The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes, by Zack Dundas (2015)

Few figures have loomed across the cultural landscape more largely – more constantly – than Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant consulting detective of 221B Baker Street.  From his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887) until today, his cultural currency has been remarkable.

The profile, deerstalker cap (not really part of the original canon), the curved pipe (ditto), and ever-present “elementary, my dear Watson” (ditto-ditto-ditto), are recognizable the world over.  “Sherlock Holmes” has become shorthand for many things, from “detective” to “intellectual” to “smart ass.”  He is the first fictional character to inspire a slavish fandom, predating such masscult figures as Dracula, Superman and Harry Potter.  Now, 129 years after his initial appearance, Sherlock Holmes is the lead character in one American television series, one (infinitely superior) UK series, and a string of (negligible) international blockbuster adventure flicks.  And I have the sneaking suspicion that he’s only just starting…

Novelist-physician-adventurer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) wrote the first Holmes novel in just three weeks at the tender age of 27.  The initial book was well-received in the UK and did fair business; American audiences, however, ate it up, and made the novel a great success.  Doyle followed it with an even better book three years later, The Sign of Four, and literary detective fiction has never been the same since.

Many of us (Your Correspondent included) first find Holmes in our adolescence.  For the vast majority, Holmes is a milestone passed on the way to greater, broader reading.  But for many, Sherlock Holmes becomes a defining figure in the cultivation of the self, a guidepost to a life of the mind, intellectual acquisition, and moral conundrums.  One of my dearest friends, the New York-based Sherlockian Susan Rice – a woman of remarkable intellectual attainments, generous instincts, expansive humanity and great good humor – credits all the many good things that have come to her in life thanks to her association with Mr. Holmes.  I could think of no higher accolade for a work of art.

In The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes, Portland-based writer Zach Dundas tries to capture the immensity of the impact Conan Doyle’s creation has had upon the culture, and upon the many individuals who actively take part in the Sherlockian experience.  And while he does not quite succeed in his expansive brief, he provides a journey that is engaging, amusing and informed.

For Dundas, the beginning and end of all essential knowledge about Holmes can be found in the four novels and fifty-six short stories by Doyle.  But, he also believes that Holmes is a never-ending work-in-progress, a cultural and imaginative construct that is revised and refitted to meet the needs of succeeding generations.  There has been no shortage of Sherlock Holmes pastiche since nearly the beginning (Doyle actually read some knock-off stories written by both fans and celebrated professionals, like J. M. Barrie), and all of this material has built the decades-long conversation we have had with Holmes. 

Dundas first got the bug while a young man, starting his own Sherlock Holmes society and exchanging letters with other young fans around the world.  He later returned to Holmes, attending the Baker Street Irregulars annual dinner in New York, chatting with people in the Holmes societies around the country, and even tracing the great man’s footsteps throughout London and the English countryside.

Through it all, Dundas returns to what it all means to him – the individual stories and novels, the fandom, the experience of immersion in the Sherlockian world.  There are few efforts to put the Sherlockian phenomena in a larger context, but within the realm of personal experience, his anecdotes sparkle.

He is also laugh-out-loud funny.  Here is a footnote about Jude Law (the recent big screen Watson): Law makes a terrific Watson, whatever one thinks of the movies.  (I enjoy them in the same I enjoy cotton candy, roller derby, and dubious pop music.)  Or, better still, the end of a longish footnote on following Sherlockian leads on YouTube: This can lead, algorithmically, to the hour-long English language cartoon version of Hound from 1983 (with an incredibly fat Watson), not to mention a funky fan-made remix of clips from the splendid 1981 Soviet film adaptation.  Be careful.  You can do this all day. 

Writing about his early infatuation with the tales, and the worlds they opened up for him, Dundas says, I had arrived too late, doomed to be part of a generation clad in oversized Quicksilver T-shirts and sweatpants, fated to live behind a chain-link fence.  A gasogene?  A tantalus?  New Coke had just come out.

Dundas is perhaps at his best detailing the explosion of Sherlockian fandom in the wake of the BBC’s popular Sherlock series.  Historically, Sherlock Holmes devotees have been remarkably different from, say, science fiction buffs or Tolkien geeks or those sad people who obsess over Dark Shadows.  Once a high-camp joke shared largely by New York’s literary elite, Sherlock Holmes fandom has become remarkable inclusive.  It has gone from upmarket game to masscult fandom.  This once all-male preserve has successfully been mined by women (starting with the organization The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, begun by Evelyn Herzog with a cadre of brilliant college-age women in the 1960s who may be ultimately responsible for keeping the movement alive at all), and now includes people who know only the films, or the various television shows … or the contemporary novels featuring an elderly, married (?) Sherlock Holmes.  This seismic shift has shaken some longtime Sherlockians to the core, and Dundas makes hay with various ‘scandals’ in the Sherlockian world. 

Dundas has written a book that is alternately discursive and solipsistic, as well as endlessly funny and often insightful.  However, it is also ultimately a little … thin. He presents us with all the materials necessary to create a fascinating mosaic, but ultimately fails to be them into a beguiling sequence.  I kept waiting for the defining moment, the passage that put it all – Holmes the man, the friendship with Watson, Doyle, the devoted fandom, the nearly unending fascination with this character – into some kind of final context, and was left wanting.  Dundas has no cohesive argument; he just has stuff.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that twelve decades of Sherlock Holmes is enough Sherlock Holmes, but that the saga is really only just beginning.  That it is too early in the creation of the Sherlock Holmes myth to put it into any type of perspective.  There are many literary creations that were as large a presence as Holmes that have fallen by the wayside (think Tarzan or Buck Rogers or Fu Manchu and, to an extent, James Bond); but Holmes has outlasted all of them with a vengeance.

I recall thinking that, while reading the recent novel about an elderly Holmes facing dementia, A Slight Trick of the Mind, that Holmes will continue to resonate.  Not only resonate, but actually be the lynchpin for champion literary novels in the future. 

Perhaps the story of Sherlock cannot yet be told because it’s only just begun.  Maybe … the game is afoot.

