Author’s note regarding spoilers: Granted, this book has been out for 25 years now, so the statute of limitations on spoilers expired, oh, about 24 years ago. However, I realize that there are still quite a few Twin Peaks fans who might only be now discovering that Frost wrote a few other books before the two that book-ended Season 3. So, with that in mind, the beginning of this article will be spoiler free, minus the kind of info you’d glean from the blurb on the back cover. Midway through though, and I’ll warn you, we’re going to dig in and from there on everything will be fair game until the Conclusion, which will be spoiler free again.

Introduction (Spoiler-Free)

The List of Seven was released September 1, 1993, and it is Mark Frost’s first published novel. Technically he is one of several authors listed for Welcome to Twin Peaks: Access Guide to the Town (published in 1991), but he apparently doesn’t count that (sigh – does anybody?). Also, Mark has stated in interviews that he started writing at age 11 and by age 15 had written three novels [1], but who knows whatever happened to those. It was generally well received at the time and maintains good ratings today on GoodReads (3.93), Amazon (4.2) and Barnes & Noble (4.3) [2][3][4]. It is currently ranked #9 (out of 164) on Goodread’s list of works of historical fiction that feature real-life authors [5]. You can find the book in hardback, paperback and Kindle versions from the usual sellers, including plenty of autographed copies floating around on EBay [6].

Personally, I’m an audiobook guy and I thought I recalled listening to this on audiobook, even though Audible disagreed with me. After a bit of digging, I did find the audio edition. It was only produced on cassette back in 1993, but I found a place where I could order it online, new, still “wrapped in plastic”. Some days later, having forgotten my order, I received a strange envelope, roughly the size of a large, thin paperback. Then I heard that familiar cassette rattle (to those of us who grew up in the ‘80s) and realized, uh oh, this is my audiobook and it must be abridged. Sure enough, abridged, on two cassettes. Not my favorite, but I’d read the full novel some time ago in the past and really just needed a refresher, so this would do (I’d later go on to buy the Kindle version). It’s read by Rene Auberjonois, better known to Star Trek fans as the shape-shifting Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, so that made up for things a bit.

I think it’s interesting how the title shifts around in the various editions that have been produced over the years [6]. It’s given as “The List of 7” (the number) sometimes, “The List of Seven” (spelled out) other times, and even just “List of 7” (no leading “the”) on one of the US hardback editions. Prior to publication, Frost had considered another variation with “The List of the Seven”, along with a completely different title, “The Left-Handed Path” [7]. On his own personal web site, Mark Frost refers to it as “The List of Seven” [8], so I’ve adopted that convention here for this article.

Plot Summary (Spoiler-Free)

Frost has said the idea for the story came to him when he was playing Scrabble, as he was creating an anagram out of “Sherlock Holmes” with the tiles [9]. Unfortunately he doesn’t explain any further, nor does he say what the resolved anagram was. In an early interview before the novel was published, Mark gives this vague overview of the story:

“It’s set in Britain in 1888, and it’s the story of the young Arthur Conan Doyle and the man who will become his model for Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle told everybody that Holmes was based on one of the men who taught him medicine in Edinburgh, but I’m positing a more mysterious figure. The book is written in that very dense Victorian style, and it’s a way of taking apart his characters and putting them back together in a more psychologically complex way. It also has a mystery plot, and an element of the supernatural – Doyle was a huge believer in spiritualism.” [7]

Like I said, a bit vague. The blurb on the back of my audiobook version is a bit more informative:

“The game is set afoot when an anonymous note from a lady-in-distress sets Arthur Conan Doyle — rising young surgeon and part-time demystifier of the occult — on the trail of a dangerous group of elite Satanists known as the Dark Brotherhood. Joining Doyle on this perilous quest in one Jack Sparks, special agent to Queen Victoria and a man of great daring and bravado, but one who is also shrouded in as much mystery and sinister potential as the Brotherhood they face, a mystery Doyle must unravel at great personal risk. Mark Frost presents ingenious explanations for the creation of some of fiction’s most famous characters while filling his story with epic heroes, horrific villains, death-defying stunts, and incredible escapes – including a final shocker guaranteed to leave you speechless.”

The story reads very much like the script for a summer action-adventure movie, with chase scenes, gun fights, narrow escapes, and even a gratuitous sex scene thrown in for the hero. Small wonder that talk of turning the novel into a feature film has been active since before the book was even released [7]. Universal Studios had the movie rights at that time [10][11] and was planning to release a movie based on it in the summer of 1994 [3]. Frost himself was writing the screenplay, but had no plans to direct the film [12]. More recently, Guillermo del Toro had some sketches for a potential movie in his 2013 book “Cabinet of Curiosities” [13]. So far though, it still hasn’t happened.

