tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:19:09 +0000Abandoned BooksReviews of books and authors not much discussed on the web.noreply@blogger.com (Doug Bassett)Blogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304.post-8337239923333926594Sat, 19 Feb 2011 09:55:00 +00002011-02-19T05:13:21.846-05:00A Handful of Thrillers, Most from the Seventies<div><br /><a href=" style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 225px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 225px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575339066865585730" border="0" alt="" src="; /></a><br /><strong>MADONNA RED -- James Carroll</strong><br /><br />Exceptionally odd thriller tries to marry the “Catholic Problem Novel” (which always seem to down to “Those Mean Old Priests Are Trying To Stop Reform, Dammit”) with, ah, um, a thriller.<br /><br />I don't know what to say. I suppose it's better than marrying the thriller with the “Jewish Writer Problem Novel”, which would probably end up with a lot of scenes of the hero masturbating fiercely in the bathroom. But it still seems like a really strange thing to do. Also a lot of genuflecting Irishims, the kind of book where JFK is mentioned and we're all supposed to bow our heads in prayer. Ridiculous, avoid.<br /><br /><br /><strong>THE SPY WHO SAT AND WAITED – R Wright Campbell</strong><br /><br />I only read a few pages into this, so maybe I'm missing some tremendous payoff down the line, but I kinda doubt it. For one thing I've been around, y'know? I know how stories work, pretty much, and I'm pretty sure I know where this is headed. Secondly, I kinda skimmed ahead and what I saw didn't surprise me none, yo.<br /><br />Maybe I'm wrong, but I can live with that.<br /><br />And anyway, I decided years ago I wouldn't put up with books that weren't good. Life is short, you'll never read half of what you promised yourself, let alone what's out there, don't waste your time on crap. At it's heart book reading should be fun, not a chore. This isn't 11th Grade English and you do not have to make a report on this when you're done.<br /><br />Anyhow, the general concept here is this the “spy in deep cover who has to juggle his mission against the friends and connections set up in his new country”. I have never bought this notion from the start, at least in any serious way. In it's more entertaining gonzo variants it's a plot right out of a Nick Carter: Killmaster novel, basically it transfers the “invasion of the body snatchers” type story to the spy novel. Fred the kindly old barber is really a Chinese Commie Spy? Really?<br /><br />In it's more serious variants I think it's trying to move the “undercover cop in danger of losing site of his mission” trope to the spy arena. This is a more serious variant and I suspect tha<a href=" style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 82px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 139px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575339188287072498" border="0" alt="" src="; /></a>t's the inspiration, particularly because I suspect “R Wright Campbell” is really “Robert Campbell” a guy who was once well known for tough guy novels. Like IN LA-LA LAND WE TRUST. So it would make sense, see, this would be a logical move for him.<br /><br />In it's more serious variants it runs into problems immediately, though. To begin with, people do not leave their home, stay deep within another culture, and then at a predetermined time rise up and start blowing up bridges or whatever. Psychologically it doesn't work that way. The environment is too strong, the pressures to great, in the absence of careful mentoring (and it's made quite clear early on that there's no careful mentoring here) the subject will just join the new culture.<br /><br />Yes, of course, moles have existed in the past and continue to do so, but don't miss the thread – these guys are converts. That's the point, and actually the interest of them. See TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY on this – the point is the mole wouldn't be so interesting if he actually WAS a Russian citizen, would he?<br /><br />So, I don't really buy the premise. But let's set that aside, as much as we can, anyway, and look a little at where this comes from, like I said up top....probably the undercover cop story.<br /><br />There's really only a couple of ways those kinds of stories can go. One is the “guy infiltrates Bad Guys to Bring Them Down, all the while Suffering Emotionally/Mentally/Physically”. Think Scorcese's THE DEPARTED, if you need an example. In that case, our hero is definitely an outsider, has a mission, suffers but in the end completes (or at least tries to complete) the mission.<br /><br />The other way is the “both sides are rotten” kind of story, the undercover cop tale as social commentary. This is much harder to pull off, because it's a lot less clear who to root for in such stories, but usually you end up just focusing on the viewpoint character himself, who usually comes to embody all that is Good and Pure and Noble in the writer's mind. Laurence Fishburne in DEEP COVER was a version of this.<br /><br />Now, it's kinda dicey in a crime story, but if you got skills you can sometimes make it work there. In a spy story? Particularly a WW 2 spy story like the above? Never.<br /><br />Think about the problems Campbell set for himself. He can't make it a battle between two equally bad systems, Nazi Germany and Great Britain, because, even setting aside the fact that it WASN'T in fact, it's going to be a helluva tough sell in the story proper. WW2 stories always occur in a context, they can't help it, it's a mediated war, and one of those contexts is “Nazis are evil bastards”. If you're gonna challenge that context well.....well, good luck, I guess. It might even be an interesting book. It certainly would have a hard time out there, though. Probably.<br /><br />So Campbell can't do that, he's a consummate pro and he realizes that trying to disengage the message of the 400 WW2 movies his readers have seen is a losing battle. So the Brits (actually, here the Scots) are good and the Nazis are bad. So.<br /><br />So, why doesn't this guy just make a new life for himself in Scotland?<br /><br />Because mind, this is a sensitive, caring, intelligent guy. This is part of the point too. A guy in his absurd position who really stayed loyal to Deutschland through all of those years, resist all the normal psychological pressures working against it, would almost certainly be some kind of weirdo – he certainly wouldn't be able to blend in under “deep cover”. But since we ill-advisedly are in this guy's head, we see that he's a pretty decent chap, all in all. So why doesn't he just give up Germany? We're even told he has nothing to keep him loyal to the country. He doesn't seem to obsess over it much, except for periodic reminders that I feel are more authorial intent than anything. So why not?