Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds., The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1983)

             The book’s several authors draw parallels among what Poe’s Dupin called ratiocination; what the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who had read Poe, called by several names, including hypothesis and hypothetical inference, but most often called abduction; and what Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes always oddly called deduction. Abduction, for Peirce, is the process of going from an observation to an interpretation of the fact observed, and it involves a hunch or guess. Thus Holmes sees red dirt on Watson’s boot, knows that the Wigmore Street Post Office has that kind of red dirt that one can’t avoid when entering, and concludes that Watson has been to the Wigmore Street Post Office. Moreover, since Watson was in the same room with him all morning and did not write a letter, together with the fact that Watson has an ample supply of postage stamps in his letter case, leads Holmes to conclude that Watson went to the Post Office to send a telegram. Notice that this kind of guessing—for that is what it is—depends on additional information, such as the state of London streets at the moment and what services are offered at an English post office, but it is not deduction, such as working from some universal such as No post office other than Wigmore Street has red dirt in front of it. Nor is it more than a guess until Watson has confirmed it.

            The most ambitious essay in the book, and the one Eco and Sebeok must have regarded as their centerpiece, is that by Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” which argues that the reading of signs—semiotics—runs through many human endeavors, beginning with hunting, which depends on observing tracks and many other small and seemingly insignificant marks and traces. Diagnostic medicine, also, uses many seemingly unrelated small signs of the body’s appearance and behavior to come to a conclusion. In the nineteenth century, an art historian named Giovanni Morelli developed a method of attribution of paintings based on painters’ particular and habitual ways of depicting small details such as the shape of ears, fingernails, hands, and feet. This technique of connoisseurship has gone in and out of fashion in the years since Morelli used it. Freud saw that the Morelli method of studying seemingly insignificant trifles had a clear parallel in his own practice of psychoanalysis, where usually unnoticed features such as slips of the tongue and absurd dreams could lead to a successful analysis. The observation of seemingly insignificant detail is the cornerstone of the methods of both Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, but it is not just fictional detectives who rely on minor matters such as a hair or a thread to help solve crimes. Even before Holmes, Alphonse Bertillon had developed a method of identifying people by using measurements of ears and other parts of the head and body—anthropometrics—to differentiate one human being from every other one. Bertillon’s methods were too cumbersome to survive, but by 1880, Sir Francis Galton’s system of identifying people by the unique tiny whorls and convolutions of the minute skin ridges on the tips of their fingers was already in use in one district of India, and of course is now universal. Handwriting analysis is another field that treats tiny parts of written letters of the alphabet as important signs for recognition.

            In some of these essays, Sebeok and Eco are just showing off their semiotic or other jargon, but a few others go farther than just self-display or reiteration of the book’s thesis. One of these extends the parallel of Peirce and Holmes to include some observations on the philosopher Karl Popper. Gian Paolo Caprettini’s essay demonstrates that, regardless of his often repeated warning that it’s a capital mistake to theorize without enough data, Sherlock Holmes’s method was to formulate one or more hypothetical explanations on the basis of very little data, and then to look for more data to either confirm or deny such hypotheses. Holmes’s method resembles Popper’s notion of how a real scientist works, in distinction to the conventional notion of “the scientific method,” where hypotheses wait until all the data is in. For Popper, science is much more of a creative act, and Holmes acknowledges that so is his work, insisting as he does that the astute investigator has to have imagination as well as an eye for details.

            Some of the reviewers of this book pointed out that its authors might have at least looked at the modern studies of the mystery story, where they would have found that they had been anticipated in their discovery that Charles Sanders Peirce, in his reading of Poe and in his own writings, was an important parallel figure in the history of crime fiction and its detectives.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Kinky Friedman, Roadkill (1997)

             Kinky Friedman has been a country singer, a Peace Corps volunteer, and a mystery novelist. He was in the news in 2006, running as an independent for governor of Texas and managing to get more than twelve percent of the vote. He toured for years with his band, called the Texas Jewboys. The name may give you a clue to Friedman’s approach to language and propriety. In Roadkill, his tenth mystery novel casting himself in the role of country singer turned private investigator, as in all of Friedman’s books, the writing is raunchy and the political correctness is absent. Friedman never passes on the opportunity to make a bad pun, an obvious double entendre, or a crude reference to body functions or body parts. The result is fairly sophomoric, but hey, we’ve all been sophomores, and the fact that we’ve moved on doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Friedman’s arrested development.

            The mystery in Roadkill concerns Friedman’s real-life friend Willie Nelson, whose tour bus, the Honeysuckle Rose, accidently killed a Hopi Indian on Interstate 40 near Winslow, Arizona. Sometime later, Willie was handed a small buckskin package, a bundle of bad medicine that sends him into a noncommunicative funk. But it’s clear to his friends, including Friedman, that Nelson believes he is going to die from an Indian curse. Friedman doesn’t believe it, and when Nelson’s look-alike assistant is shot, he begins to investigate. Willie Nelson, after all, is a friend of the Indians, and probably part Indian himself. Moreover, if he were fated to die, why would it be necessary to try to kill him?

