The Books I Read In March

Fiction

'The Murder in the Basement' by Anthony Berkeley [Anthony Berkeley Cox] 

I have been given quite a lot of the classic crime novels that the British Library has found great success in re-releasing over the past decade. Most are from the 1920s and 1930s (some earlier, some later) and were often good sellers at the time but have been forgotten by subsequent generations. This was the first of those books I had (not by date of publication but by surname of the author) that I have. Berkeley is not well known these days but was actually a founder of the Detection Club which counted renowned crime authors in its membership.

This novel is a classic of the genre, revolving around a corpse found in the basement of a semi-detached London house that a married couple have just moved into which after the body is finally identified, proves to be linked to a small fee-paying preparatory school just north of London. The private school setting is one that turns up often in books of the time, this one was published in 1932; even Hercule Poirot has a case at one. 

Berkeley has two protagonists that he had used in a previous novel Chief Inspector Moresby and author Roger Sheringham who has a connection to the school. The novel is effectively divided into three parts.The first focuses on identifying the corpse. Then the middle part is actually a novel in the novel that Sheringham has written detailing the tensions between various members of staff as a basis for Moresby's further investigation. The third part is tackling the issue of the prime suspect and whether it can be proven that they did and even if they should be the prime suspect.

The first part of the novel can rather lead you to think this is a going-through-the-motions novel. It is very police procedural in identifying the corpse with what was available at the time. However, Berkeley lifts the novel through the conceit of the novel in the novel and then in the third part, disentangling issues around the prime suspect. You come away feeling that it is greater than the sum of its parts.

'The State of the Art' by Iain M. Banks

This is a collection of science fiction short stories by Banks. The fact that at the end of the month in which I read it, I struggle to recall all of the stories, says something as I was not overly impressed. This may be because it was published in 1991 and as a result the 'unfailing inventiveness' which the review from 'The Guardian' states now may seem well established tropes and indeed rather pretentious. There is a sentient plant in 'Odd Attachment' plucking a human apart. 'Descendant' is about the relationship between a crashed spaceship pilot and his intelligent space suit, that actually felt like a story from the 1950s or 1960s as is 'Cleaning Up' about alien technology appearing all over the Earth at random. The concepts they explore are well known now. Perhaps the strongest stories come from Banks's Culture setting. 'The State of the Art' about Culture explorers coming to Earth and getting too involved, while quite commonplace is reasonably well handled as is 'A Gift from the Culture' about a super-powered weapon to be used for an assassination.

In many ways this book shows that Banks was grounded in the science fiction of the preceding decades. He even explores a Moorcockian set-up with fragmented text in 'Scratch'. Thus, if you are new to science fiction this book will be a good introduction that is quickly consumed and highlights many themes that 20th Century science fiction concerned itself with. For me, though, I had been expecting more and so reading it was rather mundane.

'The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard' by Arthur Conan Doyle

This is a collection of 8 short stories featuring a French hussar during the Napoleonic Wars. Many have likened him to Harry Flashman in (1969-2005), Gerard is not as intelligent as Flashman, but certainly has that self-belief. He thinks that he is very successful with the ladies, but in fact we never have anything more than his word for it, probably due to these stories being published in literary magazines at the end of the 19th Century. While they are brisk, Conan Doyle does really show his skill with the short stories, which in fact most of the Sherlock Holmes adventures were as well. There is a good attention to detail as Gerard finds himself in different parts of the war, from what would now be Poland across to Portugal. Conan Doyle brings out the different arms of the forces and nationalities too and these form a sound basis for witty stories. My edition was only 188 pages long so you could get through it in a single sitting. I do recommend it, if this sounds like your kind of thing.

'The Other Side of Silence' by Philip Kerr

This is the 11th Bernie Gunther book and features him working as a hotel concierge on the French Riviera. In contrast to the previous novels, despite for some brief asides to 1937 and 1944/45, most of this one is set in 1956. Set at the height of the Cold War and during the Suez Crisis it is much more of a spy novel than a crime novel. As is typical, Gunther crosses paths with someone from his past, in this case an SS captain, Harald Hennig that he knew in Berlin before the war and then in Königsberg [Kaliningrad] near the end of the war. The story features real people particularly the British author, Somerset Maugham and his nephew both of who lived on the Riviera at the time. Maugham is being blackmailed and is encouraged to use Gunther as a go-between with the blackmailer. It soon is revealed, however, that the scheme is more about getting to the British intelligence agencies as Maugham previously worked for them. Following the defection of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, there appears to the East Germans and the Soviets a way to embarrass the British especially with their allies the Americans who are increasingly dubious of them.

Compared to the previous novels, this one has little action and much more dialogue, so feels more like a John Le Carré novel. It is a slow burn in terms of determining what is going on with the various blackmailing. The settings in rich houses and hotels on the Riviera in the 1950s is very well portrayed.  The scene which needs to be noted is how Gunther adeptly manages to turn what is being done to set him up, against his antagonists. Given what we know of the character, we know he has the skills, but Kerr renders the scene admirably. Gunther again gets to sleep with a woman young enough to be his daughter, though in contrast to The Woman from Zagreb' (2015), the previous novel in the series where this happens, this one has a more feasible explanation.

Overall, this is different to the other Gunther novels and may appeal more to those looking for a kind of classic spy novel rather than a detective one.

Non-Fiction

'The Pelican Guide to English Literature 1: The Age of Chaucer' ed. by Boris Ford

I read the 7th volume in the revised version of this series, 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 7. From James to Eliot' edited by Boris Ford back in August 2021: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2021/08/books-i-listened-toread-in-august.html  The various writers who contributed to that volume were very dismissive of the authors they were asked to comment, without exception judging them as far less competent than authors and poets of previous centuries. In Volume 1, fortunately, the attitude is much more positive. I imagine that is because the contributors were eager to promote medieval literature including the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland but also far less well known authors. The only one who really suffers disapproval is Edmund Spenser who while recognising he was an author in a transitional period, Derek Traversi feels was not as good as he could have been and was too derivative of outdated approaches something he puts down to Spenser's disappointing career in public service.

As Ford notes a lot of these texts are not easily available to the general reader, so entire texts are included in the second part of the book after the critiques of the first part. Thus there is an interesting range of stories and plays, particularly allegorical ones. As there is reference to work from different parts of England and indeed Scotland, you can see the regional variations in English of the time. Especially in 'Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight' (still attracting attention as the 2021 movie showed) we see specifically north-western English with words that seem drawn from Swedish, Dutch, German and French. A lot of the stories have religious themes which is unsurprising given as contributors note, the importance of miracle plays in culture of the time. In addition, what is shown in this book is simply what has survived and it is certain there were many other works that are now lost.

Thus, this is an interesting book for people who enjoyed Chaucer or Langland or who are interested in having an insight into what concerned medieval people (and what made them laugh) and what they would watch or have read to them. The thing is, while there are numerous footnotes outlining what various words mean and after reading a lot of it, you get a feel for some of the commonly used words, for the most part you are rather wading through Middle English texts and this needs a lot of attention and patience. I think the effort is worth it for what is revealed. However, this is far from being an easy book to read and will take you a lot of time and effort. Ironically the easiest chapter is the incongruous one on medieval architecture, which I am not sure why it was included.

