OPUNTIA 457

Thanksgiving 2019

Opuntia is published by Dale Speirs, Calgary, Alberta. It is posted on www.efanzines.com and www.fanac.org. My e-mail address is: [email protected] When sending me an emailed letter of comment, please include your name and town in the message.

NOSE HILL PARK: EASTERN END

photos by Dale Speirs
2019-10-03
Calgary has two massive natural parks within its boundaries, Nose Hill (municipal) and Fish Creek (provincial). It occurred to me that I haven’t depicted them as often as I should have, so over the winter I’ll run photos.

Nose Hill is the easternmost foothill of the Rocky Mountains and until the late 1970s was the northern boundary of Calgary. The suburbs have long since sprawled past it. The western half of the hill was overrun by developers and is now covered in houses. A citizen group managed to preserve the eastern half as a natural park.

The hill is bald-headed prairie, but it has coulees and draws along its slope that allow shrubbery and small trees to survive because the rainwater is channeled down them. The cover photo is a typical view of the easternmost end of the hill and shows the vegetation in the draws changing colour.

We had our first snowfall on September 27 but when I photographed the area a week later, most of it had been removed by chinooks. Thanksgiving is usually brown in Calgary but by November we start getting more frequent bursts of snow.

The park is a popular viewpoint, looming over the city as it does, and as you will see on the next few pages.

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At left: Looking northeastalong14 Street NW.

• B e l o w :
• A n

extreme telephoto shot looking due e a s t a t t h e C a l g a r y In t e r n a t i o n a l

• Airport.
• I got

tired of waiting for a passenger jet to taxi out and take off. It must have been a slow part of the day.

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Looking due south at central Calgary and the downtown core.

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At right: An old country road that once traversed the hill. After the City took it over they let it go back to nature.

Below: A telephoto view to the southeast.

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SHERLOCKIANA: PART 31

by Dale Speirs
Blalock and her 10-year-old son Johnnie saw a man fall to his death. Did he jump or was he pushed? She was visited by Watson and his grown son Dr John Watson Jr, and they became a team investigating the murder. The dead man, Charles Harrelston, supposedly owed gambling debts to Christopher Moran, a surname instantly recognizable to Sherlockians.

[Part 30 appeared in OPUNTIA #433.]

The original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are called the canon, while stories written by other authors are known as pastiches.
Harrelston and Moran were part of a group holding onto treasure from India

scooped up during the Second Afghanistan War. As these sorts of men will do, there was a falling out over the proceeds. Harrelston was the first but not the last victim, and the death toll steadily climbed.

Pastiches: Novels.

THE HAUNTING OF TORRE ABBEY (2000) by Carol Buggé was a haunted house mystery that brought Sherlock Holmes to the manor of Lord Cary. The stately pile, known as Torre Abbey, was plagued by a headless ghost. The locals immediately conjured up all manner of superstitions and ancient legends to go with the hitherto unknown ghost. A short time later the cook was murdered, and with that the plot kicked into gear.
The denouement was the recovery of the loot from a safe protected by two cobras. Certainly beats a motion detector. All ended well. The finale was a set-up for future novels in what would be a series.

Pastiches: Short Stories.

To Holmes and Watson it was obvious someone was playing dastardlytricks for reasons unknown. The story was briefly sidetracked into a music hall when a magician was killed during a William Tell style act. Someone had substituted real bullets for the blank cartridges. Holmes tied the magician’s death into the Torre Abbey mystery.
THE BIG BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES (2015) is an anthology of 82 stories, edited by Otto Penzler. Relax, I’m not going to review them all here, just a couple of stories in this column and a couple more elsewhere in thematic columns. 789 pages, so it is indeed a big book. Lots of reading while waiting out the next polar vortex.

Letterboxing also entered the case. During a countryside ramble, Holmes and Watson discovered that the perpetrator was using letterboxes out on the moors to communicate with an accomplice.
“TheAbandoned Brigantine”(1990)bySam BenadybroughtHolmestoexplain the Gibralter Admiralty Court hearing on the mysteriously abandoned ship Mary Celeste. This was a real-world incident, about which Doyle had written.

The denouement was that an elder Cary had faked his death years ago to give him a free hand in murdering those who might impede his claim to the family fortune. He planned to make a dramatic return years later, claiming amnesia, then inherit the wealth. A reasonably good pastiche.
Holmes told Watson that he had been a passenger on the ship, that they had been saved during a storm by an experimental Italian submarine. The ship had been pursued by ruffians, so to avoid them the survivors came ashore anonymously and assumed new identities.

