Category Archives: Detective

Book review, Conan Doyle, Detective, Detective fiction, Holmes, Holmes and Watson

Supplementary: The Mystery of Sherlock Holmes

If you read the comments on my recent post about ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ you may have seen I postulated that there is a paradox at the core of how we perceive Sherlock Holmes. On the one hand he is (and so far as I can make out, always has been) enormously popular; on the other his stories are formulaic and (in the words of Bookertalk) “preposterous”.download (3)

The case for the prosecution  is easily made. The Holmes stories are rigidly structured – Holmes and Watson are chatting, Holmes casually tosses over a letter he has received from his most recent client, telling him they will call at a certain hour which precisely arrives at the moment their initial assessment of the case has concluded.

“DEAR MR. HOLMES:—I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as governess. I shall call at half-past ten to-morrow if I do not inconvenience you. Yours faithfully, “VIOLET HUNTER.”
“Do you know the young lady?” I asked.

“Not I.”

“It is half-past ten now.”

“Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring.” (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches).

Holmes performs his parlour trick of determining the visitor’s background – “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.” – (The Red-Headed League)

The game is then afoot, and Holmes quickly resolves the mystery by dint of some off-camera background research, investigations using a disguise or two, and a good dose of luck. I pointed out in my previous post that the resolution of each case is often not what the client hoped for. Of the twelve stories in ‘The Adventures’, one case fails completely (A Scandal in Bohemia), in another the client is murdered and the murderers escape (The Five Orange Pips) and in yet another Holmes solves the mystery but decides not to reveal the solution to his client (A Case of Identity).

Beyond this rigid structure, there are other issues. Apart from Holmes and Watson few other characters are brought to life – certainly not in the way they are in Sherlock for example, where they are given complex and interesting back stories. The writing is nothing out of the ordinary, and the author frequently ‘cheats’ by way of undetectable poison or by withholding information key to the resolution of the case until the last moment. Some if not many of the situations are indeed preposterous – for example in ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ a  bell pull is installed in the victim’s bedroom, but it is not connected to anything (did people have bell-pulls in their bedrooms anyway? Perhaps the senior aristocracy who needed help dressing, but not in a small household as in this story).

The case for the defence would probably point out that the Holmes stories are some of the best loved in literature. Holmes has inspired many other writers, film-makers and artists, and the rich range of secondary characters in the books, from Mrs Hudson to Irene Adler, Lestrade, and of course not forgetting Moriarty may indeed be sketched briefly but are powerfully brought to life. The defence would also mention Conan Doyle’s virtual invention of the detective story, the cleverness of many of his plots, the inventiveness of Holmes’s deductions, and the strength of his enduring relationship with Watson. Descriptive writing may not be Conan Doyle’s strength, but London is brilliantly evoked.

Thus far a fairly balanced case. But I think the enduring power of the Holmes stories lies elsewhere. Holmes was one of the earliest super heroes.  He has enormous strength – he can straighten a bent poker. He is utterly fearless. He has almost super-human powers of observation, deduction and intelligence, and well as a vast array of scientific and other information at his fingertips. He fights for the poor and the oppressed as well as the prosperous. He is a master of disguise, and sometimes wears a cloak. He lives among us, but apart. The country would fall without him. Yes, he’s Victorian Batman.Sherbat.jpg

And we all love a good super hero. The MCU franchise is not the most successful series of films in Hollywood history for nothing. What is more we need heroes. In Victorian England the readers of the Strand magazine would have felt threatened by trade unions, rising crime, the poor, suffragettes, and Germans, not in any particular order. Today we fear rising crime, lawlessness, terrorism, Trump. We still need Holmes out there stopping the bad guys, which is why we still have him.

