Spider Dance (75 page)

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Spider Dance
, the eighth Irene Adler novel, opens in New York City in the late summer of 1889. Irene Adler Norton and her biographer-companion, spinster Nell Huxleigh, are still searching for the mysterious “Woman in Black” who may have been Irene’s mother. They continue on their own, missing the third leg of their domestic life in Neuilly, near Paris: Irene’s barrister husband, Godfrey Norton, who is on business in Bavaria for the Rothschild banking family, which often employs one or more of the threesome as its agents.

This leaves Irene and Nell with a trio of acquaintances in New York City, possible allies, or rivals, in their personal quest. When murder most violent enters the picture, so do Irene and Nell’s uneasy associates in investigation—Sherlock Holmes and the enterprising American “stunt girl” newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly. Quentin Stanhope, an old acquaintance, British agent, and likely romantic interest for Nell, is also in New York. He should be Nell’s and Irene’s staunch ally, but he’s been commissioned to keep Nellie Bly quiet about their shocking pursuit of Jack the Ripper (after the Whitechapel “horrors”) in Paris the previous spring. This means paying far more court to the vivacious young daredevil reporter than to reserved Nell.

F
OR
D
ISCUSSION
Related to
Spider Dance:

1. It’s often been noted that protagonists in genre fiction, like mystery, traditionally don’t have parents, or very visible
parents, or children. This novel continues the search for a mother Irene Adler may not want to know, much less the father she never knew either. Why is she so adamant about being indifferent to her forebears? Why do you think parents and children might encumber such characters? Certainly Holmes and Watson were parentless as far as readers were concerned. Are there other favorite detectives you can think of who are singularly alone in the world? What kind of parents would you imagine Miss Marple to have had? Nero Wolfe? The only facts Doyle gave about Irene were that she had been born in New Jersey, was therefore American, and had sung grand opera. What history would you invent for her, instead of this one? Why did the author choose to give Adler the background and milieu she is developing in the American-set novels,
Femme Fatale
and
Spider Dance?

2. Three women with varying personalities and goals are involved in tracing Irene’s history. Sometimes they cooperate and sometimes they compete, as is also the case with all three in relation to Sherlock Holmes. What characteristics do you admire in each of the three women? What don’t you like? Motherhood, real and mentoring, is an element of this novel’s plot and theme. Who were the “good” and “bad” mothers in the book? How did the cultural imperatives of the time distort the mother-daughter relationship? The character most capable of evolving during the novels is Nell Huxleigh. Is she changing during this novel and the others in the series, and does your opinion of her change as well? What is your opinion of Nellie Bly and Nell’s fear of her?
The Drood Review of Mystery
observed of
Chapel Noir
. “Douglas wants . . . women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of their world.” How does
Spider Dance
contribute to this goal?

3. New York City has always been a major setting for American fiction. Did anything about the depiction of it in this book surprise you? How many elements did you glimpse in their infancy then, which have become staples of contemporary American life? For instance, Joseph Pulitzer was just entering the newspaper business then, but the journalism
awards given in his name today are the most prestigious in the country. How much can history teach us? Can history change our opinions of our own times?

Do you like to read historical novels for the facts of the time period or the attitudes, and how much do you think you can trust such evocations in fiction? Often, historical novelists say, they’re challenged on the accuracy of facts that are absolutely true, but seem too modern. Are you encouraged to do more reading about the historical periods you encounter in novels?

4. Mesmerism, or hypnotism, is a minor factor in these novels: it’s even hinted that Irene Adler received her last name from a little-known reference in a novel about a famous fictional mesmerist, Svengali.
Trilby
, the eponymous heroine of the George du Maurier (father of Daphne) novel that features Svengali, was hypnotized by him to sing beautifully although she was tone deaf. Svengali married her and forced her to tour as a singer.
The Phantom of the Opera
by Frenchman Gaston Leroux arrived in 1911, more than a decade after du Maurier’s
Trilby
, and was far less popular than it is at the present time. It too featured a “monster” training a helpless young woman to sing.

Why, besides the ever-popular Beauty and the Beast parallels, did this theme of women forced to sing by taskmasters create two immortal characters, both of them men and villains? Another minor historical figure named Adler is mentioned in this book. Can you think of any other historical Adlers who might be suitable candidates for Irene’s Father? You could make a game of assigning historical “parents” to fictional characters. The intersection of history and fiction can produce fascinating hybrids.

5. Sherlock Holmes has been resurrected as a character by countless writers since Doyle’s death in 1930, but by very few women. Writers claim he is a very hard character to change, that even Doyle did better with stories in which Holmes was not too dominant. How is Holmes’s character evolving in this series? Which aspects of Holmes as you first encountered him in fiction or film do you feel are immutable,
and which allow for change? Does his associating with these particular characters, the three women, two of them liberated American women, throw a different light on his character?

Three Englishmen are continuing characters the novels: Irene’s husband, Godfrey Norton, Holmes, and Quentin Stanhope. How do these men differ from each other? How do they each relate to the three women, and how is that different with each man?

6. Douglas has said she likes to work on the “large canvas” of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multivolume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twenty-first century too short? Is longterm, committed reading becoming a lost art?

For discussion of the Irene Adler series:

1. Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to reevaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the recent copyright contest over
The Wind Done Gone
, Alice Randall’s reimagining of
Gone with the Wind
events and characters from the African-American slaves’ viewpoints? Could the novel’s important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the classic work generally familiar to most people? What other works have attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

2. Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels, including the time’s anti-Semitism. This is an element absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell’s strictly conventional views affect those around her? Why does she take on a moral watchdog
role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene’s pragmatic philosophy? Why is Irene (and also most readers) so fond of her despite her opinionated personality?

3. Douglas chose to blend humor with adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What classic writers and novelists use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

4. The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and.the Continent, artist-tradesman and aristocrat, as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

5.
Chapel Noir
makes several references to
Dracula
through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before the novel actually was published. Stoker is also an ongoing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modern genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late nineteenth century produced not only
Dracula
, Doyle’s Holmes stories, and the surviving dinosaurs of
The Lost World
, but also
Trilby, The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dr. Jekylland Mr. Hyde
, among the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery, and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

A
N INTERVIEW WITH
C
AROLE
N
ELSON
D
OUGLAS