 Under A Raven’s Wing - Interview with Stephen Volk Following the recent release of Under A Ravens Wing (to great critical acclaim), Stephen Volk has taken time out of his busy schedule to discuss the book with Ginger Nuts of Horror’s own Kit Power. In this first, spoiler-free part, they discuss taking on legendary fictional and historical figures, researching 1870’s Paris, and much, much more. Enjoy. Ginger Nuts Of Horror: I think we’ve got to start with Sherlock, if that’s okay, because I have a lifelong obsession with the character; especially the Doyle short stories and Jeremy Brett’s screen personification of the character. What’s your own history with Holmes as a reader? And how did it feel to be taking on one of these fictional titans of British literature/storytelling? Stephen Volk: Well, taking the second part of the question first, I think you are implying a certain amount of intimidation inherent in such a task! But, obviously, if I felt like that I wouldn’t do it! There are too many things in life to feel intimidated by, without adding to them by what you are writing! So, no, I’d have to do it without any nervousness beyond the usual nagging question of whether readers will give a hoot about the story, or characters. Which I guess is where the intimidation, if any, creeps in—will “my” Holmes be accepted or not? Well, the thing is, it is not canon, it is not the Holmes of the Doyle stories, it is my imagining of a Holmes before he becomes Holmes, and I’m as entitled to have ideas about that as anybody else. And in a way it’s not the Doyle universe. It’s a jigsaw or compendium of many influences, including Doyle and Holmes on the page and screen, as well as various other literary and cultural entities I grew up with—not least, of course, Poe. My personal history with the great detective began with one of my formative memories: Listening to The Hound of the Baskervilles on a big wooden wireless with my cousin when we were children. Boy, it scared us witless! My uncle had to reassure us that the howls were made by a little bald man in glasses in a recording booth. Honestly! Then it was the Douglas Wilmer incarnation on BBC television. But when I was growing up, my father always talking about Basil Rathbone and I used to love watching the old black-and-white films when they popped up on TV. Old fashioned though they might be to modern eyes, you have to admit “Basil” absolutely nailed the character forever. Like the immaculate Peter Cushing (who donned the deerstalker after Wilmer for the BBC), Rathbone just completely convinced as Holmes and I always say the two of them were Holmes as opposed to acting him (as, forgive me, I consider both Jeremy Brett and Cumberbatch do—fine actors though they are). Around the same time—that is, the late ‘60s—we were experiencing Mr Spock on Star Trek and I think it’s no great revelation to say that we bookish, socially inept and even girl-phobic schoolboys identified with both, but were slightly saddened by the side of our nature reflected in them. It’s a theme that finds its way in Under a Raven’s Wing, I suppose. How cutting off from human passions can be a refuge, but also a prison. What we sacrifice by doing so is always the subtext, I think, of Holmes and Watson. By the way, I didn’t know I was going to write this series of stories. They just evolved from my writing the first one, prodded into existence by that wonderful Canadian editor and fellow Sherlock freak, Charles Prepolec. But what came out of them, oozed out of them, really, was the thick gruel of those early enthusiasms, bunged in a pot and stirred up into a new, hopefully tasty concoction! I came back again and again because I absolutely loved the concept, the world, and the potential of this duo I’d set up. They took me back to a place in my head I wanted to be. In fact, once or twice on social media I think I said: “That’s it! I’m off back to the 1870s!” GNoH: One thing I note from your reply, about ‘...cutting off from human passions can be a refuge, but also a prison…’ is that, in detective work, as in writing, there’s a paradox there; in that, without being able to understand and synthesize ‘human passions’ we’d be unable to do our work well - and yet the distance is also crucial. How do you strike that balance in your own life? SV: Oh I don’t know how to analyse that in my own life, at all! That’s possibly why it is interesting to me in stories, because I can try and understand it in the abstract. Stories are always about the mystery of being human, aren’t they? I think in these stories in particular there is a thread about the “harm” of being too passionate, of letting yourself go without restraint, the idea of “falling in love” being the most universal example – because (my) Dupin believes that is the road to emotional pain (and he has good reason to think so). On some level being prepared to fall in love is to open yourself to the possibility of pain, but to deny it yourself is another kind of pain. If pushed, I might say the passionate side of our nature, without restraint, could be said to be Paris – the city of lovers – whereas London (particularly Victorian London) is more the repression and denial. That’s why I find Dupin and Holmes such lovely opposites. You always seek out opposites and clashes as a writer. The ends of a magnet. What brings people together and what pushes them apart. GNoH: At what point did it become clear to you that you were writing a series of connected stories? And how did