'The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941' translated and edited by Fred Taylor

Fuller collections of Goebbels diaries have come to light since this edition was published in 1983. However, this one does provide a slice of them from which we can learn a lot. Josef Goebbels was both the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Gauleiter of Berlin. As these diaries make clear he was very close to Hitler and indeed murdered his children and wife and committed suicide with Hitler in the bunker at the end of the Second World War when other leading Nazis had fled.

The diaries provide interesting insights into facets of the Nazi regime but reading them at this time, constantly made me hear echoes of populist attitudes and rhetoric which has become so common again in the 2020s. Throughout Goebbels is painfully smug. Any speech he, let alone Hitler gives, as well as their writing is assumed to be the most important thing in not just Germany's but the world's media. Goebbels even believed that this propaganda effectively killed former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in November 1940 when actually he died of bowel cancer.

Any Nazi event is seen by Goebbels as the biggest and best that has ever been hosted. Goebbels bitterly complains that all claims, especially those by the British are lies that must be vigorously contested and they, especially Churchill, will pay the price for this in the future. Yet, he also outlines all the lies he is pumping into other countries whether neutral or the enemy. This double standard is apparent incessantly and for someone living in 2024 seems very familiar.

Goebbels's attitudes do lead him to make mistake. All through 1940 he keeps expecting the British to surrender. Every bombing raid he insists is lowering the British morale to a point that it is unsustainable for the country to continue fighting and that the Americans are losing faith in the British. In contrast he dismisses the air raids on Germany as almost minimal and insists that German morale will not be harmed by them. You slowly see a change and by 1941 even Goebbels recognises that if the German public can persist under such attacks that there is nothing to say that the British and Soviet publics can too and that imminent surrender is far from likely. However, this initial attitude applied not just to Britain and the USSR but to Yugoslavia and Greece, does remind us that the Germans went into these battles with strong assumptions of quick and easy victories. Goebbels's access to Hitler and his ability to interfere in aspects far outside his assigned portfolios adds to this fact.

The preparations for the invasion of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Greece are interesting. The internecine battles with Nazi officials and other departments become tiresome but do show how chaotic the Nazi regime was. The Foreign Office in particular seems despised by all sides of the regime but retained power and influence. It is hard to swallow Goebbels wittering on about his beloved children, his numerous houses and the art works he is buying. These statements do nothing to humanise the man and it is clear that he finds it difficult to comprehend anything outside his own desires.

I found this book useful to contextualise the ones I have been reading in recent years about the Nazi regime and to show some of the reasons by what often seemed to be irrational policies and behaviour by its staff.

Books I Listened To/Read in May

 Fiction

'The Rituals of Infinity' by Michael Moorcock

This was a Moorcock novel that I had not encountered before. It was first serialised in the 'New Worlds' magazine, 1965-6 before being released as a novel in 1971. I do miss the days of the slim science fiction novels. My edition of this book is only 192 pages long. There is something crisp and to the point of this kind of novel which seems absent these days. The central concept of the novel is that the hero Professor Faustaff is part of a team travelling between a number of alternative Earths that have been created and discovered but are being rather erratically destroyed. Yet another Earth appears and people from other versions are drawn there to re-enact various scenes from Earth's history, the rituals of the title. Fighting back against the demolitions mutates the planets further. For a short novel it covers the idea quickly and yet manages to get in ambivalent characters and complex twists before the true antagonists are revealed. Faustaff is a robust character, unlike many of those Moorcock subsequently wrote. The 1960s background is apparent in that sex is never far from anyone's minds and a young woman simply drops into having sex with Faustaff and waits around while he adventures so they can have more. Though very much of its time, it does show the inventiveness of Moorcock at a time before some of his writing became so esoteric as to easily lose readers.

'Rome. The Emperor's Spy' by M.C. [Manda] Scott

Manda Scott is a very accessible author and she wrote a nice email in response to one I sent her via her website. I was particularly interested in the short story which is included at the end of this novel, 'The Roman in Britain' which is a 'what if?' story about Boudica being victorious and driving the Romans out of Britain, a topic which featured in my chapter, 'From these Shores' in my 'what if?' anthology 'Route Diverted: What If? Stories of the British' (2015). It was great to see someone who has written a lot on the Roman period tackle this topic.

This is the first book in the second tetralogy from Scott, bringing over characters from her successful Boudica tetralogy, 2003-2006. She has also written spy fiction and this book combines the two genres. It is around a team of chariot racers and their support staff in the reign of Emperor Nero leading up to the Great Fire of Rome in 64. This provides the context for seeking out a prophesy which says that if Rome and Jerusalem are burnt then there will be the Second Coming. A heavily scarred and crippled spy, Sebastos Pantera accompanies the team from their starting point near what is modern-day Cherbourg in northern France to a training camp in Alexandria, Egypt and on to Rome itself. This is a novel which is unafraid to feature a number of LGB characters, in line with the cultures of the time.

One challenge of the book is the multiple viewpoints as Scott has brought in Math, a male prostitute and trainee charioteer, son of a British warrior, 'Ajax' the prime charioteer of the team concealing a past in the Middle East and his sometime lover, healer, Hannah alert not just to the Sibylline Oracles but also the factions forming early Christianity. This can make it complex for the reader and there are some scenes such as a fire at the town in France and later during the torture by the prime antagonist when Scott goes through what is happening a number of times from different perspectives. The fragmentation between the three sites, though adding background interest, also complicates and lengthens the novel, reducing some of its dynamism.

I did find the discussion of just two of the different factions that followed in the wake of Jesus (or indeed Judas as he may have been named) interesting. It seems ironic this was the third book in two months I had read/listened to which looked at how people did not believe Jesus was divine until much later, centuries after his death. The portrayal by modern-day Christians of the Bible being written during or immediately after Jesus's lifetime and that there is a simple path from the early churches to the modern one, is mistaken. In an essay at the end, Scott highlights that there were perhaps 30 factions that might have become the Christian Church and the one led by St. Peter easily might not have won out.

The conspiracy, the spying elements, the races and fighting against the final fire, are the highlights of the book and where Scott shows her ability with the tension and action. She certainly grounds her novel in detailed research but sensibly uses that as rich colouring while saving the historical debate to the essay at the end. Overall this is not a bad book. If the multiple viewpoints on particular incidents is reduced in subsequent books then I would be happy to read more in the series. I certainly welcome that someone has brought the spy novel to a very different era to the Cold War.

'The Tinner's Corpse' by Bernard Knight

I welcomed the fact that this novel eschewed the action-adventure stuff of the previous two. Instead it focuses on one and then a second quite mundane murders among the tin panning industry of Dartmoor. Knight has done a lot of research and shows how the industry at the time outstripped that of Cornwall and was the second most profitable export from England. Consequently, tinners were permitted their own kind of parliament and bar for crimes of physical harm, had their own laws and prison. Knight also moves on with his protagonist, Sir John De Wolfe's life. A second coroner is appointed to North Devon and De Wolfe's relationship with his tavern landlady mistress comes to an end. There is a lot of trekking around Dartmoor but this is handled without it being tedious and giving a real feel for the locales which differ so much from Exeter where De Wolfe is based and its surrounding countryside.

