Literary Chocolates

I’ve been indulging in Harbor Sweets chocolates for years and have bestowed many a box of them on family and friends. Most of their goodies follow a nautical theme, like the Harbor Lights (truffles embossed with a sculpture of a Salem Harbor lighthouse) and the Sand Dollars (pecan halves and butter caramel surrounded by dark chocolate).

The company recently introduced its “Experience Salem” line, candies that can be eaten guilt-free because it’s in support of the literary arts. A portion of the proceeds from each of the confections goes to support a particular museum — Salem Witch Chocolates (almond butter crunch in milk chocolate) for the Salem Witch Museum, Sweet Wheat (dark sweet chocolate with mint and molasses) for the Peabody Essex Museum, and Chocolate Gables (solid milk and dark chocolates, above left) for the House of the Seven Gables.

All three museums are located in the seaside town of Salem, Massachusetts, where Harbor Sweets has its headquarters. The gabled mansion (right) was made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic tale The House of the Seven Gables. There is also a connection between the writer and the other two museums. His great-great grandfather participated in the Salem witch trials and earned the moniker “The Hanging Judge.” The Peabody Essex Museum’s East India Marine was constructed in 1825 to showcase objects sailors brought back from their global journeys. Hawthorne (whose father was a member of the East India Marine Society) proudly showed the hall to his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A good way to see the town is with the National Park Service’s self-guided walking tour of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Salem. –Shannon McKenna Schmidt

Grant’s Drugstore placed on ‘Endangered’ List

One of our readers, Gary Wyatt, wrote in to tell us the unfortunate news that Grant’s Drugstore, where Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) once lived, has been placed on Missouri Preservation’s “Most Endangered Buildings” list.  The writer’s father died there while the family resided in rooms over the pharmacy and  he mentions it several times in his autobiography. The building, which currently houses a recreation of a period drug store and is a part of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum complex in Hannibal, was discovered to be in danger of collapse. Donations are being solicited to undertake critical restoration work. Among the many ways you can support the Twain legacy and the historic boyhood sites associated with him are by applying for a Mark Twain VISA card (a portion of all sales will be donated to the museum at no cost to the consumer), by signing a petition to designate 2010 as “The Year of Mark Twain” (2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the author’s death), or by simply donating a dollar for each Twain book you have read to contribute to the museum’s “One Book, One Buck” program.

Thanks in part to the previous donations of Twain fans, restoration work is proceeding on another important site within the Hannibal historic complex–the Becky Thatcher home. The little white frame house (which last week was revealed to have been painted beige during Becky’s time) was once the home of Laura Hawkins, Mark Twain’s childhood sweetheart and the model for Becky. The house is expected to reopen to visitors this fall.

In the meantime, visitors to Hannibal can still see  the many other wonderful sites within the museum complex, including the Twain family’s small frame house at 208 Hill Street , which has been recreated with period furniture, and the Museum Gallery, originally an 1850s department store that is now home to many fascinating exhibits about Twain’s life.  On display in Hannibal are many Twain artifacts like one of his famous white jackets (believed to be the only one still in existence), his writing desk, chair and typewriter.

Elementary, My Dear Watson

 “I have my eye on a suite on Baker Street,” confided Sherlock Holmes to the new acquaintance who was to become his future roommate and unwitting partner in detection, Dr. Watson. Despite the renowned deductive powers of the masterful sleuth, there’s one thing even Holmes himself couldn’t have divined at the start of his adventures: that the unassuming upstairs flat he went on to rent would soon become one of the world’s most famous addresses.

Although it’s been over a 100 years since the fictional detective left these lodgings at 221B Baker Street—now the Sherlock Holmes Museum—visitors can be forgiven in thinking that he might reappear there at any moment. (No doubt with calabash pipe in hand, inquiring solicitously, “You don’t mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?”) The Victorian-era rooms he ‘rented’, initially with Watson, have been perfectly preserved just as they would have been when the groundbreaking detective left them for the second and final time in 1904.

Illuminated by two large windows overlooking bustling Baker Street in north London, his infamous book-lined study remains frozen in time in all of its comfortably cluttered glory. Awaiting Holmes’ return are his most prized possessions: the tweed deerstalker cap and magnifying glass haphazardly tossed down after a long day’s detecting, the Persian slipper where he eccentrically chose to store his tobacco, and the Stradivarius violin upon which he often scraped gratingly.

While Watson gamely tolerated Holmes’ eccentricities as a roommate, he rightfully considered him to be “the worst tenant in London.” The detective forever tried the patience of their kindly landlady Mrs. Hudson with his strange habits such as affixing his correspondence to the mantle place with a jackknife, carrying out bizarre chemical experiments in the study, and welcoming an endless barrage of strange visitors at all hours.

Today this flow of visitors hasn’t ceased, despite the detective’s permanent retirement. To enter the fictional duo’s vividly re-created quarters—the starting point of so many remarkable adventures—is to become, much like Watson himself, an accomplice in Holmes’ exhilarating world. Posing for a picture on the armchair where inspiration often struck in front of the crackling fireplace, you can’t help but pause in wait for the dramatic moment when “A ring comes at the bell; a step is heard upon the stair.” Then, without further ado, you are summoned: “Come, Watson come, the game is afoot!”–Joni Rendon

This article first appeared in Pages Magazine and is reprinted here in honor of the 150th anniversary of Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sleuthing with Oscar Wilde

Best known as a playwright, Irish scribe Oscar Wilde displays a different side in Gyles Brandreth’s mystery series: amateur detective. In the first two page-turners, Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance and Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder, the flamboyant writer puts his powers of deduction – which rival those of Sherlock Holmes, created by Wilde’s friend Arthur Conan Doyle – to use solving crimes in Victorian London. The latest book, Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile, finds him setting sail for America and then France. A mysterious death at sea leads Wilde to uncover a horrifying secret…one that puts his own life in jeopardy.

We invited Gyles to talk with us about his Oscar Wilde Mysteries, which feature plenty of literary landmarks. He shares some of his favorite Wilde-related places and also reveals the famous street he lived on while growing up in London.

NovelDestinations.com: What makes Oscar Wilde such a great detective?
Gyles Brandreth: Famously, Oscar Wilde was a brilliant conversationalist. He was, also, by every account, a careful listener and an acute observer. And he had a poet’s eye. He observed: he listened: he reflected: and then – with his extraordinary gifts of imagination and intellect – he saw the truth. He is a detective in the Sherlock Holmes tradition: he has wonderful deductive powers and a fine intellect. And, like Holmes, he is human: he has flaws, he has weaknesses. What makes Wilde particularly attractive as a character to write about is that he was such a fascinating and engaging individual. What makes him particularly useful – and credible – as a Victorian detective is that he had extraordinary access to all types and conditions of men and women, from the most celebrated to society’s outcasts, from the Prince of Wales to prostitutes.

ND: What inspired you to have Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle as a recurring character in the series?
GB: I discovered, by chance, reading Conan Doyle’s 1926 autobiography, that Doyle and Oscar Wilde had met (in 1889, introduced to one another by an American publisher) and that they had become friends. The creator of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde, wit and dandy, seemed such an unlikely couple – and yet Doyle describes their evening together as “golden.” I wanted to explore this unlikely friendship – and my first murder mystery begins on the afternoon of the day they met…exactly 120 years ago.

I was brought up in Baker Street in London – immediately opposite 221b, Sherlock Holmes’ address – and when I was a boy I was befriended by an old gentleman who had been a friend of Oscar Wilde. Conan Doyle and Wilde have been lifelong heroes of mine, and I love the idea of bringing their world to life again in my mysteries.

I do believe that Conan Doyle based the character of Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes’ elder brother, on Oscar Wilde. I hope my readers will find that Wilde makes a credible, if unexpected, amateur detective. He did say: “There is nothing quite like an unexpected death for lifting the spirits.”

ND: Along with London, your most recent mystery, Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile, is set in Paris and the U.S. What are some of the highlights of Oscar’s overseas adventures?
GB: The extraordinary people he met – and he really met them! In the U.S., for example, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman and P.T. Barnum. Oscar met Jumbo the Elephant – it’s true. “Which of them is the more remarkable?” asked Barnum. In the mid-West, Oscar met cowboys and silver miners and marksmen – and they were as fascinated by him as he was by them. My story begins during Wilde’s celebrated 1882 lecture tour of the U.S. and then moves to the decadent theatrical world of Paris in the 1880s as the murders multiply.

ND: What are your favorite literary landmarks associated with Oscar Wilde?
GB: The Langham Hotel in London where Wilde and Doyle first met – I often take tea there: it helps inspire my writing! And the cemetery in Paris where Wilde is buried. In July, to mark to anniversary of Oscar’s interment at the Père Lachaise cemetery in northern Paris, I went there with his grandson, Merlin Holland, to lay flowers on his grave.

For lovers of mystery this is a special year: the 200th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, who really invented the genre, and the 150th birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle who gave the world The Great Detective in Sherlock Holmes.