I have a short story in the new Arthur Conan Doyle tribute anthology Steel True, Blade Straight, starring Doyle’s other other hero, Brigadier Gerard!
And, spoilers, the story also stars Nikolai Rostov from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace!
Doyle’s hero, of course, is Sherlock Holmes. Then there’s his other hero, Professor Challenger, in all of his wonderful Brian Blessed-ness. But then there’s his other other hero, Etienne Gerard, French cavalry officer during the Napoleonic Wars.
Doyle wrote the Gerard stories at the height of his creative powers, in the period when Sherlock Holmes was believed dead. (The Gerard stories fall on either side of the writing of The Hound of the Baskervilles.) Gerard is a bit like Forrest Gump — he goes everywhere, he does everything, he meets everyone, and he’s an idiot who lacks the self-awareness to realize just how much of an idiot he is. He’s also completely full of himself; he thinks he’s the best fighter, best lover, best soldier. He isn’t, and much of the comedy of the stories comes from the distance between Gerard’s perception of events (and his role in them) and what’s actually going on.
I read the Gerard stories nine years ago (despite having them in paperback for a decade more than that; sometimes books just don’t make to the reading pile), and I liked them. I also started thinking about Napoleonic era fiction as one giant metafictional universe — Horatio Hornblower is in Riga when Jack Aubrey is in the Pacific and outside Newtonian space-time when Pierre Bezukhov is at Borodino when Sharpe is in Spain — and I began thinking about story possibilities. I gravitated toward stories and characters in the public domain, and that meant Gerard and War and Peace.
(To explain that “Newtonian space-time” joke… Half of the Aubrey-Maturin books take place in 1812. There’s no way they fit into 1812 unless space-time is broken.)
If War and Peace has a main character, it is Pierre Bezukhov, and I wanted to write a story with Gerard and Pierre during the French occupation of Moscow in 1812, but it really does not work — Gerard, though he goes into Russia in the 1812 campaign, canonically does not go all the way to Moscow (“How the Brigadier Rode to Minsk”), and Pierre spends all but a handful of days of the French occupation of Moscow in custody, so there was never an opportunity to put them together, and the story I attempted to develop anyway really struggled to keep them heroic and in character. I toyed with some ideas with Andrei Bolkonski, Pierre’s best friend, who has more opportunties —Andrei goes abroad! he disappears for a long stretch of the book!—but these didn’t lead anywhere. Two characters, and I’m already way down on the depth chart…
Nikolai Rostov was the character that fit best with Brigadier Gerard–both men are cavalry officers, and they’re bold men of action–and when flipping through Tolstoy late last year I found there’s a point in War and Peace where they could credibly meet and have an adventure together.
And so they do, in my short story, “How the Brigadier Saved the Duke and Won the Love of the Russian Hussars.”
The irony of writing a story about Nikolai Rostov is that, of the dozen or so major characters in War and Peace, he is, by far, my least favorite. I do treat him well, though. Gerard and Rostov have larger stories, and by chance they happen to intersect here.
The story was tremendous fun to write. You don’t need to know the Gerard stories. You don’t need to know War and Peace. It’s Napoleonic Era adventure fiction. It’s a little absurd. Napoleon pops up for a bit. And it might even be funny!
I do hope you’ll check out the anthology on Kickstarter, funding through December 10th.
Vive l’Empereur!
When I was doing my brainstorming and research, I revisited the BBC’s 2015 radio adaptation of War and Peace. Ten hours of listening was a quicker way of finding the narrative space to zoom into than a month or two or reading.
I was too harsh on it almost a decade ago. The format is clever, and the performances were better than I had remembered.
The image above is “The Battle of Friedland,” by the French painter Horace Vernet. It has nothing to do with my story, except for Napoleon. Rather, according to Sherlock Holmes, he’s related on his mother’s side to an artist in the Vernet family, though it’s not clear which Vernet that might be. It rather seemed the appropriate art for a post about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his characters.