The Man With the Golden Typewriter; Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters, Edited by Fergus Fleming (2016)

I came to an odd realization while reading the collected James Bond letters by author Ian Fleming (1908-1964), The Man With the Golden Typewriter, edited by Fergus Fleming – and that was I really like Ian Fleming, the man.

Odd because … well, are any self-respecting 21^st century males supposed to like someone like Fleming?  A drinking, smoking, sexist, politically incorrect dinosaur?  Bosh to all that, we heartily reply.  The Fleming that emerges from his letters is a warm, intelligent, witty and engaging man, kind to a fault and capable of deep and sincere friendships.  If the Ian Flemings of this world are dinosaurs, then, bring back the dinosaurs, we say.

This indispensable look inside the mind of the man who created James Bond is neatly organized – each group of letters is filed under the titles of his 14 Bond books.  Interspersed between his thrillers, though, are chapters that collect letters between Fleming and Geoffrey Boothroyd (who consulted with the writer on guns and weaponry – and who makes a cameo in the novel Dr. No), mystery great Raymond Chandler, and Herman W. Liebert, librarian at Yale University and Samuel Johnson scholar, who worked with Fleming on mastering American slang for the US-based Bond books.

But the majority letters are between Fleming and Daniel George and Michael Howard, editors at Cape, the first publishers of James Bond, and William Plomer, South African-born poet who was Fleming’s friend and literary mentor.  These letters are a revelation because they illustrate how tenuous the entire James Bond enterprise was at its beginning, and how Fleming threw himself into thriller writing with a dedication and seriousness often lacking in his more literary brethren.

These editors did not always have the best judgement, we can now acknowledge with the gift of hindsight.  Editor Michael Howard did not particularly care for From Russia, With Love, now considered one of the two-or-three finest Bond novels.  Fleming replies:  Personally, I think I shall get a good deal of readers criticism such as yours, but I do think it is a good thing to produce a Bond book which is out of the ordinary and which has, in my opinion, an ingenious and interesting plot.  There is also the point that one simply can’t go on writing the simple, bang-bang, kiss-kiss type of book.  However hard one works at it, you automatically become staler and staler and very quickly the staleness shows through to the reader and then all is indeed lost.

Fleming was not after realism – and he gleefully acknowledges that in these letters.  But he did want to get his facts correct – if you read about something (anything – from deep sea diving to poisonous fish to Fort Knox) in a Fleming novel, know that it was researched and checked, and that Fleming strove to get it right.  It is also clear that Fleming attacked his work with complete conviction – as if, in writing about the preposterous, he could make it more believable by believing in it, himself.  This lack of irony is perhaps his greatest legacy as an author, and perhaps stamps him as the last serious creator of escapist fiction.

But is industry enough to make me … like Fleming?  No, it is the many kindnesses chronicled throughout these letters.  People who provide information or help are often presented with thoughtful gifts, courtesy of Cartier.  When John Goodwin, founding president of the James Bond Club, wrote Fleming, he found himself invited to the set of From Russia, With Love.  Fleming entreats an editor friend to write about an ill, aging author ushering in her 80s, while signed books and sweet notes to fans are the order of the day.

Most telling, Fleming sends note after note after heart-attacks and illnesses, putting on a brave front, making jokes, and putting his friends at ease.  Here is one letter, recounting advice he received on recovering from heart attack:  Am receiving the most extraordinary advices from various genii. “Be more spiritual” (Noel Coward), “write the story of Admiral Godfrey” (Admiral Godfrey), “Be sucked off gently every day (Evelyn Waugh).  Over to you.

In these pages, we recently reviewed The Spy Who Loved Me, one of the greatest of the Bond thrillers.  Amazingly, this book was dismissed by many reviewers at the time, who wanted ‘the mixture as before.’  These reviews hurt Fleming, who wrote with a specific purpose in mind:  I had become increasingly surprised to find that my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, were being read in the schools, and that young people were making a hero out of James Bond when to my mind, and as I have often said in interviews, I do not regard James Bond as a heroic figure but only as an efficient professional in his job … So it crossed my mind to write a cautionary tale about Bond to put the record straight in the minds particularly of young readers.

He can also be needlessly self-deprecating, as he writes to Raymond Chandler:

Dear Ray,

Many thanks for the splendid Chandleresque letter.  Personally I loved yor review and thought it was excellent as did my publishers, and as I say it was really wonderful of you to have taken the trouble.

Probably the fault about my books is that I don’t take them seriously enough and meekly accept having my head ragged off about them in the family circle.  If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond.  You after all write ‘novels of suspense’ – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.

But I have taken you advice to heart and will see if I can’t order my life so as to put more feeling into my typewriters.

Incidentally, have you read A Most Contagious Game, by Samuel Grafton, published b Rupert Hart-Davis?

Sorry about lunch even without a butler.  I also know some girls andwill dangle one in front of you one of these days.

I had no idea you were ill.  If you are, please get well immediately.  I’m extremely ill with sciatica.

Fleming also mentions his many brother thriller writers, and clearly read deeply in the field.  He mentions Fu Manchu, Nero Wolfe, Richard Hannay, Mr. Moto and alludes to Simon Templar.  (He rather preferred Marquand’s Moto books to his more serious novels.)  This sense of continuity charming, and one wonders what Fleming would have made of the scores of Bond imitators over the years.

There are some problems with the book: it could have used an additional edit (one letter appears, verbatim, in two separate chapters), and the index is vague to the point of useless.   More amusing, Fergus Fleming closes with a list of Bond novels and Bond films, which is as pressing as telling Californians that they live on the West Coast.  But despite these few missteps, The Man With the Golden Typewriter is essential for Fleming devotees.

Readers interested in Bond are referred to these wonderful sites:  James Bond Memes at: https://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/ and Artistic License Renewed at: https://literary007.com/. 

Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books, by Nick Hornby, Introduction by Jess Walter (2014)

So, what makes a great (or even a good) critic?  One would imagine breadth of culture, cultivation of taste, a reverence for great work from antiquity to the present day, and discrimination.

