At one point in the book Pale Horse Rider Mark Jacobson describes the scene in Oliver Stone’s JFK where crusading DA Jim Garrison (Keven Costner) gets a crash course in conspiracy theories from Mr. X (Donald Sutherland) while they sit on a bench with a view of the Washington Monument. Painting a picture of the setting, Jacobson has them “dwarfed by the upward thrust of the lingamic monument.”

I’ve often heard the Washington Monument described as “phallic” but “lingamic” was a new one for me. For once, a knowledge of Greek or Latin won’t help you. The word derives from the Sanskrit lingam, which is an aniconic phallic representation traditionally worshipped as a symbol of or in connection with Shiva. Or, in a secondary meaning, it’s a penis. So basically the word means phallic. But it’s most often used in reference to religious statuary: “a short cylindrical pillar-like symbol of Shiva, made of stone, metal, gem, wood, clay or precious stones.” These pillars also usually have a circular base, which the Washington Monument does have if you see it from above.

I suspect Jacobson just wanted to avoid the cliché of a phallic Washington Monument so he went with a word that had a more exotic flavour. And he certainly got that, as I don’t think lingamic is an adjective you see used very often. And I can’t say I’ll be adopting it anytime soon myself.

Words, words, words

In “The Greek Interpreter” Doyle shook things up a bit by introducing Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. In “The Final Problem” (published only a few month later) Mycroft has a cameo as a cab driver but of more importance is the introduction of Professor James Moriarty.

These two characters would go on to have a huge importance in later Holmes mythology, but I find it interesting that Doyle himself didn’t make much out of either. They are only referred to in a handful of stories in the canon, and usually don’t have any significant role to play.

In “The Final Problem,” however, Moriarty does have a critical function, which was to kill off Holmes and thus free Doyle to write what he thought were more important literary works. As we know, that didn’t take, but it does show a real spirit of idealism given how much money writing Holmes stories was bringing in.

It’s a different sort of Holmes story in that there’s no mystery to be solved but just a game of cat and mouse between Holmes and Moriarty that ends with the two of them plunging, presumably to their deaths, from the Reichenbach Falls.

That dramatic plunge is one of the iconic moments in all of fiction, so much so that I think all of us can picture it in our memories. We might also be thinking of any of the many illustrations of the scene, beginning with different versions in both the original British and American publications. Re-reading the story for the first time in a long while I was actually surprised to find that Watson didn’t witness the event at all. He’s been sidelined and only returns to the Falls after the fact to find some footprints in the blackish soil and an awkward note from Holmes explaining what was about to happen. After that, we’re told that an “examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms.”

That must have been quite an expert examination! What did they base their conclusions on, especially given that neither of the bodies was ever recovered? The only evidence for what occurred were the footprints and the note, which don’t paint a very full picture.

So as it turns out, one of the most iconic moments in all of fiction is one that’s wholly imagined. Unless you’re reading an illustrated version there’s nothing of it on the page. And Doyle could have easily arranged things so Watson sees the fatal plunge from a distance. Was he leaving himself an out? Or just playing a game? Even though this isn’t one of my favourite Holmes stories it remains one of the most intriguing.

Holmes index

Lew Archer is a bit out of his usual L.A. stomping grounds here. While on his way to Sacramento he stops for “the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me.” This turns out to be a young man who has been shot and left for dead in a ditch by the road. And just like that Archer is involved in a complicated web of murder and corruption in the sleepy town of Las Cruces.

