I have no doubt that many of you readers are currently saying either: "'The Wold What?'" or " 'Philip who?" or both. And once I tell you that Philip José Farmer is a legendary science-fiction author who has won more Hugo™ and Nebula™ Awards for his fiction than just about anybody bar Arthur C. Clark, Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov, I have no doubt that your next question is: "Then what on earth has crime and mystery got to do with a science-fiction writer?" The answer, in true Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy style, is: The Wold Newton Theory Alternate Universe. Once upon a time, there was a poor medical doctor living in Victorian London, who was struggling financially due to his prospective patients preferring to go to older, more experienced doctors than this newly qualified tenderfoot. In order to earn himself some money upon which to live, the doctor took his old university professor, one Dr Joseph Bell, and modelled upon him a fictional scientific detective, who used new, "modern" (to the 19th Century) methods such as determining the origin of soil samples in order to solve crimes; he named the detective Sherlock Holmes, and gave him as a companion, and recorder of adventures, one Dr John H. Watson, M.D., Her Majesty's Armed Forces Retired. And a legend was born. Arthur (later Sir) Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887. Three years later, Conan Doyle was churning out Holmes' short stories for The Strand magazine, who snatched them from his fingertips as fast as he would relinquish them. From the Royal Family itself, headed by the septuagenarian Queen-Empress Victoria, down to the barrow-boys of London's chaotic markets, from the marble halls of dukes to the pimps and prostitutes of Gin Lane, Conan Doyle had Great Britain and her Empire at his feet, hanging upon every stroke of his pen. That breathless anticipation was, in fact, the embryonic "first cause" of what would eventually develop, over three-quarters of a century later, into The Wold Newton Family [WNF] followed by the Wold Newton Universe [WNU]. Weary of the character that he felt overshadowed much "better" works, and under intolerable pressure to produce ever more scintillating tales of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle rid himself of the literary creation he had come to detest in The Strand magazine's issue of December 1893, with The Final Problem, sending Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes plunging to their deaths over the Reichenbach Falls. But such was the power of Sherlock Holmes – the "second motivator" leading to Wold Newton – that Arthur Conan Doyle could not escape him. The outraged public, even the "great and good", continuously lobbied for "new" stories, even if they were "histories of past cases". They could clamour for these retrospective tales because, somewhat injudiciously, Conan Doyle had "Watson" refer to/mention at least one undescribed case in almost every Sherlock Holmes story, such as "the Vatican cameos," (Hound of the Baskervilles) and the famed "Giant Rat of Sumatra, for which the world is not ready" (The Five Orange Pips). Conan Doyle yielded to the inevitable: Holmes, but not Moriarty, survived the fall and returned in 1903, before Conan Doyle was finally allowed to let him slip gradually into obscurity with the advent of the horrors of World War 1. Losing three members of his family, Conan Doyle became profoundly distressed and spent the remainder of his life immersed in spiritualism, trying futilely to make "contact" with his son Kingsley, brother Innes Doyle, and nephew Oscar Hornung (who, like Rudyard Kipling's also-slain son, was the only male child of his father, author Ernest Hornung), all casualties of the War to end All Wars, but which did exactly the opposite in blatantly laying the foundations for the second one. It was at this point in the early 20th Century that we experienced what was to become known as "the Golden Age of Heroes". The war-weary, bitterly cynical Britons, of every rank and station, from prince to pauper, were desperate for heroes. These were families who had seen nearly an entire generation of genuinely heroic youths – lions - wiped out at places like the Somme, Loos and Ypres, for no good reason than some donkey-General's pride, and then had to suffer greater losses in less than eighteen months than the entire 1914-1918 conflict, courtesy of the Spanish Influenza. The desire for escapism was epidemic: the public craved larger-than-life figures who fought evil and won because of being decent, honourable and just, untouched by deformity, disease or war-induced insanity, who were tall and beautiful and who, preferably, harked back to the non-existent "golden age" of Victoria and her son, Edward VII, when the world was a genteel, quiet place, consisting of Bertie Wooster finagling his fearsome aunts, men in their whites playing Sunday cricket and everyone knowing how they fit into the world. There were many, many writers willing to "step up to the plate", but the towering repute of Sherlock Holmes stood before them. These authors, understandably, wanted their characters to have the same literary and financial success that Holmes had brought to Conan Doyle, who had even received a knighthood from the late King-Emperor Edward VII. So, again somewhat understandably, it seemed a logical deduction (no pun intended) that in order to succeed like Sherlock Holmes, their characters should be like Sherlock Holmes to the greatest degree possible without risk of being sued for plagiarism. Indeed, one author, E. W. Hornung, had actually escaped censure for plagiarism with his A. J. Raffles/Harry "Bunny" Manders stories, but then Hornung had had the advantage of being Conan Doyle's brother-in-law and close friend (Hornung even went so far as to "kill" Raffles in 1902, during the 2nd Boer War at Bloemfontein, South Africa, the place and year where Conan Doyle partially earned his knighthood). Thus, dozens of imitation/arguably derivative characters exploded across the scene of pulp fiction novels, comic books, radio/stage plays, newspaper strips and so on: The Shadow; John "The Baron/Blue Mask" Mannering; Richard "The Toff" Rollison; Simon "The Saint" Templar; The Phantom; The Spider; G8; Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond; Raffles (brought "back" by Barry Perowne in pastiche to fight anew, against Nazis and gangsters); Fu Manchu; Denis Nayland Smith; Nero Wolfe (the character most believed to be Sherlock Holmes' illegitimate son); Tarzan; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Sexton Blake; Clark "Doc" Savage; Wolf Larsen; Lord Peter Wimsey; Modesty Blaise; Nellie Grey; George Manfred the leader of the Four Just Men; Mr J. G. Reeder…the list is large and those above comprise only a small part of it. Alongside these characters grew also the famous Baker Street