And then, you could be novelist/reviewer, Nick Hornby (born 1957).  He has none of the above, as he writes here:

Something has been happening to me recently – something which, I suspect, is likely to affect a significant and important part of the rest of my life.  The grandiose way of describing this shift is to say that I have been slowly making my peace with antiquity; or, to express it in words that more accurately describe what’s going on, I have discovered that some old shit isn’t so bad.

Hitherto, my cultural blind spots have included the Romantic Poets, every single bar of classical music ever written, and just about anything produced before the nineteenth century, with the exception of Shakespeare and a couple of the bloodier, and hence more Tarantinoesque, revenge tragedies.  When I was young, I didn’t want to listen to or read anything that reminded me of the brown and deeply depressing furniture in my grandmother’s house.  She didn’t have many books, but those she did own were indeed brown: cheap and old editions of a couple of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, for example, and maybe a couple of hand-me-down books by somebody like Frances Hodgson Burnett.  When I ran out of stuff to read during the holidays, I was pointed in the direction of her one bookcase, but I wanted bright Puffin paperbacks, not mildewed old hardbacks, which came to represent just about everything I wasn’t interested in.

This unhelpful association, it seems to me, should have withered with time; instead, it’s been allowed to flourish, unchecked … I soon found that I didn’t want to read or listen to anything that anybody in ay position of educational authority told me to.  Chaucer was full of woodworm; Wordsworth was yellow and curling at the edges, whatever edition I was given.  I read Graham Greene and John Fowles, Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe, Chandler and Nathanael West, Greil Marcus and Peter Guarlnick, and I listened exclusively to popular music.  Dickens crept in, eventually, because he was funny, unlike Sir Walter Scott and Shelley, who weren’t.  And, because everything was seen through the prism of rock and roll, every now and again I would end up finding something I learned about through the pages of New Musical Express.

So, for Your Correspondent, (self-confessed snob, aesthete and reactionary), this is enough to disregard each and any of Hornby’s critical assessments.  To us, his seeing the world through the prism of rock and roll is especially damming – as that is surely a sign of a severely arrested development.

And yet…

And yet, Hornby clearly loves literature and is besotted by books.  It’s almost impossible to read his criticism and not come away with a deep and abiding admiration for Hornby and his own, peculiar aesthetic.  Even more telling, it’s almost impossible not to like him.  Here is a man of real warmth and charm, with a lively intelligence, a big heart, and a detestation of cant.

The reviews collected in Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books were written for The Believer magazine between 2003 and 2013; many of then were collected in two previous books: The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, but the current volume collects everything in one handy book.  He brings to his role as critic a lively intelligence, a sense of what makes fiction work, and great good humor.  Here is the opening of a typical column:

The advantages and benefits of writing a monthly column about reading for the Believer are innumerable, if predictable: fame, women (it’s amazing what people will do to get early information about the Books Bought list), international influence, and so on.  But perhaps the biggest perk of all, one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you can’t read long books.

At the start of each column, Hornby lists the books that he bought (and, at times, it would seem that he is keeping the publishing industry afloat single-handedly), and books read.  The two don’t always tally, but he will always tell you what led him to read the chosen books that month, and if they lived up to expectations.

A successful novelist (we here at The Jade Sphinx are especially fond of About a Boy and The Long Way Down), Hornby is wise enough to know that different writers with different styles all bring something to the table, and his indiscriminate taste allows him to find and recommend many terrific books we would otherwise overlook.

Perhaps the most significant bow in his quiver is the fact that he does not engage in critical smackdown.  When he doesn’t like something, he’s more likely to leave the reader chuckling than quaking at the quality of his venom.  Here he is on a comedic novel that he found decidedly unfunny:

On my copy of Michael Frayn’s The Trick of It, there is a quote from Anthony Burgess that describes the novel as “one of the few books I have read in the last year that has provoked laughter.”  Initially, it’s a blurb that works in just the way the publishers intended.  Great, you think.  Burgess must have read a lot of books; and both the quote itself and your knowledge of the great man suggest that he wouldn’t have chuckled at many of them.  So if The Trick of It wriggled its way through that forbidding exterior to the Burgess sense of humor, it must be absolutely hilarious, right?  But then you start to wonder just how trustworthy Burgess would have been on the subject of comedy.  What, for example, would have been his favorite bit of Jackass: The Movie?  (Burgess died in 1993, so sadly we will never know.)  What was his most cherished Three Stooges sketch?  His favorite Seinfeld character?  His top David Brent moment?  And after careful contemplation, your confidence in his comic judgment stars to feel a little misplaced: there is a good chance, you suspect, that Anthony Burgess would have steadfastly refused even to smile at many of the things that have ever made you chortle uncontrollably.

Sometimes it feels as though we are being asked to imagine cultural judgments as a whole bunch of concentric circles.  On the outside, we have the wrong ones, made by people who read The Da Vinci Code and listen to Celine Dion; right at the center we have the correct ones, made by the snootier critics, very often people who have vowed never to laugh again until Aristophanes produces a follow-up to The Frogs … If I had to choose between a Celine Dion fan and Anthony Burgess for comedy recommendation, I would go with the person standing on the table singing “the Power of Love” every time.  I’ll bet Burgess read Candide – I had a bad experience with Candide only recently – with tears of mirth trickling down his face.

Despite his critical liberality, there are some things that still fail to register with Hornby.  He does not understand the appeal of series characters (why read many James Bond adventures, he wonders, rather than just his greatest one?), and is immune to most genre fiction.  (Given the choice of a terrific science fiction novel, or a way-we-live now book about divorce, he’ll take the latter.)  But these foibles are few, and may even be evidence of his aesthetic maturity being great than mine own.

At any rate – Nick Hornby is a gifted novelist, and perhaps an even more gifted literary critic.  Readers interested in intelligent, thoughtful and amusing criticism could do no better than Ten Years in the Tub.