The refreshing thing about The List of Seven as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche is that it does not just cast Sparks in the role of the cold, analytical Sherlock Holmes and Doyle in the role of the bumbling Dr. Watson. The characterization of both men is much deeper, darker and more complex, and more importantly it’s their interaction as a team, on equal deductive footing with each other, that solves the clues [14][15]. Wrapped in Plastic points out a particularly fun scene where the two take turns guessing elements of each other’s past based on observations, allowing Frost to engage in a little bit of exposition without being egregious about it [16]. When the perhaps “implausibly liberated” Eileen Temple (again, per Wrapped in Plastic [16]) joins Doyle and Sparks late in the story, she too is treated as an equal and contributes her share to their efforts.

Twin Peaks Connections (Spoiler-Free)

The connections between Twin Peaks and Sherlock Holmes go back to the original series. It’s well known that Agent Cooper is modeled after Sherlock Holmes at least in part, that likely being due to Mark Frost’s influence [17]. In the pilot, Cooper’s quick dismissal of Bobby Briggs as a suspect and his seemingly clairvoyant knowledge of Harry and Josie’s relationship both smack of Holmes-level powers of observation and deduction.

In The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, a young Dale Cooper makes the following audio diary entry:

“March 30, 7 P. M. Have just finished reading about Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. I believe Mr. Holmes is the smartest detective who has ever lived, and would very much like to live a life like he did. It is the Friends School belief that the best thing one can do in life is to do good rather than do well. I believe that in Mr. Holmes I see a way to accomplish this.”

Both Scott Frost and Jennifer Lynch were given a rough outline of things the show creators wanted to establish in their respective spin-off novels [18], so it’s entirely possible this particular connection flowed directly from Scott’s brother. Mark Frost’s own cameo role, reporter Cyril Pons, was named after Solar Pons, another literary detective that was specifically modeled after Sherlock Holmes in an attempt to pick up where Doyle left off with the series [19][20].

Twin Peaks may even be set in the Sherlock Holmes universe. In that diary entry, notice that young Dale is speaking of Sherlock Holmes as if he was a real person who actually lived [17]. Now, it could just be that he was fooled by the premise of Dr. Watson writing about their adventures — My Life, My Tapes does portray Dale as rather naive at times. But then again, maybe not.

Mark Frost has said that Twin Peaks and The List of Seven have “thematic similarities” [21], though I would say the connections are mainly in the form of shared research. One only needs to read a few chapters of The Secret History of Twin Peaks to see that Mark Frost loves to research the past. It’s presumed that much of the elements of Native American history, UFOs, and theosophy that were added to the original Twin Peaks series flowed from Mark’s pen. Frost was working on the novel during the filming of Twin Peaks season 2, so the bleed over of thematic elements is only natural (I’ll leave the specifics for the upcoming sections that include spoilers).

Plot Summary (with Spoilers)

The List of Seven opens on Christmas Day, 1884. At the time, the 25 year-old bachelor Doyle was living three roles: not very successful physician, not very successful author, and investigator/debunker of spiritualists. In real life, he had his own independent medical practice in Southsea, some 70+ miles southwest of London [22], so we can already see that Frost is taking some liberties with the setting. However, his practice was indeed not very successful, leading to his return to writing fiction [22]. He already had 10 stories published in periodicals over the preceding 5 years, but had yet to have his first novel published [23]. That would be the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. This was also around the time he did indeed begin attending séances as a psychic investigator [24].

Doyle attends a séance at the behest of the aforementioned lady-in-distress, Lady Nicholson, and finds himself smitten with her upon first sight. When he exposes the event as a fraud, all hell breaks loose, literally, as dark hooded figures descend upon the gathering, killing the Lady before his eyes. Doyle only escapes the same fate with the aid of a mysterious stranger who whisks him away to safety. When he returns with the police the next day, every trace of what happened has been removed. What clues he has take Doyle next to Cambridge, where he reconnects with the stranger who turns out to be Jack Sparks, secret agent to the Crown. After another attack and narrow escape, they follow the trail of the murder victims to Topping and then back to a book publisher in London.

