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.

Batman Breeds Thoughts on Culture High and Low, Along with Musings on the Current Cultural Crisis

Yesterday we looked at Glen Weldon’s wonderful new book, Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, and that got us to thinking.  (Before we get to thinking, though, let’s reiterate that Weldon’s book is quite terrific and highly recommended.)  Is Batman art?  And is a deep engagement with Batman (or other facets of Nerd Culture) a worthwhile endeavor?

Before we start exploring, let’s set some ground rules.  We here at The Jade Sphinx have given serious consideration to pop fiction and film, along with kiddie books.  We have also examined literary, artistic and musical works by great masters.  Clearly, we think that pop fictions are worthy of serious consideration … but the mistake this discussion often makes is equating serious consideration with serious art. 

But that is not the case.  Kiddie lit and pop fiction can be crafted with varying degrees of artistry, but that does not necessarily make it art.  Oh, it can be art, but it does not transmute into art simply through virtue of its examination.  A doctoral thesis on Batman, for example, may result in a diploma, but the intrinsic quality of our pointed-eared friend and the body of work about him remains unchanged.

Now, the call to canonize kitsch is a relatively new phenomenon.  From the 1930s through the 1960s – a time of unprecedented media saturation – junk art for children was enjoyed by children.  In what seems was a more innocent time, there were whole industries creating art for children: comic strips and books, movie serials, radio shows, animated cartoons and hosts of literary options created expressly for everyone from beginning readers to teenagers.  Adults could sometimes dip in an appreciative toe to remember the sweet currents of youth, and may even enjoy much of the material, but to become an avid consumer of such was a sign of feeble-mindedness.

Pop fiction for adults also fully realized (and embraced) its limitations.  One well remembers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dedication to his 1912 novel The Lost World (a masterpiece of its kind): I have wrought my simple plan/If I give one hour of joy/To the boy who’s half a man,/Or the man who’s half a boy.  That lovely and poetic preamble is suitable for so much that came before and after, everything from Fu Manchu and Tarzan, to James Bond and Indiana Jones.  Good pop fiction can be terrific stuff: insightful, bracing, engaging and amusing.  It is not to be sneered at; nor, however, is it to be overestimated.

We are not saying, to be clear, that it is impossible for a piece of genre fiction or popular entertainment to elevate into the realm of higher art.  Wind in the Willows, The House at Pooh Corner and Peter Pan are magnificent books, transcending the designation of mere kiddie lit to soar to literary heights.  And one need only to think of Poe, of much of H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, of Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, to realize that many classic novels could also be shelved in the genre sections of your local bookstore.  But, again, such company doesn’t elevate a genre en toto.

But over the last few decades what has changed in the culture at large is a flight from adulthood and complexity, from the challenges of great art and great beauty, and a retreat into comfortable and childish enthusiasms.  Worse than that, consumers of pop culture are demanding that attention not only be paid, but that entry to the Canon is fair and just.  And, in so doing, they debase the wonderful raw power of pop fiction, and the innocence of kiddie lit.

In the 1990s, I was frankly amazed at the adult craze for Harry Potter books.  This is in no way to say that these books were bad, but they were written for children, and a deep identification with them signifies a lack of seriousness.  Worse still, as more and more adults read them, the books lost more and more of their grounding in a child’s world, ending with what was to be the Gotterdammerung of kiddie books.  It became almost impossible to read the last novel in the corpus and remember that it all started with some kids playing ball from atop some brooms.

Much the same thing for adults who obsess over Batman.  It is adults (of questionable maturity) who have demanded the darker, brooding, psychopathic Batman.  It was the same adults who have consigned the sunnier, smiling, and more optimistic Superman into oblivion, insufficiently violent or complex and now hopelessly passé.

What these adults playing with children’s toys forget is that amusements made for children cannot bear the weight they wish to impose upon them.  We are supposed to move on from the amusements of our youth to more challenging, complex and elevating fare.  Enjoy them as palette cleaners, but then get onto the main meal.  The answer is not to make Batman relevant to adults (an impossibility), but to embrace the challenge of real adult art. 

