“the Kennedy assasination”
Shodan,
I think you can rest assured on one thing at least–wouldn’t the nearest Grassy Knoll have been a few blocks away; say in Regent’s or Hyde Park?
-----Alan Q
Great report. My own feelings are summarized by Vincent Starrett, in his poem “221”: “Only those things the heart believes are true.”
Thanks for the mention of the Reference Library. Five volumes are now available, “Adventures of SH,” “Memoirs of SH,” “Study in Scarlet,” “Hound of the Baskervilles,” and “Return of SH,” all through Amazon (or my webpage).
Of course Flashman belongs on the “real” list, but so does Tarzan! See Philip Jose Farmer’s fine biography “Tarzan Alive” as well as his “Adventure of the Peerless Peer,” an account of the meeting of distant cousins Holmes and Lord Greystoke.
Great report. My own feelings are summarized by Vincent Starrett, in his poem “221”: “Only those things the heart believes are true.”
Thanks for the mention of the Reference Library. Five volumes are now available, “Adventures of SH,” “Memoirs of SH,” “Study in Scarlet,” “Hound of the Baskervilles,” and “Return of SH,” all through Amazon (or my webpage http:\webpages.charter.net/lklinger).
Of course Flashman belongs on the “real” list, but so does Tarzan! See Philip Jose Farmer’s fine biography “Tarzan Alive” as well as his “Adventure of the Peerless Peer,” an account of the meeting of distant cousins Holmes and Lord Greystoke.
Sir–
This is a minor, pedantic quibble about your otherwise excellent Holmes piece, but…
Of course there were fictional detectives before Dupin. There were fictional female detectives before Dupin. There were dozens, hundreds, of stories with detectives before Dupin. There were magazines with detective serials before Poe wrote the first Dupin story. Research methods into the roots of detective fiction have come a long way since Dannay & Lee (Ellery Queen), we have access to a lot more information and old magazines and books than Dannay & Lee did, and we know a lot more about it than they did.
Poe did not invent the detective story. What Poe did was synthesize what came before and create the modern short story form, written better than anyone who came before. Poe wrote a detective story that was well written and could be taken seriously by the literateurs. As importantly, Poe created the Great Detective template that Gaboriau and Holmes would later perfect.
Like I said, it’s a minor, pedantic quibble. But to those of us writing on the subject, it’s an important one.
Say, it just occurred to me that no one has mention Jen-Jieh Dee, the 7th century Chinese judge (who really existed) who was the subject of an 18th century “biography”. It was translated into English by Dutch diplomat Hans Peter van Gulik, and who went on to write an entire series of detective novels about “Judge Dee”.
According to Van Gulik, Dee was just one of a series of popular detectives in Chinese novels, many of them based on real people. Van Gulik often constructed his novels by taking elements from these Chinese novels and fitting them into a western-type novel setting (Chinese novels are a bit outside Western popular tastes – overlong, heavily concerned with relationships and supernatural evidence, and the put the solution near the beginning).
There was an Amwerican TV-movie of Judge Dee in the early 1970s, a British TV series about the same time. There were rumors that Paul Veerhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, etc.) wanted to make a Judge Dee movie, but he never did. I’ve long suspected that the British TV series helped inspire Judge Dredd. There have been at least three novels featuring Judge Dee by folks since Van Gulik.
Cool. Could you please provide cites where this research is published?
In my case, it’s original research which will be published in fall 2004 as The Encyclopedia as Fantastic Victoriana (Austin: MonkeyBrain Books). I’ll be giving examples from magazines like The Gentlemen’s Magazine and writers like Bulwer-Lytton of significant pre-Dupin detectives.
But you only have to read the work of folks like Lucy Sussex, whose book on early women writers of detective fiction should be out later this year, to see what new scholarship is showing about the early days of mystery fiction. Heck, even Bruce Murphy’s The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery (Palgrave, 2001), a book of shallows rather than depths, point out that Poe only crystallized what came before, rather than creating something new.
I feel indeed honoured that Mr Klinger has posted here. I confess to devouring his wonderful volumes, as quickly as they come out, and they have a distinguished place on my shelves.
So, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, lklinger… and if you go to the Archives and do a search on Tarzan, you’ll find that we’ve discussed Straight Dope Staff Report: What kind of ape was Tarzan raised by? … pretty much in the Grand Tradition and with due homage to Philip Jose Farmer. I hope that you’ll comment often in future!