Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ as good as the Sherlock Holmes stories. No … they’re better. Considered in their totality, they are a vastly more substantial and successful literary achievement, one that I believe to be comparable in quality only to the work of Georges Simenon.

      Now I don’t want to leave anyone uncertain of my admiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. To have created Sherlock Holmes was a considerable feat of the romantic imagination, and to have paired him with Dr. Watson was a stroke of something not unlike genius. But Conan Doyle, lest we forget, didn’t think all that much of his most memorable literary creation. His objection to the Sherlock Holmes stories, and to detective stories in general, was that (in his words) “they only call for the use of a certain portion of one’s imaginative faculty, the invention of a plot, without giving any scope for character drawing.”

      In fact, this objection comes perilously close to inverting the truth about Holmes. The puzzles that he solves are certainly clever enough, but their cleverness exhausts itself on first reading. It is, instead, Holmes the character who fascinates us—and it is his failure to develop other than superficially that is to my mind the principal weakness of the Holmes stories, especially when they’re read in bulk.

      Anyone who returns to the Sherlock Holmes stories in adulthood after having put them aside for half a lifetime, as I did a few months ago, will likely be startled by this weakness. The Holmes and Watson of A Study in Scarlet, it turns out, are already fully developed as personalities, and while we learn a certain number of new things about them in the tales that follow, they do not grow, nor does their relationship alter in any truly significant way. Hence there is no dynamism to the Holmes canon: reading it from beginning to end is not a journey, but a long string of discontinuous events.

      Not so the Wolfe novels and stories. It’s true that Wolfe and Archie remain the same age, more or less, throughout the series. But they develop in a way that Holmes and Watson do not.

      I was talking about the first point with my wife the other day, and she put her finger on something that had never before occurred to me. In the early novels, Archie is a very young man—immature, really. It isn’t just a matter of his authorial voice not yet having developed fully. He’s also immature in his attitudes. Not only is he filial toward Wolfe, but he regards him with more than a touch of youthful hero worship.

      As for Wolfe, he’s showy, even stagey, forever trotting out the kinds of meant-to-be-quoted aphorisms that the Brits call “made dishes.” “I am merely a genius, not a god,” he goes out of his way to tell Archie in Fer-de-Lance, and we roll our eyes in response, just as we do when he repeatedly asserts that he is an “artist.” Real artists don’t have to tell us they’re artists—we know it already.

      Moreover, Wolfe in the Thirties is habitually condescending, at times almost sneeringly so. An all-too-typical example is this exchange from The Rubber Band. Wolfe: “Pleasant afternoon, Archie?” Archie: “No, sir. Putrid.” Wolfe: “Indeed. A man of action must expect such vexations.” You can imagine his tone of voice when he says it, too.

      But while these over-obvious traits grate on the sensitive reader, they gradually dry up and disappear as Wolfe and Archie cease over time to be dresser’s dummies for made-up affectations and grow into their now-established characters. By the mid-Forties Wolfe has evolved, not dramatically but noticeably—and significantly. His conversation, both on and off the job, has acquired a Johnsonian force and authority that is far removed from the self-conscious posing of the early novels. And when, in The Silent Speaker, Archie has occasion to refer to him as a “genius,” he does so to Wolfe’s face, and he does it not to praise him but to tease him. Wolfe sends Bill Gore to the office of the NIA to “compile certain lists and records,” and Archie responds by asking, “Fifty dollars a day for the dregs. Where is there any genius in that?”

      Wolfe’s response, by the way, is no less revealing: “‘Genius?’ His frown became a scowl. ‘What can genius do with this confounded free-for-all?’” This tells us everything about Nero Wolfe in his maturity. He knows how impressive he is, and so feels no need to assure us of his singularity. Likewise his creator: instead of asserting that Nero Wolfe is an eccentric genius, Stout now shows us. The postwar Wolfe burns up a dictionary out of sheer pique. He quizzes his bootblack on classical Greek culture. He goes into hiding, loses a hundred pounds, and grows a beard in order to track down Arnold Zeck—and lets Lily Rowan neck with him to boot!

      If anything, the transformation that Archie Goodwin undergoes is even more striking. I have a feeling that Archie, like so many other young men of his generation, was matured by the war in which he served, though the process was already under way by the time he put on his uniform in 1942. Whatever the timing, he’s evolved into a noticeably different person when he returns from the war. Yes, he’s still a confirmed bachelor who takes love lightly and is quick with a wisecrack. But he’s also acquired a touch of gravity, a recognition that the world is a place in which bad things happen to good people, and though he never wears that understanding on his sleeve, it’s still visible.

      Once again, let’s go back to The Silent Speaker, the first postwar Wolfe novel, in which Archie meets a classy dame, Phoebe Gunther, and clearly has it in mind to romance her—until the dame in question has her skull caved in by an unknown assailant lurking in the areaway of the brownstone at West 35th Street. And how does Archie respond? He’s jolted. Really jolted. So much so that when he reflects on how the murderer covered his tracks, he says the following: “Very neat management, I told myself …. Very neat, the dirty deadly bastard.” That’s serious stuff—not quite Chandleresque, but also not at all the kind of thing Philo Vance would say. It is, in fact, the reaction of a real person, authentic and mature.

      And what of Archie’s postwar relationship with Nero Wolfe? He’s still Wolfe’s hired hand, but he’s also become an undefinable combination of servant, goad, trusted confidant, and court jester. It’s an uneasy relationship, intimate but never affectionate. You can still see that Archie loves Wolfe like a father, but it’s inconceivable that he’d admit such a thing, or even hint at it. As a result, their intimacy is transformed into a daily contest for dominance—and at least half the fun of the Wolfe books comes from the way in which Stout plays their struggle for laughs, in exactly the way that he might have portrayed a marriage of similarly long standing.

      Such relationships lend themselves to close scrutiny, and this is the first and most important way in which Stout surpasses Conan Doyle: we learn more and more about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin as the series progresses, and the more we learn about them, the better we understand them and the more interesting—and human—they become. Compared to Wolfe and Archie, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are little more than fabulously well-dressed stick figures.

      In addition, Stout was also much more sophisticated than Conan Doyle when it came to building into his novels a continuing cast of comparably memorable secondary characters. First come Fred, Orrie, Saul, Fritz, and Theodore, then Inspector Cramer, then Lily Rowan and Lon Cohen—and unlike Lestrade and Moriarty, they are not stick figures but highly distinctive personalities in their own right. Stout could have spun off whole novels about them (and did, of course, with Cramer, though unsuccessfully so). Wouldn’t you have gladly read a book about Saul Panzer? But Stout was careful never to tell us too much about any of them, not even Saul. He knew who his stars were.

      He also understood that Archie is more essential to the artistic success of the novels than Wolfe, and so took care to make him a richer character than Dr. Watson. Archie is also smarter than Watson, and in my opinion a better writer as well. For therein lies the real genius of the Wolfe novels—Archie’s literary style. It drives the books and is the main source of their enduring interest, and it wouldn’t be nearly as effective on a smaller scale.

      Which brings us to the last key difference between Rex Stout and Conan Doyle: Stout uses the novel, not the short story, as the basic building unit of his canon. It is, of course, a pleasure to read the Wolfe novellas, СКАЧАТЬ