Sherlock Meets Poe? Sherlock Meets Lovecraft?

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I am reading one of the Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child “Agent Prendergast” mysteries right now ,Crimson Shore.

Pendergast is a New Orleans-raised rich eccentric (New York mansion, manservant) with a twenty-something assistant/ward, Constance, possessed of “an old-fashioned beauty.” He has FBI credentials, but apparently answers to no one in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on a regular basis, instead taking cases that engage him intellectually.

Crimson Shore is set in a lonely, decayed Massachusetts fishing village1 and the plot involves events in Salem in 1692. And someone once was walled up in a wine cellar and left to die — there is your Edgar Allen Poe reference, as the characters make clear. Lovecraft? How about a reference to the Necronomicon delivered with a literary elbow to the ribs? Also mysterious creatures in the salt marshes.

So is that more like the Murder, She Wrote TV series meets Poe, etc? A little toward the “cozy” end of the spectrum as opposed to the hard-boiled “police procedural” end?

“What I would like you to do, Constance, is to go to Salem tomorrow morning. I understand there are many attractions, including a ‘Witch house,’ a ‘Witch Dungeon Museum,’ and the famous Witch Trials Memorial, not to mention the ‘Witch City Segway Tour.'”

“Segway Tour? Surely you’re joking.”

“More to the point, Salem is also home to the Integrated Wiccan Alliance.” He passed her a card. “A certain Tiffani Brooks, also known as Shadow Raven, is head of the league and the leader of a coven there.

Constance took the card. “Wicca? White magic? And what am I supposed to find out?”

But then it gets considerably weirder. Still, after all my Salem-related posts earlier this yea, there is room for more!

  1. Are there really any un-gentrified ports left? [↩]

One thought on “Sherlock Meets Poe? Sherlock Meets Lovecraft?”

  1. Preston and Child lead us a little wrong with the notion of an “Integrated Wiccan Alliance.” My experience–and I’m surely not alone here–is that any group of Wiccans can barely agree to share a check for breakfast at the diner. Let alone a deep, dark, devious conspracy to gain power as a group.

    But–willing suspension of disbelief as a reader. And, demons.

    Another entertaining mashup series:

    Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu
    by Lois H. Gresh.

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