 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 spoiler-filled second part, they discuss the merging of the fictional with the historical, Doyle, Poe and racism, and much, much more. Enjoy! Ginger Nuts Of Horror: So there’s a lot to cover, spoiler wise, but first HOLY HELL, C. AUGUSTE DUPIN is POE!!!! I cannot tell you what a shock to the system it was when I realized what was going on; audacious doesn’t even begin to cover it. You’ve obviously written fictional narratives around historical figures before—notably Peter Cushing, Alfred Hitchcock, Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley in The Dark Masters Trilogy—what differences in approach, if any, did you have to take when you had one character who is ‘real’, and one entirely fictional? Stephen Volk: Perhaps it was stupidity on my part, but I don’t know that I thought about the difference, to be honest! Sherlock Holmes was (and is) a very vivid and clear character in my mind, to the extent he feels as “real” as many a documented historical personage of his era, and I had a pretty vivid and clear idea of Edgar Allan Poe as a person, too, having read about him all my life (even writing a screenplay about him many years ago). So it didn’t seem crazy to put them together—Poe being the literary “father of the detective story” and Holmes being its grand master, it felt inevitable: in fact, I was shocked that nobody (to my knowledge) had done it before! There was The Seven Per Cent Solution, which teamed up Holmes and Sigmund Freud, and in the 1979 film Murder by Decree, Sherlock had set out to solve the real-life Jack the Ripper crimes, so there were a number of precedents of melding fact and fiction. In a way, there is a point where a public figure such as a famous author becomes, ostensibly, a “character” in the form that we understand them, or think we understand them: and, concomitantly, there is a point where a fictional character becomes “real” or “as-if-real” when it comes to fandom. Sherlock Holmes was the first character, I believe, who had fans in the modern sense: those members of the public who were outraged when his creator had the temerity to kill him off! And of course, there were people who wrote to “Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street”. On the other side of the coin, we have the fictitious picture of Poe—maudlin, tormented, addicted, the absolute proto-goth or emo—and the actual facts: how can we ever unravel them into any objective idea of “truth”? I don’t think we can. So I unapologetically treat him as a fictional Poe. “My” Poe. GNoH: Obviously you researched Poe extensively; when you came to write these stories, did either he or Holmes surprise you at any point? To what degree do you find you discover characters in the act of writing, and to what degree is that covered in the research/planning stage? SV: I had to mentally chart, albeit roughly, how much (or little) my Holmes could wear his heart on his sleeve—given he hasn’t become the Doyle Holmes yet. I think it’s a bit like painting. You block in the rough areas of colour, the broad strokes, then the more you work on it, the more detail you add. The overall composition might remain the same—then again, you might stand back and think: “That shape really needs to change to make the overall pattern work.” As a for instance, when I wrote the first story, The Comfort of the Seine—and more or less throughout—Poe (“Dupin”) is committed to the cause of logic and reason. (I say in the first story he has rejected working on fiction as not worthy of his intellect!) But as I worked on the stories I slowly realised I was playing with literary tropes throughout. So I was skirting around the fact that the stories were all about the nature of stories themselves. I wondered where this was all taking me, and I didn’t know until I reached the final tale, The Mercy of the Night, which happens towards the end of Poe’s life. And a gap opened up in that story which was plot-driven, which was “Why does the murderess, Josephine Rappaport, want these books?” And the idea occurred to me about the humanizing influence of literature. And then I had a kind of death bed conversion for Poe—his realisation that, in spite of his dedication to cold ratiocination, what matters is literature because art conveys all we are as human beings in all our contradictions and abstractions (including love and friendship). So, finally, it gave me a start point and end point about the character. That’s a laborious example, but perhaps it helps convey what I mean. There were also surprises along the way. I didn’t plan for Holmes to be given the gift of a violin in The Purloined Face, and in The Lunacy of Celestine Blot I didn’t know that his brother Mycroft had spent time in a madhouse until I wrote it! It was necessary, obviously, to prefigure that Holmes was not exactly a ladies’ man, but the idea that Poe prevents him from emotional engagement for his own psychological reasons didn’t occur to me until I wrote The Language of Terror. I suppose the cumulative effect of the stories was to demand me to answer certain questions like that, and that was part of the enjoyment of it. It’s a strange business to be excited about discoveries about characters that never actually existed and are just words on the page! GNoH The Purloined Face claims to tell the true events behind Leroux’s Phantom Of The Opera. Did you revisit the original text as part of the planning for this story? And what attracted you to the notion of adding Holmes and Poe to that tale? SV: Shamefully, I didn’t, and I haven’t read the