Guest post by Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives author Tim Major
Tim Major is a writer and freelance editor from York, UK. His books include Snakeskins and Hope Island, three Sherlock Holmes novels, short story collection And the House Lights Dim and a monograph about the 1915 silent crime film, Les Vampires. Tim’s short fiction has been selected for Best of British Science Fiction, Best of British Fantasy and The Best Horror of the Year.
About Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives: Dr Jekyll and his monstrous alter-ego join forces with his ex-fiancée Muriel to solve a series of disappearances across Victorian London. To solve the case and bring those responsible to justice, Muriel must find a way to place her trust in Mr Hyde, which might mean uncovering secrets about her own life she never dreamed of discovering.
There’s a lot to be said for familiarity. Often, many of us opt to continue working through TV, film or book series rather than place our trust in an entirely new concept. I don’t think that’s due to laziness or lack of imagination. Since the beginning of human history, we’ve always loved stories, and we’ve always loved ongoing sagas and retellings. Sometimes we can learn the most about ourselves by exploring an idea in the company of familiar characters.
As a writer, there’s a degree of comfort in working with well-known characters. There’s none of the blank-page panic relating to your protagonists, for a start. You can visualise your principal characters, and you can foresee, broadly, how they might respond to new situations. In my case, there’s also a sense of reassurance in terms of publication. In recent years I’ve written three Sherlock Holmes novels, and in each case I’ve found them easier to promote than my original fiction, with none of my earlier sense that I’m pleading for people to buy my work. Oh, you like Sherlock Holmes, do you? I might say. In that case, you might enjoy my new book in which Holmes solves a crime related to early filmmaking. No embarrassment at all, because readers immediately understand whether the book I’m describing suits their tastes.
Writing any genre novel involves a sort of contract with the reader, I suppose. For example, if I promote a novel as a locked-room mystery, there’d better be both a locked-room and a mystery, and the mystery must have a plausible, satisfying solution. Featuring well-known characters adds another clause to that contract. It raises particular expectations that need to be met: these characters must be recognisable and they must act in a manner that’s consistent with their previous appearances.
But… it’s complex. Expectations are difficult to predict. As I discovered with my Sherlock Holmes books, every reader has a slightly different conception of how Holmes should act, and even how he ought to appear. That’s because a character as well-known as Sherlock Holmes has, for many people, become divorced from his source material. My Holmes books were pitched as faithful pastiches of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales, but many of my readers have never read Conan Doyle. Instead, their image of the character is drawn from film or TV adaptations or spinoffs. Adding to that, each of my novels is far longer than any single Holmes story written by Conan Doyle, which means that the idea of ‘faithfulness’ to the original tales is flawed from the outset.
Anyway. My new novel is about Jekyll and Hyde. And we all know the story of Jekyll and Hyde, don’t we? So we all have the same expectations, surely?
Absolutely not.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is rightfully one of the best-known works of Gothic horror, alongside Dracula and Frankenstein. But how many people have actually read it? Like Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde have developed far beyond their source material. The central concept of the novella – the transformation from one man to another – is more famous than the story itself. We talk about people having a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, to mean they exhibit large swings in mood or behaviour.
That leaves me in a strange position. I guess you could call it the Strange Case of the Little-Known Well-Known Characters.
For example, what is Henry Jekyll like? Upstanding, moral, intelligent. What is Edward Hyde like? Brutish, violent, amoral. Are there any more reader expectations to take into account in Jekyll and Hyde spinoff fiction? Transformations from Jekyll to Hyde and vice versa must be included, obviously. And then there’s a certain tone that must be achieved. Readers picking up a Jekyll and Hyde novel expect fogbound, gaslit London streets and Gothic chills.
It’s not much to go on. Despite Jekyll and Hyde being so well-known, there are actually very few expectations to be met. That seems a bit of a gift to a writer, I think.
Stevenson’s novella is one of the most adapted stories on stage and in film. Some critics state that it was the most adapted single work in the silent-movie years. Characters such as Sherlock Holmes appear far more often, but in a variety of different stories, whereas Jekyll and Hyde almost always populate the same fundamental tale: Henry Jekyll develops a means of releasing his id in the form of Edward Hyde, who behaves violently and then threatens to take over Jekyll’s life entirely.
What I mean to say is that Stevenson’s almost mythical story of Jekyll and Hyde has been retold many times… but there are far fewer spinoffs involving the characters. Those that exist are often really just tweaks to the original plot: for example, shifting to a modern setting, or Jekyll transforming into a female Hyde. New stories featuring the same characters are far less common.
Again, that’s a gift to a writer.
