March 2019 Meeting

Re:  Vampires

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire was first published in The Strand Magazine and in N.Y. Hearst’s Int’l Magazine in January 1924

Vampires in Sussex?

No, this case has nothing to do with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was a popular play touring England at the time.  (Bram Stoker was a business manager at the Lyceum Theatre, where Holmes and Watson accompanied Mary Morstan for a rendezvous with Sholto’s agent.)

Holmes’s opinion on vampires?  “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish!”  “…it’s pure lunacy!”  “…we seem to have been switched on to a Grimm’s fairy tale.”  “No ghosts need apply.”

Holmes and Watson travel to Sussex, nonetheless, where the old house is full of curiosities.  A beautiful Peruvian wife and mother who lays dying.  Her young step-son, with whom she has come to blows, her loyal servant, her loving husband (from whom she is keeping a secret) a baby with a wound on its neck and a lame dog.

From Bill Blackbeard’s “Sherlock Holmes in America”

The Stormy Petrels will sink their teeth into The Sussex Vampire  on Tuesday, March 5th at 7:00 pm, meeting at our usual Hampton Place lounge.

For more information, please contact Fran at:  franziskah@shaw.ca

Bonus questions for members attending the meeting:

(1) What was the name of the ship associated with “The Giant Rat of Sumatra”?

(2) Name another ship mentioned in this adventure

“Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,” said Holmes……