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genuinely criminal that holmes and watson didnt get to be companions in the VNAs like they were planning because the dynamic between the two of them and the doctor in this book is so fucking funny. imagine being the worlds greatest detective and fucking bugs bunny shows up and starts solving your case for you. imagine how pissed youd be
all-consuming fire (novel: 1994)
do you know this doctor who story?
yes, i have read it
yes, i have read parts of it
i have heard of it & plan to read
i have only heard of it
no, i have never heard of it
Sherlock Holmes from All-Consuming Fire, the official Doctor Who-Sherlock Holmes crossover! (Well, semi-official: it's an official Doctor Who tie-in, but I don't believe they bothered to ask anyone's permission to use Holmes. Anyway, it was written by Andrew Lane who went on to do the Young Sherlock books.)
This also crosses over with the Lovecraft mythos apparently. Oddly enough, not the only Holmes/Lovecraft crossover. Anyways, let's hear it for the time and space traveling Sherlock Holmes!
In Deadfall, Ardethe was a planet in Kasterborous implied to be a ruined Gallifrey (specifically destroyed by the Daleks in the original AudioVisual story). Indeed it was later confirmed to be one of the Nine Gallifreys in @rassilon-imprimatur‘s The Story So Far...
Ardethe is home to the Shabooj'm, implied to be the descendants of Shobogan survivors.
According to All-Consuming Fire, many Shobogans on Gallifrey worshipped the Great Old One Azathoth.
The same book also confirmed that many of the powerful beings in the Whoniverse are Great Old Ones / Outer Gods from Lovecraftian lore going by different names (likely nerfed to varying degrees from their Mythos counterparts by the Anchoring of the Thread). The book features a creature claiming to be Azathoth, but the Seventh Doctor dismisses it as a fake, having little resemblance to its namesake.
One creature that does resemble Azathoth, however, is Akhaten. A slumbering idiot god, in the form of a (radioactively?) glowing large planet / brown dwarf. It is kept sleeping by an endless song, but it is foretold that it will destroy the universe when it wakes.
Azathoth was referred to as “the Nuclear Chaos”. This has been linked to radioactivity by later writers, but originally meant that Azathoth existed at the centre (’nucleus’) of the universe. Gallifrey has also been suggested to exist near the universe’s centre (ignore the fact that physicists don’t believe our universe has a centre).
Akhaten is worshipped by various species, including Merry Gejelh’s. Her unnamed species is humanoid, strongly-psychic and is seen wearing scarlet (with some beige-gold) in cultural ceremonies.
THEORY:
Is it possible that Merry’s species is in fact the Shabooj’m, or another distant descendant of the Shobogans that survived a destruction of Gallifrey, who went looking for Azathoth and found Akhaten?
They share some traits with Gallifreyans, being humanoid, psychic and wearing scarlet ceremonial robes (which could be especially relevant if one assumes that the Dalek-caused devestation of Ardethe is linked to the Time War, and thus possibly occurred after the dissolution of the chapters). Note especially the mix of beige-gold and red worn both by Merry and Ablif the Outsider in the images above. It’s definitely a stretch, but you could even make a link between the gold and white flowers Merry wears and the Gallifreyan Flower of Remembrance:
At least one species at Akhaten, possibly Merry’s, is also likely to be very long-lived, potentially with lifetimes similar to Gallifreyans. We know this thanks to The Doctor: His Lives and Times, which reveals that Susan bought the Doctor’s Five Hundred Year Diary as a present for him during their original visit to the system. Slow ageing and a Time Lord-like memory could also help to explain how Merry and other Queens of Years (a title which, when you think about it, is quite similar to ‘Lords of Time’) are able to learn every song and story of their culture.
The Akhet system is also, if Akhaten IS Azathoth, near the centre of the universe, placing it in the same region of space as Gallifrey and Ardethe, possibly within Kasterborous.
Doctor Who All-Consuming Fire Annotations; Prologue & Chapter One
Prologue
The Old Man, his granddaughter and the British Army officer are the First Doctor, Susan, Siger Holmes respectively. The Doctor and Susan originate from, whodda thunk it, Doctor Who while Siger Holmes is a direct lift from Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective.
Lane takes a number of elements of Baring-Gould’s attempt at a biography for Holmes, including both Siger and the third older, older Holmes brother, Sherringford, who will appear later in the novel. Gould identifies Siger as the Holmes family patriarch and seemingly derived the name from the detective’s use of Sigerson as an alias in The Adventure of the Empty House.
The other figures present during the prologue are of course the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Bernice Summerfield following the events of the book. They primarily serve to add a few tantalising hints at what’s to come and help introduce Lane’s notion within the book that Holmes and Watson are false-names attributed to the duo by Doyle during the publication of Watson’s memoirs. An idea largely abandoned by the time they appear in Happy Endings.
With Barbara and Ian notably absent during this sequence, it could be taken that the events are pre-Unearthly Child. However, you could always assume that they are just around the corner and aren’t terribly interested in Siger’s tale. There’s a slightly indulgent vibe to the entire set-up, however, Siger’s knowledge of the temple ultimately plays a larger role within the novel and beyond that, there’s a nice atmospheric element to these figures existing on the periphery of the tale.
Chapter One
“thirty-five volumes of my diary” - Doyle wrote 60 Holmes stories between 1887 and 1927, however chronologically his adventures begin in 1881, All-Consuming Fire takes place in 1887, with The Final Problem occurring four years later in 1891. The later is foreshadowed throughout the book, and one of the short’s more notable figures will appear in a minor role later in the novel.