My novel Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives is a sort of sequel, taking place a decade after the events of Stevenson’s tale. As the title suggests, it’s also a mystery novel. Jekyll and Hyde are a detective duo, albeit a duo inhabiting the same body, who can’t communicate and who resent each other’s existence…
Actually, Stevenson’s novella is a mystery story too – one thing that may surprise people who haven’t read the original novella is that it’s concerned with the mystery of Hyde’s identity, and the fact that he and Jekyll are one and the same person is revealed only at the end of the story. There’s even an amateur detective in the form of lawyer Gabriel Utterson. However, by the time the first stage adaptation opened in 1887, this secret was known to all – so the plot changed to a melodrama in which the transformations are known to the audience from the off. Most adaptations also introduced a love interest for Henry Jekyll, who is usually the daughter of the man Hyde will go on to kill, which makes the stakes more personal. So, it’s understandable that few people associate Jekyll and Hyde directly with the mystery genre. Whether my novel represents a shift of genres depends upon readers’ expectations.
Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives isn’t a strict follow-on from the original Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In a nod to the fact that readers’ knowledge of the characters and story will be drawn from any number of adaptations and retellings, I’ve allowed myself to pick my favourite aspects from several of them. Equally as influential as Stevenson’s novella is the 1931 film adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, which is my favourite onscreen version – it features a frankly amazing transformation sequence, an unforgettable performance by March in the two main roles, and it was released just before the Hays Code industry guidelines affected Hollywood output and diluted the ability to feature explicit details, so it’s still shocking today. The main aspect I’ve drawn from that version is the character of Muriel Carew, Henry Jekyll’s fiancée and the daughter of the murdered Sir Danvers Carew.
In order to retain some degree of mystery about Jekyll’s and Hyde’s true relationship, I made Muriel my main character. A decade after her father’s death and after Henry Jekyll fled the country, she’s uncertain how she feels when Henry reappears. The fact that he now operates a detective agency thrills her, and appeals to her sense of independence and her boredom with high-society life, and she tries to charm her way into his business. But she soon begins to understand that wherever Henry Jekyll goes, Edward Hyde follows, and that Edward may have been directly responsible for her father’s death.
The funny thing is, writing Muriel turned out to be far easier than writing either Jekyll or Hyde. I think the reason is that Muriel is an observer. Like the reader, she’s shrewd and able to glean what’s happening by observing clues… even if the conclusion is as unexpected as the fact that her ex-fiancé can transform into another man. I allowed myself to make her incongruously modern in her outlook, so that when placed in Victorian high society she seems almost as fantastical as a body-morphing scientist.
Writing Edward Hyde presented a different set of challenges. In the novella we only see him from a distance, often glimpsed in witness accounts rather than shown directly. In order for my mystery novel to be a true three-hander, I was determined that Edward would be given point-of-view chapters. But how does a man like Hyde think? Perhaps in impulses and images as opposed to methodical thought processes. He’s victim to wild emotional swings, and can’t help but act on them. I suppose I could be accused of humanising a monster, which would be a fair assessment. But this is what I feel is interesting about the original tale: Jekyll claims that Hyde is made of all the bad parts of himself… but I think that would still add up to somebody who’s recognisably human. Plus, after a decade of infrequent appearances, I think it’s reasonable to suppose that Edward Hyde may have developed a little.
Henry Jekyll is another matter, and in a way he’s the most complex character in my novel – not that he tends to reveal it. On each reread of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde I feel more uncertain about Jekyll’s claims about his experiment. Has he really isolated all his negative traits, leaving himself with only the good parts? If so, why does he seem unchanged before and after his experiments? While the Jekyll of many of the early film adaptations is a straightforwardly moral character, in the original novella his characteristics are far more murky. Essentially, I don’t accept that the experiment worked. I think Edward Hyde is a version of Henry Jekyll unhampered by societal conventions, and that Jekyll remains the same as he ever was. In short, I think Henry Jekyll is a hypocrite.
And that’s no bad thing for a writer! I’m a fan of the trope of the flawed detective, and Henry Jekyll is deeply flawed in a psychological sense – and adding to that, he might transform into the violent Edward Hyde at any moment! Of course, Muriel Carew brings her own hang-ups and idiosyncrasies to the detective team, which results in all sorts of additional problems. I’m not interested in making things easy for my characters.
Alongside the backstories of (semi-) familiar characters, my novel contains another mystery entirely. This is a detective story, after all! While I wanted to ensure that all the gaslights and fog that readers expect are present and correct, I was also determined that the mystery the characters need to solve would relate to the same concerns as Stevenson’s novella. So, the missing-persons case that Muriel, Henry and Edward investigate links back to doubles, and facades, and hypocrisy… and violence and Gothic thrills, of course.
One thing that I’ve learned about working with well-known characters is that it often ends up being fun, with little of the anxiety of creating entirely new people. I’ve so enjoyed writing Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, who I hope are recognisable but will also surprise readers. Adding to that, my more-or-less invented character, Muriel Carew, allows insights into those male characters that I hadn’t expected, along with introducing bundles of her own issues. It’s her involvement that pushes Jekyll and Hyde beyond their source material and into new territory.
Writing Jekyll & Hyde: Consulting Detectives has left me in a strange place, dealing with a strange case. After spending so much time with them, I feel that these characters are mine, now. And what I want most of all is to push these versions of Henry, Edward and Muriel into new territory. I want to write spinoffs to my own work. More than anything, I hope I’ll get to write about more cases involving this very unusual detective agency.