<br /><br />Campbell never really gives me a good answer to that, in the pages I read, and I felt no need to read further. THE SPY WHO SAT AND WAITED is the kind of bad popular book that is sometimes mistaken for good. On some level it's very carefully written: it's a pro's job, the scenes are very carefully delineated, I wouldn't say the prose ever really distinguishes itself but it's fussy in a reliable craftsmanlike sort of way, intelligent as far as it goes, you won't hate yourself reading this. But taken as a whole it's a badly written book, and that's because the whole idea is, to put a fine point on it, stupid. It's a stupid premise. I could never suspend my disbelief that it could ever work, and the bad choice of viewpoint character ensured that the whole setup was just insane. When you're sneering at the book's main character that's not a good sign.<br /><br /><strong>THE THREE JUST MEN – Edgar Wallace</strong><br /><br />THE FOUR JUST MEN is that rarity, a political thriller which is literally about politics – that is, about the ways we organize, decide, and conduct ourselves politically. It's a very unique book and if there's only one Wallace you read, it definitely should be that.<br /><br />The sequels really do not match it. THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE is a political thrille<a href=" style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 194px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 259px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575340366508582562" border="0" alt="" src="; /></a>r in the more standard tradition of the time – “basic action thriller with political overtones that skews conservative and does have some fascist overtones, frankly, like it or not”. BLACK GANG sort of stuff. While not nearly as snazzy as THE BLACK GANG, COUNCIL is good on that level and worth reading. THE JUST MEN OF CORDOVA I don't remember a gosh-durned thing about, except that it's set in Spain and Wallace apparently really liked Spain. I wouldn't take my failure of memory as a recommendation. THE LAW OF THE FOUR JUST MEN is a collection of stories, and they vary in quality as most short story collections tend to do. I would describe the book as “pleasant, but minor”.<br /><br />Leaving THREE, the last one. And apparently Wallace decided to leave the characters with a bang. We're pretty far afield here of the mysterious grim men of FOUR, here the remaining three (one of 'em dies in FOUR...oh crap, is that a spoiler?) have been pardoned and actually work a detective agency in their spare time, where, as this book opens, they are apparently just sitting around waiting for the plot to start.<br /><br />Yes, this is a straightforward pulp adventure novel, and on that basis it's quite entertaining. It has all of the standard Wallace elements: damsels in distress, a corrupt member of the aristocracy, a fiendish plot to defraud said heiress, a mysterious murder full of mysterious mystery, and best of all a memorable villain. The problem with turning the Just Men into just pulp heroes is that they were most effective in narrative terms when they were mysterious – Wallace, to keep the series going, ultimately had to characterize them, and while he did a professional's job they do lose some of their luster in comparison.<br /><br />But accepting that, it's very entertaining. The best thing Wallace does here is two fine villains – a henchman who on the run from ahem “certain unspecified things” in Germany and, when he's not a psychopathic killer, is a master of disguise, and, best of all, the lead bad guy, Oberzhon, a guy who's just a marvelously entertaining collection of tics: he only sleeps in a chair; he rarely eats solid foods – there's a reference to him boiling down an entire ox and sipping that and there aren't enough exclamation points in the universe to indicate how awesome that is; he relaxes by reading the lesser Germanic philosophers (extra special points to Wallace by making sure we understood – the lesser.) There's a priceless sequence where he attempts to court a woman he, uh, kidnapped (don't ask) and he does it in a ponderous Germanic way which is the kind of thing they really gotta film, it's crying out for the movies.<br /><br />Add to that a good-for-the-time mystery, for once; some cool stuff from the Just Men; and one really excellent fight sequence – we've spoken here before about how hard it is to do action properly, the fight with the snakes in the cellar is really masterfully done, very well choreographed. Not a necessary book like FOUR JUST MEN, but if you like Wallace this is one of his better efforts, and is the only other installment of “the Just Men” series that I would recommend.<br /><br /><strong>THE HEIGHTS OF RIMRING – Duff Hart-Davis</strong><br /><br />Earlier we talked about one classic kind of bad book, THE SPY WHO SAT AND ATE A HOAGIE or whatever it was called, which was “the character study that springs from false assumptions, and thus is unbelievable on it's face”. RIMRING is another classic kind of bad book, “the thriller which is really a travelogue”.<br /><br />The bio in the back of the book tells me that Hart-Davis spent time in the Himalaya<a href=" style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 172px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 293px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575340997660896706" border="0" alt="" src="; /></a>s, which I guess accounts for his setting, yo. He obviously loves the area, and the descriptions are nicely done. But this is all done in the service of an extremely hackneyed thriller plot: The Ex-Spy Who Is Roped Back Into The Business, The Evil Commie Opposition, The Simple But Good Natives, The Evil Cutthroat, The Love Interest, The Secret Idol, etc. The intent, I'm pretty sure, was to do a classic adventure, but you don't do a classic adventure by forcing the tropes of a classic adventure onto a modern setting: this ensures laborious stage-setting (where you're carefully told how sheltered the native populace is, how rural the environment is, where the Improbable Throwback From Another Era is carefully placed, etc.) and in general just makes the whole thing seem as contrived as it really is. Instead, you need to just move the tropes into the modern era. They're hardy things, they can stand them. To not do that is to betray a lack of faith in your story telling ability proper, it suggests that really you don't think you can TELL a good adventure story by itself, that you gotta rely on the old tropes to stand in and deliver for you. (Ie, the Mysterious Idol is now code for “the prize”, instead of being, well, the prize.)