I have an electric toothbrush that indicates how long I should continue to brush. It pauses briefly every thirty seconds; then at the end of two minutes its motor stutters to tell me I've done enough. I do this twice a day, and this morning I realized for the first time that every two weeks I'm spending an hour brushing my teeth, or, to put it in a more depressing way, every year I spend an entire day--24 hours--doing nothing but standing in front of a sink with a toothbrush in my mouth. Maybe I should spend less time brushing. Wouldn't regaining half a day be worth two or three more hours in the dentist's chair?
This train of thought is much too gloomy to pursue. How much time waiting for lights to turn green? Washing coffee cups? Buttoning, unbuttoning, or trying to get the damned bottom parts of the zipper engaged?
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