Bloodhounds of Heaven and The Adventures of Conan Doyle
Murchison, William
Richard will oblige, or should he be absent, you can seek out one of his circle. O. Max Gardner, for example, a former Governor's grandson, can fill you in on Democratic Party politics; or Jim...
...BOOK REVIEW Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle IanOusby / Harvard / $10.00 The Adventures of Conan Doyle Charles Higham / Norton / $9.95 William Murchison "You beast...
...Dickens celebrated them as heroes, although his Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House, has his share of human frailties...
...How did Sir Arthur do it...
...He served as a surgeon in the Boer War and later wrote the-conflict's history...
...Doyle, though trained as a medical doctor, was a compulsive writer...
...The commonsensible British and American publics would never have listened so politely to Doyle's ceaseless testimonies to the proximity of the spirit world had they not known him as the father of Holmes...
...Numerous Londoners paraded about town in mourning...
...WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR (continued from page 4) concentration camps, and his show trials as "infringements on personal liberty...
...And yet how is it possible fully to understand and appreciate Holmes without first knowing something of Williams, who was the first English fictional detective...
...It casts a wholly new light on the man who created the most beloved detective of all time--by showing how far he rose above those who went before him...
...Well, yes, now every Tuesday night...
...Sergeant Cuff may have been "the perfect detective" for T.S...
...It was only natural that Caleb should be looked down on, too...
...and he has a point...
...The conference The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 35...
...But what else should one expect of Richard's ? Nothing is spared in order that members might have the gentle repose they seek...
...He had murdered Sherlock Holmes by tipping him over the Reichenbach Falls, that is what he had done...
...Across the short front wall of this domino-shaped tavern ~tand plenty of lockers for liquor...
...Or you might be fortunate enough to run into a garrulous foreign celebrity, the publisher Baron Von Kannon, who's been known to duck into Richard's, posturing as a dogooding reformer...
...Or you can just be alone, stuck in the corner table with your choice of tune ringing from the juke box, beer, and the gratis popcorn at an elbow...
...But this he did, not because he was a better policeman than Bucket, but because his creator, in a gesture that would have gladdened the heart of Murray Rothbard, set him up in competition with the state lawenforcement monopoly...
...He may be just that--which would mean that the social planners and the feminist harpies have botched their work...
...Once, he struck his son for speaking of a woman as ugly...
...Actually she had railed lustily against those anti-Communist liberals like John Dewey and Sidney Hook who were suspicious of the Moscow trials, and she published her objurgations in cultural journals like the Daily IVorker and the New Masses...
...They plainly reflected prevailing public attitudes toward the police--a body that in Williams' day (1794) was much looked down on...
...Ousby has made it his business to sniff out the changing social perceptions of detectives throughout the 19th century in England...
...For once a spark of idealism flickered in America, and the Comrades were itching to get down to some constructive lying and utopianizing, when that ferocious Communist-hater Norman Cousins barged in, leading an entire brigade of Saturday Review storm troopers...
...Country musicians, you ask for...
...they have failed to wipe out the age of chivalry, for they have proved their incapacity to purge Sherlock Holmes...
...Had he been born in Georgian instead of Victorian England, Holmes would have had a prodigiously hard row to hoe...
...He becomes progressively more Watson-like, more charming and personable...
...Like Kipling, whom he greatly admired, he venerated the Empire and the Army...
...The party was called the Progressive Party, and it was composed of equal parts Communists and simpletons...
...When, in the '20s, Doyle became a renowned spokesman for spiritualism, it was not his convictions or his special insights that propelled him to public notice...
...All that cocaine-taking and world-weariness...
...The trouble, too, as Higham shows, is that Doyle himself believed in science with only a part of his mind...
...or Jim Burnley, the chairman of the county Republican Party, can do same from his perspective...
...Granted that the early Holmes displayed "overtones of Decadence...
...Eliot would call "the perfect detective...
...State law forbids liquor by the drink, but this hurdle doesn't stop regulars at Richard's, which has, of course, a brownbagging license...
...He was equated with the government spy and often rightly suspected of profiting from the same crimes he professed to be combating...
...Of course, if you'd rather play pinball, you can try the machine in the back or the one up front, with the club ready to give you free games for sufficiently high scores...
...Gulps were heard throughout the ballroom, Adam's apples bobbed furiously, but Lillian screwed up her courage and with pith and wit scotched the knave...
...Holmes, says Ousby, exerted a scientist's control over the physical world...
...Following his literary resurrection a decade later, Holmes became a cruder type, Ousby feels...
...Is Holmes, then, a Victorian knighterrant mounted on a hansom cab, tilting with consummate style and skill against the powers of darkness...
...A point that Ousby emphasizes is that fictional detectives existed in no social vacuum...
...Not definitively enough, as it happened, to prevent his resurrection, the late detective having been, if nothing else, a solid money-maker...
...On a sunny afternoon, you can play croquet on the green in front of Richard's...
...But how then explain Holmes' enduring appeal...
...Doyle's publisher, the Strand magazine, received more than 20,000 cancellations...
...The dimensions of Holmes' greatness are just as evident from Charles Higham's brisk and cheerful recounting of Conan Doyle's slightly bizarre career...
...What barbarous offense had been perpetrated by this inoffensive writer of light entertainments for the public prints...
...Thanks be to Richard and the saving remnant, who wisely understood that ideas have consequences, but more wisely fathomed that good times, spiked with beer, have much more immediate ones...