Leroux novel to this day! I was really using my memory and the primary cultural images of The Phantom, largely Lon Chaney and Hammer’s Herbert Lom versions. It was really that the Paris setting and the opera house setting cried out for me to do it. I knew that opera has a liking for women dying of consumption, so that brought it alive, given that Poe’s wife had died of that disease; though, as I think he says at one point in my story: “She never sang about it”. I liked that my Poe, who is as sarcastic as he is brilliant, could have fun with the situation, and I could too. By plunging him and Sherlock into a horror classic—re-tell it, but not a straight reboot. Twist it and subvert it, I hope. It’s not a bloke in a mask, for a start. I’m a sucker for stories that go “You know that story you think you know? It wasn’t like that at all.” GNoH Can you talk a bit about how you constructed the mystery for this story? I realise that I don’t have the first clue how one would even go about writing such a tale - do you start with the resolution and work backwards? SV: I honestly can’t remember, but that is usually the case. Know the ending first, and make your detective incredibly clever in how they get there. Which is (he says in hushed tones) terribly easy. (As Poe says about detective fiction in one of the stories!) I don’t have my earliest notes on this one, but I think I needed an unmasking scene (per Phantom), but wanted a different spin or reveal on that, so—(spoiler alert!)—I made it a child that you’re made to think is a maniacal dwarf. Which is, frankly, my revenge on the film Don’t Look Now for doing terrible things to my brain when I first saw it on a wet Wednesday in Coventry. My climax is really Don’t Look Now where you are expecting a dwarf. I think the idea of the acid attack victim came quite early, too. You always want a vivid character appealing for the help of your detective hero, and I liked (liked?) the idea of an actress whose looks are destroyed as an act of vengeance. That was the thrust of what I wanted to play with, so I would put down the beats of the scenes in, say, a page and a half—client arrives, visit to the opera house, and so on, planting red herrings, et cetera—then I’d flesh out that outline with more ideas (like beginning with the elderly Holmes going to see the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera in a cinema; which chronologically just about works) until it feels ready to write. Coming from a screenwriting background, I like to plan. I have to, really, especially with these kinds of stories. I don’t like flying blind and trying to find the runway. GNoH: In a collection not short on macabre horror, The Three Hunchbacks stood out for me as a masterclass in both claustrophobia and body horror; for me, it felt in some ways to be a mirror-darkly version of The Man With The Twisted Lip, though the Poe influences are also sizable. Can you recall the inspiration for this one at all? SV: It was quite funny, the way it came about, in typical circuitous fashion! Paul Kane had edited the previous story in the series for an anthology about Dupin, Beyond Rue Morgue, and joked that I should write one about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as that was set in Paris! I presumed it was a joke, because my stories are set in the 1870s, and Notre Dame was set in medieval times, so I completely ruled it out as impossible. Then, many months later, I read a story in Fortean Times about another novel by Victor Hugo about brigands who deliberately deform people: it was the basis of the Conrad Veidt film The Man Who Laughs (which in turn inspired the look of Batman’s Joker). The article mentioned the idea that children were sometimes stolen and crippled to make them into beggars, so I took that as the catalyst for my tale. Of course, it’s delicious that the hunchback is an echo back to Poe’s “Hop-Frog” too. And why three of them? Because it is more bizarre than one! And because “The Three Hunchbacks” is a perverse nod to “The Six Napoleons” title in Doyle’s canon. GNoH: Though Doyle was, in his personal life, relatively liberal for a white man of his place, time, and class, the Holmes canon does occasionally contain shocking racism (Tonga in The Sign Of Four, for example), frequent reliance on junk science (such as skull size to denote intelligence, and graphology), as well as clearly well meaning yet still problematic tales like The Yellow Face. Similarly, Poes’ work unquestionably leans into racial stereotypes that were prevalent in his era. You take some of this head-on in The Language of Terror; I’m fascinated by what your decision making process was with regard to this; can you talk about that? SV: This is a very important question and I am very glad you asked it. I must admit I circumvented it in the case of Holmes. I might justify that decision in saying that those Doyle stories hadn’t happened yet chronologically, but that, of course, is rather flip. In the case of Poe, I didn’t feel the issue could be quite so easily navigated around. Yes, in stories such as The Gold Bug Poe’s writing of Jupiter and his comic patois is horribly offensive to read today, and I’m well aware it can be construed as excusing Poe to say he was a man of his time and upbringing: though I equally think it’s silly to argue that he wasn’t. We are all products of our time, and I am quite confident we will be seen as deplorable to future generations in ways we cannot foresee. Again, that is not to excuse him or his writing for aspects that are problematic in the least. So, to cut to the chase—was Edgar