Irregulars, a group of Holmesian scholars who worked on the idea that Holmes was a real person; Wold Newton is based on the same premise. What makes the list conspicuous, however, is the "problem" of similarity. A far too large proportion of the Golden Age Heroes listed above were unusually tall, preternaturally fast, abnormally strong men (and occasionally women) with dark hair and grey eyes (see Denis Nayland Smith, The Shadow, Tarzan….) to be easily explained away. The zenith of this mimicry was Sexton Blake, who had actually had rooms in Baker Street, where once The Master had lived. In addition to all these close imitations were "editorial" mistakes in abundance, due to the woefully lax editing done by some publishing houses in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, (a prime example being Hodder & Stoughton's publishing of Edgar Wallace's error-strewn thrillers). In his original pastiches, serialised in The Thriller and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine [EQMM], Barry Perowne established Raffles and Bunny as being born in 1865 and 1868 respectively, but when the Second World War - enabled largely by the political humiliation heaped on Germany by a foolishly, spitefully vindictive Great Britain, France and America in 1919 - began to loom large, Perowne recognised a golden opportunity. (See article Cricketer & Cracksman: The Life & Times of AJ Raffles by C D Stewart in Thriller UK, July 2002 issue for a discussion of Hornung versus Perowne's Raffles). Realising he could now ease off the shackles of E. W. Hornung's somewhat superficial characterisations, Perowne quickly saw how invaluable the two quintessentially British characters of Raffles & Bunny could be as pro-British propaganda – not to mention that the more stories he could write, the more money he would make. So in the mid-1930s, Barry Perowne switched from his original Edwardian short-story scenarios of lazy Sunday cricket matches, and began to write the duo as virile, thirty-something patriotic heroes, setting the stories in the "Roaring Twenties" of running boards and Tommy guns, and completely ignoring the fact that his own chronology insisted Raffles would be 60 in 1925 and Bunny likewise in 1928! Another far more obvious example is Kent Allard, The Shadow, who had a second identity known as Lamont Cranston, who was then put in as actually being The Shadow. The novels were written by Robert J. Hogan with the Shadow as "really" Kent Allard with Cranston as a fake ID, but when the radio show began to air, The Shadow's real identity was changed to Lamont Cranston. Just to really confuse the already addled fan, the pulps and the radio show had different timelines/histories that were extraordinarily difficult to harmonise - along with other Golden Age characters (e.g. G8, a sort of American Biggles, and Richard Wentworth "The Spider", written by Walter Gibson "in pulp") - who appeared in pulp fiction novels, comic books, on stage, as radio plays and in newspaper strips sometimes simultaneously and often with wildly differing histories. In Tarzan Alive!(1972) Philip Jose Farmer initially proposed G8 (novelised by one Norvell Page), The Shadow and The Spider as the same man. Farmer abandoned this idea in 1975 with Doc Savage, postulating instead that G8 and The Shadow (remember, Lamont Cranston was The Shadow only on radio and in the feature film starring Alec Baldwin) were full brothers and that The Spider was their half-brother, probably because the idea gave him the same splitting headache it gave me. Please feel free to re-read the above paragraph a couple of times if you need to! With the same characters being presented in wildly differing universes at the same time (some characters like Raffles were even "translocated" to different eras) through many different media such as pulp fiction novels, stage/radio plays, comic books, cartoon strips, etc., there developed a confusion of top-heavy mythology and conflicting continuity that slowly began to drift into obscurity as the rabidly blind nationalism of World War II gave way to the even more cynical Fifties. The damage caused by paper shortages during the war was accentuated with the advent of TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, Doctor Who, Blake's Seven, Sapphire & Steel, Lost in Space and Star Trek. Collectively, these shows took away large swathes of readers, who, with the human imagination rendered obsolete by the idiot box in the corner, no longer had the patience or even ability to unravel the scores of conflicting, convoluted, contradictory character "histories". (This trend has been somewhat reversed due to the Internet where fans can write their own fan fiction and "publish" [post] it very cheaply). That way it might have stayed - until Philip José Farmer, sci-fi author extraordinaire and pulp fiction aficionado, invented a superbly innovative, yet beautifully simple explanation for the entire tangled mess: The reason the Golden Age of Heroes all looked alike, acted alike, had the same hobbies and personalities, was because they were all members of the same genetically mutated family. He published the idea of the Wold Newton Family, in his fictional "biography" of the "real" Tarzan, Duke of Greystoke, Tarzan Alive, and expanded the idea in his other fictional biography, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. Eventually WNF became known as the Wold Newton Universe since Win Scott Eckert coined the term in 1997 in order to distinguish between the family itself and the universe in which Eckert was placing them, since this included characters who existed in the Wold Newton Universe, but who weren't members of the Wold Newton Mutant Family (some of these are mentioned below). Farmer's brilliant notion created order out pulp fiction continuity problems. Farmer's genealogy was also helped by the fact that certain imitation/derivative characters of Sherlock Holmes co-incidentally dovetailed so neatly and elegantly into Conan Doyle's original stories that they could be easily "blended" into the Sherlockian canon to give verisimilitude to the "fictionist genealogy" Farmer had created. There are two outstanding pulp fiction hero examples of this – the first is Edgar Rice Burroughs' character John Clayton, Duke of Greystoke and "Tarzan" of the Apes, secondly is Lester Dent's 1932 pulp-magazine hero, Clark "Doc" Savage Jr, "The Man of Bronze". (NB - Yes, with a change of metal, change of name and planetary origin, Savage underwent a metamorphosis into the hugely successful Man of Steel, Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, from Krypton). Farmer was able to work the "family history" of both Tarzan and Doc as created in his own WNU into Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. For example, in The Adventure of the Priory School, Holmes is called in by the "Duke of Holdernesse", whose young