...Maybe he was...
...an angry letter writer snarled at Arthur Conan Doyle one day late in 1893...
...Ousby's book, originally a Harvard Ph.D...
...But this is played down in the later tales...
...At all events, it cannot have done Sherlock's reputation much harm, for the "brutalized Watsons" (such as Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay) and the Holmesian imitations that followed have failed to displace him...
...The deerstalker cap is hardly a plumed helmet...
...It was left to Holmes, who first appeared in 1887, finally to upgrade and stabilize the detective's reputation...
...That is clearly what Ousby would have us wonder...
...But so was the age growing cruder...
...How shocked she must have been after the 1948 election in which the Progressives fared no better than the last-ditch Prohibitionists, but the indomitable Lillian still burned for a better world and in 1949 she served as the Shirley MacLaine o f the famed Waldorf-Astoria Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, quite possibly the most oudandish collection of Stalinists and fellow travellers ever allowed outside the Soviet Fatherland...
...It was a grh,~ moment, especially when the fierce Cousins questioned the brethren about their possible allegiances to a "foreign government...
...Such was the man whom multitudes mourned after Doyle hurled him over the Reichenbach Falls...
...book as boring as the moors ranged over by the Hound of the Baskervilles--as for example Ousby's scrutiny of William Godwin's forgotten novel, Caleb William Murchison is on the editorial staff of the Dallas Morning News...
...Yet who looks nowadays at 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 Brigadier Gerard, or The Maraeot Deep, or The ~auderings of a Spiritualist...
...There are stretches in his rather brief (194 pp...
...His manners were chivalrous...
...N. Konstantinovich Roerich, a quack guru for a sect of theosophists...
...But they serve, and while they serve, there is hope...
...Higham's bibliography lists 82 different books of fiction, military history, drama, poetry, and spiritualism published by Doyle between 1888 and 1930...
...By the time of Dickens, the police were on a public relations upswing, thanks to their increasing professionalism...
...Eliot, but for almost everyone that niche belongs to Holmes...
...This is doubtless what Doyle himself sensed so early as 1893, when he decided that Holmes had interfered long enough with his more serious work and had to be disposed of definitively...
...The man he spies on is his own employer...
...These the Holmes stories richly provided...
...The 1970s are badly at outs with science, and yet Holmes remains as beloved as ever...
...the magnifying glass is no Excalibur...
...The people of an increasingly scientific age yearned for fantasy, for magic, and for wild adventure," Higham asserts...
...In the 1940s when anti-Communists were barred from Hollywood and from university teaching posts, she was off mooning over deer on her upstate New York farm, dreaming of the day when she could fence them all in near her picture window, the better to appreciate their sylvan charm...
...It was no mere fictional character who had perished--it was a national hero...
...What a prodigy the son therefore had to be--a creation transcending time, national borders, and even a certain public discomfort with the creator's eccentricities...
...It ~ not as fairy tales, then the Holmes tales are perhaps most accurately to be regarded as exquisitely polished romances...
...Asian mystic, the Rev...
...he cried...
...For only a century earlier, as Ian Ousby demonstrates in Bloodhounds of Heaven, the English detective had been a figure scorned and despised...
...Jefferson Davis' birthday you want remembered...
...What a thundering irony...
...Think of it, she hollered for the only Presidential candidate in the history of the Republic actually to subscribe to the hocus-pocus of at...
...All right, next Lobster night will honor his birthday...
...Or you can settle down to table tennis, or backgammon, or poker, or even Scrabble...
...Williams, a book no modern reader in his right mind would open...
...Wilkie Collins, in that first fullblown English detective novel, The Moonstone, dealt affectionately with Sergeant Cuff, whom T.S...
...dissertation, makes good reading, not just for Sherlockians but for detective story buffs of all shadings and persuasions...
...Alas, the fiction of the '70s and '80s tossed the detective off his throne as "minor cultural hero"--a reward for widely publicized failures by the real-life police...
...He was the world's only consulting detective, and a gentlemen to boot--altogether a fitting hero for late Victorians in their middlebrow moods...
...the perfect gentleman hero, the embodiment of the values and aspirations of the contemporary middle-class public," as well as "a solitary crusader on behalf of the weak and helpless individual...
...The theory, though underdeveloped, isn't a bad one, especially given that Doyle believed explicitly in fairies...
...Doyle would have been an inferior spiritualist had he not adored all his life the things of the spirit--honor, valor, gallantry, pageantry...
...The thesis is of course somewhat at odds with Ousby's suggestion that Holmes was a rational man who titillated science-minded Victorians by imposing order on nature...
...he wrote while waiting in lines, while traveling, while doing virtually anything, and from his writing he made a lot of money...
...Williams is nothing if not an ambivalent figure--"more the Peeping Tom and the gossip," says Ousby, than the disinterested solver of mysteries...
...It is Holmes, and Holmes alone, who makes Doyle one of the world's most famous authors...
...He wrote, declares Higham, a collection of "fairy tales--magical, improbable, buoyed up by an imagination as inexhaustible as that of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm...
...Thus Richard's, a Great American Saloon smack in the downtown, such as it is, of Greensboro, North Carolina...
...Henry Wallace's preposterous run for the White House fetched her to the soap box where she simultaneously served as his Ron Ziegler and his Rabbi Korff...
...No woman is ugly...
...Science could never bring back the dead for a spot of civil conversation--quite unlike those fraudulent mediums in whom Doyle so confidently trusted...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
