thefisherqueen

[thefisherqueen]

This is a work of art. Does anyone know the photographer?

#photo #jeremy brett #what an intriguing photograph #the pose the framing the light and shadows #he's staring directly at me but he's staring at himself first #contact through a layer #the light on the side of his face draws you in but his eyes are shadowed #what a work of art

[thefisherqueen]

He flung the stump of his cigarette into the fire, stretched himself as he rose, and remained so long in the inelegant attitude that my eyes mounted from his body to his face; a second later they had followed his eyes across the room, and I also was on my legs. 

Bunny here like 'He stood frozen so long that even after I'd finished my habitual checking him out he was still in the same position.'

#lol #basically yes #letters from bunny #raffles #gay disaster #bunny manders #be gay do crime #cricket and crime

[thefisherqueen]

So you thought I was really gone? Poor old Bunny! But I hope Mackenzie saw your face?" "He did," said I. I would not tell him all Mackenzie must have seen, however. "That's all right. I wouldn't have had him miss it for worlds; and you mustn't think me a brute, old boy, for I fear that man, and, know, we sink or swim together." -The Return Match

poor old bunny indeed :( he had a rough day :(

#beautiful art #raffles #letters from bunny #bunny manders #cricket and crime #be gay do crimes #aww very cute drawing!! #living for the hurt/comfort

[thefisherqueen]

TCM

New letter from my dear Bunny and Raffles used and old classic chemical in crime media:

"Difficult thing to break your own head," said Raffles later; "infinitely easier to cut your own throat. Chloroform's another matter; when you've used it on others, you know the dose to a nicety. 

Chloroform or trichloromethane (TCM) is an organic compound with formula CHCl3 used mostly as a solvent. It was synthesyzed in 1831 and used a lot as anaesthetic, sedative and anxiolytic.

Old cough syrups such as Kimball White Pine and Tar Cough Syrup contained chloroform until 1911 when it was proved in experiments with animals that chloroform can cause ventricular fibrillation.

It's a common trope the use of TCM for different crimes. It takes some minutes of continued inhalation to feel dizzy and a lot more to lose consciousness. I was once in a lab where a lot of TCM was distilled I barely felt a bit of dizzines, but there was a good ventilation system.

Exposure to TCM can cause from dizziness (like my case) to nausea, vomiting, hyperthermia, cardiac arhythmia, icterus, liver failure, cancer and coma. In presence of air and UV light chloroform converts slowly into phospogene COCl2, which is more toxic and used as chemical weapon during the first World War.

Considering that Raffles used it just as a fake clue and the smell is strong, he didn't need to use a lot, but it was enough to convince Mackenzie and Bunny:

So you thought I was really gone? Poor old Bunny! But I hope Mackenzie saw your face?" "He did," said I. I would not tell him all Mackenzie must have seen, however. "That's all right. I wouldn't have had him miss it for worlds; and you mustn't think me a brute, old boy, for I fear that man, and, know, we sink or swim together." "And now we sink or swim with Crawshay, too," said I dolefully.

Poor Bunny, the anxiety was breaking his heart. Please Bunny, don't use TCM as anxiolytic!!!

#letters from bunny #raffles #chloroform #chemistry #fascinating stuff!!

[thefisherqueen]

Lovely work! 'So much is going on' is a great summary of the latest letter, lol

Raffles nodded again, this time with a smile that stayed in his eyes as he leant back watching me. I knew that he was thinking of other things I had stooped to, and I thought I knew what he was going to say. He had said it before so often; he was sure to say it again. I had my answer ready, but evidently he was tired of asking the same question. His lids fell, he took up the paper he had dropped, and I sculled the length of the old red wall of Hampton Court before he spoke again. -The Gift of the Emperor

oh boy its gift time... so much going on but the dynamics during that little weekend visit in thames ditton are Fascinating

#beautiful art #raffles #letters from bunny #bunny manders #be gay do crimes #the amateur cracksman #cricket and crime

[thefisherqueen]

Jeremy in the Sidney Paget pose

#sherlock holmes #jeremy brett #art #sidney paget #how lovely are both #granada holmes

[thefisherqueen]

Certainly I would, and I told him so without reserve; not brazenly, you understand; not even now with the gusto of a man who savors such an adventure for its own sake, but doggedly, defiantly, through my teeth, as one who had tried to live honestly and failed. And, while I was about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that record was written only in one's own soul. It was the old story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against nature, and there was an end of it. Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of checkers; why not reconcile one's self to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board, and liked the light the better for the shade. My conclusion he considered absurd.