And, again, read and look at what you want.  But a steady diet of aesthetic and cultural junk is much like a steady diet of junk food: it will significantly impair your physical and mental health, greatly diminish your quality of life, and, in the long run, it will kill you.

Now, we make our children’s entertainment for adults.  I can think of few more damming condemnations of us as a culture and as a people that we actually make Batman or Superman movies that are so violent … that children cannot see them. Stop for a moment and ponder how … impossible that would have been as little as 50 years ago.  The idea of a “serious” Batman movie would have been met with well-deserved derision.  But not today.  The cheapening of our culture since the 1960s (and the concomitant tenets of aesthetic relativity), have made this dumbing down not only possible, but inevitable.  The highest grossing films of the year are blockbusters based on 40 year old superhero comics.  This lack of adulthood has poisoned our language, our music, our political discourse. 

This corruption has bled into everything.  For example, in the just-released Against Democracy, a political screed published by Princeton University Press (!), author Jason Brennan breaks the body politic into three classes:  hobbits, hooligans and vulcans. 

Hobbits…?  Vulcans...?  Really?  Is that what 21^st Century adulthood has become?

I love pop fiction.  And when pop fiction is working on all cylinders, it can be wonderful, terrific and … art of a kind.  But it’s like a twinkie: I’ll eat them, but it’s not my sole diet.  And if the very notion of adulthood is to survive, we have to get back to the business of serious art, or our emotional, intellectual and philosophical selves are finished.

Tomorrow: James Bond – it aint art, but nobody does it better.

The Party (1968)

I had so much fun reading American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller, that I decided to briefly write about some of my favorite comedies.  So it was a double bit of serendipity to learn that the 1968 cult hit The Party recently made its way to Blu-Ray and DVD.  If you have not seen this film – and it’s unlikely that you have – get yourself a copy.  You will not be disappointed.

The Party is the only collaboration between Peter Sellers (1925-1980) and director Blake Edwards (1922-2010) that was not a Pink Panther film.  In fact, after shooting the second Panther film, the hilarious A Shot in the Dark (1964), both men vowed never to work with one-another again.

Edwards then conceived a film that would be a tribute to the great silent clowns of his boyhood.  According to Edwards, his childhood was largely an unhappy one, save for the moments of transcendence afforded by such clowns as Buster Keaton (1895-1966) and Harold Lloyd (1893-1971).  He often allowed this silent-screen era slapstick sensibility to creep into his work (look, for instance, at the epic pie fight in The Great Race), but a strictly silent film was a challenge he wanted to set for himself.

Always contemptuous of the Hollywood scene, Edwards conceived of a silent film about an incompetent and accident-prone actor, blackballed by Hollywood but inadvertently invited to a swanky soiree where he wreaks havoc.  The initial screenplay was little more than 60 pages long, and was mostly the set-up for gags that would be improvised on the set.

But who would star in it?

After much internal debate, Edwards decided to bring the project to Sellers, who instantly fell in love with it.  Edwards encouraged Sellers to create a character – a fish out of water who was basically decent, but inherently accident-prone.  Out of whole cloth, Sellers fashioned Hrundi V. Bakshi, the world’s worst actor.  The Party opens with Sellers as Bakshi starring in desert opus Son of Gunga Din, ruining take-after-take and unexpectedly demolishing the key standing set. 

However, his ends up on a party list rather than a kill-list, and from that simple premise, Edwards and his cast improvised the movie, shooting in sequence to ensure that the story flowed properly.

The Party is a remarkable film for its time, and for ours, as well.  The story is so lose and improvisatory, and the narrative arc, such as it is, so fluid that one could easily mistake it for a French comedy of the era.  That Edwards was able to get away with such a high-cost gamble is quite an achievement, and it seems unlikely that something similar would happen again today (unless it involved ray guns or superheroes). 