Turns out Doyle’s latest novel, The Dark Brotherhood, has caught the attention of a real Dark Brotherhood, who now want him dead. At the abandoned publishing house, they finally find the “list of seven” names, a diverse group of powerful people whom they deduce are the leaders of the Dark Brotherhood. Jack reveals that his brother, Alexander, is the mastermind of the group.

Following a lead to the acting troupe that put on the fake séance takes them next to Whitby. There they find the sole survivor of the troupe, Eileen Temple, who played the role of Lady Nicholson. Though her death was staged, the other actors were actually killed on the scene or caught up with later. Joined together now with Jack and Doyle, the three of them interrupt one of the Dark Brotherhood’s ceremonies, and Doyle and Eileen are captured. They are brought as unwilling guests to an estate where all seven members of the cabal have come together, along with their intended victim, Prince Albert, third in line for the throne. Doyle and Eileen break free and attack their captors just as Jack shows up with a regimen of royal marines. Only two members of the Dark Brotherhood manage to escape, Alexander Sparks and the real Lady Nicholson. Jack and Eileen leave Doyle behind as they each go their separate ways.

Doyle makes his way back to London and is visited by Queen Victoria. She thanks him for his service and swears him to secrecy on the matter. After that, Doyle wanders around England aimlessly for a while and finally runs into one of Jack Spark’s henchmen. He finds out that Jack caught up with his brother in Austria, and in their final battle they both plunged over Reichenbach Falls to their apparent doom. Though Doyle cannot write directly of their adventures, he decides to commemorate his friend by writing a story about a fictionalized version of him, giving his character the name Sherlock Holmes.

Along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of course, there are several more real-world characters who appear in the novel:

Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Hardcore Twin Peaks fans will know the name Madam Blavatsky as a founder of Theosophy, an occult religion whose precepts lay the foundation for much of the original series’ mythological elements. The story opens with Doyle reading her book Isis Unveiled, a key Theosophical text, and he later reveals that he “borrowed” both the title of his manuscript and large elements of the plot from the various works of Blavatsky. Of course, he thinks he’s writing fiction, not realizing that the fantastical things she has written about actually exist.

Doyle meets her in person after she gives a talk in Cambridge. She reveals that she has been as interested in Doyle as he was in her, having had an agent living right in his building, watching his “progress”. In the real life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he did initially tread a fine line between skeptical investigation of and wholesale belief in Spiritualism [24]. After World War I however, he came out to the public as a Spiritualist and began writing many books and pamphlets on the subject starting in 1918 until his death in 1930 [23][24].

Dion Fortune

The book Psychic Self-Defense which is also featured early in the story was actually written not by Blavatsky as portrayed, but by Dion Fortune [25], who shows up in the story as a sort of aide-de-camp to Madam Blavatsky when Doyle meets her in Cambridge. The real-world book was also published much, much later in 1930, and Fortune herself would not even be born until 1890 [25]! Much in the way that Doyle lifts his story of the Dark Brotherhood from Madam Blavatsky’s work, Mark Frost has admitted in interviews that he lifted the concept of the Black and White Lodges from Psychic Self-Defense [7]. He apparently wanted to include it in The List of Seven badly enough to take some significant liberties with its authorship and author.

Bram Stoker

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Madam Blavatsky and Dion Fortune are not the only real world authors to appear in the pages of Mark Frost’s first novel. While attempting to track down the actors who put on the fake séance, Doyle and Sparks run into Abraham Stoker, “Bram to [his] friends”, the future author of Dracula. Stoker is also in Whitby trying to find the actors, as they are members of a London theatrical company that he manages for the great actor Henry Irving.

Just as events in The List of Seven allude to things that Doyle would later write about in his Sherlock Holmes stories, so too are there events that Stoker would later include in his novel Dracula [26]. The parish where they encounter Stoker features in Dracula. The Dark Brotherhood arrive to the area by ship in the middle of the night and unload a pair of coffins, very reminiscent of how Dracula arrives in England. Alexander Sparks appears in Eileen’s bedroom, hovering above her all in black with his eyes burning, similar to how Dracula is found watching over Mina Harker.

In real life, Doyle and Stoker were actually friends. Stoker’s interview of Doyle in 1907 about his career and impending (second) marriage was published in newspapers around the globe. Stoker attended that wedding in the same year and would later produce Doyle’s play A Story of Waterloo at the Lyceum Theatre in London [27].

