A giant in any age - golden or otherwise |
A kind review of my Sherlock Holmes
novel House of the Doomed took me
aback recently by suggesting the book seemed more like a Golden Age mystery
than a Holmes story.
Certainly, the Sebastian McCabe – Jeff
Cody mysteries are thoroughly Golden Age in spirit, but I hadn’t thought of my
Holmes efforts in that vein. Then my friend Ann Margaret Lewis, herself a
talented pasticheur, reminded me that Holmes and what devotees call GA are not
antithetical.
In its strictest meaning, the Golden
Age is a time-period – basically the years between the two world wars. Arthur
Conan Doyle’s final 12 Sherlock Holmes stories collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927) were
published during this period. So, as a factual matter, the later-written Holmes
adventures are Golden Age. And a few of
them are excellent.
But GA is also an attitude, as well
as an era. In an introduction to the two “Golden Age” volumes of the Masterpieces
of Mystery anthology series (Davis Publications, 1977), Ellery Queen summed
up the characteristics of Golden Age novels as:
·
ingenuity of plot,
·
originality of concept, including
the locked room, the miracle problem, and the impossible crime,
·
subtle and legitimate misdirection
of clues – poetic license – but always with complete fairness to the reader,
·
and often a stunning surprise
solution,
·
in a phrase (R. Austin Freeman’s),
“an exhibition of mental gymnastics.”
In other words, Golden Age stories often
turn on logic, brilliant deductions, and clever plots. So do most of the Holmes
tales, several of which are locked room stories. (This is admittedly not true
of some of the weaker tales, which are scarcely mysteries at all.) In a nice
play on words, an early Ellery Queen novel even called Queen “the logical successor
to Sherlock Holmes.”
Like Queen, Agatha Christie, John
Dickson Carr, Dorothy Sayers, and Rex Stout – some of the brightest lights in
the Golden Age firmament – all adored Sherlock Holmes and mentioned him and some
the more famous Holmesian plot tropes frequently in their own stories. Even Carr’s
ornery old Sir Henry Merrivale owes a lot to the Master.
Golden Age or Sherlock Holmes? They are
different – but not different as it seems at first thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment