January 31, 2004
FOG, ALLEYS, INTERTEXTUALITY
Angus on The Talons of Weng-Chiang. On Talons' intertextuality, the brilliant BBC site (imagine working for that! What a job!) has a few interesting things to say:
"Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon has often been cited as one of the story's major influences, but this was disputed by Andy Lane in In-Vision Issue Twenty-One, dated December 1989: '[It] picks up not on the truth of Sherlock Holmes, but on what people think the truth is. In fact, the vast majority of Holmes' cases do not take place in London, do not involve fog and hansom cabs, and revolve around villains smaller, rather than larger, than life... The Doctor's costume of deerstalker and cloak is suitably Holmesian, except that Holmes never wore a deerstalker - that was the invention of one of the original artists... Sherlock Holmes' reputation rests upon his powers of observation, memory and deduction... In comparison, the Doctor puts up a bad showing. Fair enough, his memory is as good - he immediately recognises scorpion venom, the Tong of the Black Scorpion, the rat hairs on the murdered cab driver and the effects of opium. But his ratiocinations are few and far between... In fact... one [is put] more in mind of Sir Denis Nayland-Smith, arch-enemy of... Doctor Fu-Manchu. The connections here are more obvious: the fog, the alleys, the crowds of orientals skulking through the streets spoiling for a fight, the base on the river, the villain who expands his lifespan through strange scientific means, the hero and his sidekick who blunder into trouble but escape more by luck than judgment, the melodrama, the plot device that could affect the world. It's almost too good to be true.'"