Being a conscientious blogger I always try and find out if what I think is an original observation is just a cliche, and no surprise – I am not the first person by a long way to draw this parallel. Apologies, but I think the point still stands. Incidentally I don’t think it is important to get hung up on the specific super hero – the point is he plays the same role in society, offering hope to the vulnerable and scared. Which is why Holmes has developed such a rich life outside the Conan Doyle stories, and why he will remain a source of fascination and inspiration for many decades to come. Inevitably the original source material might look a little jaded in this context, but that would be to miss the point. Which I think, in my previous post, I did.

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Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ contains 12 short stories, all originally published in the Strand magazine between June 1891 and July 1892. Some are better known than others, but all follow a fairly rigid format – a curious case is brought to Holmes’s attention by a flustered individual, often incognito, Watson’s support is engaged, and the case is then swiftly resolved. Disguises are often deployed, trusty service revolvers are pocketed, and Lestrade is ritually humiliated. In every story Holmes performs the deductions which are his hallmark, usually at the opening of the story, although rarely if ever are these deductions anything to do with the case in point.

A Scandal in Bohemia is the story in which Irene Adler, ‘the woman’, makes her one and only appearance in Conan Doyle’s stories. It is a simple case of blackmail which is resolved without Holmes’s assistance, because Irene marries and decides not to pursue her victim. Holmes counts it as one of his very few failures, which suggests his definition of success is somewhat flexible, but there is no suggestion of any attraction between the two, more a mutual respect.800px-A_Scandal_in_Bohemia-04

The Red-Headed League is one of Holmes’s more ridiculous cases. A pawn broker is duped into leaving his store all day for several weeks to allow a tunnel to be dug from the premises to a nearby bank. The bank robbers could surely have found easier ways to do this than the invention of the League, which would have drawn a lot of attention to themselves, left clues all over the place, cost a lot of time and effort to establish, and could have fallen apart at any time.

A Case of Identity is one in which someone assumes a flimsy disguise, which Holmes sees through but fails to tell his client he has resolved the case. See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’

The Boscombe Valley Mystery. In this story Holmes bizarrely allows a murderer to go free, and a guilty man to spend months in prison, simply because the murderer is dying.

The Five Orange Pips sees Holmes allow his client to be brutally murdered and the murderers to escape the country, if not justice. Another great success!

The Man with the Twisted Lip. Someone assumes a flimsy disguise which Holmes sees through, again.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. In this story Holmes starts with the missing gem falling into his lap, and then working back to find out who stole it – an easier approach than the other way round I would have thought.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Conan Doyle thought this his finest Holmes story, but it is riddled with preposterous plot points.

The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb. A good headline, but a story in which Holmes detects absolutely nothing. Perhaps explains why this has not been an adaptor’s favourite.

The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor. A missing person story depending for its resolution of a previous relationship in America – the States is the setting for several of Holmes’s client’s backstories.

The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet. I think the real mystery – why a member of the royal family comes to pawn an incredibly valuable coronet for a fraction of its value – is ignored, instead focusing on whodunit in which footprints in the snow provide all the answers.

The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. A governess is recruited at highly inflated wages to impersonate a kidnapped heiress. Another case where the villains employ ridiculously complex means to pursue their villainy, when many other simpler options are available.

To Victorians, Holmes’s deductions and flashes of brilliance must have been dazzling, and to this day there are readers who hold Holmes in the highest possible regard. He is not the character most often portrayed on film for nothing. In recent years ‘Elementary’ and ‘Sherlock’ have given new life and new depths to the character. For me Holmes probably works best in this short story format where the weaknesses in his deductive method and approach aren’t too visible.

