Michael Dirda, On Conan Doyle: or, the Whole Art of Storytelling (2012)

             Dirda discovered Sherlock Holmes when he was a boy and says of reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the first time “I shivered with fearful pleasure, scrunched further down in under my thick blanket…as happy as I will ever be.” He goes back and forth between his own experience with Conan Doyle’s writing and description of his life.

            The young Dirda in Lorrain, Ohio finds the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes which keeps him busy for a while. In the course of his going to college at nearby Oberlin, moving on to graduate school at Cornell, and ending up, after some teaching and translating, finding his niche reviewing for the Washington Post’s Book World, he expands his reading to Conan Doyle’s other works, including his historical novel The White Company and his “club tales” narrated by Brigadier Gerard (“comically naïve, charmingly vain, and absolutely convinced that every woman finds him irresistible”). Dirda’s grasp of Conan Doyle’s oeuvre is wide and deep, though he confesses to not having read everything. He notes the author’s efforts to find justice for the unjustly accused George Edalji and Oscar Slater. He also notes Conan Doyle’s thirteen books on Spiritualism and the one arguing for the existence of fairies. He has read the stories, mostly based on Doyle’s and other doctors’ experience, in Round the Red Lamp, as well as his book on books, Through the Magic Door, and autobiography, Memories and Adventures.

            Dirda got involved with The Baker Street Irregulars, the club that originated so-called “Sherlockian scholarship”—the whole tongue-in-cheek field of writing about Holmes and Watson as if they were real people. Something too much of this, here, but the book is entertaining and informative (I didn’t know about the “club tales,” for instance) for those of us who have been lifelong Holmes fans.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child, (Colin Duckworth, 1977; rpt. Mariner, 1999).

            Penelope Fitzgerald is a British novelist who did not begin publishing until she was in her sixties, but who eventually won England’s top literary award, the Booker Prize, as well as the National Book Critics Award in this country.  Her first book, The Golden Child, is a mystery based on the Tutankhamen exhibition which came to London’s British Museum in 1972.  But the museum in the book is not quite the British Museum, though it resembles it; the Golden Child of the title, a gold-encrusted mummy, is not quite Tutankhamen; his country of origin is not Egypt but “Garamantia;” and the museum director is not quite Lord Kenneth Clark, though he looks and acts like him.  And unlike the Tutankhamen exhibit, this one turns out to be a fake; the thousands of people in folded queues in the famous courtyard are unaware that the mummy in the gilded sarcophagus is not the adolescent king but a much more modern corpse covered with gold-leaf.

            The quirky staff of the museum, besides the Kenneth Clark look-alike, includes a precious aristocrat his coworkers call the May Queen, a ubiquitous assistant known only as Jones—whose name turns out to be Jones Jones—the cantankerous old Sir William, discoverer of the real treasure of the Golden Child, and Sir William’s sleepy, insouciant, six-month’s pregnant secretary Dousha Vartarian.

            Fitzgerald shows a Dickensian playfulness about names, such as that of Professor Untermensch, the expert on hieroglyphics.  The book has a parody Frenchman, a sort of combination of Jacques Derrida and Claude Levi-Strauss.  There’s a little touch of P. G. Wodehouse and more than a little reminder of Waugh as the museum employee at the bottom of the food chain is the one singled out for an intrigue-filled trip to Moscow, where he uncovers the real Golden Child artifacts and the international Cold War politics that dictate that a fake one be sent to England.  The British ambassador to Garamantia, where the Golden Child came from, is, according to the museum director, “Pombo Greene, whom I have known, since he was in my election at Eton, to be exceptionally foolish and incompetent.”

            The book has an orthodox mystery plot with a couple of murders, but its strength is social comedy, and its conclusion is a farcical scene which satisfies our desire for poetic justice.  Fitzgerald died in 2002, shortly after this book was reissued in a Mariner paperback.  It’s her only mystery.

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Amanda Cross [Carolyn Heilbrun], In the Last Analysis (1964)

Uncommon Mysteries is the heading I’m using for brief notes I’ve made about mysteries I found odd, or especially good, or memorable in some other way. Some of these notes were broadcast as fillers on a public radio station, WKMS, in Murray, Kentucky, a decade ago. Others are new.

             Kate Fansler teaches literature at an unnamed private university in New York. A student of hers, Janet Harrison, asks her to recommend a psychiatrist. The year is 1962, and psychiatry is all the rage. Fansler is not sure she believes in psychiatrists, but she has slept with one, and she gives her student the name of her former lover, Dr. Emanuel Bauer. Several months later Fansler discovers that Janet Harrison has been found, murdered, on Emanuel Bauer’s couch.

            It appears that the police have no intention of investigating the murder beyond finding more evidence to incriminate their only suspect, Dr. Bauer. Fansler decides to do a little investigating herself. She enlists the aid of an old friend, Reed Amherst, who is an Assistant District Attorney, and she is also helped by Jerry, a young man about to marry her niece.  Fansler figures out that Janet learned a secret about the offices Dr. Bauer shares with other doctors. Specifically, she discovered that the gynecologist in the adjoining office is not in fact Dr. Michael Barrister, whose name is on the door. Harrison, it turns out, had once been the real Barrister's lover. So the book, in the last analysis, is very much a tale of former lovers.

            A literary allusion to D.H.Lawrence's The Rainbow tips Fansler off to the truth.  And that’s fitting because Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, an English literature scholar who taught for many years at Columbia. In 1972 Heilbrun became the first woman tenured and promoted to a full professorship at Columbia, a fact and a date that implies a good deal of resistance to women and an old school, old boy network at that university. Not surprisingly, Heilbrun became a feminist.

            In the Last Analysis was the first of Heilbrun’s Kate Fansler mysteries, and for a time only the publishers knew the identity of these books’ author. By the time Heilbrun was revealed as Amanda Cross, she had tenure, and there couldn’t be any reprisals for some of the highly unflattering depictions of her colleagues that show up in her books. Heilbrun wrote fourteen Kate Fansler novels in all, and this first one is less concerned with academic life than most of the others. The series ended with The Edge of Doom, published a year before her death. She also wrote books of literary criticism and personal books about writing, about being a woman author