Coming down the King’s Canyon trail
near Tucson, I found myself thinking of a line from Kipling: “And you may hear
a breech-bolt snick, though never a man is seen.” That canyon, aside from its saguaro
and prickly pear, probably looks a good deal like some of the terrain in
Afghanistan. I was thinking what a shame that we didn’t learn anything from the
British experience there, or the Russian. Even supposing we had to eliminate
the Al-Qaeda camps and destabilize the Taliban for a while, we could have hit
them hard, chased them up into the high mountains for a while, and used what
time we had to train ten thousand Afghans to be drill sergeants, and then GOT
THE HELL OUT, leaving a trail of money behind us, and sending more unless and
until the Taliban took over again. Ten years. Alas. With the number of dead,
limbless, or brain-damaged only a small part of the ongoing cost of mental
derangement and suicide. When I got home I looked up “The Ballad of East and
West” and found that I’d had the line almost right. It’s really: “And ye may
hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.” Those poor guys are still
being ambushed, even after they get back to the States from their third or
fourth deployment.
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.
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