that knowledge impact the writing of the later tales? SV: I think around the third one, which was written for editor Simon Clark, I wondered, “Hello, if I do, say, six of these, it could be a book!” But it was only after one or two more that I started to think, hey, if this is a book, I want these characters to go somewhere, I want the book as a whole to amount to something. To become more than a linked collection, more of a “composite novel”, if you will. And that meant digging into what these two characters meant to each other and what was the “ending” that made sense of the series – that set up the eventual moving on of Holmes as the Holmes we know when we meet him in London. Or rather, when Watson meets him. And that was the most gratifying part of the whole process. Deciding where I wanted this to go – or rather, the stories telling me how this had to end. GNoH: Did you ever find yourself missing Watson, as you wrote these stories, either narratively or in terms of his voice? The vast majority of the Holmes stories are told from his point of view, after all… SV: Actually, no. It was liberating and I was grateful for that. But I’d already written a story from Watson’s point of view, called “Hounded”. Again, it wasn’t strictly canon, because Holmes is dead and Watson is suffering from grief at his loss. I enjoyed writing it, but doing a whole pile of Holmes/Watson stories didn’t interest me. GNoH: Holmes is one half of the equation, but of course Poe, and Poe’s Dupin especially, is the other half. Given your Twitter avatar is a portrait of Poe, I feel safe assuming you’re a fan. What is the importance of Poe to you as a writer of genre fiction? What about his work endures, and deserves that endurance, do you think? SV: Ha! Yes, I put the portrait of Poe on twitter when I’d written the first few tales. As well as reminding me every day of the high bar set by the original Master of Horror, of psychological crime, of detective fiction, of science fiction in many ways, and so much else; it was also a reminder to get on with the next one in the series! To me, frankly, Poe is the Shakespeare of horror. Nobody comes close. In the small space available I couldn’t possibly do justice to the many ways in which Poe is important to literature and to genre fiction in particular. Any one of his stories could be dissected as an absolute fount of future storytelling and thinking, and the depth of their psychological insight has been widely and thoroughly documented. (I particularly like the Freudian analysis of Poe’s stories in relation to the phases of his life story, as documented by Marie Bonaparte.) But it is interesting. Rupert Everett recent made The Happy Prince, a truly superb film about the last days of Oscar Wilde, and I went to a screening, and somebody in the audience asked what drew the actor/director to Wilde’s work, and Everett said something astonishingly honest: he said it wasn’t so much Wilde’s work, which was not that remarkable (many writers were publishing similar work but have been forgotten), but to Wilde as a person. And this is part of what attracts me to Poe. His biography is so damned interesting. Not merely the successes, but the failures, the arrogance, the misbegotten attempts to start literary magazines, his hatred of John Allan, the death of his mother on stage, coughing up blood the way his child bride would do years later, the descent into drink and drugs, the high of “The Raven” and the low of the gutter. From his acerbic put downs and pompous reviews of other poets, I always sense Poe was one of those people you would love to see on a TV chat show: a mixture of the louche Robert Downey Jr, the witty Stephen Fry and the obnoxious Will Self. With a dash of Truman Capote thrown in. And dead at forty. My God! If you were to force me to say what endures, and deserves to endure (as you in fact did), I would say the vivid symbolism at the core of his stories—sometimes a single chilling image. An ape wielding a straight razor. The walling up of a murdered wife. The terror of waking up in a coffin. The Red Death that no wall can be protection from. The punishment of the swinging pendulum—representing time, the ticking clock of a wasting disease, or the faceless judges representing guilt, possibly sexual guilt, and the descending blade of castration, or whatever you want it to be. These primal horror tropes have never been bettered because Poe dug deep into his psyche—perhaps by dint of certain substances, let’s be honest—but also because in most cases he approached stories with a certain perverse glee, definitely with an impish (sic) (and “sick”) sense of humour, but also, I’d say, a playful, deliberately shocking, and anarchic one. He showed his contemporaries, as he shows us still, that the gothic wasn’t born of landscape or ruins, but was the stuff of our minds, our secrets. And in terms of his detective stories, I think they were all about the absurdity of the rational. That life was not rational. An ape with a straight razor who stuffs a woman’s corpse up a chimney is not rational, it’s insane. Yet we persist in thinking we can catalogue and understand this madhouse. For Poe, that is the ultimate joke. GNoH: We’ve discussed research before, but it strikes me that 1870’s Paris is a next level challenge, in that it exists entirely outside of living memory, very little photographic material… What was your research process for these stories? And how did that research impact on the stories? SV: That decade