Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22. Arthur Conan Doyle
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22 - Arthur Conan Doyle страница 6
Название: Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22
Автор: Arthur Conan Doyle
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
isbn: 9781479426263
isbn:
I could quote ad infinitum to prove my point, but let me settle for one of my all-time favorite digressions. It’s from Before Midnight:
I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it. It may be that a bevy of beautiful maidens in pure silk yellow very sheer gowns, barefooted, singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and scattering rose petals over me would do the trick, but I’d have to try it.
That’s Archie Goodwin to the letter, and in my opinion it beats Dr. Watson all hollow.
And is it art? Of course—not in the same way that Proust and Tolstoy are art, but what of it? Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, nor can any writer, however gifted, hope to produce them every time he sits down at his desk. It is in the nature of things that there must also be well-made pieces of intelligent entertainment to keep our fancies tickled, and that’s where Rex Stout came in.
When I wrote about Stout on my blog six years ago, I quoted something that Evelyn Waugh wrote about one of his own characters, a man who wrote detective stories for a living:
“There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living …. to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste.”
That is what Rex Stout did: he supplied his readers with tasteful, intelligent, impeccably artful literary entertainment of a kind that is not merely readable, but re-readable—infinitely re-rereadable, in my long and happy experience.
Others have done it as well, but except for Simenon, no one has ever done it so consistently well over so long a span of time—forty-one years, all told. That’s an achievement rare enough in any kind of literature and unique in the annals of what H.L. Mencken liked to call “sanguinary literature,” one for which I have long been and will always be profoundly grateful. No other writer has given me as much pure, uncomplicated pleasure as Rex Stout. I bless his memory.
d
Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the author of biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H.L. Mencken. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his first play, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.
“I’M THE OLD MAN”
H.M. and the Brothers Holmes
by Dan Andriacco
“I’m the old man,” announced H.M., suddenly inflating his chest and assuming an air of aloof majesty which would have done credit to King Edward the Seventh having his portrait painted. “If there’s any flumdiddling of the police to be done, I’m the man to do it.” A spasm of ghoulish amusement crossed his face.
Thus speaks the unmistakable voice of Sir Henry Merrivale in My Late Wives (1946). Vain, profane, atrocious in grammar and outrageous in behavior, H.M.’s penchant for confronting and solving seemingly impossible crimes makes him one of great detectives of the Golden Age of mystery fiction. He is also one of the funniest.
“The Man Who Explained Miracles,” as he was called in the title of the only H.M. novelette, sprang from the incredibly fertile mind of John Dickson Carr, writing under the transparent pseudonym of Carter Dickson. Carr is well known to Sherlockians as the author of The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the co-author, with Adrian Conan Doyle, of half a dozen Sherlock Holmes pastiches in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes.
Although both H.M. and Holmes could be labeled “eccentric” by conventional standards and are both honored by France as members of the Legion of Honor, they would seem to have little else in common. In fact, it would be easy to list the ways in which they are different. Sir Henry is a baronet whose family has held the title for nine generations in a direct line, while Holmes is the descendent of country squires. The baronet is a fighting Socialist in the early days and a member of the Senior Conservatives Club later; Holmes is apolitical. H.M. has a never-seen wife who spends most of her time in the south of France1, two daughters, “two no good sons-in-law,” and at least one grandson in contrast to the bachelor Holmes. One could go on. A close reading of the Merrivale oeuvre, however, leads to the conclusion that Carr’s passion for Holmes had a profound impact on the creation of his own detective.
H.M. was born in 1871, making him a younger contemporary of Sherlock Holmes. He sometimes claims that the ancient top hat he sports in the early books (later replaced by a Panama hat, a bowler, or a tweed cap) was a gift to him from Queen Victoria herself, reminding us that he came to adulthood in the Victorian era. Sherlock Holmes, we can be assured from the Sidney Paget illustrations, also wore a top hat on the streets of London. But in The Plague Court Murders and The Unicorn Murders, the old man has a nickname that evokes the older Holmes brother—some of his underlings call him “Mycroft.”
The comparison between H.M. and M.H. goes beyond what Carr frequently calls the baronet’s “corporation” (i.e., paunch), the description of his hand in several books as “a big flipper,” his fondness for cigars and his Mycroft-like laziness in the early adventures. Like Mycroft, H.M. holds an ambiguous office in the British government. In The Plague Court Murders (1934), the first H.M. novel, narrator Ken Blake describes him as the former head of the Counter-Espionage Department who is now “tinkering with the Military Intelligence Department.” If Mycroft is the original “M” of the British Secret Service, as many pastiche writers (including me) have posited, then Merrivale is one of his successors.
H.M.’s Mycroft nickname traces back to a letter to Blake from one of the old man’s agents in Constantinople. The agent wrote: “I tell you, if our H.M. had a little more dignity and would always remember to put on a necktie and would refrain from humming the words to questionable songs when he lumbers through rooms of lady typists, he wouldn’t make a bad Mycroft. He’s got the brain, my lad, he’s got the brain …” And he employs it solving mostly “impossible” crimes. Whatever H.M.’s title or function at his Whitehall office overlooking the embankment, he is in reality from this first recorded exploit to the last an amateur sleuth and unofficial consultant to Scotland Yard—an unpaid Sherlock Holmes.
Another apparent link to the elder Holmes is Sir Henry’s membership in the Diogenes Club, which Mycroft helped to found for the convenience of “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town.” Or is this a different Diogenes Club? Throughout the H.M. series, the old man’s membership is almost always mentioned in connection with a certain card game. “Poker players at the Diogenes Club do not get far in attempting to read his face,” is how Carr put it in The Gilded Man. One wonders how to say “ace in the hole” in Latin—or with no words at all. For according to The Red Widow Murders, the inexorable club rule enforced in the downstairs rooms (“except in the Visitors’ Room”) is: “Herein the brethren shall speak Latin or else keep silent.” In Mycroft’s club, according to brother Sherlock, the Diogenes had a somewhat different club rule: “No member is permitted to take the least notice of the other one.”
At any rate, the Diogenes Club is said to be a good spot for “sittin’ and thinkin’,” which is how H.M. СКАЧАТЬ