The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming (1962)

It is very hard for people who have never read Ian Fleming (1908-1964) before to dip into the James Bond novels.  And that is mainly because the movies have ruined our perception of Fleming and his world, perhaps for all time.

This is not to say that all Bond-films are bad.  Some of them – Goldfinger (1964), Octopussy (1983) and a few other come to mind – are delightful fun; and others – most significantly From Russia, With Love (1963) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) – are almost real movies, films that pack an emotional and intellectual heft.  But from the best to the worst, there is very little of Fleming’s Bond in these films, and the rewards of reading Fleming have not yet been replicated in other mediums.

Despite the fact that Fleming himself sometimes denigrated his own work, it is clear that he was a novelist with ambitions within, and beyond, the framework in which he wrote.  He was initially influenced by the ‘hardboiled’ school of detective fiction, and professed a great love of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959).  But his earliest books, Casino Royale (1953) and Live and Let Die (1954), are little better than simple thrillers.  It was only with his third book, Moonraker (1955) that the unique fictive world he sought to create started to crystalize. 

Pop fiction can be written with various degrees of artistry, and such books as From Russia, With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958), and You Only Live Twice (1964) are written with a great deal of dash and more than a touch of something akin to a pulpy poetry.  When Fleming finally found that unique “voice” of the Bond thrillers, he was writing with a stylish purity that cannot be found in mere potboilers. 

Like the most vivid of thriller writers (Sax Rohmer comes to mind, ditto John Buchan and very early Leslie Chateris), Fleming wrote with complete conviction: once he finally found the voice of Bond and his world, he wrote with a complete and total emotional investment.  It is this authorial honesty that makes so many of the books work so wonderfully well.

But he was also acutely aware that the Bond novels were simply entertainments.  Expertly crafted and intriguing, but still simply entertainments.

And so, he tried, within the framework he had created, to transcend the disposability that was hardwired into character and the framework of the novels.  These experiments resulted in the terrific short story collection For Your Eyes Only (1960), and the only first-person James Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962).

For Your Eyes Only consists of five short stories, and most of them are as “Un-Bondian” as one can imagine.  More literary, more anecdotal, more set in a recognizable reality, Fleming slips into Somerset Maugham territory with tight and psychologically sound short stories that humanize Bond.  I find For Your Eyes Only to be a terrific book with which to hook readers on Fleming, and it is highly recommended.

However, Fleming comes his very closest to a real, moving and genre-busting novel with The Spy Who Loved Me.  Initially dismissed by the critics (so much so that Fleming put the kibosh on paperback reprints in his lifetime) and usually shrugged off by hardcore Bond fans (more on that later), The Spy Who Loved Me is actually Fleming at his best: psychosocially sound, moving and profoundly real.

Spy is written in the first person by a young French-Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel.  She tells of her leaving her provincial hometown and the nuns that taught her, and, of her first love affair with a boy named Derek.  Fleming writes of a terrifying (and searing) moment when Vivienne nearly loses her virginity in a dirty cinema, and how Derek casts her aside once he uses her.  

Vivienne then steals herself against emotional involvement until later when she and her German boss, Kurt, become lovers.  Though cold and calculating, their relationship is satisfactory until Vivienne finds herself pregnant.  Horrified at the notion of marrying a non-German, Kurt fires her and gives her a plane ticket and an abortion as severance.

Finally promising herself that she is through with men, Vivienne then takes to her handy Vespa, and starts travelling down through Canada and into the United States.   It is in these passages that some of Fleming’s most pungent writing can be found: his disdain for tourist culture and kitschy roadside attractions drips from the page like rank battery acid.

Vivienne finds work in a soon-to-close for the season motel near Lake George.  On her last night there, alone and waiting for the owners to come next morning, Vivienne is assaulted and detained by two small-time punks, Sluggsy and Horror.  Rape and murder seem to be her ultimate fate … until the doorbell rings.

It’s Bond, James Bond, stranded with a flat tire.  At first, Vivienne thinks he is another punk:  At first glance I inwardly groaned—God it’s another of them!  He stood there so quiet and controlled and somehow with the same quality of deadliness as the others.  And he wore that uniform that the films make one associate with gangsters—a dark-blue belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down.  He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way, and a scar showed whitely down his left cheek.  I quickly put my hand up to hide my nakedness.  Then he smiled and suddenly I thought I might be all right.

It doesn’t take a famous, world-class secret agent much time to deduce that there are problems in this little, out-of-the-way motel.  Before too many pages fly by (and they do fly by), Bond has saved Vivienne from the burning motel, eliminated the punks, and bedded our heroine.  More than that, he smooths matters over with the police, and ensures that Vivienne is on the road safe-and-sound in her Vespa as if nothing ever happened.  James Bond, professional killer and troubleshooter, restores her faith in male-kind.

Fleming plays a very canny (and very tricky) game here: Bond is, no matter how much one wants to parse his motives and methods, a hero.  But he is also a denizen of a darker and more dangerous world; a world that has no place for normal people with normal problems like Vivienne Michel.  But it is this compromised figure who saves her life and restores her faith in people.  Fleming is fully aware of the irony, and we, who know so much of Bond from previous books, know as well.

However, it is this very act of authorial savvy that prevents Fleming from elevating his tale into something closer to a real literary achievement, rather than merely executing a world-class entertainment.  Because the very presence of James Bond in the third act cheapens everything that comes before it.

My paperback edition of Spy runs to 180 pages, and James Bond does not enter until page 108.  What has been a straight novel now becomes a James Bond adventure.  Fleming had the confidence to stretch and try something new, but not enough to do it without the crutch of his most famous creation.  Could he have written a novel where Bond makes a late-page entrance and does not play the role of hero and savior?  Yes, we are convinced of it.  But, at the last minute, his nerve failed him and he went for something more tried-and-true. 

The Spy Who Loved Me is a terrific book that is let down by its ending, and a stellar James Bond novel that ultimately fails once James Bond comes into it.  As such, it hovers in a weird twilight within the Fleming corpus: an almost straight novel of real power and insight that is just a fair James Bond adventure. 