wasn’t chosen other than the fact that I had to pre-date it from Holmes meeting Watson. Retro-fit the timeline, in effect. And, as I mentioned, I didn’t plan the stories all in one fell swoop: the series took about ten years to write, on and off. Plus, as detective mysteries, each one needed a heck of a lot of working out (by which I mean, mulling over stuff while I work on other things, jotting down ideas, snippets, filling a file with jottings, references, ten pages, twenty, forty pages... long before I plot them or start writing!). But the research I guess came on a subject-by-subject basis. The first concerns the Paris Morgue. (Snippet: let’s coincide it with the first Impressionist exhibition!) The second concerns the Paris Opera, so let’s dive into that. The third, Charcot’s famous hysteria patients. (Which does have a lot of photographic evidence, in point of fact—which happens to be fascinating.) It is no great pain to grub around in these areas. In fact, I’d say it’s possibly the most enjoyable part of writing historical crime or horror. You learn stuff you never knew, and find connections, and challenges—what would Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin say to one of the founding fathers of psychiatry, for example? Or to Jules Verne?—I didn’t know, but it was fun to find out. Naturally, over time, I built up ideas about the era, the politics (the Franco-Prussian War, for instance—which Dupin, naturally, had a hand in), and other random things which I’ve been interested in over the years, such as so-called “spirit” photography. It all became rather rich and I loved the idea of my Paris being rather sleazy and rather decadent compared to the Victorian London which has come to be inseparable from Doyle’s Holmes. GNoH: I’d like to revisit the subject of politics more fully in the spoiler part of our interview, but it strikes me that there’s a delicate balance to be struck between faithfully portraying the politics of the time (as abhorrent as some of that will be to modern sensibilities) and writing for a modern audience where, in some respects, we have a better and fuller understanding of some matters than even the finest minds of the times were able to muster (Charcot’s patients being an excellent case in point). How do you approach navigating those tensions when writing a period piece? SV: Very good question. In a period setting, attitudes that are problematic are a tricky issue I was fully aware of throughout. To be honest, I try to tackle it instinctively when I get to that kind of knot in the wood. By which I mean, you don’t want to be wilfully untruthful of the past, which at worst is rewriting it, but on the other hand I have no interest in replicating old prejudices and outdated ideas in my fiction without authorial comment. The benefit I have is that “Dupin” is smarter than the age he lives in, so he can express a more enlightened view than those around him, therefore I can have my cake and eat it. He’s way ahead of Charcot’s ideas on madness, and “female” madness, for instance, and isn’t afraid to say so. Overall, I’d say, I can’t be anything but a modern author working in 2021, and my concerns are of today, not of back then. So I can use my stories and characters to comment on that era, if I want, while hopefully maintaining a sense of authenticity. That’s the balance, really. GNoH: Did the research itself lead directly to any of the story ideas, or story elements? Had you always intended Verne to be a character in one of the stories, for example? SV: I can’t recall what order it came in. I wanted to do one about hysteria and Charcot, because that fitted the timeline. I probably had a note elsewhere about Verne having penned a version of Poe’s Ice Sphinx (from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). Mesmerism was probably another note to myself: having Dupin hypnotise the patient as a nod to The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. So I’d tend to collect lots of fragmentary ideas and see how they fitted together. The moon-men seemed to link nicely with Poe’s moon hoax and I was intrigued, mainly, to write a kind of “UFO abductee” experience in Paris in the 1870s. But all the stories were sporadic – there was no “always intended” about them! You can tell this because of the liberal sprinkling of “cases yet to be told” – which are literally my scribbled notes for possible future stories! I wonder if Doyle ever know what the Giant Rat of Sumatra was? Anyway, he gave us plenty to play with. GNoH: Can I take it from that reply that you’re still collecting notes? Do you still feel the pull of 1870’s Paris? SV: I have taken my foot off the accelerator. In fact I have pulled the handbrake. For now. It feels as if I took it to completion, but I can’t completely rule out a story idea coming to me in the future. You never know. I’m in no hurry, though. There are many other fish to fry. GNoH: And with that, Part 1 of our interview concludes. Join us shortly for part 2, where we will delve into spoiler territory, covering twists, the art and science of mystery, and much more. Read Kit Power's review of Under A Ravens Wing here UNDER A RAVEN’S WING BY STEPHEN VOLK  UNDER A RAVEN’S WING BY STEPHEN VOLK 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.
TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITETEENAGE GRAVE, EDITED BY IRA RAT (BOOK REVIEW) THE HEART AND SOUL OF author interviewsComments are closed.
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