Queen Victoria

Ultimately, the goal of the Dark Brotherhood is to bring forth an evil entity into the empty vessel of a child. Not just any child though, for they hold the Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, under their sway, and his offspring would be in line for succession to the throne. After foiling their plot, Doyle is visited in secret by Queen Victoria in person, who thanks him and swears him to secrecy regarding the events and any discussion of their “mutual friend” Jack Sparks. She gives him a pen as a token of her thanks, and it is with that very pen that he later sits down to write a story based on Jack, but without giving away his identity. The story that would be titled A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel.

Jack the Ripper

Sir Nigel Gull, physician to the royal family and one of the names on the “List of Seven”, appears to be a slightly fictionalized version of Sir William Gull, who also served in that capacity and has been the central figure in several Jack the Ripper theories, as either knowing the identity of, or himself being, the infamous killer [28]. In the story, Gull is the one who fosters the Dark Brotherhood’s access to the Duke and also has Jack Sparks committed to Beldam asylum when his early investigations bring him too close.

The “canonical five” Jack the Ripper murders ran from August 1888 to November 1888 [29], placing The List of Seven slightly early to be crossing paths with the “Whitechapel Murderer”. Following the attack at the séance, the body of street walker known as “Fairy Fay” is found 3 blocks away, carved up in a manner that leads Doyle to conclude that the killer must have surgical skills. Of the “List of Seven”, only Gull would have had those skills, implying that this and the other Ripper murders were actually ritualistic sacrifices being made as part of the Dark Brotherhood’s sinister plans. The “Fairy Fay” murder is a real case that has been considered a potential Jack the Ripper murder, though she was found on December 26, 1887 — three years earlier than portrayed here [29].

Adolf Hitler

The “final shocker” that the back cover blurb of my audiobook hinted at comes in the Epilogue. In the prior final chapter, Doyle learns from Jack’s henchman Larry that after they cut him loose, he and Jack continued to pursue Alexander Sparks and Lady Nicholson across Europe, nearly catching up to them in Austria. There they went into a house the couple were staying and saw the ectoplasmic evidence that these last two Dark Brotherhood members had perhaps successfully brought something through from the spirit realm. Jack and Alexander battle on Reichenbach Falls and plunge to their apparent deaths, but Lady Nicholson is left behind as Larry flees the scene back to England.

The epilogue opens on April, 1890, as Doyle takes his new family, first wife Louisa and daughter Mary Louise, to Reichenbach Falls on a vacation. There he views the infamous falls with his own eyes and learns a little bit about the likelihood of surviving such a fall. His daughter comments to her mother on the beautiful eyes of a baby in a carriage next to them and the two mothers exchange a few words. As that other family departs, the mother says “Komm mit, Adolf” (translation: “Come with me, Adolf”). The implication being that this 1 year old baby is Adolf Hitler (born April 20, 1889), and that he was the successful embodiment of the Dark Brotherhood’s attempts to summon forth the Dweller on the Threshold.

Incidentally, Mary Louise Doyle was also born in 1889, and would have been only a few months older that baby Adolf at the time. Why adjust her age up just to give her a speaking part in the Epilogue? I’ve got a theory about that that we’ll talk about in the next section.

Twin Peaks Connections (with Spoilers)

As I’ve eluded to, the connections with the original Twin Peaks series lie generally with the shared research that contributed to each of their respective stories. Connections to the new Twin Peaks series are a little more intriguing.

Dweller on the Threshold

One turn of phrase Twin Peaks fans will find familiar is “Dweller on the Threshold”, although it is used much differently here. The “Dweller” in The List of Seven is a conscious evil that is born into the physical world in successive cycles. It was formerly a high celestial being that was corrupted by the temptations of the material world. Essentially a fallen angel, perhaps even *the* fallen angel, Lucifer. The “Threshold” is a limbo between the physical and mystical worlds, where the Dweller gathers itself to await being called back into physical form. This being is the “Black Lord” that the Seven serve and are preparing the way for.

Timeline Confusion

Mark Frost is a meticulous researcher — this I believe to be true. However, that said, there are many discrepancies in the dates of real world events that seem to go beyond merely taking liberties. This may just be an effect that rubbed off on Frost from his partnership with David Lynch on Twin Peaks and other projects. Discrepancies in continuity were present in Twin Peaks long before The Secret History took the concept of an “unreliable narrator” to a whole new level. Was Frost just being sloppy? Did he just not care since it was a work of fiction?

