I don’t think Bret Harte’s read much today, but during his lifetime he was quite popular. He primarily wrote Westerns, but also penned a number of parodies of contemporary authors. I also don’t know if he personally knew Conan Doyle, but Doyle had read some of his writing and even admitted an early debt.

“The Stolen Cigar-Case” came out in 1900, a time when Doyle was still cranking out Holmes stories at a good clip. It’s very much a parody pastiche, with the narrator being the assistant of the great detective “Hemlock Jones.” It’s quite funny, but I wonder what Doyle thought of it. It has a real edge, playing up Watson’s sycophancy as a sniveling codependent (the story begins with his throwing himself at Jones’s feet and then caressing his boot) while giving us a Holmes who is just a brainless, bullying airbag with delusions of grandeur. This isn’t a gentle satire and I got the sense that there was something about the Holmes stories that really bothered Harte. The thing is, I don’t know if that would have upset Doyle. He’d already had his fill of Hemlock too.

Holmes index

In doing some background work for a longer writing project, I’ve been going over examples drawn both from my own experience and in my reading of instances where people have fallen short of a basic level of competence in their supposed fields of expertise. Whether we’re talking about contractors or bankers, members of the medical establishment or waiters, I think we’ve all had occasion, occasions that are increasing in frequency, to be frightened at the realization that the people we are dealing with don’t actually know what they’re doing or what they’re talking about.

I recently found an example of this in a place I wasn’t expecting it, while reading a cultural study of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H. P. Lovecraft was published in 2016. It’s not really an academic book, though I think the best work of this sort now takes place outside of the academy now, and the author, W. Scott Poole, is a professor of history with a Ph.D. In any event, I thought I’d supplement my reading of it with some of Lovecraft’s fiction, which I haven’t revisited in years.

I’ve been enjoying In the Mountains of Madness, but reading it alongside Lovecraft’s stories I’ve found my confidence shaken in Poole as a trustworthy authority. While acknowledging that he’s writing “as a historian,” he plays pretty fast and loose with the literary evidence. A case in point is the very first Lovecraft story that he bores into, the early “Dagon.” Here’s how he begins talking about it:

The story’s absurdly unlucky protagonist escapes from the German U-boat that sank his merchant ship only to find himself a castaway on an island that’s no island at all.

We’re off to a bad start. The narrator’s ship isn’t sunk by a U-boat but by what is later described as a “German man-of-war.” Which makes sense, because how was he to escape from a submarine in a small boat? That’s quite a mistake, but while I’d also object to the narrator being a “castaway” (he escapes from the German ship) and the island as “no island at all” (then what is it?), even more significant errors were to come.

The story’s climactic moment comes when the narrator witnesses a sea beast slide out of the water and embrace a strange carved monolith. Or, as Poole describes it: “Falling into a troubled sleep, he [the narrator] wakes to a terrible sound, another upheaval from the shadowy sea that brings forth a slippery, slurping, sucking monstrosity that slithers its way to land and crawls over the monolith, almost seeming to sloppily absorb it in a cacophony of rubber menace.”

This is all wrong. In the first place, the narrator doesn’t awaken to this sight, he’s standing looking at the monolith when the monster comes out of the water. No terrible sound awakens him because he’s not asleep. Then it’s not clear why the monster itself is characterized in such a way. In the story it’s said to “dart” on the land, not slither. It’s also not clearly described here, and words like slippery, slurping, and sucking don’t appear. We’re only told that it has “gigantic scaly arms.” So it’s like a fish (Milton famously described the fallen idol Dagon as “upward man, and downward fish”), but perhaps only in terms of its flesh. We’re definitely not talking about a tentacle beast.

Finally, there’s the story’s ending. The narrator, rescued and now living as a morphine addict in California, has prepared us for it by saying in the opening paragraph that he’s going to throw himself from his window to the street below as soon as he’s finished. At the end he hears “a noise at the door” that startles him, and the sound of a body “lumbering against it.” Determined that “It shall not find me” he turns to “The window! The window!” And there the story breaks off.

