeping us for the most part within the driving narrative, with only very occasional asides to fill in some post-tale detail that might occur to the reader (in doing this, Volk also takes advantage of the Boswellian quality of the original tales - that is to say, the fact that Watson may not always be the most reliable of narrators in the original narratives - to allow Holmes to ‘correct the record’, to delightful effect for a Holmes nerd like me).

So, yes, Doylian, absolutely; but, just as crucial, if not more so, is that these are also Dupin stories.

Which is to say, narratively, they are Poe stories.

As a result, the mysteries all take a turn to the bizarre, the grotesque, and the terrifying. For example, one of the stories purports to tell the true story behind which the myth that became The Phantom Of The Opera was born. Another, The Three Hunchbacks, riffs on The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (as well as containing a fascinating, mirror-darkly allusion to one of my favourite Holmes stories, The Man With The Twisted Lip). Another story is called, with admirable directness, The Purloined Face. As I noted above, my familiarity with Poe’s work is far less than with Doyle’s Holmes canon; even so, I was able to catch a few clever, unobtrusive references to the man’s body of work, and I’m sure for the hardcore devotee (as I suspect Volk is) there’s a treasure trove of such moments.

Volk also, in my view, displays a very deft hand in dealing with some of the more problematic aspects of the source materials, without in any way compromising on what were, often, the very ugly prejudices and deprivations of the time. He does this in a number of ways; sometimes by confronting the issue directly (there’s a moment when a member of the Pinkerton detective agency popped up, and then delivered a short monologue, that made me actually punch the air with delight) and sometimes, where appropriate, by simply acknowledging it and letting it sit for the reader to judge.

Throughout, there is a palpable sense of the macabre, of a seething darkness just under the surface of things, which is both true to Poe and true to the time (history being, in many important respects, the original and greatest horror story). 1870’s Paris is a character unto itself, lurking in the background of all the stories, every bit as much as London is in the Holmes tracts; and Volk evokes the grime and splendour of the era, the ghost of Revolution still haunting the streets and psyche of many of the characters; and, of course, the enormous wealth disparities of the time, with great wealth and pomp living shoulder to shoulder with awful poverty and deprivation. It is a heady and unsettling cocktail, and suffuses all the tales in the collection with a sense of dread and melancholy.

And, look, I’m a big Stephen Volk fan, and a fan of the source material, and it’s true to say that, while I’d never have come up with the idea myself, it’s a near-perfect project, practically laser-targeted at my particular tastes. That said, the potential pitfalls for such a project are many, and in some cases quite sizable.

It is my considerable pleasure to report that, for this reviewer at least, Volk does not merely sidestep those pitfalls; rather, he transcends them. In the process, he’s produced a collection of long short stories that manage to form part of not one, but two beloved literary canons; giving us an enticing new mythology for the birth of Holmes, and recasting Dupin, and Poe’s work in general, in an exciting new light. Under A Raven’s Wing is unquestionably a work of loving devotion to both Poe and Doyle's Holmes, and every page rings with that love. It also represents an astonishing feat of imagination, bringing out all of Volk’s talents at evoking time and place, together with a literary approach that’s faithful without being in any way derivative. In this fusion of two absolute classic voices of genre literature, Volk has created something gloriously all it’s own; a set of tales worthy to stand alongside the past masters in whose proud tradition he follows.

by Kit Power
3/5/21

A COLLECTION by Stephen Volk
CATEGORY Horror
PUBLICATION DATE  March 2021
COVER & INTERIOR ART Pedro Marques
INTRODUCTION Charles Prepolec
PAGES  327
EDITIONS
Jacketed Hardcover — ISBN  978-1-786367-06-8 [£25]
JHC signed by Stephen Volk and limited to 100 numbered copies — ISBN 978-1-786367-07-5 [£35]

SYNOPSIS
The Apprenticeship of Sherlock Holmes
In 1870s Paris, long before meeting his Dr Watson, the young man who will one day become the world’s greatest detective finds himself plunged into a mystery that will change his life forever.

A brilliant man—C. Auguste Dupin—steps from the shadows. Destined to become his mentor. Soon to introduce him to a world of ghastly crime and seemingly inexplicable horrors.

The spectral tormentor that is being called, in hushed tones, The Phantom of the Opera . . .
The sinister old man who visits corpses in the Paris morgue . . .
An incarcerated lunatic who insists she is visited by creatures from the Moon . . .
A hunchback discovered in the bell tower of Notre Dame . . .
And—perhaps most shocking of all—the awful secret Dupin himself hides from the world.