I finally got around to reading Lovecraft Annual #6 (2012). I have been insanely busy until recently. Inside, however, I was saddened to find that there was a huge error in my essay on HPL & Sherlock Holmes.

This error wasn't in the final draft I submitted to Joshi, and must have occurred when David E. Schultz edited it for publication. I think that what happened is, Schultz was removing superfluous modifiers and excess baggage from the essay, in order to shorten it for publication. Unfortunately, in the process he changed the sense of the first sentence of paragraph 2 on page 201. The passage SHOULD read:

"On the other hand, while Deborah D’Agati rightly contrasts Conan Doyle’s heroic stories, in which evil is usually caught or punished in the end, with Lovecraft’s more macabre vision, in which the heroes are often reduced to madness or death, the oft-derided but little-understood heroic aspects of Lovecraft’s weird fiction -as represented by the notorious Good vs. Evil plots of such stories as “The Shunned House”, “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Horror at Red Hook”, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, (which, as Peter Cannon has observed, have caused some embarrassment to certain Lovecraft-critics⁸)- would also seem to preserve something of Lovecraft’s original Holmesian influence, and Holmes’ strict ethos of order, probity, and justice. Indeed, Peter Cannon goes so far as to link Dr. Armitage in “The Dunwich Horror” to “the archetypal fictional detective at mystery’s end”.⁹

By removing the "on the other hand" from the beginning of the paragraph, Schultz has created a run-on sentence which makes no sense whatsoever, since my intent here was to contrast my point of view with D'Agati's. Written Schultz's way, the sentence makes it seem as if I agree with her.

But these things happen, and I bear no ill-will. I only regret that the alteration makes me seem even more illiterate than actually I am.

Since I am on the topic of errors, I will also take this opportunity to say I disavow the final paragraph of my essay (p.228), in which I link HPL with the modernists in his use of the Holmes canon. I now think that HPL's rememberances of the Holmes canon in his stories (aside from a few famous instances in "The Hound") was merely coincidence; a reflection of half-remembered things from his childhood.