What happens seems clear. But in Poole’s account it all kicks off when the narrator “hears something at the window.” Then he talks of “some Thing from out of the sea showing up on his window casement.” As with the escape from the U-boat, it’s hard to see how Poole even arrived at such a reading. Why would the monster be on his window casement? I don’t even know what it means to be “on” a window casement. And it’s made clear the monster, or a monster, is at his door.

“Dagon” is a short story, only five pages long in the edition I was reading it in. To find this number of errors in a thumbnail analysis of its meaning was more than a little surprising. I’ve still found In the Mountains of Madness to be a good read, and I’m sticking with it. But I can’t shake the feeling that standards are slipping.

This isn’t a great mystery novel, but I had a good time with it anyway just for its knowingness. I felt like I could have been checking boxes, whether we’re talking about elements specifically having to do with the character of Miss Marple or tactics general to any of Christie’s mysteries.

With regard to the former there’s Miss Marple’s long acquaintance with the evil of a “sweet peaceful village” and her method of finding “the right parallel” between said evil and other crimes, given that “human nature . . . is very much the same everywhere.”

Chief among the general tactics is the information overload. We begin with a layout of the main floor of Stonygates (that’s the country estate setting). Should we be studying this? Then there follow two chapters of background material filling us in on the family dynamics. You see Ruth suspects that something isn’t quite right at Stonygates and that her sister Carrie Louise may be in danger, so she sends Miss M to investigate. But to understand what’s going on you have to know that Carrie Louise is on her third husband, with children (stepchildren, adopted children, natural children, grandchildren) all assembled around her. So yes, two chapters have to be spent filling us in here. But is any of this relevant? Or is it all a smokescreen? It’s natural to think we should be paying attention to it, perhaps even making notes, but our attention always has a filter and naturally we want to get on with the story. I mean, we don’t even have a body yet.

A regular motif in Christie’s mysteries is the crime that’s conceived and presented as a dramatic performance, which is something that really gets leaned into here. I don’t think anyone reading this book for the first time will have any doubt that the argument, which takes place behind a closed door, between Lewis Serrocold and Edgar Lawson is just a show (Edgar is immediately flagged by Miss Marple as being an excessively “dramatic” young man, delivering lines as though “playing in amateur theatricals”). But to what end? To create a distraction? Because it would be too obvious if one of them turned out to be the killer then, wouldn’t it?

But there are even more obvious suspects that we feel can’t be in play for the same reason. The two guys who weren’t in the great hall at the time of the murder, for example. No matter how suspicious they seem – one is sullen and American, the other a drama queen – we feel like they can be struck off the list.

In approaching the mystery this way, generically as it were, we’re not even looking for clues. Which is a good thing because there aren’t any. The solution just comes to Miss Marple, after it just comes to one of the other characters (who then must be disposed of in a secondary murder). There is no single event or material fact that triggers this but just an awareness of the drama of life at Stonygates, where amateur theatricals are in fact part of the curriculum at an adjacent school for juvenile delinquents. All the world’s a stage, or a magic show, and when the one churchly widow looks “exactly as the relict of a Canon of the Established Church should look” it surprises the police detective “because so few people ever did look like what they were.” Which, in turn, make us think that she can’t possibly be the murderer either.

But if everyone is an actor performing a part it’s hard to tell why one particular bit of stagecraft should mean more than any other. Or, for that matter, one character’s view of reality should be privileged over someone else’s. This is what makes the book finally disappointing. But I still enjoyed it, especially for the way it foregrounds the reality vs. illusion nature of most of Christie’s contrivances, with murder being presented knowingly as a magic trick pulled off with stagecraft, misdirection, and sleight of hand. You go into every whodunit like you do a magic show, expecting to be fooled in all the usual ways. Knowing this doesn’t diminish the experience but is part of the fun.

Marple index