In addition, it is, for all intents and purposes, a silent film.  Though there is dialog, very little of it moves the story forward, and most of it would take up some three single-spaced pages of text.  It’s not surprising that so many people have been either confounded or disappointed in The Party; it’s the world’s only all-talking silent movie. 

The root of its genius is that both Edwards and Sellers understood on a deep and profound level physical comedy.  They were able to mine gold from simple set-ups.  Here is perhaps my favorite sequence in the film:  Bakshi desperately needs to relieve himself, and finally finding a lavatory, struggles with his environment:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tByH1uM_fnI.

The film resided in limbo for a while, never really finding its audience.  I was lucky enough to see it on late-night television in my boyhood before it seemed to vanish completely.  Since its release, it has acquired something of a cult following, with many ardents of both Sellers and Edwards championing it as their best film.  We wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is something very special, off-the-beaten-track, and splendidly funny.

Happily, Sellers is surrounded by a talented supporting cast.  Special kudos must go to Steve Franken (1932 – 2012) as the drunken waiter – who nearly steals the film with hardly a word spoken.  Franken was a familiar face in both movies and television, and this film will make you wonder why he was never a bigger star.  His comedic timing is flawless, and one wishes a follow-up movie would be built around his character.  Former screen Tarzan Denny Miller (1934 –2014) is especially fetching as cowboy-western star “Wyoming Bill” Kelso, and J. Edward McKinley (1917 – 2004) as the host deadpans superbly.

Fans of period cinema would find much to savor, as well.  Few films scream a 1960s sensibility more than The Party.  Its Henry Mancini (1924-1994) score will either charm or repel you; in addition, the romantic lead is Claudine Longet (born 1942), who is one of the great mysteries of the 1960s.  Quite popular as a singer and actress, she has evaporated into well-deserved obscurity.  Why was she so popular?

Though not to all tastes, The Party comes highly recommended.

Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine and Contemporary Culture

Proving once again that great things often come in small packages, my New York readers could do no better than a visit to the Palitz Gallery at Lubin House, 11 East 61^st Street.  In this small space, Syracuse University Library has managed to cram 61 super-rare works from the long-ago world of pulp magazines – treasures much too fun to miss.  I attended last night with arts advocate Clarissa Crabtree, and the show is sure to please anyone with even a passing interest in Americana or classic pop culture.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: the pulp magazine was so-named because of the rough, wood-pulp paper on which they were printed.  As such, pulps were not supposed to last – they were the essence of disposable literature.  But many, many American pop culture icons emerged from the pulps, including such characters as Doc Savage, The Shadow, Conan the Barbarian, Sam Spade and Tarzan of the Apes.  Writers who worked in the pulps included Ray Bradbury, Dashiell Hammett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, and even world-class crackpot and religious huckster, L. Ron Hubbard.

The heyday of the pulps was roughly from the start of World War I to the end of the 1940s.  They were largely genre-specific, and to walk into a newsstand in the 1930s was to walk into a paradise catering to every taste.  There were magazines devoted to science fiction or supernatural stories, or detective stories, jungle stories, adventure stories, hero pulps and aviation stories.  There even was a short-lived pulp dedicated to stories about airships! 

One of the greatest things about the pulps was the vibrant cover art, well represented in this exhibit.  Several paintings by Norman Saunders are on hand, and they have to be seen to be believed.  Artists worked at breakneck speed, and most of the work created for the pulps no longer exists.  But it is not scarcity alone that makes this exhibit worthwhile -- the pulps were often lurid, but they were lurid to an almost lyrical degree, and much of the work (both art and prose) attains a status of near-poetry.

Also on hand: rare letters from a young writer named Ray Bradbury, still trying to break into the business; a table devoted to The Shadow (the greatest creation of the pulps), including rare radio scripts, advertising posters, the first issue of the magazine, and an Orson Welles radio show playing on a continuous loop; a payment stub for H.P. Lovecraft for his story At the Mountain of Madness, naming Julie Schwartz (of later comic book fame) as his agent; and a copy of Weird Tales containing the first published fiction of Tennessee Williams.