Ian Fleming was only 56 at the time of his death, and he was just entering the height of his powers.  What kind of novels would we have gotten from him had he another 10 or 20 years of life?  Would he have continued to grow and evolve as a novelist?  Would he have ultimately abandoned James Bond and written more literary novels?

We’ll never know.  But we do know that in the realm of pop fiction, Fleming was in a class by himself.

Readers interested in Bond are referred to these wonderful sites:  James Bond Memes at: https://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/ and Artistic License Renewed at: https://literary007.com/.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature, by Selma G. Lanes (1972)

Though perhaps little remembered today, Selma G. Lanes (1929-2009) was an influential editor and children’s book critic.  Born in Dorchester, MA, she attended Smith College after a stint at the Dorchester High School for Girls.  She would eventually land in the Columbia School of Journalism.

She became editor of Parents Magazine, and from there became managing editor of Western Publishing children’s book division.  During this time, she wrote dozens of reviews on children’s books for the New York Times daily and magazine section.  She was one of the first members of the literary establishment to recognize the genius of Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), and would eventually write a book about his art.

But Lane’s great claim to fame were her two books about children’s literature, Down the Rabbit Hole, published in 1972, and much-delayed and far superior sequel, Though the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature, published in 2004.

Down the Rabbit Hole is a remarkable achievement, both as literary criticism and as a historical document.  Being a journalist, Lane clearly recycles previous reviews and covered trends.  Happily, there is a minimum of recycled journalism in Rabbit Hole, and Lane includes original chapters that are as fresh and insightful as they were over 40 years ago.

Lane seemed to be among the first in the literary establishment to fully realize Sendak’s genius, and her chapter comparing him to English illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) – of all people – is something of a tour de force.  Better still is her dissection of the American fairy tale tradition, and just how unique and separate it is from its European counterpart.  She also sites L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) as one of the central figures of American letters, a position as unpopular in 1972 as it is today.

Lane also provides historical context with a lengthy chapter on St. Nicholas Magazine, the first important periodical directed at children.  She writes at length on why such a publication would be impossible in 1972 (as it would today!), and mourns, to a degree, the then-incipient fracturing of our society.

Happily, Lane also champions children’s serial fiction, finding much value in the various adventures of The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.  She concludes that children do not see life as a story with beginning, middle or end, but, rather, as a series of adventures.  It’s only natural that their books reflect that view.  More important, the endings of individual titles in children’s series are often quite disappointing … better still is the promise at the end of further adventures to come.  (Children weaned on everything from Nancy Drew to Harry Potter become, I’m sure, besotted by the continuing adventures of everyone from James Bond to Sherlock Holmes.)

Her finest chapter, though, was on the explosion of books for African-American children.  While applauding these books – some of which by now are considered classics – she bemoans the loss of previous books about black children chucked overboard in the name of Political Correctness.  (PC seems to be a scourge of modern life – its baleful influence seemingly as potent then as now.)  Lane pleads for both historical context and intent when reading a work of the past, a simple catechism that seems inexplicable to most college students today.

Though Down the Rabbit Hole is sadly out-of-print, this title is easily gotten by Abebooks.com or ebay, and is well worth the investment.  Delightful reading for anyone seriously (or even somewhat) interested in the genre.

In the weeks to come, we will look at her follow-up book, Through the Looking Glass, written more than 30 years later.

Who Is Your Santa, Part III: The Santa Claus of William Joyce

Today, we actually get two Santa Clauses for a single entry as we look at the work of William Joyce (born 1957).

Joyce took the publishing world by storm in the late 1980s-early 1990s with a series of picture books, including Dinosaur Bob (1988), A Day With Wilbur Robinson (1990), and his Christmas book, Santa Calls (1993).

Though Joyce has expanded his talents into film and television production, it is his picture books that I perhaps love the best, and Santa Calls most of all.  It tells the story of Arthur Atchinson Aimesworth, boy inventor, cowboy and amateur adventurer.  With his sidekick, Spaulding Littlefeets, and his sister, Esther, he goes from Abilene, Texas to Santa’s Toyland at the North Pole.  There, Esther is kidnapped by the Dark Queen and her evil elves, and it is up to Art, Santa and the rest of the gang to rescue her.

In summary, it does not sound like much – but in execution, it is nothing short of magnificent.  I have long considered Santa Calls to be Joyce’s masterpiece, and it is a story that I seem to see with fresh eyes every year.

First off, Joyce’s talents as an illustrator were never put to better effect.  The entire book is suffused with a creamy, subtle color strongly reminiscent of the Golden Age of Illustration.  (Without a publication date, anyone coming to the book with fresh eyes could easily mistake it as a work from the 1930s or 1940s.)  True to his art deco aesthetic, Joyce reimagines Santa as a North Pole dandy, complete with flowing red frock coat (trimmed with white), striped off-white vest and dashing monocle.  And his Toyland is filled with gadgets both wondrous and fabulous.  This should not be surprising – as one of Joyce’s inspirations was… James Bond.  Joyce conceived of Santa as an older gadgeteer, and his workshop much like the highly-mechanized fortresses found in the Bond films.  Double-Ho Seven, indeed.

His Toyland – where the motto is The Best of the Old, The Best of the New, The Best That Is Yet To Be – is a major feat of imagination.  Inspired by both the spacious and ornate dreamlands found in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo strips, it also nods its head at the Emerald City of Oz.  However, with its floodlights, bow-tied elephants, Santa-shaped buildings and walking beds… it rather makes the Emerald City look like Dubuque.

The action zips along as quickly as a Robin Hood adventure, and is richly garnished with Joycean pop culture references to everything from Punjab in Little Orphan Annie to silent screen cowboy Tom Mix to the pets found in Doc Savage.  But through it all beats a warm and generous heart, and I guarantee that this overstuffed and gorgeously designed book will leave you weepy at the final revelation.  It is my favorite Christmas picture book.