There's a certain tragedy in Bunny's struggle with society-enforced binary thinking. It thoroughly failed him again and again, yet he keeps attaching value to it and that is the major cause of his self loathing, while Raffles has freed himself from that inner demon and seems happier as a result

#letters from bunny #raffles #bunny manders #be gay do crimes #cricket and crime #gift of the emperor

[thefisherqueen]

I burst out laughing. "You needn't be ashamed. You are doing the very thing I was rather hoping you were going to propose the other day on the river." "You were HOPING it?" said Raffles, with his eyes wide open. Indeed, it was his turn to show surprise, and mine to be much more ashamed than I felt. "Yes," I answered, "I was quite keen on the idea, but I wasn't going to propose it."

Congratulations to Bunny and Raffles for leaving the 'pining and self-denying' phase behind

#letters from bunny #raffles #gift of the emperor #cricket and crime #be gay do crimes #bunny manders

[thefisherqueen]

The one tree I never want to hug

I just spent like ten minutes looking for a paper that I thought would have perfect background info and then I found it and it was generative grammar based

#not generative grammar #linguistics #lol #the horror

[thefisherqueen]

"Then you should have let me know when you did decide. You lay your plans, and never say a word, and expect me to tumble to them by light of nature. How was I to know you had anything on?" I had turned the tables with some effect. Raffles almost hung his head. "The fact is, Bunny, I didn't mean you to know. You—you've grown such a pious rabbit in your old age!" My nickname and his tone went far to mollify me, other things went farther, but I had much to forgive him still.

'Other things went farther'. Other things, like a kiss, Bunny?

#he's so elusive #letters from bunny #raffles #bunny manders #the amateur cracksman #be gay do crimes #cricket and crime #is 'mollify' a pun??? #it is like hornung was having great fun playing a game with 'let's see how obvious I can make this while still getting away with it'

[thefisherqueen]

Despite the graven prohibition, I had tried the bridge as a last resort; and there, indeed, was A. J. Raffles, seated on a skylight, and leaning over one of the officers' long chairs, in which reclined a girl in a white drill coat and skirt—a slip of a girl with a pale skin, dark hair, and rather remarkable eyes. So much I noted as he rose and quickly turned; thereupon I could think of nothing but the swift grimace which preceded a start of well-feigned astonishment. "Why—BUNNY?" cried Raffles. "Where have YOU sprung from?"

The grand gay Italian tour of these two is not off to a great start, I see

#letters from bunny #raffles #bunny manders #gift of the emperor #be gay do crimes #cricket and crime #the amateur cracksman #raffles is acting so guilty lol

[thefisherqueen]

"Self-censorship was a practical necessity, but it was also part of the process of self-discovery, which makes it doubly unreasonable to accuse writers like Proust or James of failing to support the cause. Far more damage was done by the mutilations and incinerations of embarrassed readers. A diarist might turn his closet into a time-machine, but when it arrived in the future heirs and editors would be waiting to barricade the doors.

Some crude attempts at censorship are easily reversed - hims replaced with hers, and so on - but a great deal of the unread corpus was destroyed forever. Edmund Gosse and the librarian of the London Library organized Symond's papers into a pile in the library garden and set fire to them. Richard Burton's extensive research notes on 'pederasty' were probably destroyed by his widow. Minnie Benson's son Arthur left behind 'a packet of letters of very dangerous stuff' and another packet 'that had to be burned unopened', according to his brother Fred. Edward Lear's papers seem to have been selectively destroyed after his death by the man for whom Lear had harboured a 'twarted, frustrated, impossible love'.

To judge by the large number of known destructions (most presumably went unrecorded), at any moment in the 19th century someone, somewhere, was burning the papers of a homosexual relative. People who were almost certainly homosexual, like Thomas Gray or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, can now have no firm place in the record, especially since the standard of proof demanded of biographers is far stricter for homosexual than for heterosexual subjects. It is almost as if the surviving testimonies to forbidden love were written 2000 years rather than four or five generations ago. Ancient Greek literature and 19th-century confessional gay literature probably survive in approximately the same proportions."