Another possibility is that he purposely inserts these little tidbits as puzzles to be discovered by the more intrepid reader. That’s the conclusions I came to regarding The Secret History discrepancies in Reporting on Reporter Robert Jacoby. After all, when you look at some of the timeline discrepancies in The List of Seven, many of them are associated with things that do not really directly contribute to the story. Why add Dion Fortune as an assistant to Madam Blavatsky years before she is even born? Why include the Boxing Day murder of “Fairy Fey” three years early, when it could have been any random, non-real world victim? Why have Doyle’s daughter be a few years older when the two mothers could have easily had their conversation without her prompting?

Middle Names

Midway through the novel, Doyle is given reason to doubt whether Jack Sparks might not be an escaped lunatic from Bedlam asylum. Fearing the worst, he has the following aside with the other of Jack’s henchmen, Barry:

“Barry, have you ever seen Alexander Sparks?” asked Doyle, keeping his voice low but not unduly confidential.

Barry cocked an eyebrow, glancing at him sideways. “Odd question.”

“Why is it odd?”

“That’s the maestro’s middle name, idn’t it?” said Barry, nodding toward Sparks. “Jonathan Alexander Sparks. That’s my understanding.”

Here Frost has employed a literary device of giving his protagonist the middle name of the antagonist, sowing confusion as to whether the hero and the villain might not be one and the same. A technique he would reuse some 20+ years later with “Sarah Judith Novack” in Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier. This is precisely what I proposed in Hiding in Plain Sight – Judy Revealed, that Judy is actually a split personality fractured off a Sarah broken by the pain and sorrow of her experience, whom she has endowed with her middle name. Of course, in The List of Seven, it turned out that Alexander Sparks was indeed a real person, separate from his nemesis and brother, Jack. So who knows?

Darkness and Light

The novel begins with the following quote in the Epigraph:

“All the Devil requires is acquiescence… not struggle, not conflict. Acquiescence.”

Frost tweaked the wording a bit, but this appears to be a quote from Suzanne Massie, an American author who was instrumental in helping Ronald Reagan understand the Russian people and come to a peaceful conclusion to the Cold War [30]. The full quote is:

“Evil is near. Sometimes late at night the air grows strongly clammy and cold around me. I feel it brushing me. All that the Devil asks is acquiescence … not struggle, not conflict. Acquiescence.”

Acquiescence, or, as I phrased it in The White of the Eyes – Revisiting Judy as a Metaphor, the indifference of bystanders, is one of the strong themes that can be detected working in the background of Twin Peaks Season 3. Frost has described Part 8 in particular as an origin story for “this pervasive sense of darkness and evil” in Twin Peaks [31]. When faced with that evil, two options are presented. We can enable “the evil that men do” by looking away, showing “the white of the eyes”. Or we can follow Margaret’s advice from The Final Dossier to “hold the light inside you”, recognize it in others, and together make the light strong enough to make the darkness yield.

Bookending the Epigraph to The List of Seven, in the final chapter, Doyle reads the following words written to him in a letter by Eileen Temple that sums up all of these themes nicely:

“I know that none of us who lived through those days and nights together shall ever see life with the same blind and blinkered eyes with which most around us look out at the world. Perhaps we have seen too much. I only know that your kindness, your decency, your tenderness to me and your courage are a beacon that will guide me through whatever remains of this dark passage. Please know, dear man, that you will be forever in my thoughts, that you have my love always, wherever the tide may carry you. Be strong, my darling Arthur, I know in my heart, know truly and believe that the light you possess will burn to the great benefit of this world long after our poor footprints have been washed from the sand. I love you.”

Once you have seen the darkness for what it is, you cannot go back to looking away. But we all possess a light, burning within us, which can guide us through that darkness and ultimately make the world a better place. Messages that resonate with us even 25 years later.

Conclusion (Spoiler-Free)

The List of Seven is a genuinely good story. Not perfect, but well deserving of the 4-star ratings it maintains to this day. Frost did write a sequel, The Six Messiahs, published in 1995, but it was not as well received and Mark seems to have moved on to write several non-fiction historical novels about golf and the young adult fiction series The Paladin Prophecy.

Sherlock Holmes is never too far from the public zeitgeist, having had recent successes with the Robert Downey Jr. movies, BBC series Sherlock, and CBS series Elementary. Mark Frost is likewise hot right now following the success of The Secret History and Twin Peaks Season 3. So it’s not unreasonable to hope that the long overdue movie version of the novel could finally see the light of day. If so, maybe we’ll even get a decent, unabridged audiobook version as well – narrated by Kyle MacLachlan! I can dream.

Notes / References: