First publication in The Strand Magazine June 1892. It was apparently around this time, which was still relatively early going, that Doyle wanted to abandon Holmes. But his (Doyle’s) mother came to him with the germ for this story so the great detective’s (false) demise was postponed. I mean, how can you turn down writing a story for your mom?

I don’t think it’s a great story, as it seems to borrow a number of basic elements from previous cases without adding much. And once again there is the business of removing obstacles blocking a pair of young lovers uniting. Solving a crime, or unwrapping a mystery, is of course fundamental to the way detective fiction works, but Doyle seems to have had an atavistic attachment to an even more basic plot. That the lovers in this case manage well enough on their own, leaving Holmes to clean things up with an explanation of what’s been going on, is only a slight wrinkle in the fabric.

If you’re a collector of Holmes’s words of wisdom though you get fair service. Beginning with the opening utterance:

“To the man who loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, “it is frequently in its least important and lowest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”

That’s an observation that I think can be extended far beyond where Holmes immediately takes it, which is to commend Watson for writing up his more “trivial” adventures rather than the “many causes célèbres and sensational trials” in which Holmes has taken part. By “low” Holmes means something intellectual, involving the processes (or art) of “logical synthesis.” I like the idea of the man who loves art for its own sake being a connoisseur of the “lowest manifestations” of entertainment the newspapers have to offer, but I realize that’s the opposite of what is meant. Unfortunately, Holmes’s lecture on high and low is mixed up quite a bit here, as he concludes that “Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” The pleasure of the story is here lower than the operations of logic, which is more what you’d expect him to say.

Another interesting topic of discussion comes up on the train ride to Winchester. Watson admires the green and pleasant countryside they pass through but it fills Holmes with horror.

“It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“You horrify me!”

“But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.”

I think in the 1890s this would have been seen as a perverse take, which is how Watson immediately responds to it. One can see Holmes’s reasoning, but even in Victorian England I’m not sure how persuasive it is. Rural isolation does leave people more vulnerable to crime. I’ve had experience of that myself. Call the cops and you may have someone come by later that afternoon. But urban living is in many ways more anonymous, which helps conceal a lot. As far as the psychological effects are concerned, again isolation may not be conducive to robust mental health, but then nothing degrades one’s love for humanity than being stuck in traffic or packed in a subway for hours every day, or living crammed into a tiny apartment alongside people who smell bad or make a lot of noise. I don’t think we can be as certain about these matters as Holmes is.

Things wrap up quickly. Holmes sees the solution as obvious, but it’s only obvious when seeing the events as a dramatic story, not as a logical system. Which sort of undercuts what he kicks things off by saying. Then Miss Violet Hunter is dismissed to head a private school, as Holmes “manifested no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the center of one of his problems.” The young couple are hitched and sent to Mauritius. What I find most interesting is the fate of Mr. Rucastle, who survives “a broken man, kept alive through the care of his devoted wife.” And his “old servants.” And (though this isn’t mentioned) their demonic, cockroach-killing kid. I would have thought everyone would have abandoned the old miser after all he’d done. But I guess they had fewer options back in those days. People had to stick together.

Holmes index

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

By Caroline Fraser

Page I bailed on: 28

Verdict: It might not be a bad book but it wasn’t what I was expecting or what I wanted. Given the title, which drops murder, crime, bloodlust, and serial killers, I was expecting something in the true crime vein. But it only comes at this indirectly.

More specifically, it’s a book that addresses the amount of serial killer activity in Washington State in the 1970s and ‘80s. Think names like Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), Randy Woodfield (the I-5 Killer), or any of the other bad people you’ll find in books by Ann Rule, who made a career out of covering this beat. Fraser gives these killers a context that is meant to give some explanation for their appearance at this time and in this place. It begins by talking about something called the Olympic-Wallow Lineament, but we’re immediately told that “Nobody knows what it is.” After reading Fraser I had to do an Internet search to find some better explanation. I came away just as confused. Then we get a chapter on the building of a couple of bridges: the famously doomed Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the Mercer Island floating bridge. Interesting if you’re into bridges, or engineering in general. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with serial killers. After this, skimming ahead, we turn to the smelting industry and the pollution it caused. I think this is where Fraser is hanging her hat, making a connection between lead poisoning and an increase in headline murders.

Maybe she’s onto something, but I’d lost interest and was just turning pages. Fraser’s prose is overgrown with literary flourishes, like the one that begins on page 28 (not coincidentally, the page I bailed on):

Let us linger for a moment in that frothy postwar fizz of euphoria, when people are eager to swallow the cost of progress. How bad can it be, after the world has gone to war? It is a time of celebration.

Just for a moment, if you will, let us float across the country in that effervescent bubble of champagne elation and planetary subjugation and heedless sexual entitlement to look down from our cloud somewhere above Philadelphia and witness the conception of a noteworthy child.

Wait, are we in a bubble or a cloud? Either way, no thanks.

Also, as a child of the region Fraser can’t resist introducing a memoir angle into the proceedings, which as you may know by now is something I despise in true crime writing. This needs to stop.

In any event, as far as explainers go, I think Rule addressed the same subject in her books and for a sharp analysis of why this period became a “golden age” of serial killers I’d recommend Peter Vronsky’s American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years. Fraser’s speculations on pollution being partially at fault could have been the subject of a magazine article, but they feel lost in a grab-bag book of this size.

The DNF files

Oh, what a disappointment.

This is the second story in the Marple: Twelve New Stories anthology that got off to a great start with Lucy Foley’s “Evil in Small Places.” As the title indicates, it’s a sequel set several years after the first Miss Marple novel, The Murder at the Vicarage. Once again narrative duties are handled by the vicar. He and his wife have a young son now (Griselda had only been pregnant at the end of the novel), and their nephew Dennis is a probationary police constable working under Inspector Slack. As things kick off here the vicar discovers yet another body in his home, this time of his former maid, Mary. She was his maid in the novel but had run off with the ne’er-do-well poacher Bill Archer. Now both Bill and Mary are dead: he from eating poisonous fungi and she from having her head bashed in with a cast-iron omelette pan.

All of that sounds like it could be a lot of fun, but it’s not. Val McDermid is a big name in mystery fiction but I’m not familiar with her work. On the strength of this story I won’t be looking for more. It’s hard to even call it a mystery. Miss Marple just pulls a rabbit out of a hat in her quick explanation of what happened. The killers are a couple of minor characters whose names are dropped in passing in the rest of the story but who we never meet or even catch a glimpse of. The clues Miss M uses to solve the case go unmentioned. We’re only told that Miss Marple seems to be noticing things, and then at the end she tells us what it is she had noticed. So there’s no way as a reader you could even guess at whodunit. This won’t do.

Marple index