The book lines up a number of suspects and has the classic situation of a contested will with various precepts. However, just as you feel you are building to a satisfying conclusion, the book stops. I have always been supportive of crime stories in which the criminal is not brought to justice and it is to be expected with stories set in the 12th Century when power and status meant much more than actual guilt and torture was habitually used in investigations. However, it seems in this case that Knight reached a certain page (330 in my edition) and was told to stop. There are no arrests, no resolution, not even De Wolfe being certain who the guilty individual(s) was/were. It just crashes to an end. I do not know if Knight finishes off the story in a subsequent novel or we simply have to put up with this. After his need for action to round off the previous two novels, it seems he was at a loss as to how to end this one. However, whatever the cause, whether he had no idea how to end it or publishers told him to cease, this makes it probably the most disappointing of the series. As I have a number of the subsequent books, I can only hope he handled them better or I will have to abandon reading them.

Non-Fiction

'A History of Latin America' by George Pendle

This book was first published in 1963 but was updated to 1976, the year before Pendle's death. It continued to be reprinted and my edition is from 1987. Thus, you should not expect to find any recent history of the countries covered. However, this is a good introduction to the region and Pendle is excellent in showing how long-term factors such as the geography, the various ethnicities, the relationship with Europe, the beliefs and the economic factors have shaped the diverse countries in the region throughout the centuries right into the 20th Century. He manages to summarise events from the civilisations in place before Europeans arrived, the conquistadors, the break away from the colonial countries, the various wars and revolutions then caudillo regimes very well. This is a quick way to get an engaging description of the various countries set in context, perhaps as a basis for reading newer works. I found it easy to read and full of details of which I had been ignorant before, despite having even studied Latin American history for a period in the 1980s when I bought this book.

Audio Books - Fiction

'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes I' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; read by David Timson

This is one of the Naxos audio book versions of the stories. This volume contains 'The Speckled Band', 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches', 'The Stock-Broker’s Clerk' and 'The Red-Headed League'. These stories effectively break into two pairs with the first two about young women put under pressure by nefarious men and the second two about honest urban workers tricked for the purposes of a crime. Hearing them in this collection really highlighted to me what Conan Doyle did well in detailing late Victorian society. Here we see women mixed up in legal and inheritance situations as the result of deaths and remarriage. The step-family is far from being a late 20th Century invention too many people pretend.

In addition, there is a sense of vulnerability, that many in an age without social welfare were at the mercy of relatives and employers. Conan Doyle does seem to chide, in turn the stock-broker's clerk and the pawn broker, for not being more suspicious of overly well-paid positions they are offered; double pay for a job is a trait in a number of the Holmes stories. However, he also shows that at a time without even labour exchanges, let alone Jobseeker's Allowance, how people had to accept what was offered, no matter how dubious, or face penury. Thus, though I was familiar with the stories, having them this way, I found something more in them. Timson is excellent with the range of voices covered, both male and female, but especially Holmes and really brings to life the details of the text. Particularly memorable was a line from 'The Red-Headed League': 'He is as brave as bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster'!

What If Sherlock Holmes Had Never Returned From The Reichenbach Falls?

Earlier this year I watched a rather confused and disappointing drama, 'Reichenbach Falls' (2007).  The one-off drama based on an Ian Rakin short story was set in modern day Edinburgh and initially appeared to be about a detective inspector, Jim Buchan, working in the city whose former lover, Clara, is now wife of a successful author, Jack Harvey.  The detective begins to see the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and it transpires that the detective himself is not real, but a figment of the imagination of real-life author Jack Harvey.  Harvey plans to kill off his long-running character the way that Doyle did with Holmes in 'The Final Problem' (1893) when Holmes fell to his death battling Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.  Like Doyle, however, Harvey is encouraged to retrieve Buchan and so in his own mind, Buchan comes back to life, a life we see as if it was real.  Despite being based on an interesting concept, the drama was poorly made and left me very dissatisfied.  However, it did get me thinking about how literature would have been different if Doyle had not decided to bring Holmes back.

'The Final Problem' was the 24th Sherlock Holmes short story.  They had all featured in 'The Strand' magazine and had been collected as 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' (1892) and 'The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes' (1894), of which 'The Final Problem', set in 1891 is the last story.  There had also been two novels, 'A Study in Scarlet' (1887) and 'The Sign of Four' (1890).  Thus, quite an extensive collection which had attracted global popularity.  As I have noted before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/01/real-sherlock-holmes.html  if you compare the Sherlock Holmes stories with most of its rival detective series, you see that the complexity of the mysteries combined with the amoral approach of Holmes made the character stand out.  However, you can also understand, why, after seven years, Doyle felt a need to move on to new characters. 

Interestingly in Michael Dibdin's story, 'The Last Sherlock Holmes Story' (1978), Holmes is a real man but turns out to have been Jack the Ripper and is killed at the time 'The Final Bow' is written.  Consequently the subsequent stories are 'made up' by Dr. John Watson, who in this book was also a real person.  I do wonder why authors are attracted to playing around with the reality/fiction of Holmes.  You see it again in the movie 'Without A Clue' (1988) in which Holmes is shown as a bumbling former actor who acts only as a figurehead for Watson's astute detective work.

Which stories would be missing, if after 1894, Doyle had not been persuaded to revive Holmes?  As it was Doyle took a break, not publishing a proper Holmes story until 1902, though the character was in the background of some short stories that Doyle wrote in the nine year period.  The main missing novel would have been 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' (1902), though it is set in 1889.  This is probably the best known of all Sherlock Holmes stories, certainly the one that has been dramatised the most.  Without it, a story which seems to sum up a Gothic flavour of Holmes and does not have the moral ambiguity of many of the stories, then Holmes would probably not be as accessible to general audiences, in particular in the USA.  The moral ambiguity has always set US audiences at unease, one reason why 'The Adventure of the Cardboard Box' (1892) which features adultery (and severed ears) was removed from US editions of 'The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes' (1894) and only appeared in 'His Last Bow' (1917), published 13 years later, when presumably American audiences could stomach it. 

With 'The Return of Sherlock Holmes' (1905) and the thirteen stories it featured would have been lost well known ones such as 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men' (1903) [often used as an introduction to ciphers] and 'The Mystery of the Empty House' (1903) [featuring an air rifle and the bust of Holmes as a decoy].  'The Valley of Fear' (1915) is not at all well known and there has been no live action adaptation of it, bar 'The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes' (1935).  'His Last Bow' (1917) features eight stories, none not that well known to the general public, bar perhaps, 'The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans' (1912) though more as a synonym for civil service inefficiency than for the story itself and to a lesser extent for relocating corpses in detective stories by dropping them on to railway carriage roofs.  In the final collection, 'The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes' (1927) among the 12 stories are ones like 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man' (1923)  [in which a man injects himself with serum derived from a monkey to keep himself young] which has fed into ideas of this kind; similarly 'The Adventure of the Illustrious Client' (1924) has informed many stories with its villain who misuses a string of women.