<br /><br />There's two ways to look at a book like RIMRING. Either the thought was “hey, man, you know the Himalayas and that's a classic setting for an old timey adventure story” (that's what I think happened) or “I want to tell a classic adventure – hey, I know the Himalayas! – wait, where's the typewriter...” (the old “tell what you know” fallacy). Either way it results in bad books, and any given installment of Edward S Aarons's “Assignment” series, which almost always took place in exotic parts of the world that he knew only through the local library, is simply superior to this kind of well-intentioned mediocrity. </div>2011/02/madonna-red-james-carroll-exceptionally.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Bassett)101tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304.post-1482588623047549112Sun, 30 Jan 2011 04:23:00 +00002011-01-29T23:25:37.019-05:00Emile Gaboriau - THE MYSTERY OF ORCIVAL<a href=" style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 118px; height: 178px;" src="; border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5567830352891873794" /></a><br />THE MYSTERY OF ORCIVAL (1867) – Emile Gaboriau<br /><br />I want to show how to approach an older book properly, and I'll use this as my model, partly 'cause I've just finished it and it's great, partly because some of the great things about it directly relate to Doyle and some of the point I raised with him, partly because it's a good model to talk about how to approach books like these aesthetically. <br /><br />Gaboriau is a forgotten author nowadays, but it wasn't always the case. He was once so famous that in A STUDY IN SCARLET Holmes feels like he needs to measure himself in part against Lecoq, Gaboriau's detective hero. He's dropped as a peer of Poe, for Chrissakes. And I ought to take the moment here to acknowledge that some of the things I laid at Doyle's feet last time I was wrong about. I implied that many of the shifts in tone in Doyle were there because basically he didn't care much for the mystery part of what he was writing, that wasn't where his action was. I still think that's at least partly true, but there's a much simpler explanation for it as well – one that ironically shines a much harsher light on Doyle. <br /><br />He's simply copying Gaboriau. The structure of many of the Holmes stories, particularly the longer stories, apes the structure of things like ORCIVAL, where the detection is contained and then there's a flashback explaining what the hell happened. Sorry, Emile. <br /><br />Doyle owes a hell of a lot to Gaboriau, in fact, which we'll touch on in a sec, but for now all I want to point is that this is an early detective novel, arguably the first one (it came out the year before the usual contender, Wilkie Collins's THE MOONSTONE). I think this endless chasing of who's first is ultimately counterproductive, aesthetic ideas tend to just be in the air, the detective novel is as good an example of it as any, but it IS interesting that I can go into my failing-Borders and buy a copy of Collins (actually his complete output, including now unreadable novels like ARMADALE) in classic additions, whereas Gaboriau is forgotten to all but the hardest-core mystery fans. <br /><br />Anyway. <br /><br />I picked this up free for my Kindle app on my personal computer. I remain convinced that right now the best function of ebooks is old titles like this. There's no financial incentive for most presses to reissue them, the print on demand or old stuff is pricey. Why not? (I do try to support places like House of Stratus who are reissuing in nice pb editions guys like Wallace, or R. Austin Freeman, or Orczy.) I didn't have overwhelming expectations for it, I had read in the past Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, which I remember generally liking but not thinking was all that. That's a big book, though, with an entire second volume devoted to “why it happened”. <br /><br />This is an extraordinary book on a number of levels. Without overdrumming the historical stuff to death, it ought to be said that ORCIVAL contains, at least in embryonic form, the following tropes which would reappear in mystery fiction for years to come:<br /><br />a murder at a country house<br />a detective who is a genius, associated with the police but in some ways is not “of” the police. (Lecoq almost seems like a police organization within a police organization, he has his own men, investigates crimes his own way, has his own enemies, sees himself as a seperate force that can sometimes act autonomously, to the dictates of his conscience. <br />In very embryonic form a Watson, a helper who's the readers gateway into the world of the story. <br />The mystery novel used for social criticism. <br /><br />WARNING, STARTING TO GET INTO SPOILER TERRITORY<br /><br />a femme fatale<br />a noirish plot (second section of book) that feels transposed directly from, I kid you not, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. <br />A concentration on police procedure, on the “how catch 'em?” question<br />A meditation on the difference between “law” and “justice” (a common theme of the crime novel) <br /><br />And that's just off the top of my head. Now, mind, none of this makes the novel good – but it sure makes it interesting, and for this reason alone this book and author deserve to be rediscovered alongside Collins. <br /><br />So we acknowledge the historical importance, but we put that aside. Does this book work as a novel? And amazingly, the answer is yes. <br /><br />Doyle is an important comparison here. Reading ORCIVAL makes me regard the Holmes stories in an even darker light, Doyle quite evidently owes Gaboriau a hell of a lot, not just in plot structure but in characterization as well. Holmes now feels to me like a transposition of Lecoq with the personality removed. <br /><br />But anyway. Compare the structure of ORCIVAL alongside SCARLET and we immediately see the structure pays off for Gaboriau in ways it just doesn't for Doyle. If there's a theme to the book, it's something like “things are not always what they seem” and the structure of the book is that of an onion, there is a concerted effort to peel things away, layer by layer, until we get at the truth. That's the plot as we the reader experience it: the plot as the viewpoint character understands it (ie, the story's timeline once all the pieces are known) is that of a circle: he fails to take an action, is sent on a nightmarish journey, and ends failing again to take the same action, although this time the figure who prevented him now aids him. <br /><br />I'm talking elliptically because I don't want to spoil any of the pleasures of this very good book, but let's just say it is very