Two things stood out to me. First of all there’s the speed with which the plot unfolds. It got to the point where I started to write down Archer’s full Las Cruces itinerary. He picks up the dying man just as the sun is setting “and the valley was filling with twilight.” From there he takes the man to Kerrigan’s Court – Deluxe Motor Hotel (it is later described as a “motor court”; the word “motel” was first used in 1925 but seems not to be known by anyone here). From the motel he goes to the hospital, where the hitchhiker dies without regaining consciousness and being able to say what had happened to him. Then Archer goes back to the motel, or motor court. Then he goes to a Chinese restaurant and eavesdrops on a conversation between Kerrigan (the motel’s owner) and a sexy young chanteuse. Then he visits the trucking company the dead man drove for. Then he goes out to the house where the owner of the trucking company lives and gets hired by him to find out what happened to the load of booze the dead man had been driving. Then he goes to the sheriff’s house and meets the sheriff’s sexy wife. Then he goes to the apartment of the daughter of the owner of the trucking company. She has gone missing. Then he goes to a sleazy bar and interrogates one of the prostitutes about the missing girl. Then he goes to the singer’s apartment. Then he goes to the motel owner’s house, remaking that by this time “it was getting late.” Then he goes to a drive-in burger joint where he witnesses what looks like a handoff of some money. Then he goes to an abandoned air base just outside of town. At around 1 o’clock in the morning he’s back at the motor court, where he gets knocked out (or at least knocked on his ass) for the third time. Then he goes back to the motel owner’s house. We’re told it’s now 2 o’clock. The motel owner’s wife sends him off to check out a cabin on a lake two hours’ drive away. On the way there exhaustion (finally!) catches up to him and “something broke like a capsule behind my eyes. It leaked darkness through my brain and numbness through my body.” He keeps driving until he comes to a tourist camp where he rents a cottage and spends the rest of the night (or early morning) “wrestling nightmares on a lumpy bed.”

This is a busy guy! And even given Las Cruces isn’t that big a place I still found it hard to believe he was going so many places and meeting so many people in the space of at most eight hours. But that’s the nature of stories like this.

The scenes are set with some quick brushstrokes. Macdonald is particularly fond of personifying buildings, so one will have yellow rust streaks running “down from the balconies like iron tears” while another sports “a peeling yellow face with blinded windows, surrounded by a wild green hair of eucalyptus trees.” I also loved this description of the owner of the trucking business’s man cave:

His living-room was the kind of room you find in backcountry ranch-houses where old men hold the last frontier against women and civilization and hygiene. The carpets and furniture were glazed with dirt. Months of wood ashes clogged the fireplace and sifted onto the floor. The double-barreled shotgun over the mantel was the only clean and cared-for object in the room.

We’re even told that the place smells like a bear cage, which I can believe.

Information in these wonderfully degenerate settings will be conveyed in clipped dialogue with lots of snappy comebacks, and may end in fisticuffs. And then it’s time to hop in the car and go to the next stop.

The second thing that struck me was the evocation of a now long-vanished time. In part this has to do with the language, so I’ll include some notes here for fellow word nerds. “Wasn’t he drunk on Sunday?” Archer asks the singer of the motel owner. “He was pixilated all right,” she replies. This does not mean that the motel owner has the appearance of being an enlarged, low-resolution digital image where the individual pixels stand out, giving it a blocky texture. The word for that is pixelated, though apparently pixilated is now accepted as a variant spelling of the same thing. Anyway, pixilated is a much older word referring to someone behaving in a strange, eccentric or mentally disordered way, as though being led by pixies. Obviously the singer has in mind this older meaning, but even so it seems a bit inappropriate to describe someone who is actually an angry and dangerous drunk.

At another point Archer is driving over a rough road whose “surface was pitted with chuckholes.” I had to look this up and found that it refers to any hole or rut in a road or track. So a pothole. I’ve never seen or heard the word chuckhole before and I don’t think it’s in wide use.

I was far less successful tracking down the term “sluff.” At one point Archer interrogates a drugged out girl who asks him “Are you sluff?” From the context I think she’s asking if he’s with the police. Later, her boyfriend will beat Archer up and say “God damn you, sluff.” So again, I think he’s saying that he thinks Archer is a cop. But I looked around for any information on this one and found nothing except dictionaries giving it as a variant spelling of “slough,” which is clearly not what was meant.

Aside from the language, there are also some other parts of the book that give its date away. In The Way Some People Die Macdonald had indulged his dislike for the drug business by giving us a heroin junkie going through withdrawal. There’s another druggie in this book but she’s hooked on marijuana and she really needs a reefer bad. I think in our own time we’d be put off by such a depiction of “reefer madness” (the film of that title had come out in 1936), as while marijuana can be addictive in most cases it isn’t, and certainly not to the extent depicted here. The scene plays today as silly, but luckily Archer has some reefers in his car (hey, it’s evidence) and he’s able to use it to get her to open up. Which is kind of low, but worse will happen to her later.