One interesting factor is that, given Holmes survived at the Reichenbach Falls, it is easy to imagine that Moriarty did too.  With 'The Final Problem' both Holmes and Moriarty were proven to be mortal and fallible.  Once this incident was recast by 'The Mystery of the Empty House', as different to what readers had been previously been told, then it opened up an acceptance of both heroes and villains who, despite appearing to have died or be killed, actually can re-appear in later stories.  I think if the Holmes sequence had stopped with the 'The Final Problem' then it would have been far harder for writers of everything from children's cartoon series to James Bond movies, to have a villain who keeps coming back.  A 'norm' of so much popular fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries would be missing with Holmes and Moriarty's clear deaths casting such a shadow.  Moriarty has become the basis of the 'super-villain' trope apparent in so much of our fiction.  It may be a stretch to see Holmes as the first 'superhero' (Superman did not appear until 1938, 11 years after the last Sherlock Holmes story) but his combat and intellectual skills and apparent invulnerability seem to have laid the foundations for such approaches being tolerated in popular culture.  With no resurrection for Holmes and the chance that Moriarty, some day, could come back too, then these elements would be missing from popular writing or certainly delayed.

Without these 35 latter stories, the Holmes canon certainly would be a lot smaller.  However, aside from 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' it would only have been particular fans of the stories who would have noted an overt difference.  There would have been a cultural impact as I have noted, because so many writers of books and movies have been influenced by elements of these later stories: the nature of villains, the use of ciphers and hazards of toying with nature.  However, I still think Holmes would be well known.  In addition, whilst the bulk of the Holmes stories appeared after Queen Victoria had died, we still tend to think of him as a Victorian detective (primarily as most of the later stories are still set during her reign).  It is clear that sensibilities were changing, particularly by the late 1920s, not least due to the brutality of the First World War.  This had a heavy personal impact on Doyle himself, turning him to spiritualism, a topic he wrote about 1918-30; it is believed his interest in the movement developed following the death of his wife in 1906, his son in 1918, his brother in 1919, and subsequently two brothers-in-law and two nephews in the early 1920s.

Without Holmes, much of Doyle's other work may be more prominent than it has been.  From 1889 onwards Doyle wrote 39 non-Holmes novels, but who has heard of Raffles Haw [E.W. Hornung, Doyle's brother-in-law wrote the Raffles, gentleman burglar, novels 1903-9], Stark Munro or Brigadier Gerard?  When have their stories been dramatised? The only other non-Holmes character who has received much attention has been Professor Challenger stories (5 novels 1912-29; one featuring spiritualism). Doyle also wrote 12 non-fiction books, though after 1918 these tended to focus on spiritualism and fairies rather than contemporary warfare and colonialism as they had 1900-16. 

Doyle killed off Holmes because he felt the stories were too much of a distraction from his historical novels, of which he wrote seven 1888-1906, the best known of which is 'The White Company' (1891), but even that is obscure compared to any of the Holmes stories.  Perhaps without Holmes to 'distract' him, Doyle would have developed other characters and written more historically-set novels, turning him into looking more like Sir Walter Scott than simply a detective novelist.  It is quite possible he would have written more non-fiction too. 

If Doyle had not killed Holmes off in 1894 and had a break of at least six years before returning to him, but instead had kept writing them through the second half of the 1890s, then the quality may have faded or by 1902, he may have been burnt out and we would have found Holmes killed once again.  The break probably did the canon good.  However, the story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's writing shows how one success can distort everything about the rest of his output.  In writing terms, Doyle was probably right to end Holmes in 1894.  As the makers of many television series today know, it is always best to go out on a high note.  This is not to say that the latter stories are of any lesser quality, and in fact, many tropes that we recognise in contemporary fiction originate, to a great extent, from many Holmes stories even though this might not often be recognised.  Thus, without these stories, whilst we might not notice it, many of the stories around today could be different.  

Even within the Holmes stories, the removal of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' would have probably meant greater focus on the other stories, perhaps sanitised to give them a clearer morality.  Certainly without that single novel, we would have seen far fewer dramatisations of Sherlock Holmes stories in subsequent decades.  In many ways, I am ambivalent over whether Doyle was right to resurrect Holmes.  I am not a fan of 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', feeling it jars badly with the nature of the stories before and after it.  I guess I have to come down on the side of approval of the revival of Holmes per se, as I know that, without that return, we would have missed out on a sizeable number of excellent short stories.

The Movie 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009)

Back in January, having heard the criticisms against 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009) I produced a posting arguing that a lot of people's expectations of what the Holmes stories are about are based on misunderstandings of these stories and often on the misapprehensions or choices of directors and actors who have portrayed the character throughout the 20th century.  This posting can be found at: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/01/real-sherlock-holmes.html  It was really not until the 1970s that the recognition that Holmes was a drug addict was even allowed to be hinted at; 'The Seven Percent Solution' (1976) movie is a turning point in this respect.  The key error people make is how old Holmes is. Partly I think they are misled by the Sidney Paget illustrations that appeared when the Holmes stories featured in 'The Strand' periodical.  Holmes is tall (this is one element in which Downey Jr. falls down) and lean and naturally wearing clothes that by the 20th century look old fashioned.  He is a drug addict and lives an unhealthy life, but he does not really appear to be a man in his fifties, which is right as he does not reach 50 until 1904.  As I noted in January at the time of the events shown in of 'A Scandal in Bohemia', the first short story, set in 1888, Holmes is only 34; by 1891 when the current movie is set he is supposedly 37.  It has been argued that Robert Downey Jr. was too young to play Holmes, but at 44 in fact he is a touch old.  Some commentators, notably Laurie R. King, argue that Holmes was born sometime 1863-8 which would make him even younger, between 23-28 in 1891.  However, the standard assumption that he was born 6th January 1854, seems to work.

Anyway, I finally got around to watching 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009) and enjoyed it so much that I viewed it twice within 24 hours.  Yes, there is action in it.  Again, though, this is something you would expect from a movie honouring the original stories.  Holmes often carries and uses a revolver but is also noted to be skilled in singlestick, fencing, bare-knuckle boxing, and bartitsu combat.  He is often shown haring around London or rural England in pursuit of the criminal.  Possibly the most famous story, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' (1901/2) which is set before 1891, shows Holmes living rough and charging around Dartmoor suggesting real vigour.  So, as in the Conan Doyle stories, this latest movie shows Holmes both as deductive and a man of action, and using the technique from the 'CSI' television series, shows him combining these two traits and constructing events in his mind and then following them through, notably during a bare-knuckle boxing match he is fighting in.  This CSI slow motion approach is also used in the way it is in those series, to show how Holmes reconstructs what went on previously using the evidence left behind.

I have likened this movie's relationship to Conan Doyle's stories as being like that between the James Bond movies and the Ian Fleming novels.  As the Bond movies do, occurrence from across the canon are referenced.  Many incidents from the Holmes stories appear for fans to spot in this movie, such as the scratches around the key hole on the pocket watch, seeking to control flies using notes plucked on his violin and Holmes shooting the initials V.R. (for Victoria Regina) into the wall of his room.  Despite being a little short, Downey Jr. seems to combine the switch between Holmes when he is at his sharpest and when he is a wreck very well.

Jude Law who plays Dr. Watson could easily have made an excellent Holmes in this movie.  Eddie Marsan, who has long portrayed Londoners on the borderline of legality is now just right to portray Inspector Lestrade.  Alongside numerous British actors (notably James Fox and Geraldine James as a rather tall Mrs. Hudson) the viewer is aware of elements that have been included to woo an American audience.  Notably the USA is portrayed as being under threat from Lord Blackmoor (played wonderfully by Mark Strong) planning to reclaim the lost British colonies.  This leads to one element in the movie which I felt jarred which is his claim that the USA is weak in 1891 from the civil war, despite the fact that the war had ended 26 years earlier.  The American ambassador is murdered and the chief female protagonist is Irene Adler (described as 'the woman' by Watson), who appears in 'A Scandal in Bohemia' and is an American (born in New Jersey) as shown in the movie.  She is supposedly born in 1858 making her 33 by 1891 (Rachel McAdams who plays her in the movie is 32), but, for example in the 1984 ITV dramatisation of the story she is played by Gayle Hunnicutt who was 41 at the time, though seemed older.  Hunnicutt is actually an American but you could not have told it from her portrayal of Irene Adler.  These are ways of drawing the American audience into something that might look parochially British, but, in general, they are not too out of step with Holmes stories.  Conan Doyle seems to have viewed the USA with suspicion and often in his stories sinister criminals originate from there as in 'A Study in Scarlet' (1887), 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men' (1905) and 'The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone' (1927).

Lord Blackwood is a new invention for Holmes stories.  However, I am not one of these people who never wants a story that does not adhere strictly to the original author's stories.  In the case of Sherlock Holmes numerous authors including Michael Dibdin, Nicholas Meyer, Bert Coles, Mitch Cullin and June Thompson among others, have produced pastiches of Holmes stories some of which have been filmed or made into radio dramas.  In the latest movie, a new story is fixed firmly in a very Conan Doyle setting.  Professor Moriarty does appear (in shadow as do all the best villains) and it is likely we will see more of him in the sequel that is apparently underway.

Right, so those are three elements that I enjoyed about the movie: the references to the original canon, the portrayal of Holmes's deductions and the action.  I also like that Guy Ritchie is the director.  His movie work is erratic (though occasionally, as here, shines) but one thing he truly loves is London, making him ideal for this movie.  Of course, much of London portrayed in the movie is computer generated, but the quality of the technology is such that now your mind barely registers that it is not real.  It is put to the full with Holmes and Watson charging through a range of locations from the headquarters of a Freemason-like organisation in the West End to a shipyard and a butchery warehouse along the Thames in East London; there is even a visit to a wonderfully gothic High Victorian cemetery.  The climax of the movie runs from the Palace of Westminster to the incomplete Tower Bridge (which was built between 1884-94, so was probably at the close to completion stage on the outer structure, as shown in this movie set in 1891).

The other thing I like about the movie is that it touches on themes that fascinated the Victorians themselves, the gothic and rational scientific thought.  Though gothic writing had come to the fore in the early 19th century (Jane Austen satirised it in 'Northanger Abbey' (1817, though written originally 1797-8)), it was still a staple of popular fiction in the 1890s.  Holmes is often shown as counteracting rather hysterical theories that seem informed by gothic writing notably in 'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire' (1927), 'The Adventure of the Devil's Foot' (1917) and in 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.  This seems a little ironic given Conan Doyle's later firm beliefs in spiritualism.  In the 2009 movie Lord Blackwood makes it appear that he has supernatural powers with the intention of whipping up support for his coup d'etat.  His father, the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Rotheram, is part of a secret society which believes in the efficacy of black magic.  Blackwood's abilities are in fact enabled through bribery and sophisticated technology, notably poisons and a nerve-gas releasing machine activated by electro-magnetic pulses.  Holmes's appreciation of the scientific developments enables him to disprove Blackwood's claims to mystical powers.  Holmes is often shown experimenting in his room with chemicals.  Thus, in this movie we see two sides of Victorian culture: the gothic horror imaginings and the rational scientific/engineering advances.

This may not be the greatest movie ever, but as a piece of entertainment I found it thoroughly enjoyable, with a wide range of interesting characters and a story which combined both action and mystery.  The sign of a good murder mystery is that you want to go back and see it again knowing the outcome.  Blackwood appears to be killed in this movie, which countered my expectations that he would escape, so to a good degree my expectations were confounded, which is always refreshing especially from a Hollywood movie.  I know I have given away a load about this movie, but I do recommend going out and renting it.  I look forward with anticipation to the sequel.

The 'Real' Sherlock Holmes

Naturally there has been much discussion about the recently released movie 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009) directed by Guy Ritchie, well known for British-set gangster movies notably 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' (1998), 'Snatch' (2000) and 'Revolver' (2005).  He does seem to have suffered from diminishing returns and whilst he has a loyal fan base notably among men living in London, he has never recaptured the success that he achieved with his first feature movie in 1998.  Moving from contemporary Britain to the 1890s might be a sensible step for him to break away a little from seemingly repeating the same formula over and over.  He has managed to keep attracting high profile actors, Brad Pitt appeared in 'Snatch' and for 'Sherlock Holmes' he has Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson.  Downey Jr.'s comeback which really got going in the mid-2000s has continued and does not seem to have suffered from appearing in Ritchie's movie, there is already talk of a sequel.  Unsurprisingly for a Ritchie movie London is the setting and there is a lot of action.  Interviews with the leading actors, notably, Law, have emphasised, however, that though the movie has the feel of something very 21st century, in fact in characterisation it is taking steps back to the original stories.

In the very hot summer of 1995, for £1.99 I got a complete set of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1887-1927 and set 1875-1904/14.  I have also read a couple of the pastiches, possibly the best known 'The Seven Percent Solution' (novel 1974; movie 1976) by Nicholas Meyer and 'The Last Sherlock Holmes Story' (1978) by Michael Dibdin.  There were four novels and fifty-six short stories written by Doyle.  This is one reason why Holmes is such a good character for television serials.  A short story is sufficient for an hour long television drama.  As the 'Inspector Morse' (1987-2000) and 'Poirot' (from 1989) series have have shown a short novel generates a decent two-hour programme.  Many modern detective novels are far longer and so cannot be as easily made into one-hour programmes.  Doyle began the Holmes stories in the era when serialised stories in magazines were incredibly popular and, even as late as the 1920s, this format had not really died away.

Holmes was in fact in a very crowded markeplace.  If you read collections of other genuine Victorian and Edwardian detective stories, notably in the collections, 'The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1970), 'More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Cosmopolitan Crimes' (1971), 'The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1973), 'The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1979) all collected by Sir Hugh Greene and 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1982) and 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: 2' (1980) [this was a US publication hence an explanation for it being published in reverse order in the UK; no doubt there were difficulties in the similarity in title to Greene's books] both by Alan K. Russell and more recently, 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (2008) by Nick Rennison, you can find dozens of fictional detectives from different countries, even a couple of female ones like Loveday Brooke, who have been severely overlooked, but none of them have endured like Holmes.