Allan Poe racist? That is for the individual to decide and I can’t decide for you. Toni Morrison said, “No early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe”—yet many critics have acknowledged the slippery way in which he deploys genre not only in the examination of race but also of gender and class. G. R. Thompson says “Almost everything in Poe is qualified by or controlled by a prevailing duplicity or irony”. In researching a completely different story (not in this book) I was intrigued to read that Leland Person and Lesley Ginsberg interpret The Black Cat solely as the re-enactment of the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, while to Hannah Walker it “depicts the injustices of slavery and ultimately shows how slavery damns the South”. It is hard after reading her analysis not to see the image of the hanged black cat as that of a lynched slave. Joan Dayan makes a similar compelling argument that the story is about the mutually destructive effects of slavery on both slave and master. It was Poe’s political intent and personal attitudes, she says, that anchor the story. In this context (according to Walker) the narrator’s wife has a pivotal role, representing Northern abolitionists in their fight to abolish slavery. It is she who takes a “solid stand” against the violent narrator/slaveholder, making Poe’s tale a racial allegory and “an omen of the damning effects to come if the South continued to unleash aggression towards slaves and Northern abolitionists”. I find this fascinating, and certainly implies that the argument about Edgar need not be binary. To be absolutely honest, I did not want to write a story, let alone a book, in which one of the heroes is a racist. I would find it objectionable and impossible. To that extent, I avoided the issue until I had to address it—that is, when I came up with a story that involved the assassination of Lincoln and the possibly still-alive John Wilkes Booth: The Language of Terror. It felt incumbent on me--here—to say something of Poe in relation to race. But it is, of necessity, a commentary on my fictional Poe, not the real Edgar (whose views are unknowable). So in the story, my fictional Poe sees the destructive force of the racial divide, and the obvious fact that what holds all races together is that we are all human. (“Dupin” again expressing a modern idea “out of his time.” Quite deliberately on my part.) I wanted to emphasise this by showing yet another “twin” figure in the black Congressman Vance, born on the same day as Poe. (You probably noticed, there are several doppelgangers in the book!) The tide of history is changing. Lady Liberty is being physically exported to the USA, and Le Bon, who has been Poe’s loyal black assistant throughout, is given by Poe on his deathbed a more fitting and optimistic future in America, where greater opportunities can be realised than in Europe (the past). It’s perhaps sentimental, but I think Eddy deserved to express a little sentiment in his final hours. That, I have to say, is how I chose to depict my fictional Poe in these particular stories—detective stories, which have a certain need and structure, which would have been unbalanced by too much political and social chin stroking. If somebody wishes to write a story or novel that depicts Poe in a way they think more truthful, they are quite entitled to do so. I’d be quite excited to read it! GNoH: There was a similar, if smaller moment, I thought, in Father Of The Man, where the Pinkerton Detective character is keen to distance himself from some of the crimes of that organisation… SV: Oh, that was just misdirection on my part. Giving the dogged Pinkerton a moral conscience, simply so that the reader would think he was a stand-up guy with integrity. As it turns out, of course, he is the complete reverse of that. A liar and criminal with no moral integrity at all. GNoH: I want to get into the final story, The Mercy Of The Night, where Poe is finally given a voice of his own. Why did you want to do this, a rather risky move, rather than maintain the device of Sherlock as narrator? SV: Partly I thought the change of tone would be refreshing. Partly I loved the idea that Poe has to solve his own murder. And partly because Holmes can’t tell this one, because he is the antagonist. He is the one whose intended crime has to be uncovered: in that respect it was a practical decision. But that practical decision yielded certain benefits and opened certain doors. If you are made to bend a certain way, creative opportunities present themselves. Poe being bedridden is interesting: he can’t get out so Holmes has become his footslogger. That’s a twist on the situation I have set up, and a poignant one, I hope. Also Poe being unable to speak, when he is so verbally dextrous in previous stories lends the tale an air of melancholy and loss. I also wanted Poe to be the storyteller because I thought by now the reader has earned the right of a view inside the great man’s head—you get to peek into his bedroom and are privy to his dreams, as well as his more private and crippling fears. It is the story that is most about Poe. Ironically, it is about his decline into an old age which, in reality, he never suffered. I granted that. Or inflicted it on him, I’m not sure which. Most of all it was a more interesting way of passing on the baton to the man who will become the greatest detective the world has ever known: Sherlock Holmes. To tell it from Sherlock’s viewpoint it would have been: “Oh dear. My mentor is dead. Off to London. Aren’t I the bee’s knees!” Which doesn’t really