There are the usual Archer elements here, especially his fascination with breasts. The sheriff’s wife is stacked, “heavy-breasted and very female, almost too female for comfort.” Later, while he is holding onto her, these same breasts will move “against me like wild things in a net,” and later still she will grip them “cruelly” herself. I don’t know what’s going on with all this. Boobs just have a way of grabbing Macdonald’s attention.

And finally there’s Archer’s sense of mission. Told that he’s brave at one point, he replies “Not brave. Merely stubborn. I don’t like to see the jerks and hustlers get away with too much. Or they might take over entirely.” The jerks and the hustlers, however, aren’t the real problem here. They rarely are. Instead the rot runs deeper, into perverted family dynamics and degenerate psychologies. Archer can afford to be understanding, but is no doubt relieved to finally get out of this town.

Archer index

In that often-cited list that Doyle made of his favourite Holmes stories he ranked “The Naval Treaty” nineteenth out of nineteen. Which, given that the original list he composed was of twelve stories and he later added seven more, and that the canon contains 56 stories total, sounds almost as though he didn’t like it much at all, or that he considered it at best mid.

I’d rate it much higher. It’s actually one of my favourites.

In part this is because Holmes displays an attractive side not often witnessed. He takes time to smell the roses, literally. The scent of a moss rose through an open window moves him to poetic reflections that reveal “a new phase of his character” to Watson, “who has never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.”

“Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but of course totally unscientific. As commentators point out, the smell and colour of a rose are not superfluous extras. Nor does it make much sense to me for Watson to say that Holmes had never shown a keen interest in natural objects. He made a study of many. What I like most about this passage though is the reaction of the couple who have hired Holmes. They are struck “with surprise and a good deal of disappointment.” They want him to find the stolen naval treaty, not talk about flowers!

A similar moment comes on the train journey back to London where Holmes sees the newly established Board schools through a window. “Lighthouses, my boy!” he says to Watson. “Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.”

This paean to education is even more of a digression than his thoughts on the rose, but also reveals more of his true character. Holmes is arrogant, but he’s not a snob.

“The Naval Treaty” is a long story, the longest in the canon, and was originally published in two parts. It’s also one that has attracted a more than the usual amount of critical nit-picking, beginning with the reference to “The Adventure of the Second Stain” in the opening paragraph and ending with speculation over who Joseph Harrison may have been working for. As usual, none of this meant anything to me. I guess it’s a fun game for Holmesians, but I don’t care for it.

What I liked most of all here was the fact that it’s a great little mystery story. For starters, a surprising amount of time is put into casting suspicion on the commissionaire and his wife. “The principal difficulty” in the case, Holmes explain at the end (“in his didactic fashion”), “lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.” Of course misdirection through giving the reader too much information to pay full attention to is now a staple of mystery of fiction, but it’s not something the Holmes stories went in for as much. As it is, we’re given enough clues to at least arrive in the general location of Holmes’s solution, which ends up feeling quite reasonable given what we have to go on. Indeed, Holmes points the way to where he’s going, even though it’s not easy to see what conclusions he’s drawing. Given the high stakes we’re led to believe that something larger is going on, so the fact that the theft was merely opportunistic comes as a surprise, but a satisfying one given that it makes sense of the evidence.

I did have to roll my eyes though at poor Percy Phelps. He doesn’t come off well. Using family connections to get a cushy desk job and then being struck with “brain fever” when the treaty he’s been copying is stolen. Brain fever was a nineteenth-century euphemism for a nervous breakdown, and Percy was really selling it, becoming “practically a raving maniac” before needing nine weeks of convalescence where he is alternately unconscious and raving mad before he is even capable of reaching out to Holmes. If he wants to keep working for the British foreign office he’ll have to work a bit on stiffening that upper lip.

Holmes index