The reason why Holmes stuck out from the crowd at the time and still does today, is very much due to the elements that Ritchie has brought out in this latest movie.  One element is the action.  I have been rewatching the Jeremy Brett (1933-95) portrayal of Holmes in the television series that ran 1984-94 and Holmes is often pulling out his revolver (as does Watson) or at least a weighted cane.  He also demonstrates knowledge of bare-knuckle boxing and bartitsu, a martial art developed in Britain 1898-1902 based on jujitsu.  In the novels he is also described as a singlestick (i.e. staff) fighting specialist, it was overtaken by fencing in the 20th century but was an Olympic sport as late as 1904; Holmes generally uses his cane in this way. 

It is unsurprising that Holmes is skilled in combat given his involvement with murderers and thugs of all kinds as well as ferocious dogs.  If you read any of the 'rivals' books you see that these other detectives are mainly cerebral and solved crimes simply by thought.  In many ways they are the precursors of the more genteel detective stories, notably those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, that came to the fore in the 1920s and 1930s, presumably as their audience was from the generation who had seen too much of violence first or second hand through the First World War.  Of course, though we are in a society, which certainly in the UK, has been seeing war casualties consistently for the past nine years, these days we certainly expect our television and movie characters to be armed and ready to fight physically.

Another element of Holmes which makes him appealing at the time and subsequently, and again is an element that appears relevant in the 2010s, is his moral ambivalence.  In sharp contrast to many his 'rivals' and certainly detectives of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, Holmes is not necessarily a force for the status quo or even for the law.  Whilst not working for the law per se he is, certainly at times, a force for justice.  The Holmes stories establish the assumption of the slow or even bumbling official police (and in Holmes's case, also royal and civil services as many of his cases are political rather than criminal) that appears in so many stories, but Holmes does not always aid authority and at times sits as personal judge and jury on people he captures.

Sometimes Holmes's punishments can be seen as harsh, at other times he is lenient.  Consequently, on beginning a Holmes story, in contrast to those of his rivals and most successors, there is no certainty that the status quo ante will be restored and that the 'correct' punishment will be meted out.  I have always enjoyed such uncertainty in crime novels which is what drew me to the detective stories of people like Josef Škvorecký and Leonardo Sciascia, though for them the ambivalence usually comes more from the society in which the detective is operating rather than from the detectives themselves.

In an era when we have a character such as Dexter Morgan, a fictional police forensics specialist who is also a serial killer (novels by Jeff Linday 2004-9; television series 'Dexter' 2006 onwards), moral ambivalence seems to fit with what people are seeking in their detective series.  In addition, since the 1970s we have seen even police detectives, let alone private ones, violating laws, breaking and entering and assaulting suspects to the extent that by the late 1980s it was being perceived as rather a cliche.

The element of Holmes which takes the moral ambivalence further is his drug addiction.  Holmes is shown as a regular cocaine injector and, at times, a smoker of opium too.  Whilst we tend to think of our own time as one in which drugs are the most common the restrictions on things like cocaine were not introduced until after the First World War, partly as a result of frontline troops taking opiates during the war (there are interesting parallels between drug abuse in the trenches of the First World War and drug abuse by US soldiers in the Vietnam War).  In addition, there was an increased moral stance after 1918 which saw prohibition of narcotics in the USA follow the prohibition of alcohol.  All of this was wrapped up in the sense of the decline of the 'race' and physical weakness that had become apparent in the UK even in the 1910s when up to 40% of volunteers for the Army had to be turned away as being unfit, though usually for malnutrition rather than drug abuse.  I once found a play from 1927 which, even then, showed the 'hero' seeking cocaine on a night out in London.  This theme appears in some Agatha Christie stories, but by then, drug abuse was seen very much as an activity of the silly rich as it was for many decades that followed, and, to some extent, is today.

Another thing about the 'real' Holmes is his comparative youth.  Doyle says that by 1914, in 'His Last Bow' (1927), Holmes is around 60, this means that for the period covered by the main stories we know, he ranges from 21 in 1875 to 50 in 1904.  However, given his expertise in so many topics, the usual assumption is that he was middle aged.  The latest movie is set in the 1891 when Holmes would be 37.  Downey Jr. is 44; Law has just turned 37.  Thus, whilst to many commentators they seem too young for the parts they are playing (Brett was 51-61 when playing Holmes, though certainly in the early series looked younger) they are in step with what Doyle envisaged.  If you take all these elements togther - lead character: maverick in his late thirties, active, intelligent, skilled in various forms of fighting, ambivalent towards the law, sexually ambiguous, drug addict, mixes with high and low society you can see why Holmes fits perfectly for the kind of movies Ritchie makes. 

Watson, played by Law, looks like a young John Steed (from 'The Avengers' series 1961-9; 'The New Avengers' 1976-7) which is probably unsurprising.  Like Steed, Watson, though a doctor has military background and has served in India and been wounded which suggests frontline action.  He is shown in the novels wielding both a cane and a revolver.  In Doyle's stories, any suggestion of anything more than companionship between Holmes and Watson is ruled out.  Watson marries Mary Moran after 'The Sign of the Four' (1890) set in 1888, though his wife has died by the time of 'The Mystery of the Empty House' (1903) which is set in 1894 and is the first story after Holmes comes back from his supposed death. To some degree questions about Holmes and Watson's sexuality stem more from later 20th century attitudes rather than those of the 19th century when all kinds of house sharing were common and thus could be a basis for different narrative imperatives.

The final question, then, is why, if Holmes and Watson have always been characters that would be right at home in a Guy Ritchie, gangster-style movie, are we so surprised to see them like this?  To a great extent it comes back to the genteelisation of detectives in the post-First World War era.  Ironically Doyle was still writing at a time when his ambivalent detective, though still popular, was effectively becoming obsolete.  Instead the reading public had a desire for detective stories in which the status quo ante was always firmly re-established and even private detectives were bastions of the law, and, as importantly, of authority (which is not always the same thing).

After Doyle's death in 1930, Holmes was increasingly assimilated into the canon of the more comfortable culture of the 'stately home' detectives like Christie's Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey (in the series of novels by Dorothy L. Sayers published 1923-42) and Albert Campion (in Margery Allingham's novels published 1929-65; then by Philip Youngman Carter 1968-70).  Partly this was through spoofs and the simplification of Holmes into the rather austere but amiable deerstalker-wearing character that most people associate with the name.  Of course, we should all know how Holmes should be attired due to the detailed drawings accompanying the original stories, you can buy fully illustrated editions of the stories nowadays.

This process of making Holmes genteel was achieved most by the Basil Rathbone movies (1939-46) which also, with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, demoted that character to a far more bumbling role than he had held in the stories (this view had been countered in Meyer's and Dibdin's novels and most visibly in the 1988 movie 'Without A Clue' in which Holmes is simply a figurehead for Watson's detective work).  It is against this Rathbone portrayal, often repeated (I remember seeing all the Rathbone Holmes's movies more than once in the 1970s and early 1980s) with Holmes as a bastion of authority, even the US military machine, that so much of what has followed featuring Holmes is set and it has proven difficult to shake off his Rathbone attire let alone that manner, to get back closer to the original, distinctive character.