son, Lord Arthur Saltire, has been kidnapped. The Duchess is estranged from her husband and lives in France. It transpires that as a youth, the Duke fell in love with a woman who died during the infancy of their illegitimate son, James Wilder. Adoring this son, but recognising the need for a legitimate heir to the duchy, the Duke had reluctantly married a childless widow, Edith, Marchioness of Blackwater, who had provided legitimate Arthur. But James Wilder was the Duke's personal secretary and the pair neglected the Duchess and Arthur due to their profound affection for each other. Refusing to live under the same roof as her husband's beloved son, the Duchess had left, and Arthur, neglected, sent to boarding school. Wilder had arranged his half-brother's kidnapping in an attempt to get his father to make him heir to the duchy. The story ends with a remorseful Wilder leaving England to seek his fortune and the Duchess being reconciled to her husband and own son. In a later story, The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier, Doyle harks back to the above story, but mistakenly refers to the "Duke of Greyminster", having forgotten the character's original name. Utilising this error that had slipped by Doyle or his editors, Farmer stated that the "Duke of Holdernesse/Greyminster" was actually the 6th Duke of Greystoke, great-uncle of Tarzan. The 6th Duke's son, "Lord Arthur Saltire" was really William Cecil Clayton (Farmer interposed "Arthur" between Cecil and Clayton), who became the 7th Duke of Greystoke. In Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories, the 7th Duke ("Doc" Savage's paternal uncle) receives word that Tarzan is the rightful Duke, but suppresses the knowledge before dying a hero's death and revealing all in a fit of remorse, leaving the way clear for Tarzan to become the 8th Duke. In Farmer's own postscript to Priory School, "Arthur Saltire's" remorse-stricken half-brother, James Wilder, marries Arronaxe Larsen, a daughter of the sociopathic Scandinavian pirate "Sea" Wolf Larsen, and vows to dedicate their unborn child to fighting crime - their son, Clarke "Doc" Savage Jr, being the grandson of the 6th Duke and cousin of Tarzan. Nor is 6th Duchess Edith neglected by Farmer's genealogy. He states that the 6th Duke's estranged wife Edith (neé Jansenius) was the vengeful aristocratic lady, the "widowed Marchioness of Blackwater", in Conan Doyle's story Charles Augustus Milverton. According to Farmer, the 4th Duke of Greystoke had two sons, the 5th Duke being the grandfather of Tarzan, and his brother (the 6th Duke whom Conan Doyle calls Holdernesse/Greyminster) the grandfather of Doc Savage. When the 5th Duke's son, Tarzan's father, pre-deceased the 5th Duke, his younger brother became the 6th Duke and his son Arthur Saltire the 7th Duke, dying a childless bachelor so the line switched back to Tarzan. Again, feel free to re-read the above paragraphs if you need to! In one sure stroke, Farmer created a plausible, interlocking Sherlockian/WNU genealogy, and explained away a few of Doyle's writing errors en route. According to Farmer, Conan Doyle was "in" on the conspiracy, deliberately changing names to protect real identities, but such was Arthur Conan Doyle's "sense of fair play" that he did not deem it honourable to outright lie to his readers, thus he left "clues" in the form of deliberate errors –such as calling the Duke by one title in one story, and another in subsequent story. So Farmer went on: Arthur Saltire's "clue" was that he had the same middle name as William Cecil Arthur Clayton, and the man Doyle called James Wilder was really named James Clarke Wildman Senior. Clark "Doc" Savage Junior was really James Clarke Wildman Junior, the surname "Savage" being a play on the surname "Wildman". Once he had made those initial connections, Philip José Farmer found himself on a roll that was unstoppable, as he found more characters who could be integrated into the WNU due to the superficiality of the characters (James Bond) or the unintentional errors of the authors (E. W. Hornung, Edgar Wallace et al); though there were occasional WNF connections - Richard Wentworth/Kent Allard/G8 – he had to abandon as unworkable. In Tarzan alive! Richard Wentworth's horrifying war time experiences in World War I, plus the colossal strain of trying to maintain several different "normal" and "secret superhero" identities at the same time proved too much for even Wentworth's super-mind, causing him to suffer a massive nervous breakdown at the end of World War I. This "breakdown" resulted in him suffering what we nowadays would describe as a mix of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). According to Farmer, Richard Wentworth (the original personality) remembered nothing other than his current "persona", not his other identity as The Shadow. Likewise, when he "switched" to his Kent Allard persona, he had no knowledge of Richard Wentworth, Lamont Cranston etc. (At the end of WWI, Wentworth "pretended" that G8 had been killed, thus avoiding having to maintain one man as three different people, and his "breakdown" enabled them ignore everything about Wentworth-as-G8 under the guise of not remembering). It also provided a socially acceptable reason for the fact that Wentworth was a serial adulterer (the characters having different "true loves"). Thanks to Farmer's "nervous breakdown", the two characters could still be used as long as the MPD explanation was given. The MPD get-out also meant that The Spider was not unfaithful to Nita van Sloan and The Shadow was not committing adultery against Margo Lane; as The Spider, Wentworth had no knowledge of being Kent Allard/The Shadow, or memory of Nita van Sloan, and vice versa. Probably wisely, Farmer abandoned this brain-hurting notion in favour of the half-brothers theory with Doc Savage in 1975. But how exactly does the WNF genealogy actually work? Farmer's genealogy theory went like this: one night in 1795, a meteorite hit the ground near the English village of Wold Newton, and it's radiation caused beneficial mutations in the DNA of a group of people who happening to be passing by, passengers in two stagecoaches. Providentially, the mutated offspring of these people married each other, as did subsequent generations, several times "reinforcing" the good mutant DNA and giving rise to children with heightened intelligence, speed, strength, etc., such as Tarzan, Doc Savage, Holmes, Lord John Roxton, Richard Wentworth, Raffles, Professor Challenger, and so forth. Of course, today it is known that such mutations are always harmful, never beneficial, but remember, Philip José Farmer had to work in the pulp fiction universe, in which "beneficial radiation induced changes" are a colossal presence – the Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, etc., etc., - are all the result of someone being careless with the