Here at the End of All Murder Monday
What I've Finished Reading
Recently in the Annotated Holmes, a series of Americans and their discontents: "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Five Orange Pips," and "The Man With the Twisted Lip," which I don't think had any Americans in it, though it might be a good candidate for my favorite, for Holmes' giant sponge of truth and the beggar's predicament. (Doyle's favorite was apparently "The Speckled Band," which sounds about right to me).
The footnotes have nothing good to say about "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" but I guess I'm not as picky as the Holmes fandom, because I liked it just fine? I have simple needs; I'm happy whenever Americans turn up in vintage British media and start talking that colorful cowboy-gangster twang. And I had somehow completely forgotten that the secret society in "The Five Orange Pips" was the first-generation Ku Klux Klan, which Holmes ascertains by paging through the "K" volume of his American encyclopedia.
A footnote about Holmes' dressing gown led me to Christopher Morley's essay "Was Sherlock Holmes an American?" Among other things, he suggests that Watson deliberately described American landscapes in unflattering terms in order to tease Holmes. It's not a very convincing argument, but convincing is not the point (I'm pretty sure).
The dressing-gown controversy: Did Holmes have three dressing gowns, or one that changed color over time? There is only one impossible hypothesis that can be eliminated at the outset, and it's that Doyle didn't care about Holmes' dressing gown and just forgot whether it was blue or purple.
Also: Plot Counter-Plot by Anna Clarke. A successful novelist in her fifties takes on a dangerous young wunderkind as her live-in secretary; several interlocking and uncomfortable obsessions ensue, and murder hangs in the balance. This book is advertised as "Mystery in the Bestselling Tradition of Josephine Tey." Like Tey, it does a lot of subverting of genre and structural expectations, though the writing is not always as assured. It doesn't have anything like Tey's low-key eccentricity. I did wind up liking it a lot - the narrator is a skein of sympathetic and unsympathetic traits and motives; she makes a billion terrible decisions for reasons both overdetermined and unclear, and the clumsy looming colossus of her self-awareness can't lift a finger to save her.
There's a startling casual reference to Christie's And Then There Were None using its original title (in the UK in 1974, which is a little later than I would have expected to see it).
What I'm Reading Now
Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.
Oh, Philip Marlowe. Why do I have a sinking feeling that this hilarious offhand description of a rich guy's window is going to get drenched in ironic significance somehow? Is it just that everything always does?
I shouldn't be getting Raymond Chandler books from the library when I have so many other books at home, but here we are. I'm reading The Big Sleep and there's nothing to be done about it.
Also from the library: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters.
"And boy, when those meetings ended he would always be the first guy out the door," Gompers says. "You got the feeling he was a lot happier at his desk, doing his thing with his calculator and his statistics binders, than he was with the rest of us humans."
I'm scratching way, nodding encouragingly and empathetically to keep Gompers talking, and I'm thinking how much I'm starting to like this guy, this Peter Anthony Zell. I like a guy who likes to get his work done.
Hank Palace only got promoted to detective in the first place because there's a giant asteroid about to hit the earth and most of his colleagues have checked out in the face of the end of civilization as they know it. Suicide rates are at at an all-time high, so why make trouble, just because this one suicide looks a little suspicious? Palace provides an elegant summary of why I find detective fiction so inexhaustibly appealing: I like a guy who likes to get his work done. Is the imminent end of the word really that much more discouraging a condition than "being Philip Marlowe"? It doesn't matter. Palace has a job to do and he's going to keep on doing it till the lights go out.
What I Plan to Read Next
Clutch of Constables! And this book I got from the library has both The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely so we'll see what happens there (endless confusion, probably). And Guards! Guards!, if that counts.
Recently in the Annotated Holmes, a series of Americans and their discontents: "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Five Orange Pips," and "The Man With the Twisted Lip," which I don't think had any Americans in it, though it might be a good candidate for my favorite, for Holmes' giant sponge of truth and the beggar's predicament. (Doyle's favorite was apparently "The Speckled Band," which sounds about right to me).
The footnotes have nothing good to say about "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" but I guess I'm not as picky as the Holmes fandom, because I liked it just fine? I have simple needs; I'm happy whenever Americans turn up in vintage British media and start talking that colorful cowboy-gangster twang. And I had somehow completely forgotten that the secret society in "The Five Orange Pips" was the first-generation Ku Klux Klan, which Holmes ascertains by paging through the "K" volume of his American encyclopedia.
A footnote about Holmes' dressing gown led me to Christopher Morley's essay "Was Sherlock Holmes an American?" Among other things, he suggests that Watson deliberately described American landscapes in unflattering terms in order to tease Holmes. It's not a very convincing argument, but convincing is not the point (I'm pretty sure).
The dressing-gown controversy: Did Holmes have three dressing gowns, or one that changed color over time? There is only one impossible hypothesis that can be eliminated at the outset, and it's that Doyle didn't care about Holmes' dressing gown and just forgot whether it was blue or purple.
Also: Plot Counter-Plot by Anna Clarke. A successful novelist in her fifties takes on a dangerous young wunderkind as her live-in secretary; several interlocking and uncomfortable obsessions ensue, and murder hangs in the balance. This book is advertised as "Mystery in the Bestselling Tradition of Josephine Tey." Like Tey, it does a lot of subverting of genre and structural expectations, though the writing is not always as assured. It doesn't have anything like Tey's low-key eccentricity. I did wind up liking it a lot - the narrator is a skein of sympathetic and unsympathetic traits and motives; she makes a billion terrible decisions for reasons both overdetermined and unclear, and the clumsy looming colossus of her self-awareness can't lift a finger to save her.
There's a startling casual reference to Christie's And Then There Were None using its original title (in the UK in 1974, which is a little later than I would have expected to see it).
What I'm Reading Now
Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.
Oh, Philip Marlowe. Why do I have a sinking feeling that this hilarious offhand description of a rich guy's window is going to get drenched in ironic significance somehow? Is it just that everything always does?
I shouldn't be getting Raymond Chandler books from the library when I have so many other books at home, but here we are. I'm reading The Big Sleep and there's nothing to be done about it.
Also from the library: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters.
"And boy, when those meetings ended he would always be the first guy out the door," Gompers says. "You got the feeling he was a lot happier at his desk, doing his thing with his calculator and his statistics binders, than he was with the rest of us humans."
I'm scratching way, nodding encouragingly and empathetically to keep Gompers talking, and I'm thinking how much I'm starting to like this guy, this Peter Anthony Zell. I like a guy who likes to get his work done.
Hank Palace only got promoted to detective in the first place because there's a giant asteroid about to hit the earth and most of his colleagues have checked out in the face of the end of civilization as they know it. Suicide rates are at at an all-time high, so why make trouble, just because this one suicide looks a little suspicious? Palace provides an elegant summary of why I find detective fiction so inexhaustibly appealing: I like a guy who likes to get his work done. Is the imminent end of the word really that much more discouraging a condition than "being Philip Marlowe"? It doesn't matter. Palace has a job to do and he's going to keep on doing it till the lights go out.
What I Plan to Read Next
Clutch of Constables! And this book I got from the library has both The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely so we'll see what happens there (endless confusion, probably). And Guards! Guards!, if that counts.