George Orwell, wrote in 1946, the article 'The Decline of the English Murder' in 'Tribune', you can read it in full here: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/decline-of-english-murder.htm  He argued in the light of the violence of the recently ended Second World War that murder in Britain was becoming more brutal and the coverage of murder cases and the fictional crime stories would become so too.  To a great extent it is wrong, as many people do, to see Orwell as arguing that the Christiesque style of detective stories was coming to an end.  Christie herself would remain a bestseller for the rest of her life (to her death in 1976) and continues to sell very well today.  Orwell, in fact, was marking the point at which 'true crime' stories were coming more to the fore.  An audience hardened by wartime experiences could stomach greater detail than would have been reported before.

Yet, as in the post-First World War period after 1945, you can see a desire for fictional murder stories that have the status quo ante restored, sometimes even back to the class structure of the pre-1939 period.  Christie's novels of the time reflect some of the post-war social changes but because of that, in fact more firmly re-emphasise the continuing values of stability, especially in rural Britain.  Thus, it is not surprising that for so long we were happy to accept a Sherlock Holmes who, whilst looking into Gothic elements of late Victorian life, seemed to be able to shine rational light into the dark corners and restore the civility that we all too often see wedded to the Victorian era.  However, hopefully in a time which is more honestly like the late Victorian period in terms of poverty, disease, drug abuse and social division, it seems right that we again engage properly with a fictional character adept in such an environment.

Historical Detective Stories and Political Correctness

The detective novel in the UK rose to prominence from the 1840s and having come to a peak in the late Victorian period has never really dipped. Each decade seems to refresh the genre with new characters and styles. People see 'golden ages' of the genre such as the 1890s and the 1930s but in fact the detective novel has constantly evolved to reflect the changing society in which we live. The genre has always straddled different elements of British society. Sherlock Holmes mixed with royalty and street urchins and everyone in between. Crime is something which touches on all levels of society and the motives such as greed, lust, jealousy, anger, etc. are universal. Detective novels reflect our society or certainly our view of our society. In the past three decades there has been a desire for grittiness and authenticity, partly in reaction to the 'country house party murder' styles of the mid-20th century and also reflecting the trend to more realistic writing and drama which came in the 1960s. As the detective story has penetrated into every corner of British society and, increasingly into other countries too, people have sought out other times and places in which to set such stories.

As a brief aside, in terms of places for detective stories, the detectives have always been well-travelled, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot solved crimes in Egypt and Iraq. He was a Belgian operating in the UK or its empire and so worked within the norms of contemporary British society. US detectives became very popular in the 1970s with a whole slew of television series coming from the USA to the UK. However, the first detective stories of note in the UK, with a character working completely in a foreign setting, were the Maigret novels, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, but set in France. He wrote 72 novels and 28 short stories featuring police detective Jules Maigret. Part of the attraction for British readers/viewers of these, often bleak stories, was that they were in a different legal, and to some extent, moral, setting. One reason why I think that the novel 'Gorky Park' (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith was so popular was because of that aspect, i.e., of trying to solve a crime while working in the Soviet state machine. For the same reason I was always interested in the detective novels of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-89) set in modern-day Italy with the detectives facing corruption and influence, and the four Lieutenant Boruvka novels of Josef Skvorecky (born 1924), set in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule during the 1960s-70s.

Simenon set his stories in the times they were written (1931-72) but they now have been conflated in the popular imagination to a period in the 1950s. Of course, many fictional detectives have very long careers. Poirot was middle-aged when he appeared in his first novel in 1926 and yet, was not killed off until 1976; like Simenon, Christie set her stories in the contemporary world. I suppose, in theory, Poirot could have still been operating in his late 80s or his 90s in the 1970s and Maigret could have had a forty-year career, but to some degree such longevity would have stretched credibility if articulated. As a result, we now tend to see these stories of being of a particular decade and Poirot, on television, has now been assigned the 1930s; as Maigret and Miss Marple have been given the 1950s (though Marple seems to have been shifted back a bit in the recent, poor quality, overly light-hearted ITV episodes).

Though Simenon's Maigret is well known in the UK, there was another foreign-based detective that had already made it into UK culture, though, these days he is pretty much forgotten. This is Judge Dee (the 7th century CE Chinese detective not the 2000s fictional British judge). There were 15 novels written in English by Dutchman Robert Van Gulik between 1949-67; you can still find some paperback copies in second-hand bookshops. Van Gulik had originally translated Chinese stories from the 14th century CE featuring a detective-cum-judge of the 7th century and then went on to write a number of his own. There have been a couple of attempts at televised versions, but the use of Caucasian actors to play ancient Chinese in the six episodes produced for the UK's Granada Television company in 1969, hardly boded for success.

Of course, we have long had historically-set detective stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not publish 'The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes' until 1927 though it features stories set in the 1880s and 1890s. The Sherlock Holmes stories were published 1887-1927 and feature cases set 1881-1914. Aside from Van Gulik, however, historical detective stories (as opposed to stories written in the past but at the particular time they were set) did not really come to the fore until the advent of Ellis Peters and her Brother Cadfael series (published 1977-94) with twenty novels and a short story collection. These stories are set between 1137-45 CE, a time when England was in civil war. Her series was boosted by the success of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' (1980; in English from 1983) featuring another medieval monk-detective that seemed to give literary legitimacy to such stories. Since then, the floodgates have opened and I have read detective novels in periods from the 1330s BCE in Ancient Egypt through Ancient Rome and Roman Britain to Elizabethan England to 17th century Japan to Russia of the 1860s to post-war Germany of the late 1940s.

As with the Maigret novels, we are interested in seeing how detectives operate in societies with different moral and legal codes to our own. This is where the challenge that I want to address in this posting, comes in. We want our detectives to be heroes, even if they are highly flawed ones. To a great extent we want them to act as a force for what is morally right, often against the hostility or ambivalence or disinterest of society. Most of us expect the detective (whether private or employed by the state) to restore things to the status quo ante, the situation of the norm of before the crime occurred. Of course, it is never back to the previous situation entirely, but that is the nature of stories, they move on even if the ending is similar to the beginning.

People are critical of novels actually written historically for including attitudes that we would not find acceptable today. This week I again read a passing criticism of John Buchan's novels as being casually anti-Semitic and racist (interestingly his support of Scottish nationalism was lauded, something he would have been criticised for in the 1910s) and that leaves a bitter taste in our mouth and dampens our enjoyment of the stories. The implied criticism is that these things should now not be reproduced, in whatever media, at all.

People often comment that women are portrayed in submissive or purely auxiliary roles (partly this is because we are unfamiliar with the female detectives of Victorian stories, notably Loveday Brooke, a series of her adventures would do very well on television; there is also a Mrs. Paschal I have not come across yet in my reading). Interestingly, of course, women in the Sherlock Holmes stories often play more active roles, sometimes as the instigators of crime, notably in the first ever Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (1891) in which a woman outwits Holmes and in 'The Three Gables' (1926).