plutonium. The passengers on the two stagecoaches affected by the radiation were, according to Farmer, (see Farmer's original tree at www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/WNUfamilytree.com): 3rd Duke of Greystoke & wife Alicia Rutherford; Fitzwilliam Darcy & wife Elizabeth Bennet; The Scarlet Pimpernel & 2nd wife Alice Clarke Raffles; 11th Baron Tennington & wife Elizabeth Cavendish; Dr Siger Holmes & wife Violet Clarke; Hugh Drummond & wife Georgia Dewhurst; Honoré Delagardie & wife Philippa Drummond. Alice Clarke Raffles and Violet Clarke were already related as cousins, Philippa and Hugh Drummond were brother and sister, adding an extra concentration to the newly mutated gene-pool. The actual Heroic Descents created by Philip José Farmer are as follows (this is not a complete list, excluding many, many others such as Travis McGee, Lew Archer, The Phantom and Richard "The Toff" Rollison; the latter two are post-WNF additions to the WNU but are included here due to being quite well known): 3rd Duke of Greystoke: great-great-grandparents of Doc Savage, Tarzan, Richard Wentworth & Lord Peter Wimsey; great-grandparents of Lord John Roxton Fitzwilliam Darcy: great-great-grandparents of Tarzan Scarlet Pimpernel: great-great-grandparents of Doc Savage, Tarzan, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, Denis Nayland Smith, Richard Wentworth; great-grandparents of A J Raffles, Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, Professor Challenger. 11th Baron Tennington: great-grandparents of A J Raffles Siger Holmes: great-grandparents of Mycroft & Sherlock Holmes; great-great-grandparents of Nero Wolfe, Denis Nayland Smith Hugh Drummond: great-great-grandparents of "Bulldog" Drummond & John "Korak the Killer" ("son" of Tarzan) Drummond Honoré Delgardie: grandparents of C. Auguste Dupin; great-great-grandparents of Lord Peter Wimsey and Richard Wentworth. If you do genealogy, you have to "double" for every generation you go back, thus, you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents and 16 great-great-grandparents. If you look at the listing above you can see the "concentration of mutation". Doc Savage and A J Raffles had 4 "original" irradiated ancestors; Tarzan, Wimsey and Wentworth, 6, not counting "immediate" parents/grandparents who in some cases both carried the mutant genetic inheritance. The vast majority of the descent came through the Scarlet Pimpernel, who conveniently produced 5 mutant children. Mavice, the eldest, became the great-grandmother of Doc Savage after the 6th Duke of Greystoke (grandson of the irradiated 3rd Duke) produced James Wilder through his affair with her daughter. Son Percy's daughter Marguerite married fellow mutant 13th Baron Tennington (grandson of irradiated 11th Baron Tennington) and their daughter became Tarzan's mother when she in turn married fellow mutant John Clayton, son of the 5th Duke, grandson of the aforementioned irradiated 3rd Duke of Greystoke. Serena Blakeney, the Pimpernel's 3rd child, married fellow mutant 12th Baron Tennington, son of the irradiated 11th Baron, their eldest son becoming the grandfather of Tarzan when he married Marguerite Blakeney, Serena's niece; their son John Rutherford becoming father to Professor Challenger; daughter Violet becoming mother of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes and grandmother of Nero Wolfe and Denis Nayland Smith when she married fellow mutant Siger Holmes, grandson of the irradiated doctor; Serena's last child Lucasta became grandmother of Peter Wimsey and Richard Wentworth. The Pimpernel's 4th child, Suzanne, was the grandmother of AJ Raffles; 5th child Marguerite married fellow mutant Paul Delagardie, son of irradiated Honoré, they becoming great-grandparents of Peter Wimsey and Richard Wentworth. According to Farmer, Dorothy L. Sayers character "Lord Peter Wimsey" was the grandson of mutant Joane Clayton, thus a cousin of Tarzan and Doc Savage. According to Farmer, Joane, the sister of the 5th & 6th Dukes of Greystoke (therefore great-aunt of Doc Savage and Tarzan) had an affair with Byron Noel-King (referred to by author J T Edson as "Lord James Roxton" in his Floating Outfit Series, see below), 12th Baron Wentworth, grandson of Lord Byron through his mother, Ada Augusta, the Countess of Lovelace. Recognising their woeful incompatibility, she refused his offer of marriage, having their illegitimate son, John Byron Wentworth (referred to in The Lost World by Conan Doyle as "Lord John Roxton, third son of the Duke of Pomfret). A few years later, Joane married the Duke of Denver (Dorothy L. Sayers refers to him as Peter's paternal grandfather), by whom she had two sons, the elder being Lord Peter Wimsey's father. Then the Duke adopted "Lord John Roxton", but issues of succession meant John would be referred to as the Duke of Denver's third son, despite being older than his brothers. Thus, Farmer neatly sews up the third son of the Duke of Pomfret gaffe by Conan Doyle – according to Farmer, Doyle was protecting Roxton's identity as an illegitimate man, and as the uncle of Lord Peter, by changing "Denver" to "Pomfret". Okay, so Farmer's neat little idea pulled pulp fiction out of the mire it had meandered/been led into by other media hijacking certain characters, but why should we be interested in this bit of literary sophistry? Because it was a godsend. Due to this jewel of an idea, whenever anyone pointed out some goof, they could be quietly taken aside (like E. W Hornung's Raffles had done Bunny Manders) and inducted into the Great Secret: namely, that Conan Doyle, Hornung, Wallace, Rice Burroughs, Orczy, Fleming, Page, Gibson, Sayers et al were not fiction writers but biographers. Things like Doyle calling the same character the "Duke of Holdernesse" in one story and the "Duke of Greyminster" in another were not continuity cock-ups but codewords that these "biographers" had used to hide the identities of real people. Farmer's beautifully simple "Wold Newton Mutant Family" enabled entire swathes of writing goofs to be changed into something deliberately – and importantly – "secret". Perhaps the best examples of this are demonstrated by author J. T. Edson, a fan of thriller writer Edgar Wallace (see articles The Inkslinger and The Mind of Edgar Wallace respectively by Catherine D. Stewart). Originally a straight "Western" writer, Edson had his Floating Outfit characters (Dusty Fog, Mark Counter, Lon Ysabel), interact with a wide variety of Crossover characters such as Wyatt Earp and Brett Maverick. He also had his own characters meet The Just Men (Edgar Wallace characters) Patrick Reeder (uncle of Edgar Wallace's J G Reeder), Sir John Uglow Ramage (grandson of Dudley Pope's character), Lord James Roxton (father of Lord John Roxton of The Lost World) and Belle "Rebel Spy" Boyd (great-aunt of Tarzan's wife), though he did make continuity errors with