From: 'Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century', by Graham Robb

Crying a little at the thought of all the queer records we've lost

#queer history #19th century #graham robb #victorian #lgbtqia+ #gay #do you ever think about what will happen to your records? #fanfics and blogs you write or download #memes and photos and fanart and gifs you save #article or book pdfs on my harddrive #books in my bookcase #the need to make them last but at the same time not read by your relatives #censorship #self-censorship

[thefisherqueen]

And write he did, a light-hearted letter enough, but full of serious solicitude for me and for my health and prospects; a letter almost touching in the light of our past relations, in the twilight of their complete rupture. He said that he had booked two berths to Naples, that we were bound for Capri, which was clearly the island of the Lotos-eaters, that we would bask there together, "and for a while forget." It was a charming letter. I had never seen Italy; the privilege of initiation should be his. No mistake was greater than to deem it an impossible country for the summer. The Bay of Naples was never so divine, and he wrote of "faëry lands forlorn," as though the poetry sprang unbidden to his pen

So I'm reading Graham's Robb 'Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century', and gods, this passage has connotations. Quote: "Some form of homosexual community seems to have existed in any city large enough to provide anonymity. In most European and American cities, there was a place or even a district where homosexual men - and, more rare, women - could meet in relative safety: the waterfront in San Francisco, Broadway and Central Park in New York, parks alleyways and toilets in Toronto (from about 1890), Montmartre in Paris, Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Retiro in Madrid, the docks in Barcelona, the Boulevard Ring in Moscow, the quare in from of Copenhagen town hall, about seventeen different places in Amsterdam, and almost everywere in Naples." The gay (and forcefully outed) poet Count von Platen wrote about Naples "where love between men is so frequent that one never expects even the boldest damands to be refused'. Italy, and especially Naples, had such a reputation that queer people used to reference it to for example test the waters in a conversation, or safely advertise in search of potential partners. One could always claim to just talk about the literal place and not mean anything else

#letters from bunny #raffles #bunny manders #gift of the emperor #be gay do crimes #crime and cricket #gay #queer #history #and then they went to Naples together

[thefisherqueen]

And we said no more about the emperor's gift; for pride thrives on an empty pocket, and no privation would have drawn from me the proposal which I had expected Raffles to make. My expectation had been half a hope, though I only knew it now. But neither did we touch again on what Raffles professed to have forgotten—my "apostasy," my "lapse into virtue," as he had been pleased to call it. We were both a little silent, a little constrained, each preoccupied with his own thoughts. It was months since we had met, and, as I saw him off towards eleven o'clock that Sunday night, I fancied it was for more months that we were saying good-by.

Raffles and Bunny acting like typical Victorians here: pining and self denying

#letters from bunny #raffles #crime and cricket #be gay do crimes #thought these two were different but no #come on kiss him bunny #you both want to #it's ok who cares about virtue anyway

[thefisherqueen]

Raffles nodded again, this time with a smile that stayed in his eyes as he leant back watching me. I knew that he was thinking of other things I had stooped to, and I thought I knew what he was going to say. He had said it before so often; he was sure to say it again. I had my answer ready, but evidently he was tired of asking the same question. His lids fell, he took up the paper he had dropped, and I sculled the length of the old red wall of Hampton Court before he spoke again. "And they gave you nothing for these! My dear Bunny, they're capital, not only qua verses but for crystallizing your subject and putting it in a nutshell. Certainly you've taught ME more about it than I knew before.

Aww, Raffles does like Bunny's writing and is not shy to compliment him on it! This seems like a not too subtle dig by Hornung at Doyle, "Look, at least MY character can appreciate the talents of his friend!"

#letters from bunny #raffles #bunny manders #gift of the emperor #crime and cricket #sherlock holmes

[thefisherqueen]

"First-rate, old boy!" said Raffles (who must needs come and see me there), lying back in the boat while I sculled and steered. "I suppose they pay you pretty well for these, eh?" "Not a penny." "Nonsense, Bunny! I thought they paid so well? Give them time, and you'll get your check." "Oh, no, I sha'n't," said I gloomily. "I've got to be content with the honor of getting in; the editor wrote to say so, in so many words," I added. 

So artists and writers already got told they should be sasisfied with mere exposure in Victorian times, I see

#some things never change #letters from bunny #raffles #gift of the emperor #the amateur cracksman #the gentleman thief #crime and cricket

[thefisherqueen]

"Difficult thing to break your own head," said Raffles later; "infinitely easier to cut your own throat. Chloroform's another matter; when you've used it on others, you know the dose to a nicety. So you thought I was really gone? Poor old Bunny! But I hope Mackenzie saw your face?" "He did," said I. I would not tell him all Mackenzie must have seen, however.

Raffles got a broken face, Bunny a broken heart (and all that for drama and deception)

#what do you mean it is easier to cut your own throat Raffles???? #what a thing to say #letters from bunny #raffles #the return match #crime and cricket #be gay do crime #the amateur cracksman #the gentleman thief #bunny manders