            Part of the book takes place on the road with Willie’s tour and part in New York, where Friedman’s apartment is fitted up in ways that recall the bachelor quarters of Sherlock Holmes and Watson in Baker Street. Instead of keeping pipe tobacco in a Persian slipper like Holmes, Kinky keeps Cuban cigars in a porcelain head of Sherlock Holmes. Friedman’s Watson is called Ratso, and there are other allusions to mystery writing. The suspect in this case is named Arthur W. Upfield—the name will be familiar to mystery fans as the Australian writer who created the Aborigine Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police, and Friedman more than once refers to “pointing the bone,” or directing an Aborigine curse; the phrase is the title of one of Upfield’s books.

            In addition to Willie Nelson and some of the members of his entourage, some of Friedman’s other friends show up with their real names in his books. If they all do indeed remain friends, it’s a testimony that none of them is taking Friedman’s books too seriously. We shouldn’t either; if you’re in the mood for a raunchy reading romp, the Kinkster’s your man.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Domecq, H. Bustos [Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares], Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, (1942), trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1980).

 

            Not only a parody of the detective mystery genre but also a satire aimed at Argentinian societal types, these six stories give Argentina its first fictional detective. Don Isidro, wrongly convicted for a murder, is the ultimate armchair detective; even Nero Wolfe and Mycroft Holmes occasionally venture out from their lodgings, but Parodi can’t stir from Cell 273. Prison has turned him from an ordinary barber to an extraordinary crime-solver. A series of flamboyant characters approach him there, including Achilles Molinari, a self-important journalist, a poet manqué named Carlos Anglado, another would-be literary figure who also fancies himself a detective, Gervasio Montenegro, and several Chinese who are much more voluble than inscrutable. Montenegro also writes the preface, in which he reveals himself to be a chauvinist, an anti-Semite, and a fool.

            Parodi listens to his clients deliver these long-winded tales that Borges himself described later as “baroque” and “painful…for the reader.” Then, after fifteen prolix pages, Parodi solves each problem succinctly, usually puncturing his clients’ pretensions to cleverness as well as implicitly condemning their prolixity by his brevity.

            The tales themselves allude to famous detective fictions: “The Twelves Figures of the World” to Chesterton’s intricate conspiracy story The Man Who Was Thursday, “The Nights of Goliadkin” to Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, and “Tai An’s Long Search” to “The Purloined Letter.” Allusions to Father Brown and other famous detectives may be found throughout, and it might be useful if a student of Argentine history of the first half of the twentieth century would annotate the references to contemporary figures and events.

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Karen Joy Fowler, Wit's End (2008)

            I went to a concert in the late sixties to see a Canadian singing duo called Ian and Sylvia. One of their original songs, “Four Strong Winds,” had been high on the charts a few years before. When they started this song, the audience began to sing it, and when Ian and Sylvia Tyson tried to change the words in the third verse, they were drowned out by the crowd’s singing of the lyrics that had been on the record. Just whose song was it, I wondered at the time.

            This question of who really owns a creative project like a song or in this case a book’s characters, is taken up by Karen Joy Fowler in her 2008 mystery, Wit’s End. In this book, Rima Lansill, saddened and confused by the deaths of her mother, father, and younger brother, arrives at Wit’s End, the Santa Cruz shoreline house of her godmother, the mystery writer Addison Early. She comes for a kind of rest cure and stays to solve a mystery.

            The mystery is partly what the relationship was between Rima’s father and Addison, a relationship that would prompt Addison to put Rima’s father in one of her mysteries as a serial killer, complete with his real name. But there’s also a stalker who haunts the coast house and who may or may not be the same woman who writes fan letters to Addison’s fictional detective and who may or may not have grown up in a cult called the Holy City with the person who inspired the character of the detective.

            At the house called Wit’s End, Rima encounters a cast of eccentrics that includes Tilda the tattooed cook, her unpleasant son Martin, the dog walkers Scorch and Cody, and various strangers who have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. The detective in Addison’s books becomes a regular visitor in Rima’s dreams, and she finds herself drawn into an investigation that puts her in danger from those who have been deranged by their bizarre and violent past.

            Karen Joy Fowler has had several bestselling books, the most recent being The Jane Austen Book Club. She’s not really a mystery writer. What I mean by that is that her attention is always less with pacing Rima’s discoveries and clearly elucidating the mystery, always more with the developing new social order at Wit’s End, as well as whether and how Rima will fit into it. As she has shown from previous books, some of which combine historical and science fiction, she’s a little bit of a genre bender. But she kept me reading with a really ingratiating style that is often funny and never mistakes sarcasm for wit.

 

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.