Dueling was
always condemned by moralists, but the imagination of writers worked hard to
shock and humiliate it out of style. Sir Richard Steele pointed out in The Tatler that it was an odd way of
getting satisfaction from a man (there are female instances: http://listverse.com/2017/09/04/top-10-female-duels-and-duelists/)
to give him the opportunity of shooting you through the head. Shakespeare makes
a joke of it: the terrified coxcomb urged to the fight, the terrified woman
disguised as a man, almost forced into a duel by the jokers who later humiliate
Malvolio. Pushkin, later to die in a duel himself, has his foolish hero Eugene
Onegin kill his best friend in a duel growing out of petty irritation.
Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon believes himself to have killed his dueling opponent
when in fact their pistols were loaded with blanks. In The Radetzky March, we are in the twentieth century, though the
officers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire have barely heard the news, when
Lieutenant Trotta’s best friend dies in a duel Trotta’s behavior has provoked,
though he does not fire the shot. For our authors, dueling represents many
centuries of petty resentment, forced acquiescence to a murderous practice, deadly
misunderstandings, tragic and needless consequences.
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