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...
...It ~ not as fairy tales, then the Holmes tales are perhaps most accurately to be regarded as exquisitely polished romances...
...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...
...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...
...He was equated with the government spy and often rightly suspected of profiting from the same crimes he professed to be combating...
...Is Holmes, then, a Victorian knighterrant mounted on a hansom cab, tilting with consummate style and skill against the powers of darkness...
...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...
...It was only natural that Caleb should be looked down on, too...
...Sergeant Cuff may have been "the perfect detective" for T.S...
...The trouble, too, as Higham shows, is that Doyle himself believed in science with only a part of his mind...
...Once, he struck his son for speaking of a woman as ugly...
...By the time of Dickens, the police were on a public relations upswing, thanks to their increasing professionalism...
...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...
...All that cocaine-taking and world-weariness...
...Higham's bibliography lists 82 different books of fiction, military history, drama, poetry, and spiritualism published by Doyle between 1888 and 1930...
...Wilkie Collins, in that first fullblown English detective novel, The Moonstone, dealt affectionately with Sergeant Cuff, whom T.S...
...The theory, though underdeveloped, isn't a bad one, especially given that Doyle believed explicitly in fairies...
...He becomes progressively more Watson-like, more charming and personable...
...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...
...Jefferson Davis' birthday you want remembered...
...Science could never bring back the dead for a spot of civil conversation--quite unlike those fraudulent mediums in whom Doyle so confidently trusted...
...Numerous Londoners paraded about town in mourning...
...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...
...Eliot, but for almost everyone that niche belongs to Holmes...
...Dickens celebrated them as heroes, although his Inspector Bucket, in Bleak House, has his share of human frailties...
...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...
...Eliot would call "the perfect detective...
...Granted that the early Holmes displayed "overtones of Decadence...
...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...
...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...
...Doyle would have been an inferior spiritualist had he not adored all his life the things of the spirit--honor, valor, gallantry, pageantry...
...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...
...It is Holmes, and Holmes alone, who makes Doyle one of the world's most famous authors...
...he wrote while waiting in lines, while traveling, while doing virtually anything, and from his writing he made a lot of money...
...That is clearly what Ousby would have us wonder...
...All right, next Lobster night will honor his birthday...
...Asian mystic, the Rev...
...an angry letter writer snarled at Arthur Conan Doyle one day late in 1893...
...and he has a point...
...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...
...What barbarous offense had been perpetrated by this inoffensive writer of light entertainments for the public prints...
...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...
...Holmes, says Ousby, exerted a scientist's control over the physical world...
...they have failed to wipe out the age of chivalry, for they have proved their incapacity to purge Sherlock Holmes...
...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...
...But so was the age growing cruder...
...the magnifying glass is no Excalibur...
...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...
...A point that Ousby emphasizes is that fictional detectives existed in no social vacuum...
...or Jim Burnley, the chairman of the county Republican Party, can do same from his perspective...
...Not definitively enough, as it happened, to prevent his resurrection, the late detective having been, if nothing else, a solid money-maker...
...Williams is nothing if not an ambivalent figure--"more the Peeping Tom and the gossip," says Ousby, than the disinterested solver of mysteries...
...But this is played down in the later tales...
...Ousby has made it his business to sniff out the changing social perceptions of detectives throughout the 19th century in England...
...But they serve, and while they serve, there is hope...
...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...
...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...
...Doyle, though trained as a medical doctor, was a compulsive writer...
...State law forbids liquor by the drink, but this hurdle doesn't stop regulars at Richard's, which has, of course, a brownbagging license...
...What a thundering irony...
...The conference The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 35...
...Had he been born in Georgian instead of Victorian England, Holmes would have had a prodigiously hard row to hoe...
...Such was the man whom multitudes mourned after Doyle hurled him over the Reichenbach Falls...
...The dimensions of Holmes' greatness are just as evident from Charles Higham's brisk and cheerful recounting of Conan Doyle's slightly bizarre career...
...On a sunny afternoon, you can play croquet on the green in front of Richard's...
...Following his literary resurrection a decade later, Holmes became a cruder type, Ousby feels...
...He served as a surgeon in the Boer War and later wrote the-conflict's history...
...The party was called the Progressive Party, and it was composed of equal parts Communists and simpletons...
...These the Holmes stories richly provided...
...It was a grh,~ moment, especially when the fierce Cousins questioned the brethren about their possible allegiances to a "foreign government...
...The 1970s are badly at outs with science, and yet Holmes remains as beloved as ever...
...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...
...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...
...His manners were chivalrous...
...He had murdered Sherlock Holmes by tipping him over the Reichenbach Falls, that is what he had done...
...he cried...
...Maybe he was...
...The deerstalker cap is hardly a plumed helmet...
...The people of an increasingly scientific age yearned for fantasy, for magic, and for wild adventure," Higham asserts...
...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...
...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...
...Like Kipling, whom he greatly admired, he venerated the Empire and the Army...
...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...
...He was the world's only consulting detective, and a gentlemen to boot--altogether a fitting hero for late Victorians in their middlebrow moods...
...Doyle's publisher, the Strand magazine, received more than 20,000 cancellations...
...Thus Richard's, a Great American Saloon smack in the downtown, such as it is, of Greensboro, North Carolina...
...But what else should one expect of Richard's ? Nothing is spared in order that members might have the gentle repose they seek...
...The man he spies on is his own employer...
...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...
...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...
...Well, yes, now every Tuesday night...
...Williams, a book no modern reader in his right mind would open...
...WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR (continued from page 4) concentration camps, and his show trials as "infringements on personal liberty...
...There are stretches in his rather brief (194 pp...
...It was left to Holmes, who first appeared in 1887, finally to upgrade and stabilize the detective's reputation...
...It was no mere fictional character who had perished--it was a national hero...
...Ousby's book, originally a Harvard Ph.D...
...They plainly reflected prevailing public attitudes toward the police--a body that in Williams' day (1794) was much looked down on...
...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...
...He may be just that--which would mean that the social planners and the feminist harpies have botched their work...
...How did Sir Arthur do it...
...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...
...For only a century earlier, as Ian Ousby demonstrates in Bloodhounds of Heaven, the English detective had been a figure scorned and despised...
...N. Konstantinovich Roerich, a quack guru for a sect of theosophists...
...Or you can settle down to table tennis, or backgammon, or poker, or even Scrabble...
...Country musicians, you ask for...
...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...
...dissertation, makes good reading, not just for Sherlockians but for detective story buffs of all shadings and persuasions...
...Across the short front wall of this domino-shaped tavern ~tand plenty of lockers for liquor...
...But how then explain Holmes' enduring appeal...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
