BK, I'm assuming you saw my post yesterday that I am indeed still calling people for you up here. As your publicist Marcy discovered, Portland is a strangely provincial little place and the bookstores here seem to have a problem with on-demand publishing. However, as I mentioned in the note you should be receiving at your PO Box today, I know I can book you into a non-bookstore venue and that you would have a large appreciative audience.
Re: Holmes reworkings with unexpected characters, also tangentially touching on our Hollywood Babylon discussion department: I think I forgot what I was going to type after that department heading.....
Oh, yes. There's a great book called The Case of the Philosopher's Ring, wherein Holmes investigates the strange disappearances of a number of late 19th century notables, e.g., Bertrand Russell. The arch-fiend of the piece is none other than Uncle Al, Aleister Crowley (The Great Beast 666).
My abandoned Master's Thesis was going to be a book-length comparison of Crowley and W.B. Yeats, who of course were both mystics involved in the Golden Dawn and had a famously bitchy feud with each other ("What, pray tell, are Yeats?" Crowley once acidly asked). However, the correspondences between the two are quite astounding (to quote Simon Cowell
)--they both had wives who each delivered "revealed" wisdom through automatic writing--in Yeats' case, his weird compendium
A Vision, in Crowley's, his self-appointed revelation of a new epoch,
The Book of the Law. They were both regular practicioners of ritual magic(k) and, though Crowley is of course better known for his prose, were both quite amazing poets who tended to cover the same symbolic territory in their writings.
Gee, that was kind of a short story in and of itself.