the latter two*. Then, Edson wrote his "Company 'Z'" series, which had Dusty's grandson Alvin solve cases with Mr J G Reeder. Wallace was a good writer, but his mind was always six jumps ahead of what his body was currently doing – when he "succeeded" as an actor, he immediately wanted to become an author, as soon as he was publicly successful at that, he wanted to become a stage director (see the article The Mind of Edgar Wallace: Mr J. G. Reeder & The Just Men, by C. D. Stewart). Of course, in his stand-alone novels, this distraction is largely irrelevant, but in his series (The 3 Just Men/J G Reeder) it caused some spectacular continuity problems, which Edson was able to excise using Farmer's original WNF and/or it's expanded WNU as a basis. According to Edson, Wallace was a biographer just like Conan Doyle, and J. G. Reeder was actually 4 different people. Jeremiah Golden Reeder was the head of a secret British Government spy agency whose HQ was the Reeder family's chicken breeding business in Surrey, but Jeremiah had 3 namesake nephews, Jason Grant Reeder, John Gray Reeder and James Garfield Reeder, all of whom were members of the organisation. Using Jeremiah's extremely idiosyncratic appearance, whoever was currently living at the Reeder family's London home, Daffodil House, dressed and acted as "the" J. G. Reeder. Edson thus cleared up the inconsistencies in Wallace's work, and acceptably explained away the hero's book-to-book "womanising" by claiming that the J G Reeder of Wallace's Terror Keep was Jason Grant, whilst the J G Reeder of another book with another female heroine was John Gray Reeder and another was James Garfield, etc., etc. Edson used WNU (specifically Farmer's "The Great Korak Time Discrepancy") to clear up one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan discrepancies as well. In The Beasts of Tarzan, his and Jane's son is an infant, yet in Son of Tarzan, John is an adult married to Meriem. Edson wrote two series about two great-grandsons of Mark Counter (his Floating Outfit hero): the "Rockabye County" set about Bradford Counter, and the "Bunduki" series about Brad's cousin James Allenvale Gunn. According to Edson, Tarzan and Jane had one son, John Paul Clayton, born in 1912, but, later that year, they adopted John Drummond. John Drummond was the youngest of seven children, the eldest being none other than Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, but who was deeply involved in his work for the British Government and unable to assume guardianship of his suddenly orphaned siblings, including the youngest, John, aged only 14 (born 1898). These were then farmed out to various relatives amongst the mutated clan – John Drummond, the youngest, being taken in by Tarzan & Jane. In his Bunduki quartet Edson uses Farmer's above theory as the plot - "explaining" that Tarzan's son "Korak the killer" was his adopted son, John Drummond-Clayton, not his real son, John Paul Clayton, feats John Drummond could accomplish because the Drummonds (see reproduction of Farmer's original Wold Newton family tree at the website of Win Scott Eckert) had the same meteorite-mutated genes as the Greystokes. As a matter of fact, of Tarzan's 4 biological children, his eldest daughter and son have been woefully neglected in fiction, since as the genetic offspring of Tarzan, they would be able to accomplish a great deal more than John Drummond could ever dream of. In J T Edson's Bunduki series, Dawn Drummond-Clayton and James Allenvale Gunn have been raised in Africa by Tarzan and Jane after Gunn's parents were murdered in the Mau-Mau uprisings in the 1950s. Illegitimate, James' mother, Alison Counter, was the granddaughter of Mark Counter, and his father was the illegitimate grandson of Sir Henry Curtis, sidekick of H. Rider Haggard's hero Allan Quatermain (a member of the expanded WNU like Wolf Larsen). Dawn Drummond-Clayton was the granddaughter of Tarzan's adopted son John Drummond a.k.a. Korak the Killer. For unknown reasons, the Burroughs' estate suddenly withdrew permission for Edson to refer directly to Tarzan, Jane, Korak et al when he was two books into the Bunduki quartet, but they could not rescind that already written, so anyone wishing to get the full picture should simply read the first two books, wherein Tarzan and Co., are referred to by Edson with impunity. The general plot/character "looseness" of the "Golden Age" of pulp-fiction writing also allowed Farmer's "original" family tree to be expanded greatly to include several more extraordinary characters. One of Farmer's original WNF characters was James Bond. Ian Fleming was, to be blunt, a sexist drunk, but what makes his Bond character so easy to "play" is exactly that superficiality. The stories have very little characterisation and so can be played by any man who resembles the vague descriptions, partly why so many different actors have done well in the role. The important point to note about James Bond, however, was that he was tall, very intelligent, unusually strong and fast, with dark hair and dark eyes. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Just like Conan Doyle, Fleming came to detest the character that took over his life to the extent none of his other ideas ever got a look in, and the later books get even more formulaic and contradictory, (ideal for Farmer's purposes). Other similar superficial/formulaic characters were equally good to be added into the Wold Newton Universe (WNU) expansion of Farmer's original WNF, both by Farmer himself and other "fan" authors. Eager to play with the wonderful new toy Farmer had given them, a bit of genealogical "grafting on" took aficionados back to the 3rd Duke of Greystoke, conveniently awash with DNA-mutating radiation after narrowly escaping being turned into pancake by a meteorite. Just as Farmer gave the irradiated Scarlet Pimpernel & wife Alice Clarke Raffles lots of kids who intermarried and produced a wide variety of heroes, the Greystoke family were used to produce the rest of the "Golden Age" characters with both Farmer and other writers "expanding" the WNU. Besides the 4th Duke of Greystoke (father of 5th & 6th Dukes of Greystoke and Joane Clayton; grandfather of Lord John Roxton; great-grandfather of Doc Savage, Tarzan, Richard Wentworth; great-great-grandfather of Lord Peter Wimsey) Philip Jose Farmer had the irradiated 3rd Duke & Duchess of Greystoke also produce a second son, the amazingly proliferate, and equally irradiated, Sir William Clayton, who went through two marriages and at least 4 illegitimate-child producing love-affairs. Sir William's 1st illegitimate relationship made him father of the evil genius Fu Manchu (and grandfather of Fu Manchu's hero son, cop Charlie Chan of the "Number One Son") who was Nemesis of Sherlock Holmes' nephew, Sir Denis Nayland Smith. His second illicit romance produced Professor