Henry F. Heard

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Henry Fitzgerald Heard , pseudonym: Gerald Heard (born October 6, 1889 in London , † August 14, 1971 in Santa Monica , California ) was an English writer and philosopher .

Heard had studied at Cambridge and moved to the United States of America with Aldous Huxley in 1937 . He published numerous books under the name Gerald Heard and a total of six crime novels, including three based on Sherlock Holmes with Mycroft in the leading role. Heard was immortalized in the character of William Propter by Aldous Huxley in his novel After Many Summers .

Mycroft crime novels

He wrote three detective novels, which are among the earliest examples of a variety of the modern detective novel. In this variant, the authors write in the style of a famous colleague and continue to compose the adventures of well-known fictional characters. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes turned out to be particularly popular with this form of “ re-poetry ” .

The main character in the first of his crime novels, The Honey Trap , is a wealthy, young idler named Sidney Silchester, who lives in a village. There his astute, older neighbor tells him about a villager who kills people with trained bees. Silchester doesn't believe him until a swarm of wild bees appears in front of his house. Silchester and his neighbor are now going to work.

At the end of the novel, Silchester claims he forgot the name of the helping neighbor.

"Can you see it! I forgot the name he gave himself. He was not unlike Mycroft. Mycroft and then another word, a short one, I think ... "

There are probably legal reasons for Silchester not being able to give the name: The original was published in 1941, when the work of Arthur Conan Doyle , who died in 1930, was still protected by copyright . Henry Fitzgerald Heard would have needed permission from the heirs to use the name of Sherlock Holmes in his novel .

Henry Fitzgerald Heard had the first novel followed by two more by 1949, in which Mr. Silchester and Mr. Mycroft investigate together. The author remained true to his preference for unusual murder weapons. In addition to trained bees, there are envelopes, the rubber coating of which is poisoned, and a hairpin , which are used for murders.

The three novels were published in German translation in the DuMont crime library .

  • Die Honigfalle (1941), German edition: Cologne 1988.
  • Enclosed envelope (1942), German edition: Cologne 1990.
  • The secret of the hairpin (1949), German edition: Cologne 1995

For his further (non-criminalistic) book production cf. the Wikipedia article (English) on Gerald Heard .

literature

  • Don Lattin: Distilled Spirits. Getting High, then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher and a Hopeless Drunk. University of California Press, Berkeley: 2012.
  • Reclam's crime novelist . Stuttgart 1978 ISBN 3-15-010279-0 page 193

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Huxley, Heard, Wilson: Getting High, then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher and a Hopeless Drunk .
  2. ↑ Huxley, Heard, Wilson: Getting High, then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher and a Hopeless Drunk .
personal data
SURNAME Heard, Henry F.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heard, Henry Fitzgerald (full name); Heard, Gerald (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English writer and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 14, 1971
Place of death Santa Monica