Joyce has revisited Santa in his overarching cosmology – the Guardians of Childhood.  This is his effort to tell the origin story of such childhood touchstones as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, among others.  Here, Santa is a reformed Cossack bandit, who learns magic and compassion from the wizard, Ombric.  Though the series is not yet complete, we see some of what Santa will become – in the latest installment, he has already started construction of his Toyland.  This Santa is a dashing, reformed brigand.  He has a sense of style and the dramatic, and is more an adventurer at this point of the series than anything else.  Armed with swords or a robotic genie, this Santa is ready for all comers in his efforts to protect his band of Guardians, and we see the nurturing, patriarchal side of the man emerge.  It is an interesting transformation, and we wonder how Joyce will end the series.

In the film version released last year, Rise of the Guardians, Santa was voiced by Alec Baldwin, in what has to be the voice performance of the decade.  It is perfect holiday fare, and as Christmas approaches, you could not do better than spending it with the Guardians of Childhood.

One Last Santa Tomorrow!

Remembering The Man of Bronze

One of the most influential fictional characters of the 20^th Century is someone you’ve probably never heard of: Dr. Clark “Doc” Savage, Jr., the Man of Bronze.  He made his debut in pulp magazines 80 years ago in March, 1933 (around the same time that King Kong made his first appearance).  Doc Savage Magazine was published by Street & Smith, and Doc was created by publisher Henry W. Ralston and editor John L. Nanovic, but most of the 181 novels were written by wordsmith Lester Dent (1904-1959).

Doc Savage was a surgeon, explorer, scientist, researcher, criminologist and all-around physical marvel.  He did two hours of intense exercise every day, giving him a fabulous physique.  His body had been tanned a deep bronze during his world travels, and newspapers have dubbed him The Man of Bronze.

Along with his medical degree, he holds several scientific degrees and has published extensively in everything from physics to anthropology.  He lives on the 86^th floor of the Empire State Building, which includes his living quarters along with his various laboratories.  Doc leaves this fabulous art deco paradise by personal elevator, which moves so fast that he is usually the only one who can remain standing during its descent.

Doc stores his cars, submarine, plane, autogiro and dirigible in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan emblazoned with the legend The Hidalgo Trading Company.  This is something of a joke on Doc’s part (a rarity, as he seldom jokes) – Hidalgo is the Central American nation in which a lost tribe of Mayans mind his private gold mine.

When Doc is not traveling the world, battling mad scientists, super-villains and various fascists, he travels to the Arctic Circle to his Fortress of Solitude, where he can catch his breath and devote time to his scientific studies.  It is also the spot where Doc, an inveterate tinkerer and inventor, creates most of his gadgets.  Doc the Gadgeteer is legendary, creating hypnotic gas, “mercy” bullets that only stun, lightweight bullet-proof vests, the first answering machine, radar…. The list goes on and on. 

How did Clark become the Man of Bronze?  Doc is, in the final analysis, something of a scientific experiment himself.  His father created a strenuous training program for his only son; Doc was reared by a group of scientists who not only developed Clark’s body, but his mind, as well.  Though this sounds like it may have been something of a grind, young Doc was also taken around the world to learn the many languages he speaks, as well as various “mystic” arts of the East.  His boyhood travels alone would have been enough to make Indiana Jones footsore.

Doc has a coterie of friends who go adventuring with him, nicknamed The Fabulous Five.  The Five are the top men in their fields, and include Theodore Marley “Ham” Brooks, famous lawyer and fashion plate; Andrew Blodgett “Monk” Mayfair, brilliant chemist who looks vaguely simian; John “Renny” Renwick, celebrated engineer who has a penchant for knocking down doors with his oversized fists; William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn, archeologist and anthropologist with a taste for big words; and Thomas J. “Long Tom” Roberts, the world’s leading electrical engineer.  Doc met these five men during the Great War – all are Doc’s senior by at least a decade or more, but Doc calls these men “brothers” and they are fiercely devoted to one-another.

The earliest stories would include all five of Doc’s friends, but later tales would include only two or three, most frequently Monk and Ham, who have a good natured rivalry and inflict endless harassment upon one-another. 

Oddly enough, Doc’s pulp magazine success was not transferable.  There was a best-forgotten radio series and a truly execrable movie version in 1975.  And most Doc Savage comic books fall flat – an oddity considering the visual potential of the corpus.

So … what is so special about the Doc Savage novels?  Well… in terms of influence, Doc’s achievement is colossal.  He was the template for the much better-known Superman, and, indeed, much of the mythology of Superman was stolen from Doc.  Both are named Clark.  Doc is the Man of Bronze; Superman the Man of Steel.  Superman has a Fortress of Solitude up north, and a group of supporting characters beside whom he can look more super.  Most tellingly, advertising art for Doc Savage Magazine often simply read … SUPERMAN.  Doc, however great his accomplishments, is fully human; Superman’s Kryptonian past separates him from us.  Doc is what we all could be, if only.

Doc the Gadgeteer has also influenced everyone from James Bond to The Man From U.N.C.L.E., as well as the adventuring family seen on Jonny Quest and even the dysfunctional adventurers found on The Venture Brothers.  Another key quality of the Doc Savage novels are their exotic locales – the novels usually open in a sun-kissed New York, a sort of art deco neverland – and before long Doc and his crew are in a dirigible or private plane headed for some barely charted spot on the map.  This taste for period exotica was an influence on heroes as diverse as TinTin and Indiana Jones.

All right, I hear you crying, enough!  So, Doc was hot stuff and a huge influence on junk adventure fiction.  But why do you like him?

Well, the simple and unvarnished truth is that I love Doc.  I love him and Ham and Monk and all the rest of them.  There is a portrait of Doc hanging in my studio where I paint, and not a day goes by when I do not think of him at least once.  This does not blind me to the flaws in the series.  Writing at breakneck speed, Dent was not a prose stylist.  He was not, nor could he ever be, Sinclair Lewis.  Hell, he couldn’t even be Edgar Rice Burroughs.  But… Dent delivered what was needed.