Moriarty, arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes. Undaunted by siring two budding criminal masterminds, Sir William tried again and the third relationship made him grandfather of good guy Travis McGee. Obviously feeling on a winner, William tried his first marriage, which made him the great-grandfather of James Bond. His second marriage made him the father of famous Victorian explorer Phileas Fogg, and Roxana Fogg, who kept their mother's name when that marriage too foundered. Through Roxana Fogg, Sir William was great-grandfather of Paul Finnegan (Kickaha), Richard Benson (The Avenger) and Robert Blake. (The great H.P Lovecraft was author of Robert Blake, Haunter of the Dark, see Win Scott Eckert's WNU website for full details). Nor were these later editions ignored as other writers helped the WNU grow enthusiastically out of Farmer's WNF. In a further bit of "twiddling", James Bond in turn had an illegitimate son, Clive Reston Beauregard, in 1946 by fellow mutant, the widowed "Shrinking" Violet Beauregard, nee Holmes, daughter of none other than Mycroft Holmes, (Bond's boss M was so designated in Mycroft's honour as "really" the first head of the Secret Services). Again, Bond had another illegitimate son in 1964, the half-Japanese James Suzuki, who was "killed" in 1996. Considering that Bond would drop his trousers and roll over any time any reasonably attractive female snapped her fingers, the character has great potential to sire entire platoons of "new" fiction heroes. One fan estimated that if every woman Bond ever had sex with had just one child, not including twins or triplets, James Bond would have at least 243 children, every one of whom would inherit the mutated genes of their father. To make the WNU expansion of the WN Family tree work to full advantage, many characters were given multiple marriages, several bastard children, secret identities, slightly altered names or completely different pseudonyms. For instance, "Lew Archer" a sort of contemporary of Travis McGee, is "really" Lewis Malone, being the son of Lost World reporter Edward Malone and his wife, Enid, daughter of Professor Challenger and Enid Delagardie (both of whom were descendants of irradiated couples). Again, WNU author Charles Loridans made heroine secret agent Nellie Grey to be really Penelope Alice Greystoke, youngest of Tarzan's three legitimate children. The 1st Duke of Greystoke (non-mutated grandfather of the irradiated 3rd Duke) was also brought in as the ultimate ancestor of Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Mr Moto, though they got irradiated ancestors too. The Greystokes also intermarried with the Walker-Standish family, who were of course, coping with their secret identity as The Phantom! Sir Denis Nayland Smith becomes father to John "Hannibal" Smith (The A-Team) who in turn fathers Leiko Smith (The Black Lotus). The Man of Bronze "Doc" Savage had two sons by two marriages – John Sunlight and Clark Savage III, father of Clark Savage IV. Indeed, there have been some truly ingenious examples of fictionist genealogy done by others since Philip José Farmer first came up with his cunning plan to solve the screw-ups of pulp fiction. Writers, researchers and fictionist scholars have delved deep in several fiction canons to come up with plausible yet fun ways to increase the size of the mutant family. There even exists potential for more, since, in The Copper Beeches, Sherlock Holmes reveals that he has several sisters – "a sister of mine" – yet only Sigrina, mother of Sir Denis Nayland Smith, is mentioned in the WNU original family tree. It is a pity, then, that the idea has descended into the same confusion it so helped to disperse. As mentioned above, in recent years people have "expanded" the Wold Newton mutant family. Many of these expansions, such as Indiana Jones, are completely feasible and actually excellent examples of good imagination – some are downright brilliant. For instance, it is highly doubtful that a couple as virile as Tarzan and Jane had only one child, John and nor did they. In fact, they had three children: Charlotte Clayton in 1911, John Paul Clayton in 1912 and Penelope Alice Clayton in 1918. Penny eventually became a secret agent/adventuress under the pseudonym Nellie Grey. Tarzan also had an illegitimate daughter by La of Opar, known to the world as Modesty Blaise. (Some object to Tarzan's adultery against Jane, but in exculpation, every time he went anywhere near Opar, he ended up being clobbered on the head hard enough to suffer amnesia; inevitably on one of these occasions, he succumbed to the perpetual blandishments of La as he had no memory of Jane. "Knowing the danger her daughter was in", the Queen of Opar sent the infant princess away with a servant and though "Modesty" was captured by slavers, she was spared the extinction of the Oparians which happened just a few years after her birth). Another example is A.J. Raffles sister, Dinah, whose son Richard Rollison was brought to the world as "The Toff" in the John Creasey books. Though not mentioned in Edson's work, Philip Jose Farmer also made Lord John Roxton's son none other than Richard Wentworth, The Spider. Other attempted attachments are far less desirable. Firstly, problems really started when people began inventing "quick-fix" tack-on characters that they then ignored or discarded frivolously. For example, E. W. Hornung created A. J. Raffles as a strongly implied only child. Barry Perowne's pastiche brought in a sister, Dinah Raffles. This sister worked because there was a plausible explanation for her absence from Hornung: it transpired that there was a large age gap between the two, so the infant Dinah went to live in Australia whilst Raffles continued his education at Harrow when their parents, Edignia and James Raffles, were killed. Then things got messy. It was desired to create a closer relationship between Sherlock Holmes and A.J.Raffles, whose lives overlapped in the 1890s and who were already maternal first cousins in the WNU (Edignia's sister, Violet Rutherford, married Sherlock's father Siger Holmes; other mutual first cousins of Sherlock and Raffles included Professor Challenger; Melissa Rutherford [mother of Monk Mayfair]; Alice Rutherford [mother of Tarzan]). So, Raffles "acquired" a sister, Marjorie, only a couple of years his junior. Marjorie Raffles and Sherlock Holmes married in 1883, she dying in childbirth to their son Raffles Holmes later that year (despite Dr Watson, already Holmes' companion of two years, making absolutely no reference to any such occurrence, just as he ignores Holmes widely accepted illegitimate son, Nero Wolfe). It is immediately apparent, considering the vigorous, robust good health of the mutant WNU family, how unlikely it would be for Marjorie to succumb to such a death. Marjorie Raffles was blatantly created as not a character, but a plot device, a quick and easy way