THE DAUGHTER OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (2017) by Leonard Goldberg was a pastiche novel set in 1914. The protagonist was Joanna Blalock, a nurse who was the daughter of Sherlock Holmes and IreneAdler. Holmes died in 1903 tending his bees on the Sussex Downs.
“The Problem Of The Purple Maculas” (1968) by James C. Iraldi is based on a throwawayline byWatson in the canon which mentioned how Holmes helped hang Henry Staunton. It was a double poisoning case, but Staunton’s wife was a suicide. She poisoned herself and he was hanged for it. A case where justice was not served.
Blalock had inherited his reasoning powers and studied nursing as the only

practical way to learn science, given the way academia treated women in those days.

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Marginalia: Cozies.

muddied the waters down at the West London Yacht Club. There may have been ties to a third death several years ago. The museum staged a dessert buffet as part of its fund raising. Surprisingly, no one died from a poisoned pastry. Doyle interrogated several people with all the subtlety of Sgt. Joe Friday.
THE CAT OF THE BASKERVILLES (2018) by Vicki Delany was a novel in a cozyseries about Gemma Doyle, proprietor of the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop in West London, Massachusetts. The shop was located at 222 Baker Street and the resident pet cat was named Moriarty. Doyle’s uncle, who had a hand in the business, was named Arthur, and claimed he was a distant cousin of the Doyle.
The murders were done by more than one person. Some were done to secure inheritances that would otherwise be lost if a divorce went through. Assorted marriages and re-marriages had produced a tangled web of spouses in debt married to spouses with huge fortunes, not a recipe for a long and happy marriage.
Pouring it on thicker, Doyle’s best friend was Jayne Wilson, who operated the adjacent Mrs Hudson’s Tea Room. The author seems to have missed a step by not calling her Jayne Watson, or if staying with Wilson, making her a notorious

• canary trainer.
• One of the items in the auction had been a Sherlock Holmes first edition

donated by Uncle Arthur Doyle. Back room security was sloppy. The back door was unlocked. When the thief went in to get the valuable book, he became a murderer when he found Lamb in the room. All told, a convoluted ending.
The drama society was staging THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES with a good local cast. They needed a famous name to bring in the crowds but the best they could afford was Sir Nigel Bellingham. He was on his way down (drinking, you know) while therest of the cast were young professionals on their way up. Gemma Doyle and Jayne Wilson hosted a fund raising party before the play opened. Jayne’s mother Leslie arranged the event. Sir Nigel went missing after, but was soon found at the bottom of a cliff.

Parodies: Radio.

THE NEWLY DISCOVERED CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES was a six-episode miniseries of BBC Radio 2 which aired in early 1999. Free mp3s can be had from www.otrrlibrary.org This was a comedy series that parodied

• the canon, performed in the music hall style in front of a live audience.
• Doyle went detecting in the usual amateur manner, such as break-and-enter into

suspects’ houses to find clues. She busily contaminated evidence everywhere. The play was the thing, though. The J’accuse! meeting was backstage after a performance. The director turned out to be just as ambitious as any actor on the set. She had an opportunity to make HOUND as a movie, and resented a drunken old reprobate spoiling her chance.
The plots were minimal and served mainly to link the gags together. The humour was broad and low. Holmes and Watson blithered their way up and down the British Isles. Anysolutions to the crimes seemed incidental to the setups for jokes. Jolly good fun and worth listening to when you need cheering up.

Carrying on in the next novel of the series, A SCANDAL IN SCARLET (2018), Gemma Doyle was strolling out one day when perchance she spotted the local museum, the Scarlet House, on fire. The fire badlydamaged the building, so the Baker Street shopkeepers organized an auction and tea function to help raise funds to restore the museum.

Pastiches: Radio.

From 1930 to 1956, Sherlock Holmes aired on old-time radio under a variety of titles and networks, with hundreds of episodes. (These and other OTR shows are available as free mp3s from www.otrrlibrary.org.) An example from 1945 was “The Manor House Case”, written by Denis Green and Anthony Boucher.
Jayne Wilson’s part in the tea social did not go well. The museum chairwoman Kathy Lamb was strangled in the back room of the tea parlour. By now, Doyle was settling into her role as Miss Marple, and leaped into the fray.
Holmes had gone off on a case in the country without telling Dr Watson where, as a result of which the doctor was rather miffed. Shortly afterwards Inspector Lestrade called at 221B Baker Street, looking for Holmes but having to settle for Watson. There had been an incident in the country where a bomb had been thrown into a manor house where a German diplomatic delegation was staying.
Lamb had not been a diplomatic person in life and had accumulated many enemies. This made it difficult to prune the list of suspects. A second murder

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This was in the 1890s, when Germanyand Britain werenot hostile to each other. The delegation was negotiating a secret treaty with Britain and obviously someone wanted it stopped. The bomb had killed a secretary but the leader of the group survived. What Watson and Lestrade didn’t know was that Holmes’ brother Mycroft, who was something in the Foreign Ministry, had alreadycalled Sherlock into the case.
The patriots recovered both the jewel and the mummy, and at once departed for Egypt. Holmes and Watson just missed the Egyptians. Watson suggested the alarm be raised with police, but Holmes said no. The mummy belonged back in its tomb, not in a British museum. Justice was better served that way.