I read the Doc Savage novels in my middle teens – the perfect age for the series.  (Since I still love Doc, that teenager is still alive in me somewhere.)  The tremendous sense of Doc’s personal accomplishments along with the variety and scope of his travels and adventures provided a landscape for my own imagination.  Maybe, I thought, one day I would see the world.  Learn a language.  Write a book. Develop deep and lasting friendships.  And maybe … something big, something exciting, something of great importance, would happen to me, too.

The other charm of the Doc Savage corpus is found in the quieter moments of the series.  They are richly infused with comedy (mostly when Ham and Monk bicker), but there are always grace notes that underscore Doc’s quiet benevolence and humanity.  Like the Lone Ranger, Doc would not kill his enemies.  Doc kept a quiet poker face, but it never hid the kindness and warmth that could be found within.

 

After 1949, the world forgot Doc.  But then, something remarkable happened in the 1960s.  Bantam Books started republishing the novels, and several new generations came to know and love Doc Savage.

The best Doc novels are those from the 1930s.  The world was a large place before World War II, and the exotic settings and outlandish plots are delicious.  Doc Savage novels are easily found on ebay, and writer Will Murray has written several new adventures over the past few years, many based on notes that Dent left behind.  For anyone who is young at heart, Doc Savage is highly recommended.

Not bad for an 80 year old.

We Go to a Comic Book Store

It is completely without shame that I confess I loved comic books as a boy.  (And have been known to read some of them in my adulthood with satisfaction.)  In the 1970s, I regularly read such comics (or black-and-white comic magazines, which were my preference) as The Shadow, Doc Savage, Planet of the Apes, Tomb of Dracula, House of Mystery, Sherlock Holmes (sadly, never lasting more than an issue or two), and even The Hulk.  And, to this day, I have a deep and abiding affection for Superman.  Even as a boy, I thought Superman was the great American success story.  An immigrant raised in America’s heartland, he took our national myth to heart and made himself into the embodiment of all that is good about us.  (I was also beglamoured by visions of his lost planet Krypton, which was often portrayed as a 1930s art deco-inspired wonderland.  If heaven exists and mirrors our expectations, for me it would resemble Krytpon to no little degree.)

Clearly, the argument that reading comics in one’s youth “ruins” one for adult literature doesn’t seem to be airtight.  I distinctly remember reading the Planet of the Apes comics and Balzac at the same time … in fact, I would heartily endorse anything that encourages young people to read at all.

When I was a boy, comic books were available in every corner newsstand, in drug and convenience stores, and sometimes in five-and-dime stores, such as Woolworth’s.  Comics were ubiquitous – read in school lunchrooms, in the park, and often found crumpled at the bottom of book bags or rolled in back pockets.

Then, something strange and terrible happened to the comics industry.  (WHAM!)  A new form of sales – comics direct marketing – changed the way comic books were bought and sold.  Instead of being available everywhere, comics were now sold primarily through comic book specialty stores.  (And today, it’s nearly impossible to find comics anywhere else.)  Where comics were once the common currency of kids everywhere, they became a specialized commodity of interest to only those in-the-know.

The effect of this decision was two-fold.  First, it saved comics when they probably would have disappeared completely in competition against laptops, video games, and other youthful time drains.  However, what it also meant is that the audience changed primarily from all children to a devoted (fanatical!) band of devotees.  And – more significantly – this audience has aged, taking comics with them.  By and large, comics are not for children anymore.

To my mind, saving comics also killed them.  Whereas comics reading amongst children once numbered in the many millions, it now numbers in the many thousands among adults.  In addition, it has perverted perfectly delightful adolescent fantasies – such as Batman or Superman – in the misguided struggle to make them “adult,” an aesthetic miscalculation and intellectual dead end.  If you treat much of this material in an “adult” manner, it often becomes even more risible.  What are the recent Batman films, really, other than Lethal Weapon in a shroud?

These thoughts came to mind as I stepped, on a whim, into a comic book store while visiting friends in Long Island.  There were very few young people on hand – though, I must confess, most were younger than I.  (Not all that difficult a proposition these days.)

The thing that struck me the most is that many (many, many, many!) things on the shelves were recreations of things I saw or had as a boy.  Aurora monster model kits; Sean Connery/James Bond model kits; hardcover collections of Superman from the 1970s; figures from the movie Mad Monster Party? (1967) at nearly $25 a figurine; action figures of characters from the sitcom The Munsters (1964-1966); bendable toys of Huckleberry Hound (1958); a Flintstones (1960-1966) watch …. I could go on, but you get the idea. No one under 50 would have any point of reference for most of the wares on parade.  And it dawned on me … comic book stores really don’t even sell comic books anymore --- they sell tired Baby Boomers the youth they so desperately miss.

If ever there was a recipe for extinction, it would be this.  While comic books still operate to a degree as the research and development arm for bloated, senseless “event movies,” the idea that they are a thriving and viable medium is, sadly, no longer correct.  It’s often amusing and even instructive to revisit the passions of one’s youth, but it’s an awful plan for building an ongoing artistic legacy.

An Evening With Sir Roger Moore

If you must like James Bond films, then you can do no better than enjoying the Bond films staring Sir Roger Moore (born 1927).  Though the Moore films are nothing like the Bond novels of Ian Fleming (1908-1964), they have qualities that appeal greatly to your correspondent.  Moore’s Bond films are light entertainments, with a leading man who really gets the joke.

Few premises are more ridiculous than a world famous secret agent, and Moore’s Bond travels (often to some of the most exotic or glamorous places on the globe) with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek.  More than any other actor to inhabit the role, Moore was the complete Gentleman Hero – he lacked the cruelty of Sean Connery or Daniel Craig, the crudity of Timothy Dalton and the nouveau riche affectations of Pierce Brosnan, but he was always accessible and amusing.  In an era when we must suffer through Batman movies that take themselves “seriously” (perhaps one of the most telling indications of our cultural and intellectual rot), Moore’s trifles are a welcome balm indeed. 

These thoughts flittered through my mind last week when I had the great pleasure of attending a question and answer session with legendary actor last Thursday at New York’s Player’s Club.  The event was presented under the auspices of the Hudson Union Society, with Moore in a discussion about his history as Bond during this, the Fiftieth Anniversary of the James Bond film series.

To those of us who grew up with Moore’s Bond pictures, it comes as something as a shock to realize that Moore is now 85 years old.  Though visibly slowed by age, Moore took the stage with a glass of wine and answered interview questions and queries from the audience for more than an hour before stopping to meet every attendee and sign copies of his new book, Bond on Bond.  Many of us then retired to the bar.

Sipping his wine, Moore said, “I don’t have a drinking problem: I can always find liquor” and the evening was off and running.  When asked which was his favorite Bond film, Moore told the audience it was the current release, Skyfall.  Then, under his breath, he murmured, “they paid me to say that.”

Moore’s self-decrepitating humor never failed him.  Commenting on the extremely muscular turn of Daniel Craig – noted especially for gratuitous shots on the beach and in bathing trunks, the octogenarian hero said, “they wanted me for those scenes, but I was busy that day.”

Moore told wonderful stories of Hervé Villechaize (1943 – 1993), whom he playfully described as a “sex maniac” who slept with over 54 women during the making of The Man With the Golden Gun.  “But,” Moore says, “I told him it doesn’t count if you pay for it.”  He also remembered his years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where, “I learned more about sex than about acting.”

Moore told stories about his turn as Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes in New York (“John Huston played Moriarty and said he couldn’t remember his lines, so the art department made the most beautiful idiot cards you had ever seen – all done by hand in calligraphy.  And the bugger was letter perfect when he showed up: he never needed them”); about his inability to ski (“my children would tell me to stay home whenever they had field trips – I was an embarrassment to them”); and expressed his disdain for pop has-been Grace Jones (“next question”).  And watching the audience laugh along with him, I thought it was a shame that Moore became such a bankable leading man when his greatest talents were as a light comedian.

Moore stated that his one unfilled dream was to play the villain in a Bond film – they often have the best dialog and work many fewer days.  I believe that ship has sailed, but it would’ve been a wonderful coda to an amusing – and amused – career.

Bertolucci’s The Dreamers

This week, The Jade Sphinx will be looking at movies that have fallen through the cracks and we start with Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, released in 2003.

The Dreamers created something of a scandal upon its release for its frank and open depiction of teenage sexuality, garnering an NC-17 rating.  (It is amazing to note that the public of 2003 was surprised to find out that teenagers actually had sex, but that’s a topic for another post.)  The film is set in Paris in 1968, right at the start of the infamous student riots, and concerns three young people, a Parisian brother and sister, and an American university student.  The trio meet, learn of their mutual love of film, and the siblings invite the American to live with them in their Paris apartment while their parents vacation out of town.

What happens next is a prolonged ménage au trios, both physical and intellectual.  The trio argue about the relative merits of Greta Garbo, leftist politics and art both pop and fine, while becoming bedmates.  Bertolucci shies away from explicitly underscoring the sexual romance between the young American and the French brother, but shows no restraint in the physical attachment between our hero and the sister.

Life in the sprawling apartment is very enclosed and …, well, incestuous.  The outside world is largely forgotten, including the missing parents and the brewing rebellion outside.  When they do reemerge, the question becomes, have they become the people they have crafted within their protective cocoon, or have the changes not been so profound?

The Dreamers is wonderfully cast, particularly Michael Pitt (born 1981) as Matthew, the American film student.  He has a certain narcissism in keeping with one so young and privileged, but he also displays remarkable vulnerability and tenderness.  One could well believe that he is growing, emotionally and intellectually, as the film unrolls.

Equally strong is Eva Green (born 1980) as Isabelle.  This was Green’s breakout film, leading to her role in Casino Royale (2006), the silly and self-important reboot of the James Bond series.  Her Dreamers performance is uniformly excellent, and courageous for its naked intensity.  (No pun intended.)  Louis Garrel (born 1981), already a familiar face on the international film scene, is brooding and mysterious as brother Theo.  His performance is subtle, always hinting that something is going on just beyond his sculpted and placid beauty.  I am surprised that his career has not had a more stellar trajectory.

That Bernardo Bertolucci (born 1941) should make a film frankly addressing sexuality should come as no surprise from the director of Last Tango in Paris (1972).  The Parma-born Bertolucci started his career with intentions of becoming a poet, but quickly focused on cinema in his college years.  Bertolucci is intensely invested in the language of film, and The Dreamers, with its endless talk about movies and what they mean, is a film for cineastes.

Bertolucci’s film is based on the novel The Holy Innocents, by the late Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair (1944-2011).  The novel is more frank about the Matthew-Theo connection, but the film is otherwise a fairly straightforward adaptation.

Why write about The Dreamers nearly nine years after its release?  Your correspondent was dismayed that the film was received with a collective yawn when first released.  The Dreamers is a beautifully photographed film (doing more for Paris than Midnight in Paris could ever hope to achieve) filled with deft and honest performances.  It also managed to capture a fascinating time and historic event with a sure hand – the film never has the ossified feel of many a period piece.  I believe the film was kept at bay simply because teenage sexuality cannot work for American audiences outside of the smirking banality of comedies like Porky’s.  Articulate, worldly young people terrify us. These are teenagers arguing over art, over classic film and over various political questions – all with intensity unique to adolescence, when we are convinced (and probably right) that we know everything.  So, The Dreamers is a film about exploration – mapping that frightening terrain called adulthood, fashioning an identity from art and the world of the mind, and, yes, finding fulfillment in sexual release.  The trio here are standing on the shoulders of those who have come before them, and are alternately terrified and exhilarated by the view.   

But, really, what has stayed with me all these years was the image of dirty feet.  At one point, Green navigates the mess the apartment has become and the bottoms of her feet are black with filth.  And this, really, is what it means to be young.  The three of them have dirty feet while their heads are in the clouds – and I would be hard-pressed to find a better metaphor for adolescence.