“I
am lost without my Boswell.”
It’s
a good guess that Sherlock Holmes’s famous comment to Dr. Watson in “A Scandal
in Bohemia” inspired Lillian de la Torre to write her long-running series of mystery
short stories featuring Dr. Samuel Johnson as an amateur sleuth whose exploits
are narrated by his friend James Boswell.
The
first collection of these stories, Dr. Sam:Johnson, Detector, was published in 1946. This month I inherited a copy
from a dear friend, along with numerous other books including a two-volume
edition of the real Boswell’s Life of
Johnson.
De
la Torre, it seems to me, did an excellent job of mimicking Boswell’s writing
style (and spelling) and well as Johnson’s manner of speaking. I found the book
to be a fast and engaging read. The stories are fair-play mysteries, with all
the clues that could enable a reader to reach the same conclusion as Dr. Johnson.
Sometimes, in fact, readers likely will find that rather easy to do.
Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector is listed on
the Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library ofDetective, Crime, and Mystery Fiction as a landmark book in the genre,
perhaps because it pioneered historical mystery fiction. Most of the characters
and many of the incidents in the stories are real. I much appreciated the section
called “Historical Background” at the end of the book, separating fact from
fiction in each story.
Some
of the tales reminded me of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown adventures because
of the way in which initial appearances deceived and everything changed when
they were looked at in a different way. But the inescapable comparison is to Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson. De la Torre’s Johnson relies in each case on solid
reasoning to solve the crime, as does Holmes.
And
if Watson is Holmes’s Boswell, it is equally true that Boswell is Johnson’s Watson
in the able hands of Lillian de la Torre.
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