cunningly plotted, and things that seem somewhat awkward at first have a reason for being where they are. It's also unified: the second section is told in flashback, but there's a reason for it to be told that way, and the audience still participates in the story even as the backstory is being told to them. Similarily the final layers of the onion do not fall away until the final pages, there are final motivational revelations in the concluding chapters of the book. <br /><br />Lecoq is a genuine stab at a character, too, which already makes him more interesting than the jumble of neurotic tics which is Holmes. He's self-pitying at times, boastful, proud, quick to anger when certain sore subjects are brought up, capable of making mistakes and willing to fess up to them. <br /><br />And there's some genuine suspense in the book. The section where Lecoq reconstructs the murder is as good as this kind of thing gets, the fact that it was written in 1866 is a revelation. The second section has a doom-laden, noirish atmosphere and while the ending is never in doubt, there's a twist there that I didn't really see coming and rather enjoyed. The third section, more police-procedural, even has it's moments, it leads up to a final confrontation in a rooming house that's very well orchestrated. <br /><br />All in all, a great book even if it had all been done before, I think. The fact that it hadn't makes this a classic, well worth anyone's time.2011/01/emile-gaboriau-mystery-of-orcival.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Bassett)41tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304.post-3428380610812205951Sun, 23 Jan 2011 04:26:00 +00002011-01-22T23:28:05.434-05:00Lawrence Schoover: THE BURNISHED BLADELawrence Schoonover – THE BURNISHED BLADE (1948) <br /><br />The next big push after Doyle will be a bunch of once-bestselling, now fairly forgotten authors of historical fiction. This was a genre that was once so associated with “bestseller” that when Chandler needed to create a bestselling writer for THE LONG GOODBYE he made him a historical fiction writer. <br /><br />We'll be looking at Samuel Shellabarger (CAPTAIN FROM CASTILLE, PRINCE OF FOXES, LORD VANITY); Thomas Costain (probably THE BLACK ROSE)' Frank Yerby (THE GOLDEN HAWK, ODOR OF SANCTITY, either FOXES OF HARROW or JUDAS MY BROTHER, depends on what I can find); one of the big female writers of the era (either Kathleen Winsor's FOREVER AMBER or Anya Seton's DRAGONWYCK, probably DRAGONWYCK if I can find it inexpensively), and the most lionized of the bunch, Kenneth Roberts (NORTHWEST PASSAGE, ARUNDEL, RABBLE IN ARMS). I don't know if I'll do a whole big post on any of these just yet, I don't know if the subject allows for it, although Yerby is an interesting writer to look at and Roberts maybe, just by virtue of his success. <br /><br />But anyway, Schoonover. If you read online reviews of this book (at Amazon, or wherever) you'll read a lot of indications that essentially it's bowdlerized, that the publication date indicates Schoonover couldn't be as, er, “frank” about the era as he might've wanted. <br /><br />Eh. Yeah, there's no graphic sex scenes or disembowelment scenes, if that's what you mean, but I wouldn't exactly say the book wasn't, you know, “up to speed”, like all you crazy kids say nowadays. There's a graphic bit about the hero's parents being burned in a fire, an unstated, but very real bit where he gets laid by a slut, a reference to what we'd call now a serial killer (and the implication that he's also a pedophile), and the whole tone in general is sort of hand-me-down hardboiled, that is, it has a feel of light cynicism about it all (the tone taken toward nobility, religious authorities, etc.). I mean, given it's era and all, it doesn't feel to me especially cloistered. <br /><br />The other criticism I've read of this book is that it's very pulpy, and there you might have something, although I think it's useful to step back and explain what you mean by it. It is very pulpily plotted, if that's what you mean, although if you say that you're relying on a very limited definition of “pulp” that not many people use anymore. That is, the classic pulp “plot” is “this happened, and then this, and then this, and then this” a string of beads continued until the somewhat arbitrary conclusion. (A lot of Burroughs, particularly the Tarzan books, are plotted this way.) .<br /><br />There's no denying that this kind of rough-and-ready storytelling is a hallmark of “pulp plotting”, although you can just as easily find complete fully formed novels in the “pulp” world (just about all of the Gold Medal guys, for instance), as well as a lot string of beads plots in middlebrow books aiming for the big time (THE CARDINAL, say.) <br /><br />It's not like it's restricted to pulp fiction and so hardly a characteristic of it. Maybe it'd just be better to call it “a rough form of plotting” and leave it like that. <br /><br />The other big aspect to pulp writing, it seems to me, is that the incidents have to be evocative, they have to be sensational and capture the reader's interest straight out. Like Sax Rohmer, say. Even Rohmer's best books are full of nonsense – killer insects, killer fungus, mind control, evil black sabbaths in the pyramids at midnight, etc. This seems to me to be a primary aspect of pulp fiction, the constant attempt to keep the reader entertained. Such is not the case with Schoonover, this is a pretty tepid book for a'that, like a lot of historical romances it's a big tease, a lot “happens” but not a lot actually happens, the actual number of incidents in the damn thing is quite low, and while you might grab a copy thinking you're gonna get a lot of adventure, you're not. I hate to tell you this, but you're not. <br /><br />So not recommended, although I have hopes that the movie version is better. Because they'd, like, put some exciting scenes in it.<br /><br />Other things I've been reading:<br /><br />Edgar Wallace – THE LAW OF THE FOUR JUST MEN (1921) – I like Wallace, and have been reading a fair amount of him lately, currently the Four Just Men series. The first remains the best, and is a genuine oddity, if it's anything it's sort of a philosophical story couched in thriller terms. It's a classic and highly recommended. THE COUNCIL OF THE JUST is not as good but is not bad, these guys become relatively straightforward vigilante heroes ala Sapper's THE BLACK GANG, albeit not as well told. I don't remember much about THE JUST MEN OF CORDOVA, except that it wasn't all that good and that Wallace obviously liked Spain. <br /><br />And then there's this one – this is a collection of short stories, about half of them recast the remaining just men as amateur private detectives, with middling success (this is not a strong suit of Wallace's) and half of them in the older vigilante form (which work much better, with a lot of “biter bit” sort of payoffs). I think Wallace is actually better in other venues, but LAW is not bad, and worth reading for anyone with a tolerance for this sort of stuff. <br /><br />Guy Boothby – A BID FOR FORTUNE (aka ENTER DR NIKOLA) (1895) – I really wanted to like this, as the setup – early decadent supervillain ala Fu Manchu, Victorian themes, wildness, globe hopping, is pretty much crack to me. He even has a pet cat he has unnatural relations with. (I kid.) <br /><br />This is really almost outrageously bad, though, almost written at a rough draft level. Stuff that you would never countenance today – outrageous coincidences, longwinded digressions, a lack of payoff, a lack of suspense, convenient plotting, you name it – is countenanced here because, well, it's old, man, huh?<br /> <br />I find this fandom worship disconcerting and disheartening: I have a taste for this genre because I like it but looking to the past doesn't relieve you of your critical precepts, my friends, and if you excuse the manifold faults of FORTUNE because you just like the idea of this kind of stuff, then you're not a true admirer of the work, you're just a fetishist. <br /><br />If the work can't stand up today it's not good. No amount of excuse-making will change that salient fact.2011/01/lawrence-schoover-burnished-blade.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Bassett)26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304.post-2684048034196505238Sun, 23 Jan 2011 04:25:00 +00002011-01-22T23:26:39.764-05:00Doyle -- the books<a href=" style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px; height: 300px;" src="; border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5565233013935672754" /></a><br />IN WHICH I SPEAK OF DOYLE AS A WRITER<br /><br />Let's be brief, because as is often the case the time lag between the last post on him and this one is a bit much, and the inspiration is a little flagging.<br /><br />Sherlock Holmes: I don't hate these stories, but I do think they're flawed and grossly overpraised. As my last two posts have pointed out (let's recap!) I think their reputation really rests on two fallacies: (a) their historical importance (too often conflated with quality), and my sense that what people really like about the Sherlock Holmes stories are not the stories themselves, but rather the consensus universe of “late Victorian England” that surrounds them. <br /><br />Doyle is always acting against himself in these stories. They're presumptively mysteries but they're not, in essence. In essence they're romances, and have much more in common with THE PRISONER OF ZENDA than they do THE MOONSTONE, say. This is the secret why half of A STUDY IN SCARLET and THE SIGN OF THE FOUR are adventures that have only the most tenuous connection to the main plot; this is why Doyle gets rid of Holmes for about half of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, because he flat out could care less; this is why so many of the stories are structured with Holmes as the framing device around an actual story-story, the flashback (see, oh, “The Adventure of the Crooked Man”). This is why so many of the other “mysteries” are not really mysteries at all, but rather adventure tales, see say “A Scandal in Bohemia” or “The Final Problem”. <br /><br />Again, that doesn't mean they're awful or the reader will find no pleasure in them I just think that this internal tension is detrimental to the work's effect as a whole. Stories should be what they are. When they are actually two completely disjointed things at the same time, that's a problem. Aesthetically. <br /><br />There's “Complete” collections all over the place, most quite cheap – pick 'em up and decide for yourselves. For what it's worth, my absolute favorite Holmes stories are the first part of “A Study in Scarlet” (introduces the character, who seems quite fresh here) and “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (more for the setting, Victorian Xmas). And maybe “The Naval Treaty”, just because I like the joke at the heart of that one. The rest I can more or less take or leave; he's not a necessary author for me the way Chesterton is. <br /><br />THE LOST WORLD and THE POISON BELT: I actually think, along with Doyle himself, that his real reputation rests here. Easily my favorite Doyle work – by far – is THE LOST WORLD. <br /><br />For one thing it's more clearly what it's supposed to be, if that makes any sense: it's not a romance cut by mystery, or (as we'll see in a second) history, it's just a straight Haggard-like adventure to a, um, “Lost World”. Challenger is far more believable than Holmes, I think: a more straightforward Thoughtful Man of Action. Albeit comically portrayed – the point is he seems like a real person. (Holmes never has to me, sorry. Holmes is a slapdash collection of tics. Holmes is so much over the place that the definitive portrayal of him, Jeremy Brett in the BBC series, turns him into something like a quivering neurotic.) The ability to step away from the mystery plots that evidently bored him to tears allowed Doyle to do the stuff that he obviously really liked, which is adventure writing (some very nice setpieces in WORLD) and some really nice descriptions (there's a final sequence in LOST WORLD which is absolutely classic in this regard, and in fact in my humble opinion is the single best stretch of writing Doyle ever did.) POISON BELT is less known and less interesting, as it's an early “it's all coming to an end, man” armageddon tale, but is still worth a look for some truly evocative descriptions of London after the “apocalypse” (which isn't quite that, Doyle wussed out although there are problems with writing about the end of the world with a viewpoint character, I would suppose. They're usually bound togeter. <br /><br />THE EXPLOITS OF BRIGADIER GERARD – This is fairly obscure historical fiction, short stories written from the French point of view during the Napoleonic Wars. Of course, as a loyal Brit Doyle couldn't ever really have a character be a completely believable Frenchman, which would in this context necessitate a hatred of the British. So it's kind of compromised from the outset. The other big thing about it is that it's obviously the major inspiration for Flashman, all well and good except Flashman is better because (horrors of horrors) Fraser was just a better writer than Doyle, and knew how to handle this kind of device much better. Plus, to be fair, the debut novel FLASHMAN appeared at a more fortuitous time, the anti-establishment Sixties. <br /><br />THE WHITE COMPANY and SIR NIGEL – These were the novels that Doyle actually thought were his best. They are “young hero comes of age” kind of things, very long, and set in the Middle Ages. They have their moments, particularly Doyle's knack for description, although I think both books suffer from the same thing that Schoonover's BURNISHED BLADE suffered from, which is the “string of pearls” kind of plot, where the story is really just a succession of incidents in the narrative. These kind of books really lack internal narrative drive, you spend half your time looking up and around wondering exactly why you're reading the damn thing. Something of a minor classic, although I bet it's just the Doyle authorship more than anything being particularly good about the novels themselves. Well described, I guess, and you might actually learn a little history if you read these, but I know of another place you can learn about history. It's called “history books”. Don't tell nobody, no, it's a big secret.2011/01/doyle-books.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Bassett)12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304.post-4467338497208980967Sun, 28 Nov 2010 01:10:00 +00002010-11-27T20:27:43.709-05:00More on Doyle: The Second Aesthetic Trap<a href=" style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 132px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 160px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544401857282165714" border="0" alt="" src="; /></a><br />My second post on the aesthetic traps people fall into that Doyle embodies won't be as long as the first, because I think it's something that most people at some level recognize anyhow, even if they don't phrase it the way I phrase it or to the extent I do. In fact, it was first suggested in a comment by my long time reader “anonymous” – and a very astute anonymous anonymous is, too.<br /><br />Anyway, anonymous anonymously yet very astutely (okay, I'm done) pointed out that it was the movies that made Sherlock Holmes big. Well, yeah, sorta, although I want to develop this a bit, 'cause I think it's a bit bigger/more interesting here than, say, Tarzan or James Bond. (Full disclosure, not an admirer of Edgar Rice Burroughs although I think he had a wonderful imagination; I do respect Ian Fleming a great deal, though.) Your general populace's idea of Tarzan or James Bond is taken pretty much direct from the movies, so much so that a favorite technique of the geek is to sniff haughtily and remind said populace that they'd might be surprised to learn that Tarzan was an educated British Lord in the books, say, or that Bond pursued hedonism as a way to distract himself from his empty lifestyle. (Like this is some rarefied experience known only to the few, not the province of anyone who can cough up $7.95 for a paperback edition of TARZAN OF THE APES or CASINO ROYALE. Sorry, pet peeve.)<br /><br />I don't think that's exactly the case with Holmes, for while there's certainly been many movie/tv versions of Holmes down over the years Holmes as a phenomena wasn't <i>created</i> by the movies, in the way that Bond certainly was and Tarzan kinda sorta was. The only thing I'm sure that Hollywood really bestowed upon the Holmes series was Watson as a dumbass – think back to Nigel Bruce and his constant sheepdog look – although especially in recent times that 'tradition' has been observed more in the breach as it were. (It never made much sense, anyway. Why would slick brilliant gentleman Basil Rathbone be hanging around with a guy who, um, ah, is a little slow, to be kind about it? What does he bring to the table? Other than comic relief?)<br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">But they still make movies of Holmes, you know. There was that Xmas thing last year with Robert Downey Jr., and on streaming Netflix right now you can watch YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES, although I'd really recommend that you don't. So what's the constant appeal, then? </p><br /><br />My thought is that people aren't attracted to Holmes himself, per se,<i> they're attracted to the world</i>. They're attracted to that gaslight world of late-period Victorian England: top hats, canes, horse-drawn cabs, country manors, royalty getting into trouble, Jack the Ripper, mist-strewn streets, British Imperialism, etc.<br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /><br />Now the whys of that are a long complicated subject certainly outside the scope of this post (and hell, maybe of this blog). For now, let's just state that it exists. People are drawn to Holmes not really because they're drawn to Holmes, they're drawn to that world, in the way that people are drawn to the Wild West, or Shogunate era Japan, or whatever you want to cite. People are fans of an<em> en</em><em>vironment. </em></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /><br />It explains a lot. Next time I'll finally talk about Doyle's work as a writer, but for now let's just suggest that it explains why Doyle has kept such a large fanbase, even though his work in the mystery field does not provide the reader with the presumed pleasures he or she would presumably want. It explains the persistence of Holmes in popular culture – the repeated movies (with versions of Holmes often at wild variance to what's in the work), the games, the cartoon characters, the pastiches, the clubs, etc. Holmes is best understood, I think, as an early, smaller version of something like “Star Trek” or the STAR WARS series – it's a consensus universe. Like these things you have people doing “scholarship” in Holmesiana, like these things you have a persistent cult fanbase, like these things you have ongoing contributions to the world., and so on. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /><br />This is <i>mistaken</i> for appreciation for Holmes as a character or Doyle's work as writing, and I understand why that is, but I think this is the best explanation of his continued persistence. It's really not about him at all. What makes Doyle interesting in this regard is (a) he was the first to experience this, I'd wager and (b) unlike, say, “Star Trek”, a created universe, Doyle's work is at least presumably based on actual reality – ie, there really was an England during that time. Seems a very simple point, but it's worth pondering – I'm ducking the question I raised up above as to why we focus on this era, but we obviously do, especially visually – there's something appealing to us, especially visually, about late-period Imperial Britain, and we derive pleasure from watching simulcra of it. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /><br />In that respect, yeah, Anonymous, you're right. It <em><strong>was</strong></em> the movies. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /><br />Other things I've been reading:</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">“Sapper” – THE THIRD ROUND (1924) </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">I'm beginning to think these Bulldog Drummond books are really built around “peaks”, as it were. I'm beginning to think Sapper had part of the story pretty much firmly in mind, went with it, and then basically vamped his way to fill out whatever needed filling out. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">#1 had a great first 2/3, sort of died at the conclusion. #2 oddly went the other way, it took about a 1/3 to get going, but once it did it just romped like crazy, with a fantastic slam-bang conclusion.</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">#3 is more like #1. It has a wonderful start: an old doddering scientist type discovers a process for making artificial diamonds indistinguishable from the real ones, and foolishly tells this to the diamond masters of London, who of course promptly arrange for his death. The first two thirds of this are really great: Carl Peterson is in it again, is brought in believably and the coincidence is accounted for satisfactorily (The fact that he keeps bumping into Drummond becomes an actual plot point and characterization element.) And we for once get a serious glimpse into his psychology (this is the best portrayal of Peterson so far). The plot is ridiculous but absolutely believable in it's ridiculousness, if that makes any sense – I mean, do you really doubt that if someone actually developed something like this, he wouldn't be killed? There's a lot of very amenable back and forthing, as someone said somewhere Sapper knew how to tell a story and given that not a tremendous amount actually happens in THE THIRD ROUND, it's amazing how compulsive reading most of this is. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">And then we hit the final third, where Sapper vamps. I won't give anything away, but despite the big slam bang conclusion not really being all that slam-bang, it suffers from two major devices that wouldn't fool a senile chimp on holiday, let alone a master villain. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">So it falls apart at the end, as thrillers often do. I can't put this one at the level of the first two, mostly because it's curiously uneventful in a lot of ways and the one big event in it doesn't make any sense. But it's good, so far all of the Sappers have been well worth reading. Make allowances and you'll like this one too. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"></p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Neil Albert - THE JANUARY CORPSE (1991) </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Routine PI novel that I picked up in a used bookstore because somebody somewhere recommended it. Not very good, with paint-by-numbers plotting you've seen a million times, me most recently in an episode of “Bones” I caught in the laundromat a ways back, and ham-and-eggs prose typical of millions of recently published popular novels (I don't know quite when the rot in popular literature set in, but it was certainly locked in place by 91, that's for sure.) The only real interesting thing about it, in fact, is that it has a twist ending.<br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">A few words on twist endings. It might be enjoyable to do a whole post on these, one of these days, but one kind of twist ending you want to avoid is “writer introduces an edgy piece of information into the reader's world”. Why? Because yesterday's edgy is today's blasé, and this sort of thing dates very badly. Spoilers for a couple of novels follow, if you care about such things.</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">…...</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Okay? </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">So, like, here. The setup is “PI looking for mysterious missing man.” The answer is “missing man has actually become woman” – ie, sex-change. Well, that's a twist! But nowadays it just seems cheesy, we're a lot more amorphous sexually, for better and worse, than we were in 1991, even. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Not that it's limited to relatively recent novels. Howard Browne's HALO IN BRASS, one of his Paul Pine novels, ends with the revelation that it's a lesbian affair we're talking about here. Again, that must've been really wild stuff in the mid-Fifties, when the book was written. Now? Not so much, eh?</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"></p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Edgar Wallace – THE BLACK ABBOT (1926) </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">I've been reading more Wallace recently, and enjoying them. I got a list of recommended novels from an old Usenet post lurking out there somewhere – thank you old Usenet poster out there wherever you are, your words reverberate into eternity. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Anyway. Wallace is a good example of how popular fiction has degenerated, he was the closest thing to the James Patterson of his time but he remains very readable. He wrote a clean, straightforward prose line, he could build suspense with a relative modicum of horseplay (always a hard thing for writers of this era, they were sort of inventing the thriller genre as they were writing it and it wasn't always clear to them how best to string the reader along), and best of all his books – at least the ones I've read so far – are all very different. THE FOUR JUST MEN and THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE are straight-up “race against time” thrillers with a political edge to them. JACK O'JUDGEMENT is a “crime syndicate taken down by a masked vigilante” sort of thing. And this is frankly a Gothic, complete with a forced marriage, unscrupulous blackguards, hidden treasure, ruined abbeys, and the ghost of the Black Abbot himself, now seen parading around. I shit you not. It's great, highly recommended if you have a taste for pulp literature of this era. I can understand why Wallace was the monster seller he was, his books are ridiculously readable, he could play the conventions of his era masterfully. But be warned, it is what it is, and it does have all of the faults inherent in that word “pulp”: it's feverishly melodramatic (although I pretty much consider that a feature, not a bug), it relies overmuch on coincidence, there's a bit of vamping here and there. It doesn't have Sapper's inventiveness or Buchan's fundamental seriousness. But it ain't bad, and Wallace deserves another look. </p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Edgar Wallace , THE CRIMSON CIRCLE (1922) – Like, say, here: this one is a “search for a Jack the Ripper” type, which is fairly routine except it has an absolute killer twist toward the end. (One of the few I think worth preserving, so I ain't tellin'.) I'm an old hand at such things and it caught me off guard (I had considered the possibility, but dismissed it as outlandish); I think those who are less jaded – including presumably his entire audience at the time – would've been/would be rocked completely by it. </p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Ib Melchior, CODE NAME: GRAND GUIGNOL (1987): Not very good WW2 thriller shows the defects of the simple-minded suggestion “write what you know” or the slightly more complicated “go out and experience life and then write about it”, because by all accounts Melchior did just that, he actually <i>was</i> an actor associated with the Grand Guignol theater troupe, and he actually <i>had</i> WW 2 experiences with the OSS, and yet his book is still awful, written at about the level of a Forties Superman comic (complete! With a lot! Of exclamations! What fearsome terror awaits those who would dare cross the forbidden threshold?! Would Marge and Stevey escape Lex Luthor's clutches?! Can Superman destroy the killer Robots of Alpha Centuri and bring back their leader to face justice?!). It seems a simple point, but the simple points are always those worth repeating – you gotta have talent too, y'know.</p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">PD James , AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN (1972) – Most famous probably as one of the first female PI's – there were others, of course, the Honey West series in the Sixties, say, but this one is probably the first of the modern era. I think James is much better with women than men and Cordelia Gray is appealing as the lead, but this novel suffers from the same faults that James's works all tend to suffer, this odd artificial portentiousness which inflates the relatively grubby murders she chronicles with a gassy self-importance. I am not sure, honestly, that the classic mystery form (the pure whodunit) is capable of the kind of weight James wants to put on it: the obvious inspirations here are Marsh, Allingham, and Sayers, but at their utmost ultimate best they're really not much more than gifted social novelists – not that that's a bad thing, of course it isn't, but it ain't THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV either. It would be interesting to ponder why and how Hammett and Chandler avoided that trap. (It may have to do with them actually creating the form themselves; certainly later PI novelists have had much the same problem as Ms. James, although there are differences between the two genres that protect the PI writer, somewhat). The more insular worlds of Christie and Carr, the pure puzzle, start to look much better seen in that light. Anyway, there's one other James novel I'm curious about, INNOCENT BLOOD, and I'll check that out sometime here.</p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">George MacDonald Fraser, FLASHMAN AND THE REDSKINS (1982): Most interesting I think as yet another example of Fraser experimenting within the formula of Flashman, here we see history as a force within Flashy's own life, as things he does in the 1840's West come back to haunt him in the 1876 West. Very ambitious novel is trying to tell a story of the American West in general, with the short period related here suggesting the actual sad briefness of the American West's heyday. Fraser is also trying to introduce real depth to Flashman, suggesting here a man who's become haunted by his earlier misdeeds. While I respect the intent, I'm not at all sure it works: for one thing Flashy as a character is something of a slender thread to hang this kind of tale on, and on more pragmatic grounds I'm not sure I buy him at the Battle of the Little Big Horn: I mean, Fraser tries, and does a pretty solid job of laying the groundwork (one of the best of the Forrest Gump style historical novelists – yeah, I guess you gotta call him that – because he always strives for plausibility, in his own oddball way), but it still feels kind of off. And maybe that's because I'm not sure I buy Flashman in the American West at all: the temptation must've been unbearable for Fraser, but the American West is the one historical moment of that century that's widely known, putting Flashman in there directly makes this a Western, which inherently calls to mind all of the other Westerns one has seen, and implicit comparisons are inevitably made. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">I suppose that's my biggest problem with it, really: as ambitious and admirable as it is, in some ways, I just don't think it was a good idea. It's a cross-pollination that probably sounded better on paper; I would've been much more interested in Flashy at the Civil War. Still, by no means a <i>bad</i> book – there are no bad Flashman books, as far as I know.</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"><br /></p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal">Currently reading: THE BURNISHED BLADE, Lawrence Schoonover; DR. NIKOLAI, Guy Boothby</p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in; FONT-WEIGHT: normal"></p>2010/11/my-second-post-on-aesthetic-traps.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Bassett)12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28875304.post-5265082350512454985Sat, 02 Oct 2010 23:34:00 +00002010-10-02T20:08:04.269-04:00Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pt. one<a href=" style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 141px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 197px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5523596693904430498" border="0" alt="" src="; /></a> <p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in">When you're talking about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle you're talking about Sherlock Holmes, first and foremost, which I think is a mistake right out of the gate because I think his best creation by far is Professor Challenger, not Holmes. But I'll get to that later. More importantly, the moment you say “Sherlock Holmes” a bunch of associations will, as if by magic, appear in your head – see, it happened just now, didn't it? – and I think we need to pick these apart right from the get-go before we get to the meat of things, as it were. </p><br /><br /><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"></p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in">So let's start here, later I'll get to the books themselves. </p><p style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in">Doyle carries with him two of the great fallacies of art appreciation. They're often not thought of as such, but they are, believe me boyo, and if you can get your head around these two you'll already be 5