advance what you know already. By telling it from Poe’s point of view there is the tragedy of death but also, I hope, the sense of continuity and transformation of what Poe leaves behind. In a sense, it is about the hope we all have for leaving behind what we have created, or the effect we might have had on those we leave behind. That’s what I was striving for, in any case. A conclusion not about two detectives, but about two human beings. GNoH: Your website lists you as a patron of Humanists UK, and I felt this tale was in some ways a very strong expression of Humanist values, when it comes to matters of end-of-life care, as well as asking some fundamental, difficult questions about the nature of suffering, and our moral imperatives in the face of such suffering. To what degree were such concerns weighing on you, as you wrote and revised this tale? Did the change in authorial ‘voice’ help with this different focus? SV: I wasn’t conscious of it reflecting any Humanist views. It was more “arse-about-face” than that. Without it sounding schematic, I wanted the climactic story to be the death of Poe, and it struck me as exciting—or at least fitting—that Holmes should be Poe’s murderer. But murder him out of love, not the usual base or greedy motive for murder. A mercy killing, if you will (hence the title). And thus, having committed the ultimate crime, he can become the great detective we all know and love. So I then struggled to form a picture of what Poe was like in his last days. Would he be mentally frail, suffering from dementia—my mother died of that, and I could certainly write that with some authenticity—but I thought, no, that’s not right for the story. How much more of a nightmare it would be if his body lets him down, his physical suffering has become unbearable, but his wonderful brain is hideously intact. That would be something that his carer would surely be horrified by, and drawn to do something about. Deciding upon that, it enabled me nevertheless to explore ideas of mortality and, importantly for me, a sense of what we leave behind when we go. Not in the metaphysical sense, but in the realm of memory, and what is carried on in the hearts of those who have been affected by us and touched by us as human beings. I suppose, returning to the Humanism point, I had the benefit of Poe not being a religious person (in my version he is the supreme logician), so I didn’t want a spiritual conversion. That would have felt terrible; a kind of betrayal. But I think I nod a wee bit towards the spiritual of sorts in Poe’s musing that, in death, he wouldn’t mind being reunited with Virginia in a dream. And you’re kind of not sure whether he is being sarcastic at that point or letting the door open a crack to the possibility of an afterlife. He doesn’t know for sure, as none of us know for sure. But he’s pretty certain, as I’m pretty certain! His thought is sort of like: “I don’t believe that stuff. It would be comforting if I did.” But I can’t say my experience of watching my mother’s decline into ill health, into that dreadful limbo of non-existence in terms of identity, really, didn’t have an impact on me writing this story. It’s possibly at the core of it, in some way. The number of times we drove away from visiting her in the nursing home and my wife would say: “Will you promise me that you won’t let me go like that? I’d rather die.” And you have these conversations and feelings and dark thoughts at the inescapable situation, the sense of losing a loved one down a slippery slope and there is nothing you can do about it, and often you don’t know that a story is the outlet for those feelings until someone asks. GNoH: Finally, what’s next for Stephen Volk, screenwriter and author? What projects can we look forward to from you for the rest of 2021 and beyond? SV: Well, 2020 was a very peculiar year. As I say, my mother died in April of Covid-related pneumonia. We were unable to visit her before she died, and only my brother and I and our respective wives were allowed to the funeral. I then felt in limbo for many months: I’m sure a lot of people did. Also the film and TV industry was frozen by inactivity. Dead. So that is scary on a professional basis. Happily, now, we are starting to come out of it, and I have been more productive, and some new stuff I have on the cards is pretty exciting. I have been writing a lot of short stories—short-form stuff seemed to come easier in 2020—and my next collection, called Lies of Tenderness, will be published by PS Publishing in March 2022. I’m really proud of the stories in that, more or less all recent ones, including a couple of novellas that nobody has seen yet. So that’s great. Also, I can’t give details but I’m developing a supernatural TV series with a production company that made one of the mega stand-out shows of recent times. It will be absolutely brilliant if that is picked up by a broadcaster. I’ve also written a low budget film that a brilliant Welsh director wants to make, and I am working on a new, insane screenplay on spec. It’s sort of like the film that Ken Russell should have made after Gothic. Yes, it is that batshit-crazy and out there! Sometimes you have to write the film you want to see in your head, and not wait for anybody’s permission. Part one of this interview can be read here UNDER A RAVEN’S WING - INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN VOLK, PART 1 - NO SPOILERS BY KIT POWER Read Kit Power's review of Under A Ravens Wing here 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.
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