“The Knife Of Vengeance” was a 1949 episode written by Howard Merrill. There’s trouble at the steelworks in Sheffield, and Holmes and Watson were called in to help. A partner in a foundry named Pickering was murdered by a vengeful ex-employee named Bennett, whose idea for a new steel alloy had been stolen years ago.
The German diplomat had to go elsewhere to continue the negotiations, and since the two men looked alike, Sherlock disguised himself as the diplomat. The disguise was good enough to fool Watson and Lestrade.

It should be noted that Watson was played by none other than Nigel Bruce, who always portrayed the character as a buffoon. Watson conducted his own investigation, not seeing through Holmes’ disguise. Lestrade wasn’t none too bright either.
The episode began with an interminablelecture byBennett duringwhich he told Pickering he was going to murder him with the knife he was holding. The idiot just stood there and listened instead of fleeing or fighting. After the murder, an equally interminable rant followed, as Bennett stood over the corpse and shouted at great length. He did everything but the bwah-ha!-ha!.
After a few alarums and excursions, the bomber was exposed. Watson had named the wrong person as the culprit, while Holmes got it in one. However, as Holmes told Watson, a vital clue had been provided by the good doctor, who noticed one of the suspects was a drug addict because she had dilated pupils.
Bennett tried to kill his next victim the same way but by that time Holmes and Watson had arrived in Sheffield. His lengthy lecture allowed time for the duo to rescue the victim.

Watson was rather depressed at having botched the case. Holmes tried to cheer him up by pointing out that when he wrote up the case for publication, he could do a little ‘editing’ and show himself in a better light.
Bennett then fled to the foundry. Because the episode had been padded with so much lecturing, time was running out, so in the final few minutes Holmes and Watson chased Bennett on the catwalks. The matter was decided when Bennett fell into a vat of molten steel. Justice was served without the expense of a trial.
It was noted in the canon that when Holmes solved a criminal case he did not necessarily notify the police if justice had already been served somehow. This was also true in the radio series. “The Adventure Of The Ancient Queen”, a 1948 episode written by Max Ehrlich, was about the trouble a British museum was having with a newly imported mummy of an ancient Egyptian queen.
The episode was too much talk and not enough plot. It also relied on Holmes finding a vital clue under the most improbable circumstances and knowing that only one newspaper in the world was published in the Coptic language.

The night watchman had been murdered, and alarums and excursions filled the air. Someone was trying to steal or at least vandalize the mummy. It wasn’t until late in the episode that it was realized there were two separate gangs after the mummy, working at cross purposes.

One was a group of jewel thieves who were after the Ruby of Ra, hidden inside the wrappings. The other was a group of Egyptians, trying to get back a portion of their country’s looted history. The thieves got the jewel but not for long.

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STEAMPUNK REVIEWS: PART 4

by Dale Speirs to management of her father’s companybut had to struggle to be taken seriously as an engineer.

[Parts 1 to 3 appeared in OPUNTIAs #364, 393, and 412.]

Another divergence was that Napoleon managed to get most of his army back from the ill-fated expedition to Moscow, then fight the 1813 battle at Leipzig to a draw instead of losing and being forced to abdicate. In these novels, France was still fighting wars and working to develop its steamships.

The Art And Craft Of Steampunking.

THE STEAMPUNK USER’S MANUAL (2014) by Desirina Boskovich and Jeff Vandermeer is a coffee table book about the art, fashion, and performances of this genre. The majority of steampunk fans, as I have observed, did not come into the hobby after reading novels. They were cosplayers or arts-and-crafts hobbyists. This book, while nodding to the literary part, emphasized the visual aspects of this genre.
The first novel in the series was STEAM AND STRATAGEM (2013). Rumours that the French were working on military steamships had been confirmed by a British spy, Lord Bond.

A handsome ladies’ man, he got into trouble and was saved by Roberta’s sternwheeler. She had trouble keeping him at arm’s length, physically speaking, but did appreciate his help in convincingAdmiraltyHouse to fund the construction of steam warships.
The authors note that brass goggles, top hats, and corsets are clichés used by lazy cosplayers. They do not make someone steampunkish per se. Any art using gears and clockworks should at least attempt to look functional, rather than sticking gears on at random in impossible configurations.
Many alarums and excursions followed, for French spies were everywhere.