This exhibit runs through April 12, and gallery hours are Monday to Friday 10 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.  Admission is free.

E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!

Regular readers know my affection for all things William Joyce and The Guardians of Childhood, his on-going project of picture books and children’s novels.  Now just in time for Easter, Joyce returns with his second-ever novel in the series, E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!

With the Guardians series, Joyce hopes to create an entire cosmology that incorporates all of the beloved figures of childhood: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Mother Goose and the Tooth Fairy, among them.  To create a backstory, Joyce has conceived of a cosmic battle bringing together all of these figures into opposition against Pitch, also known as the Boogeyman.  The first novel in the series, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King, laid much of the groundwork and introduced us to North (who will later become Santa Claus), the wizard Ombric, the girl Katherine and the robotic Djinni.

Now that much of the necessary exposition is out of the way, Joyce jumps into this installment with a great deal of dash and a sense of high adventure.  In E. Aster Bunnymund, the children of Santoff Claussen are kidnapped by Pitch, and Katherine, Ombric and North band together to travel to the earth’s core to rescue them.  On the way, they enlist the help of the last of the fabled brotherhood of Pookas, the seven-foot tall warrior rabbit E. Aster Bunnymund. 

The initial relationship between the giant rabbit and Santa is one of petty bickering and snide remarks.  Though E. Aster Bunnymund is a tough egg to crack, he and North form an alliance that will clearly create the foundation of what will be a league of great children’s heroes.

William Joyce (born 1957) is, of course, the Academy Award winning author and film-maker.  His heartbreaking The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore was one of the more delightful and moving shorts of recent memory.  As is often the case with Joyce, part of the great delight is to track his many, varied and often uniquely intertwined pop culture inspirations.  Joyce’s imagination is like a great attic filled with comics, old TV shows, pulp novels and adventure stories, toys and Americana, and tumbled and jumbled together until it forms something uniquely its own.  Part of the great fun is running a mental finger down the line of his inspiration and watching him tickle the source.

E. Aster Bunnymund, with his large ears, inter-species bickering and snide comments about “humans” obviously is Joyce’s nod to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.  And much of the backstory for The Man in Moon (with his super-science Golden Age later destroyed in a cataclysmic space explosion) harkens back to Superman, as does Ombric’s inability to alter events of the past.  Joyce also provides a delicious echo of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles when he closes a chapter with, “Mr. North,” he said with dramatic relish.  “They were the ears of a gigantic rabbit.”

The most significant influence in the current book is, of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), author of several ‘Scientific Romances” set in the earth’s core.  (Burroughs so loved the earth’s core that he even set one of his later Tarzan novels there!)  In a neat bit of homage, Joyce employs Burroughs’ method of plotting by splitting his heroes into three separate narrative threads that meet in the closing chapters, and by creating a magnificent “vehicle of wonder” to get our heroes to the earth’s core: the rabbit’s wonderfully realized egg train, much like the Iron Mole in Burroughs’ novels.

Joyce pulls all of these tricks with great humor and elan.  This book is filled with delightful little throw-aways (books in Ombric’s library, for instance, include The History of Levitation While Eating and Mysteries of Vanishing Keys), and his chapter titles are a hoot (consider The Bookworm Turns or the chapter on warrior eggs called The Mad Scramble). 

But what impresses the most is not just Joyce’s narrative drive and endless invention and good humor, but his deep and committed belief in the world he has created.  Despite his pop culture references, Joyce is no ironist and his work is devoid of snark and sarcasm.  It is a fully realized universe created by a man with a mission – and we can feel Joyce’s commitment on every page.  It’s a remarkable performance.

If you do not already own a copy of E. Aster Bunnymund and the Warrior Eggs at the Earth’s Core!, then hop to it!