This was a bit of a disappointment. I had my hopes up as the curtain rose on a dinner at an Oxford college that Miss Marple was attending as a guest. We’re introduced to the usual bunch of eccentric academics, who naturally all hate each other. That’s what faculty are like. Then one of them, the master no less, does a face plant in his roast venison in the middle of delivering a speech, apparently having overdosed on some of his own date-rape drugs.

The year is given as 1970, which struck me as well past Miss Marple’s expiry date. I mean, she’d been an old lady in The Murder at the Vicarage, which had been published in 1930. But then in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) she was only in her mid-70s or so. I guess she’s just one of those fictional characters who goes on forever at the same age, no matter how much the world changes around her.

And the world has changed. This story, by Naomi Alderman, is on the surface a proto-#MeToo tale, as the murdered master is a lech whose passing upsets no one. My disappointment with it though has to do with the fact that I was pretty sure whodunit from the first page (a clue is presented in a pretty obvious way), but Alderman didn’t play fair on letting us follow Miss M’s thinking in coming to her conclusions. Not that Christie always did this either, and the gimmick here of Miss Marple remembering some village incident from years ago that we know nothing of is as frustrating as usual. But here it’s quite a stretch, compounded by how frankly ridiculous the killer’s motives were. Christie certainly came up with some ridiculously theatrical and contrived plots, but on the question of motive she was usually pretty clear and simple.

Then again, these are university people. And they’re not the best . . . or the brightest.

Marple index

I wonder how much stock we should put in the famous list Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made of his favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. The reason I wonder is that he ranked “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” third on that list and I doubt I’d put it in the top 10. Meanwhile, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” didn’t make the cut (the original list was of 12 titles) and I liked it a lot more. But Doyle did give his reasons (he ranked “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” so highly “on account . . . of the originality of the plot”) and I guess there’s no arguing over taste. It’s just that I don’t think an author’s opinion, even of their own work, is necessarily worth any more than the average reader’s. Though readers seemed to really like “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” too.

To me the original plot just seems like the usual hook of the lover returning for revenge that Doyle had been going back to since A Study in Scarlet. Here it’s garnished with a childishly simple cipher device of the kind that I remember solving when they used to run in newspapers. It’s hard to imagine Holmes even being that interested in it, and his dawdling leads to the death of the man who had sought his help, which only happens in one other story in the canon (“The Five Orange Pips”). The man’s wife, however, may recover from her attempted suicide as “the bullet had passed through the front of her brain.” Lucky her! I didn’t know that was considered just a flesh wound in Victorian days.

The point in the story that interested me the most though has to do with Doyle’s narrative economy. I pointed this out earlier in my notes on “A Scandal in Bohemia” and another example of the same device used there occurs in this story. As Holmes is investigating the room with the corpse of the man in it this is what he says to the local inspector:

“It is now necessary that we should try to throw some light upon this third bullet, which has clearly, from the splintering of the wood, been fired from inside the room. I should like to see Mrs. King, the cook, again. You said, Mrs. King, that you were awakened by a loud explosion . . .”

The elision is so fast you don’t even notice. In the same bit of dialogue, without any indication of time passing, Holmes goes from saying he would like to see the cook again to addressing her directly. As I’ve said before, I don’t know how many other authors were experimenting this boldly with the collapsing of time. I’m not sure how many have even done it since. Doyle was precociously modern in this regard.

Holmes index

From World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) by Franklin Foer:

But reading through the papers [of Malcolm Cowley, literary editor of the New Republic during the worst of the Great Depression], I came to see that the sum Cowley paid was the disturbing revelation: $150 for a review. When I saw this figure in a letter, it gave me a stir. It was precisely the same amount the New Republic still paid for reviews of approximately the same length that we published on our Web site. I stared at the page. Eighty years of inflation . . . and stagnation. Writers are still paid precisely the same sum they received at the lowest moments in the economic history of the modern world.

Over my time as a journalist, I’ve seen the proprietors of journalistic outfits come to the conclusion that writers don’t really need to get paid very much. My career began at Slate, one of the first of the magazines created to live exclusively on the Internet. In those golden years, back in the midnineties, we paid one thousand dollars for each book review, and a few of our stars made even more than that. Today, Slate pays about three hundred dollars for a review.

We don’t need to rely on anecdote. There are studies to be examined. In 1981, the Authors Guild surveyed its members. It found that full-time writers made a median income of about $11,000 per year — if we adjusted that sum for inflation, it would now be about $35,000. That doesn’t sound like much at all, until we compare it with the Authors Guild’s 2009 findings, which uncovered a median income of $25,000. Sadly, the number rolls further down the deflationary spiral. In 2015, the median income dropped to $17,500. Over thirty-four years, writers took a 50 percent pay cut. The present salary lurks not much higher than the government’s official poverty line. Writing, a profession that once seemed fairly central to the project of Western civilization, is barely above water. The value of knowledge has been deflated and depressed, just as the tech companies intended.

From “The Lost Art of Not Pitching” by David Macfarlane, Canadian Notes & Queries 115, Spring 2026:

Two dollars and fifty cents (USD) per word was as high as I ever got (GQ) before the tide receded. And kept receding. The water’s out way past the lighthouse by now. It’s more a beach of stranded Substacks and gasping podcasts than an ocean. Magazine writing was a slightly odd career choice when there were lots of publications in the sea. (One dollar to one dollar and fifty cents was about my average.) It would be downright eccentric now. I recently read (online, don’t ask me where, and who knows if it’s true) that seven cents a word is the going North American freelance rate.

I thought a bit about whether I should include this Jeffery Deaver story in my list of Sherlock Holmes stories, as it doesn’t have Sherlock Holmes in it. But since it’s an ironic homage, and is collected in the anthology In the Company of Sherlock Holmes edited by King and Klinger, I decided to give it a place. There are “Sherlock Holmes” stories out there that are less Holmesian.

What we have here is the story of a young Manhattanite named Paul Winslow who decides, in the course of therapy, that becoming a consulting detective to the NYPD would be a dream job, especially given how he’s such a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories and has the same gift for analyzing evidence and inductive reasoning (making inferences based on observation of details). Given that there’s a serial killer currently terrorizing New York, dubbed the “East Side Slasher” by the media, ingratiating himself with the police turns out to be easy to do, and soon he’s partnering up with an overwhelmed and relatively dim police detective (Lestrade by another name) to crack the case.

This he does in an unanticipated way, leading to my description of this as an ironic homage. Not so ironic though as to put Holmes fans off, even if it does present a darkly humorous take on Holmes’s abiding influence.

Holmes index