Assassination attempts were made, and both sides fumbled about trying to gauge how far the other had gotten in steam technology. Roberta’s troubles were constantly magnified by the fact that no one in power would take her seriously because of her gender.
Spread throughout this book are small projects for the reader to attempt. Some are as simple as bottle cap magnets. Others require ability to work in wood, such as the steam-powered orrery. Art projects should be small to start with, and can increase in size as experience is gained in handling metals and wood. Likewise with steampunk musical instruments.
The Stephenson shipyard won the contract for building steam warships to use

against the perfidious French. This added more worries for Roberta because a single shipyard could not do the work. She and her father had to contract out some of the construction, which added to the cost and complexity. They had a rich contract from Admiralty House but if they couldn’t keep costs under control then the Stephensons would go bankrupt trying to fulfill their obligations.
Costumes need practicality. It is not enough to sew pieces of cloth together. There must be an easy way to dress and undress, and the clothing must hang properly. The wearer should remember that after spending a long amount of time in steampunk garments that they must allow for easy use of the toilet.

There was a brief section on literarysteampunk but only a few pages. This book is for the visually oriented steampunker who thinks of the genre in terms of costumes and gadgets. And, of course, brass goggles.
The construction of the steamships moved at a slow pace. Communications took days even within a country because the postal service had not yet been reformed bySir Rowland Hill (that came in 1840). The novel mayseem to drag to modern readers weaned on telephones and the Internet, but it does make the reader appreciate the slower pace of life, even in war, back then.

Novels.

Christopher Hoare has a series of steampunk novels set in the Regency period. The heroine was Roberta Stephenson, daughter of George, the Father of Railways. In our timeline he had a son Robert and a daughter Frances who died shortly after birth, so Roberta was one of the divergences. Roberta, succeeded
The novel cut off with numerous dangling threads. It was mostly set-up and background. The action against the French was only just about to begin when the pages ran out.

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SPIES AND SUBTERFUGES (2014) was the next novel in the series. It was not a sequel but a continuation that picked up where the first novel left off. Roberta Stephenson and Lord Bond traveled to the Netherlands, a subjugated province of the French Empire, to do some spying and try to learn about the French pyroscaphes, one of which was rumoured to be a battleship. They were married on board so as to better pass as husband and wife, at which point Roberta learned that if single women had few rights, married women had none.
The narrator was bicycle riding when he saw the dome of magma rise up at the head of the valley. He franticallypedaled downstream, stayingalongtheridges, heading to London to get his family. En route, he sounds the alarm to passersby but no one believes his fantastical tale that lava is coming their way.

The lava moved slowly but inexorably, filling the valley as it marched to the sea. London was soon no more. Many towns along the way that were high enough to escape the lava were nonetheless destroyed by fires started from the radiant heat. A good story. I’m surprised Asylum hasn’t yet made this into a movie.
Most of the novel was taken up by spy and diplomatic narratives that were too tedious to describe as action-adventure. Eventuallytheycaught a glimpse of the new steam battleship under construction. Roberta took notes, and they returned

• to England for debriefing by Admiralty House.
• “The Great Catastrophe Of 2947” by Woods Peters (1931 May, AMAZING

STORIES, available as a free pdf from www.archive.org) was written long before tectonics became an established science. Cities were being destroyed by volcanoes where none would be expected, beginning with Paris, France. Flood lavas erupted in the American grain belt and sent that country into famine.
From there to the third novel, which I did not bother to read. The initial burst of steampunk faded away into alternative history, which in turn became historical fiction. The writing wasn’t bad per se, but the pacing trickled along as every nuance of every piece of minutiae was dissected in excessive detail.
The narrator was a reporter in Hawaii, and as part of his reportage was sent to find out why, at a time when volcanoes were running amok around the world, Kilauea suddenly went dormant. He fell into a crevasse and found himself at the mercy of a strange subterranean species of bipeds who were out to conquer the surface of the planet. They had a high-tech civilization and bid fair to succeed.

THAR SHE BLOWS!: PART 3

by Dale Speirs

[Parts 1 and 2 appeared in OPUNTIA #70.1D and 314.]

What began the undeclared war was the development of broadcast radio by humans, which interfered severely with the underground technology. Since they controlled volcanoes, they fought back as best as they knew how. The narrator managed to negotiate a truce between the Upper People and the underground people. A slightly facile ending but better than the usual destruction of the bad guys, because they were not bad guys, only defending themselves.
Alberta has no volcanos, although we are close enough to Washington State that Calgary was dusted by Mount Saint Helens in 1980. My bright red car turned pale pink, and there was a run in our city for engine air filters. I like stories about volcanos, secure in the knowledge that whatever else may afflict me, they will not force me to evacuate my city. Except, of course, the Yellowstone supervolcano, but it would only bother us if we had a southeast wind, which is rare in Alberta.
“The Boiling Sea” by Vincent McHugh was a short story published in the 1953