The fourth of July fireworks show in Tucson this year had a strange hiatus; after the first few rockets exploded, silence. There was murmuring among all of us ranged along the streets at the base of Sentinel Peak--or "A" Mountain as it's usually called because of the huge "A" on its flank that the University of Arizona students refurbish each year. The fireworks are launched from near the top of Sentinel Peak. But nothing happened for a full half hour. The crowd began to disperse after ten minutes or so, and probably only half of us were still there when the show suddenly resumed, ran its normal thrity or forty minutes, and concluded with a noisy, colorful finale. We found out later one of the pyrotechnic crew needed medical assistance, so they stopped the show while they bundled him off to the hospital. But it was not, as many of us suspected, an injury form the fireworks themselves.
As any live fireworks show does, this one made me recall the most spectacular fireworks display I've ever seen. During my high school years in Chandler, a hundred miles north of Tucson, the Independence Day show took place on the football field of Chandler High. My girl friend and I climbed into the bleachers early for the show in the last summer I lived there. A few ground displays were lighted, including the usual American flag in sparklers and pinwheels. Two rockets shot up; one exploded into color and the other gave a tremendous bang. Then a trail of fire shot diagonally across the field on the ground; a rocket had fallen over. A small fire started, and in its light we could see people running off the field in all directions. Almost instantly, with many crackles and bangs, everything went off. The field was covered with a hemisphere of fire--colored, intense light, ranging up perhaps fifty feet, but somehow, mercifully, contained on its sides. Had rockets fired into the bleachers we all, with no time to move or place to go, would have been doomed. As it was, we just stared. The blaze of light hovered over the field for perhaps thirty seconds. As it was succeeded by a layer of smoke, the fire engines stationed on the track moved slowly onto the field. Several minutes passed before anyone said anything.
NEW BOOK: THE GOLDEN ERA OF SHERLOCK HOLMES AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Michael Cohen, The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries (Milwaukee: Genius Book Publishing, 2024).
In 1891, a new London magazine, the Strand, decided to publish short mysteries in connected series. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories about Sherlock Holmes nearly doubled the magazine’s circulation. Other magazines searched for tales with the same kind of appeal. Dozens of men and women began to write detective stories in the series format of the Holmes Adventures. An enormous flowering of this kind of tale followed, with stories that featured female and male detectives, professionals and amateurs, young and old, aristocrats, gentlefolk, and plain folk. Detectives went rogue and became burglars and con men. Others developed occult powers. It was a Golden Era of detective fiction, and it lasted for two and a half decades until the First World War. Nothing of its variety had been seen before. Michael Cohen’s The Golden Era of Sherlock Holmes and His Contemporaries is a guide to this trove of stories that fascinated readers a century and a quarter ago. In clear and crisp prose, Cohen takes you through the variety of stories with brief descriptions, and he shows you where to find the stories online in their original, illustrated magazine versions. Here you’ll find names you knew, such as Chesterton’s Father Brown, and less well-known ones such as Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, Anna Katherine Green’s debutante detective Violet Strange, and Gelett Burgess’s “Seer of Secrets,” Astro.
No comments:
Post a Comment