Surprise etymology and a book

Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas has been a fascinating journey through a region of the world I know almost nothing about so far. Covering how the modern idea of walled-off, spiritually advanced Tibet formed in the late 1800s, against a background of popular interest in the occult, it drops this aside:

Take for example the concept of "vril", an "all-permeating fluid" which first appears in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's proto-science-fiction novel The Coming Race, published in 1871. At the time Bulwer-Lytton was a hugely popular novelist and politician, the man who coined the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword". Vril was a kind of power or strength, and it briefly caught on. A Scottish butcher called John Lawson Johnston used the name to market his nutritious beef stock: Bovril.

I've heard of vril, and I've heard of Bovril, but I would never have guessed they had any connection.

Shortly afterward there is a mention of a book I'll probably decide to hunt down and read:

When Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to resurrect Sherlock Holmes following his apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls, it was only natural that he should emerge from mystical Tibet; the Tibetan novelist Jamyang Norbu wrote a pastiche of what the detective got up to in The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes.

Looking up that book, it turns out to also be fan fiction of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which I've never read. So two books to hunt down and read.