19th Century literature, Book review, Conan Doyle, Detective, Detective fiction, Holmes, Holmes and Watson, Sherlock

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle 1892

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21st century literature, Book review, Crime, Detective, Michael Connolly, The Drop

Book review: The Drop by Michael Connolly

The Drop sees the return of Harry Bosch, Michael Connolly’s grizzled Los Angeles police detective. Bosch is said to have seen action in Vietnam, and this novel appears to be set in the present day, so he presumably is getting on in years. Having retired and returned to work he now extends his service using a deferred retirement scheme – which gives us the title of the book. Yes, that’s right, a police story using an acronym for deferred retirement as its title. Of course there is an intended pun, in that the primary investigation in the novel is a suspected suicide by high rise jump. There is a sub-plot involving a DNA hit on a long unsolved murder which is integrated nicely into the overall structure – Connolly is a very experienced writer with 25 or so books to his name, and it shows.
This is a guilty pleasure – there is no pretence at anything other than entertainment, and I have to be honest I found it a very easy, undemanding, and enjoyable read. Bosch conforms to the stereotype defined by Raymond Chandler long ago, a loner who struggles with relationships and authority, determined to do what is right irrespective of the personal cost:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world….. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness….If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in. ” (The Simple Art of Murder)
That captures Bosch, and many other fictional detectives, so well.
In any long running series there are some challenges for the writer – how to avoid repeating yourself and being predictable while at the same time working within the recognised structure – avoiding gimmicks like relocating to different locations, (although the last Bosch novel did end up in Hong Kong). As a police detective there are constraints on where and how Bosch can work, limiting the writer’s scope for innovation. And within these constraints you can only have so many angry confrontations with impatient supervisors, interrogations of over-confident suspects, intuitive breakthroughs from tiny clues, etc, etc. Connolly seems to have recognised these issues, but shrugged and thought people will keep buying the books so no real need to keep things fresh.
As a result this novel has a reheated feel, one of Connolly going through the motions. Bosch has a short term romance – but guess what, work gets in the way. City Hall politicians conspire to frustrate his investigation. A killer wonders who will play him in the film of his exploits. And a suspected suicide turns out to be, guess what, a suicide! There’s nothing here to surprise or challenge the reader, but it is clear that the reader, even this one, sometimes wants plain undemanding fare. Same again please.
Connolly suffers from the comparison with Chandler, as every crime writer would, but if you want a murder story that aspires to be something that will just pass away a train journey, it’s Chandler every time.
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20th century Literature, American literature, Crime, Detective, Detective fiction, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, 1939

Chandler is one of my favourite writers – top 5 at least, and pretty much everything he published is consistently readable. As such I don’t really have a favourite novel of his but if forced to choose it would probably be “The Big Sleep”. This is Chandler at his sublime best. Philip Marlowe, his iconic hard boiled detective, a loner, is the quintessential private eye, the model on which so many detectives down the ages have been based upon. We see the action through his detached, sardonic perspective, although even then many things we are left to work out for ourselves.

The principal attraction of these novels – “The Lady in the Lake”, “Farewell my Lovely”, “The Long Goodbye”, “The Little Sister” – all classics – is not the plotting, tight though this is, but the prose – Chandler had an ability to craft a phrase like few others. Take this opening from “The Big Sleep” for example, probably one of the best ever written:

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
Doesn’t that make you want to stop and go and read the book itself? Go on, I won’t be offended. The dark little clocks are a great touch.

The plot is extremely complex, not that it matters. Marlowe is employed by the ailing General Sternwood to investigate a small blackmail problem. In doing so Marlowe gets involved with pornographic book lending (which in today’s world is almost cute), gambling, boot-legging, gangsters, and several murders. The story flies along at such pace that you don’t actually spot the join – the book was originally two shorter stories, welded together to make the novel. This is done with such craftsmanship that you don’t notice unless you are looking for it – and even then it doesn’t matter a jot. (End of chapter 19 if you are interested – everything is tied up neatly at that point with only the missing persons investigation, which Marlowe isn’t really supposed to be conducting, outstanding).

If you haven’t read Chandler before you are in for a treat. This is as good a place to start as any – it’s his first Marlowe novel. In Philip Marlowe we have one of the great literary characters – as well realised and fully rounded as any I can think of. Some Christians exhort people to ask “What would Jesus would do?”. With all possible respect to these individuals, I often wonder whether “What would Marlowe do?” would offer better advice. That won’t mean too much if you haven’t read the books, so you know what to do now, don’t you?
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