Why I love…

#121: On the Many Wonderful Faces of Dr. John H. Watson, MD – Part 2 of 2

/ JJ / 31 Comments

Sherlock Holmes collection covers

So, as established yesterday, there’s much more scope in Watson than there is in Holmes.  The obvious question then becomes: So what do you do with this?

Take the simple cosmetic changes out of the equation — the casting of Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson in the US series Elementary, for instance, easily one of the least disruptive changes it’s possible to get away with — and what you’re left with is the fact that Watson, being our entry into the Holmesiverse, is allowed to do anything that reflects the experience and perspective of the reader.  As discussed yesterday, there are aspects of the character, the constants I referred to, that don’t become him — making him the proprietor of a burgeoning dog-walking business, or a respected scholar of nineteenth century Gothic poetry, or giving him a form of OCD which means he must always cross his legs in the opposite manner to Holmes unless it’s a Tuesday in which case…, etc — but let’s put this aside as given and look at the way certain authors have expanded on Watson without desecrating him beyond all recognition.

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#120: On the Many Wonderful Faces of Dr. John H. Watson, MD – Part 1 of 2

/ JJ / 15 Comments

Sherlock Holmes collectionLately I’ve read an unusually high concentration of Holmes pastiches — Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary (not good), Stephen King’s ‘A Doctor’s Case’ (not terrible), Colin Dexter’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’ (extremely good), Michael Kurland’s The Infernal Device (loadsa fun), Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range (fabulous) and a superb piece of unpublished fan fiction sent to me via email — and it’s made me realise that while Watson, and specifically the Watsonian voice, is vital in undertaking Holmes, no-one can quite agree what Watson is, how he should be written, and this makes him far and away the more interesting of the two men when it comes to analysis.

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#102: Paul Halter Day – II: The Impossibility of More Impossibilities

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Paul Halter Day 2

Declaring that the detective novel was the only form of literature that put the reader to work, [S.S. van Dine] argued that “a deduction game emphasising fair play within a limited setting” would be the story structure with the best potential to result in masterpiece mystery stories […] But when the elements of the game are too severely limited and the building materials are all the same, only the first few builders will get all the glory and there will be an over-abundance of similar novels…

—Soji Shimada, in his introduction to The Moai Island Puzzle

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#98: One week until Paul Halter Day!

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Paul Halter Day

I have absolutely no doubt that Kate, Rich, Puzzle Doctor, and many others will do jobs far superior to anything I ever could in summarising yesterday’s hugely enjoyable Bodies from the Library and so I’ll leave that to them.

Instead, I’d like to remind anyone still considering it that next Sunday will be Paul Halter’s 60th birthday and so Paul Halter Day will come into effect.  If you’re posting anything Paul Halter-related on that day, put the link in the comments of this post and I’ll do a wrap-up later in the evening.

My thanks in advance to anyone getting involved, really looking forward to what people come up with…!

#95: Character v Plot 2 – Atmosphere v Redundancy

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relevance

As you’re no doubt aware, the internet is currently ablaze with my self-inflicted #9booksin9days challenge on Twitter in which, well, I’m reading 9 books over the nine days of my half term break.  It’s been fun and slightly intense – I’ve read books in a single day before, even on consecutive days, but never nine in a row – and has caused me to reflect upon my post from last week on the topic of the character/plot threshold in detective fiction (which has already been reflected upon by Brad at AhSweetMysteryBlog). In light of this, I wanted to explore it a bit deeper.  You are, of course, invited to come along with me.

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#92: Character v Plot

/ JJ / 37 Comments

Character v PlotSo here’s a starting point that doesn’t belong on a blog about crime fiction between 1920 and 1959 with frequent diversions into apparent impossibilities: I freakin’ love Batman. The whole Bruce Wayne/Batman duality in almost any form is an absolute joy to me – I’m not going to geek out here over the many, many years I’ve spent reading the comics nor the sundry disappointments of the various cinematic fusterclucks (I’m looking daggers at you, Schumacher…Burton, you’re borderline), and shall instead make the following observation: the second I heard Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was announced, I’d practically bought my ticket on the fact of it being a new Batman incarnation.