to increase the contact between Holmes and Raffles by giving them a mutual, close family relative over whom they could interact, respectively son and nephew. Just like Tarzan's elder two children Charlotte and John Paul Clayton, Raffles Holmes' rich fictional potential - stemming from his illustrious WNU heritage as a son of Holmes, nephew of Raffles, half-brother of Nero Wolfe, great-great-grandson of The Scarlet Pimpernel and cousin to a whole of host of heroes such as The Saint, The Shadow and Tarzan - was never explored. He floated aimlessly around the cosmic ether of pulp fiction for a while before being ignominiously disposed of by succumbing to his father's one-time vice of cocaine addiction, overdosing shortly before 1920. He is referred to as Holmes "lovely, lost son" in Laurie King's Holmes series. Again, it is extremely unlikely that someone with the vigorous intellect of the Raffles/Holmes families plus their superlative physique would perish in such an ignoble manner. A while later, it was desired to have "Grandchildren of Sherlock" at which point, Lo! The late Raffles Holmes was found to have sired not only John Mannering (via a brief marriage in 1901), called The Baron in John Creasey's stories (The Americans inexplicably changed the character to the Blue Mask), but also an illegitimate son, Creighton Holmes, in 1913. Again, neither of these two men have been fully utilised in fiction since John Creasey's initially prodigious output came to an end as the once-massive and massively cheap pulp fiction novel/magazine era began to wither under the afflicting heat of rising costs, and TV shows like Star Trek. Then we come to Raffles. E. W. Hornung "killed" off A. J. Raffles in 1902 in the Boer War. Whilst Hornung's Raffles was a jewel thief/mystery solver, Barry Perowne's Raffles was more of an adventurer/Secret Service hero, designed and used as a more socially acceptable propaganda tool than the blatantly racist "Bulldog Drummond" in the build up to World War II. Resolving (if only!) this "discrepancy" and providing a way for Raffles to have adventures after his "death", writers resorted to The Ultimate Cliché…the identical twin. R. J. Raffles was really the unrepentant jewel thief, and after his more virtuous brother's death at Bloemfontein, R.J. took over A. J.'s identity, working for truth, justice and the British way…aided by his own trusty best friend… Benjamin "Benny" Manders, first cousin of Bunny! I kid you not. The implausibility of such an addition need hardly be explained, particularly in view of the Bunny/Benny bit. Dinah Raffles being shipped off to Oz as an infant worked well in terms of both simplicity and believability, considering shipping unwanted children, orphaned or otherwise, to Australia was actually British Governmental policy until the 1960s (probably why Perowne went with the idea). But what on Earth could make Edignia and James Raffles create a will which stipulated that Marjorie, Dinah and R.J. be packed off to the Land Down Under, whilst R.J.'s identical in-every-respect twin brother be allowed to remain continuing his education with interruption in Great Britain? The answer clearly is nothing. However the idea was "run with", possibly because the "twin" cliché worked so well when it was yanked out of mothballs with Sherlock Holmes (some years before Farmer created his WNF), as his illegitimate son by Irene Adler, John Hamish Adler, a.k.a. Nero Wolfe, suddenly became a twin, the other being Scott Adler, a.k.a. Marko Vukcic. The great problem with such spurious and frivolous characters as R.J. Raffles is that they are not necessary! Just like wily Conan Doyle made Holmes' death "bodiless" at the Reichenbach Falls, so too there is a lack of explicit corpses in E. W. Hornung. The last of the three anthologies written by Raffles' original creator has Raffles being shot at Bloemfontein. He speaks haltingly to Bunny for a minute, then doesn't respond when Bunny speaks, and Bunny is left alone in the vast empty veldt with what is implied to be, but by no means clearly stated as, Raffles' body. It is equally possible that Raffles is merely unconscious. There was no heroic funeral back in Edwardian Britain, no ornate grave over which Bunny is written as standing. Hornung gave himself an out, just in case. Should he ever decide to go back to the character, the opening pages of Book 4 could start with anxious Bunny tending to a recuperating Raffles. Hornung did write a fourth book, the only full-length Raffles novel, Mr Justice Raffles. This was written from the viewpoint of a "reminiscing" Bunny, but again, "Bunny grieving for dead Raffles" was largely implication, and, though it would have required a bit of minor tweaking, it would have been possible for Hornung – or any competent pastiche writer, which is exactly what Peter Tremayne did in The Return of Raffles – to manoeuvre Book 5 to include explanations that Book 4 was written by Bunny whilst he was waiting for Raffles to convalesce, or that the whole death thing had been a subterfuge to lure out some evil criminal that was after the duo, or…well, I'm you see the point. Nor is that the only example. Thanks to Sherlock Holmes line, "a sister of mine," we have a marvellous, largely untapped – in my opinion neglected – fictional resource in the children of Sherlock Holmes' unnamed sisters; Brad Mengel's article Watching The Detectives eagerly gives Holmes four brothers as well as three sisters. There are also Charlotte and John Clayton, just two of many more examples, whose lives have been enormously eclipsed by the careers of their sister and half-sister. Secondly, recently some people have tried to graft on "super characters" such as Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer into the WNU (albeit not always onto the WNF). The problems with this should be immediately apparent. Farmer invented Wold Newton to explain the ridiculously high number of tall, dark haired, grey eyed heroes. Buffy Summers is little and blonde. Also, Buffy Summers was mystically granted her powers upon being Chosen as the Slayer. The WNU mutant family are born with greater strength and faster reflexes courtesy of their mutated genes. Another example is Duncan McLeod, the Immortal Highlander. Farmer's entire idea of the WN Family Tree was that it explained away the far too high number of characters who looked alike (tall/strong/dark hair/dark eyes) and had the same character attributes. (E.g., Raffles and Peter Wimsey were famous cricketers, Denis Nayland Smith was a "tall, spare" man who smoked a big pipe and whose best friend was a medical doctor named Petrie). The reason that WNF works so well is that it is REAL LIFE BELIEVABLE. The reader can read a WNF story and suspend disbelief precisely because the whole idea is so close to science fact. There is a plausible "scientific" explanation for the mutations. The WN Family might be a bit stronger, faster and brighter than normal, but they are STILL HUMAN. If you shoot one in the heart, he or she will die, without you having to resort to force feeding them Kryptonite, or decapitating them with a sword to "really" kill them. Adding characters such as Immortals (admittedly to the WNU although not the WNF per se) damages not only the reader's ability to "suspend disbelief" (essential for being able to really enjoy a good story), plus the very scientific plausibility of the Wold Newton idea, but also confuses the Wold Newton timeline. Remember, the Wold Newton mutant family did not exist before 1795, so making Duncan McLeod et al, who had been around since 1592, a member of the WNU, creates a 203 year continuity cock up. Most damaging of all, is that such spurious additions are heading towards the very confusion that Philip José Farmer's invention of "Wold Newton" cleared up. The simplicity and elegance of Wold Newton, which made it so appealing and so easy to use, is in danger of being smothered by conflicting timelines, spurious characters and quick fix tacked on explanations that are scientifically outlandish/supernatural and, in my view, don't really integrate with the Wold Newton family at all. Regardless of these, the Wold Newton Universe mutant family has definitely provided invaluable services to pulp fiction. There are dozens of WNU characters, old and new, well worth examining in greater detail. Obviously this one article cannot explore the full depth of the Wold Newton Universe, particularly in it's now much more expanded form. Many family connections in the WNF and/or it's expanded WNU that are well worth a closer look have of necessity been excluded from this article or mentioned only in passing: for example, half- Aboriginal Queensland police hero Napoleon Boneparte and Simon "The Saint" Templar, both illegitimate sons of A. J. Raffles; Modesty Blaise, super spy and last Queen of Opar, Tarzan's illegitimate daughter by Queen La; the inappropriately named "Shrinking" Violet Holmes, daughter of Mycroft, formidable lady of the British Secret Service who dated and dumped James bond, becoming mother of his son Clive Reston Beauregard. For those readers whose appetites have been whetted for a deeper look at Farmer's jewel of an idea, a good starting point is the extremely informative website of Win Scott Eckert. This very extensive site contains chronologies, character biographies, integrated timelines and detailed scholarly articles on the Wold Newton Universe: www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton. In summary, despite the current issues with those who are and are not deemed members of the Wold Newton Family, it and the Wold Newton Universe are still probably the best things that ever happened to the genre. With a single genius notion, Philip José Farmer saved the world of the Golden Age Heroes from the obscurity of decades of benign neglect, inconsistent writing, uncertain editing, and genuine confusion. Thanks to Farmer, the Wold Newton Universe enabled an entirely new generation of writers to produce great new characters without having to wade through a half century of contradictory continuity, and so it may even be argued that the Wold Newton Universe is perhaps the greatest thing that Philip José Farmer gave his readers. AUTHOR'S NOTE; FOR MORE ON WOLD NEWTON: while I hope everyone enjoyed reading this article, I remain unrepentantly proud of being able to prune it to it's current trim length (believe me, the original was more like War & Peace) and yet have it still (I hope) make sense, no easy feat considering all the sources that I referenced and then had to distil into one easy- to-understand and reasonably short article. I must stress that this is a VERY SIMPLIFIED version of WNF/WNU: I have used the term "pulp fiction" to generically cover everything from pulp fiction novel plots to radio/stage play scripts to comic book storylines without differentiating between these media. I have left out virtually all WNF/WNU writers bar Farmer (obviously), and a few others. I have presented in a nice, neat, linear and chronological way developments that occurred in ANYTHING BUT a neat chronological way for the sole purpose of giving those with only a vague knowledge – or no idea at all – about Wold Newton a broad overview of this fascinating universe, and I am content that I have succeeded. However, WNU has evolved over the years into a richly complex, multi-layered entity and this article is absolutely nowhere in-depth enough to be remotely termed "scholarly" never mind definitive. I have been forced to leave out entire reams of material, to abridge very detailed explanations into a few short sentences and generally to slot events in so as to present something that is comprehensible not convoluted. So if this article has whetted your appetite for more WNU, there are many good to excellent websites (such as those I've quoted in the article), books and so forth devoted to the subject that I STRONGLY RECOMMEND: Philip Jose Farmer's main two reference works – Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage - should be obtainable through antiquarian book stockists or Internet specialists such as Amazon, eBay, abebooks, etc. However, since I have been asked already several times, I will categorically state here: the copies of these that form part of my personal book collection are not for loan or sale. I can genuinely say that the WNUT is worth further investigation! Enjoy! AUTHOR'S NOTE: *J. T. Edson stated in his books that Belle "The Rebel Spy" Boyd was the great (grand)- aunt of Tarzan's wife, Jane Porter. However, he also stated that Belle was an only child. Your great- aunt is the sister of your grandparent, so Belle would only have become Jane's great-aunt upon marrying the brother of one of Jane Porter's 4 grandparents. Due to this, there would have been no genetic relationship between the two women, and thus no way for Belle Boyd to "pass on" particular personality traits to Jane Porter. ** In Decision For Dusty Fog, J. T. Edson includes the character of Lord James Roxton, father of Lord John Roxton co-discoverer of the Lost World. The WNU family history shows that "Lord James Roxton" never existed. However, if we accept the WNU timeline as accurate, Lord John Roxton's natural father, Byron Noel-King, had been deceased for several years by the time the events in Decision… occurred. Therefore, the "Lord James Roxton" that Edson referred to must have been John's step-father, the "Duke of Denver/Pomfret" that married his mother Lady Joanne Clayton (aunt of Tarzan and "Doc" Savage), the pair of them becoming grandparents to Lord Peter Wimsey. As such, the seeming resemblance in Edson's description of "James Roxton" to the physical description of "John Roxton" given by Doyle in The Lost World must be coincidence. © 2002, Catherine D. Stewart