“I see the repulsive story of the red leech, the terrible death of Crosby the banker.”- Lane continues Doyle’s trend of hinting at untold Holmes stories within Watson’s diary. The line paraphrases a similar moment inThe Adventure of the Golden Prince-Nez. Numerous pastiches have attempted to document these cases to one degree or another, and Lane himself would subsequently use the red leech for his second Young Sherlock Holmes novel.
“The singular affair of the aluminium crutch and its connection with an attempt upon the life of our dear sovereign…” - Another untold tale, this time lifted from The Musgrave Ritual. Its role in an attempt on the life of Good Queen Vic is seemingly an addition by Lane, and I can’t help but see this as a reference to the Jackal’s use of an aluminium crutch during his attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle during the final act of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. “Following the tragic curtailment of my marriage to Constance Adams of California I was again living under the same roof as Holmes.” - The exact number and nature of Watson’s wives are a running joke/source of hilariously serious debate within Holmes Fandom. Born of a few off-hand mentions and Doyle clearly not giving a fuck, Watson seemingly goes through between two to seven marriages. Gould alleges Constance Adams was set to be Watson’s bride to be in Doyle’s unpublished play The Angels of Darkness, so this is a bit of a twofer reference. The failure of the marrage is a bit of a joke on this front.
“The cost, he claimed, was of no concern, for he had recently been generously remunerated by Lord Rotherfield for proving to the satisfaction of various Coury circulars and scandal sheets that Lady Rotherfield was not a female impersonator.” - Another Untold Tale, seemingly a Lane original this time and an unnecessarily unpleasant “joke.”
“Finally, completely restored to health and happiness, we returned to England on the Orient Express.” - While the Orient Express was a real long-distance passenger train, it’s hard to image Lane didn’t leap at the chance to have the two return to England via the service for obvious reasons. “...Colonel Warburton and his charming wife Gloria.” - Presumably, the same Colonel Warburton whose supposed madness would come to the attention of Holmes via Watson. One of two such instances mentioned in The Engineers Thumb.
“..but only the Reverend Hawkins was present in the dining car. Baden-Powell, a self-proclaimed expert on butterflies whose tan and manner indicated military service, was absent.” - Hawkins is seemingly a Lane original, however his alias shares a surname with Doyle’s first wife. Baden-Powell is presumably Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout Movement and at the time of the novel Intelligence Officer within the British Army. Powell often travelled disguised as a butterfly collector and would use detailed drawings of butterfly wings as a means of hiding maps and other sensitive information. His presence during the sequence adds a touch of humour to Holmes’ complete failure to pick up on this while noting Hawkins own subterfuge.
“The man in the chair, swamped by his white robes, was the least impressive thing in the carriage.” - As we’ll soon learn, this apparently unimpressive figure is, in fact, Pope Leo XIII, who served as head of the Catholic Church between 1878 and 1903.
“I am Cardinal Ruffo-Scilla, and this,’ he gestured to his mirror image on the other side of the chair, ‘is Cardinal Tosca.” - Cardinal Tosca’s sudden death will latter be investigated by Holmes in yet another untold adventure mentioned in Black Peter. Notably, as with the events of All-Consuming Fire, this is at the behest of the Pope. Ruffo-Scilla is an odder figure, sharing the name with a real Cardinal. However, the Ruffo-Scilla died around three decades prior to the events of the novel. I’m tempted, primarily for fun anagram reasons, to view him as yet another Scaroth splinter particularly as it adds a few of extra layers of mirroring to the scene. Who and Holmes characters on either side of the Pope and all that shit.
“‘I remember Sherringford writing to tell me,’ he murmured, ‘ that one of our distant ancestors had been Commander in Chief of the Naval Forces of his Holiness the Pople. I had never credited the story until now.” - The first overt mention of Sherringford within the novel, this also takes another element from Gould in that the Holmes family are seemingly lapsed Catholics. Watson’s surprise at Holmes’ sudden, casual, revelations regarding his family recalls his shock upon first meeting Mycroft in The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. “Have you heard of the Library of Saint John the Beheaded?” - Recurrent minor Who fixture that first appears here, the Library holds a number of rare, banned texts. Lane would subsequently detail elements of it’s founding in Empire of Glass. Where rather fittingly, the Doctor’s alleged older sibling Irving Braxatiel played a role in its creation.
“One of the three unexpurgated versions of the Malleus Maleficarum is in the Library,” - The Hammer of Witches, Well known treatise on Witchcraft that encouraged the extermination of its practitioners. Written by discredited clergyman Henrich Kramer, lots of blatant insights into the mind of a murderous wanker.
“...along side shelves of books on the Chinese Si Fan society and its leader, Doctor Fu Manchu - a man whom we in the Vatican believe to be as huge a menace to civilization as you believe anarchism to be.” - Fu Manchu is the creation of Sax Rhomer, appearing in 12 novels between 1913 and 1948. Manchu is the archetypical yellow peril, inspiring countless equally racist figures including Who’s own Li H'sen Chang. An Anti-British figure, Manchu would battle cheap Holmes knock-off Dennis Nyland-Smith in an attempt to end British Imperialism. Rhomer was a joyless fuck, so this was treated as the Doctor’s greatest crime. Lane portrays the Si Fan as a largely unknown force during the late 18th century, and this fits quite well with the early 20th century setting of the Manchu novels.
“The Affair of the Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant” - Title of an episode of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio show, context would suggest Lane’s version is slightly more salacious.
[KLAXONS BLARING] ACE MENTIONS SONIC THE HEDGEHOG BY NAME
holmes getting like two sentences out before bennys like "huh! i cant stand this motherfucker" i love her
and this is ANOTHER story with benny crossdressing this is like the fifth one ive read. also i have to draw her in her victorian suit. hot.