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#65: On the Loss of the Rue Morgue Press – an open love letter

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A little while ago, via TomCat over at Beneath the Stains of Time, I learned to my immense sadness that the Rue Morgue Press has officially shut down and will no longer be publishing books.  If you don’t know RMP, then you’ve been missing out: set up by Tom and Enid Schantz, they have kept in print the kinds of classic detective novels that give the Golden Age such a deserved reputation while big-hitters like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers hog all the limelight.  The cessation of their endeavours is a tremendous loss, and what follows is an attempt to explain what they’ve meant to me as a reader for several years now.

RIP RMP

Dear Tom Schantz,

I have been reading classic crime novels for something like the last 16 years.  I started with the entry-level drug that is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and worked my way steadily through her books for a few years before branching out.  Eventually I discovered The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, which I hated and gave up on before realising how amazing it was and burning through it in less than a day.  Suddenly, I had a new obsession: the acquisition of more Carr.

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#54: The Kings of Crime – IV: Erle Stanley Gardner, the King of Spades

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King Gardner

Bookends: The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933)/The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973)

Books published 1920-59: 97

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: Yes, you read that correctly: by my count (and I’ve cross-checked a couple of times just in case) Erle Stanley Gardner published ninety-seven books in the space of 39 years, and that’s not including short story collections and without considering the individual stories themselves – somewhere in the realm of 200 of them (Wikipedia informs me that Gardner set himself a target of 1.2 million words a year – 100,000 a month, approximately the total word-count of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – while writing short fiction for the pulps, many of them under pseudonyms).  With that much output comes one of two things: the same story, worn infinitely thin and threadbare through retelling, or a range of styles, approaches, forms, characters, and ideas that tell of an imagination on fire, quenched only by its own overflowing.

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#50: The Kings of Crime – III: Anthony Berkeley, the King of Diamonds

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King Berkeley

Bookends: The Layton Court Mystery (1925)/Death in the House (1939)

Books published 1920-59: 21

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: Anthony Berkeley Cox’s commitment to the crime novel is evinced from his first appearance on the scene with the publication of locked-room stumper The Layton Court Mystery (1925) for which he didn’t even bother to make up a nom de plume.  Early versions of the book simply had the author listed as “?” – message: you want a puzzle, here’s a puzzle.  You were getting – before Carr, before Queen, before Christie was anything close to a household name – the promise of something that had mystery not just in its title but at its very heart (and the follow-up, The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926), was published as by The Author of The Layton Court Mystery!).  Sure, it was demystified shortly thereafter with the American publication (as Noah Stewart points out, it makes you wonder where it went on library shelves prior to that, doesn’t it?), but for a little while it was doubtless quite an intriguing notion – the crime novel as we know it was still in its very nascent stages, don’t forget, and while the content may not have quite matched the cover in that regard…well, more on that later. Continue reading →

#48: The Kings of Crime – II: Jim Thompson, the King of Clubs

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King Thompson

Bookends: Now and on Earth (1942)/King Blood (1973)

Books published 1920-59: 20

The Case for the Crown

Diversity: If you’re going to consider the hardboiled subgenre as part of the history of crime fiction – and you really, really should – the accepted wisdom says you go Chandler or Hammett or, at a push, James M. Cain.  I say that Jim Thompson did more than those erstwhile gentlemen combined and should be enthroned ahead of all three of them.  Chandler famously said of Hammett that he “gave crime back to the people who committed it for a reason”, but I feel this is more true of Thompson than of Sam: Hammett’s and Chandler’s way in was always their detective characters, who stumbled into something already in motion and acted in the way a detective is expected to.  Thompson, by contrast, gave us the petty losers, the cuckolded husbands, the big-dreaming small-town folk, the small-time grifters and any other number of subsections of society who had their own reasons for committing their crimes (sex was always a part of Thompson’s protagonists’ motivation) and made us feel their motives because – forget some fabulous inheritance, or a trust left to my wife who died so I married someone else and we’re pretending she’s the original, or the man who married my one true love and then made her miserable so she killed herself leaving me to avenge her – they were motives the ordinary man could understand, even experience themself. Continue reading →