To some degree, looking back to the past, people, including authors, often see the suppression of women as greater than was the case. Whilst they were second-class citizens they were often far more active in society than most people credit. Medieval England, especially during times of wars and crusades, was often effectively run by women; abbesses were often immensely powerful. To some extent, this is why the medieval Church so much promoted the portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a 'proper' woman. She is shown as a woman who takes little control over her life and is used by God and shipped across the Middle East by Joseph. It is more likely that, even in the 1st century CE, she would have been back in Nazareth running the business while waiting the birth of her child leaving Joseph to go off and register in Bethlehem. Do not even start me on writing Mary, wife of Jesus, out of history for the same purpose. If I had a time machine I would go and back and interview Mary the mother and Mary the wife about the challenges of living with the man; their great involvement in his career and tell them how their roles would almost be erased by historians.

The big bugbear of historical novels of any kind, but especially crime novels, because they often involve assumptions about types of people, is the racist aspect. Racism has been with us forever, but, interestingly, again, our societies, especially in Britain, were far more ethnically mixed in the past than people assume. Roman Britain had people coming to it from right across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. People from Syria have been found buried in the city of Bath. Britain had constant links to different nationalities and races. The crusades revived such connections and Elizabeth I introduced racial legislation because it had become a factor. It is interesting that the dramatisations of Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart stories and 'Doctor Who' episodes under Russell T. Davis in the 2000s are seen as odd for featuring ethnic minorities in past settings. However, in fact, they are far closer to the truth than most people realise. Britain has always been diverse and there have always been people who discriminate, just as today.

Where does this leave our fictional detectives who work in such racist, misogynistic settings? Well, to some degree, despite all the attention to detail, the author is almost compelled to make them anachronistic. The series that made me most aware of this was 'Heat of the Sun' (3 episodes in 1998) starring Trevor Eve and Susannah Harker. The series was about a superintendant sent from Scotland Yard to work in the British colony of Kenya in the 1930s. It was a picturesque setting and an interesting one given what I have said above about detection in different contexts. However, what jarred was how liberal Eve's character, Albert Tyburn, was. In fact, he was more so than the Superintendant Peter Boyd character, that Eve has played since 2000 in the series set in contemporary UK , 'Waking the Dead'. Tyburn's attitude to Africans and to women seem very peculiar, especially when characters around him showed the racism and misogyny of the times in such a colonial setting. More accurate, on this basis, was the movie 'White Mischief' (1988) which is also set in Kenya in the same era and also features the actor Joss Acland. I suppose that to have shown Tyburn as dismissive of blacks and women would have made it impossible for most viewers to have engaged with him as a hero.

Another similar situation develops in the first two of Philip Kerr's 'Berlin Noir' triology (called that even though the third book is set in Vienna), 'March Violets' (1989) and 'The Pale Criminal' (1990). They are set in Berlin, respectively in 1936 and 1938, and feature a private detective called Bernhard Gunther. He ends up working for the Nazi police machine. However, Gunther's character is again too liberal for someone operating in that time frame. Of course, not everyone in Germany in the 1930s was anti-Semitic and many people opposed the Nazi regime, but they tended not to be police officers (we can get into a great debate here about the Communist sympathisers among the police ranks before 1933, I know there has been research on this).  Any with such sympathies would not have been in any position of influence by 1936 and certainly not being employed by Reinhard Heydrich by 1938.

To some extent, Gunther is a counterpoint to the set-up in which he is operating. Reading detective stories we tend to accept the state approach as a 'norm' and, in this context, it could lead us to accepting Nazi attitudes which clearly, Kerr, knowing he is treading on risky ground having a novel set in the Nazi regime, is keen to avoid. (Looking back at those novels I was embarrassed to find Kerr has a character called Otto Rahn and in my Beckmann stories I have a character called Otto Beckmann and one of his detective constables is called Bruno Rahn. This is despite my efforts to stay away from any similarly named characters.) Whilst I am not expecting Kerr to have a full blown anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobe character as hero, he could have made him less 'nice'. Perhaps the gritty detectives are reserved for our bitter times which strive for equality of all, so allowing the characters to be different by not being so politically correct.

I am not arguing for novels featuring hate-filled xenophobes and male chauvinists, but I am hoping that we can have 'heroes', or at least detectives in a leading role, who are not so out-of-step with the times in which they are operating. This has sometimes been the case in some of the historical detective stories that have been produced in the past thirty years. I am tolerant of historically-set detectives to a greater extent than some people I know, I think because I recognise that you cannot make them so alien that readers find no connection to them. One friend of mine condemned the Cadfael series as total fantasy as he argued that in the medieval period the local lord simply arrested whoever he felt was guilty and had them executed, or tortured and then executed, and that there was none of the forensic analysis that Cadfael conducts. To some extent, you see such behaviour in the stories such as seeking to detect witches by floating women in the river. Cadfael, despite being a monk, because of his worldly nature (he had fathered a son by a Syrian woman whilst on crusade), is allowed to be more rational and, to some extent, bring in apparently Enlightenment thinking. That is what you assume until you remember that Greek logical analysis and Occam's Razor were intellectual concepts that would have been familiar to most medieval monks. Working with Occam's Razor you have the same kind of deductive thinking that Sherlock Holmes employed. I suppose I am wanting my cake and to eat it, but I do believe a balance can be struck to allow modern readers to access the characters, not feel turned off by their behaviour and yet not make the whole process overly anachronistic.

To find ways of achieving this, I return to Robert Van Gulik. I read a fascinating interview with him when he was asked how he dealt with the issue I raise here. It would be useful if his attitude was made more widely known to authors of historical detective stories. What he did was to have his Judge Dee character as a very devout Confucian. Whilst Confucianism still provides a foundation for many modern day Chinese attitudes, a lot of its elements would be unacceptable to Western readers, for whom van Gulik was writing over an 18-year period (1949-67). Of course, this period itself saw vast changes in attitudes in Western society.

Van Gulik argued that Dee operated to a moral code that he, the author, accepted was out of step with the contemporary world, unsurprising given the 1300-year difference. Yet, it was a moral basis from which the character was motivated and behaved. Elements he highlighted was the fact that Dee has a number of wives, whereas, today polygamy is seen as wrong. In particular, Dee, as a good Confucian, emphasised filial loyalty to the extent that he forces two sisters to return to slavery into which their father sold them. Interestingly, van Gulik also returned to aspects of the original stories, such as the functioning of lesbians in the era. This gave him more room in which to operate and, to an extent, shows the complexity of 7th century China and the wide scope of writing of that time. Van Gulik did play down the supernatural element which was common in detective literature of that time, but his settings are often spooky and one can understand the supernatural attributes people of the time would have attached to them and the occurences that happened there.

Ellis Peters, in contrast, would not have been able to find such a rich basis in the 12th century literature available to us in the way 7th century Chinese writing could be accessed by van Gulik. However, all things that happen in our contemporary society have been happening for millenia. Humans remain humans with all the desires and discriminations that they have had through the centuries. In my own writing I have tried to stick to van Gulik's approach and have made my Otto Beckmann a good Bavarian Catholic with mild discriminatory tendencies, which, as a policeman, he can be brought to face the consequences of. Any discrimination actually blinds you to facets of particular humans, something dangerous when investigating crime. His perception of women is in line with his society, and so, out-of-step with much of ours. I make no apologies for that. If historical detective stories are not only going to be entertainment, but, like all detective stories, tell us about the society in which the detectives operate, then we need to tolerate our 'heroes' behaving a little less anachronistically.