One of America’s best-loved comic short story writers does a Holmes pastiche. And there’s nothing funny about it at all. I wonder if this may have been the worst story O. Henry ever wrote. Even the detective’s name, Shamrock Jolnes, is a miss. Hemlock Jones in Bret Harte’s terrific “The Stolen Cigar-Case” was funnier.

As for the story, it’s about a man looking for his missing sister in the Big Apple. After being fleeced by a police detective, and Jolnes’s inductive method being exposed as a sham, the sister’s location is whimsically discovered by a third sleuth. First published in 1904, the jokes here haven’t aged well, to the point where for most readers they might need to be explained. Which means they aren’t jokes anymore.

Holmes index

Extreme Killers: Tales of the World’s Most Prolific Serial Killers

By Michael Newton

Page I bailed on: 18

Verdict: I’ve nothing against Michael Newton. I thought his Encyclopedia of Serial Killers adequate. But the fact is that he published “more than 339 novels and non-fiction books as of 2020,” and this more than suggests that he’d become a bit of a machine. In the author’s bio for his Encyclopedia (second edition published in 2006) the number given is only “more than 180 books.” In any event, he died in 2021.

I’ve also nothing against this Profiles in Crime series. I thought Killer Cults: Stories of Charisma, Deceit, and Death adequate, if only just. But as I said in my review of that volume, I didn’t see how there was much need for such books in the age of Wikipedia anyway.

I didn’t get far into this one. The first killer covered was Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman in the fifteenth century who may have been the original Bluebeard. The second was Erzsébet Báthory, the “Bloody Countess,” a Hungarian noble who may have been the original Dracula. Both figures have since entered into legend and the real nature and extent of their crimes is a matter of some debate. Their trials can’t be divorced from the historical context, where accusations of the most outrageous behaviour weren’t uncommon. Unfortunately, establishing that context takes time, and in an anthology like this that’s not what you’re going to get, with each chapter being limited to around 15 pages. So it just wasn’t adding up to anything more than what you’d expect from a quick Internet search and wasn’t any fun to read.

The DNF files

This was the second of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and it reads a lot like a rerun of The Moving Target. A damsel in distress, a rich lady unhappily married into money, comes to Archer with a problem. He heads out to the big house and meets the dysfunctional, decadent family, which includes a kittenish daughter with an eye for the wrong kind of guy. There’s a subplot involving real gangster types that leads to Archer getting roughed up, but that has little bearing on the family’s moral disintegration. Archer is slow on the uptake, which leads to the deaths of some innocents. Though being innocent is a relative term, since there are no heroes. As Archer recognizes at the end of this book: “Everyone had done wrong for himself and others. Everyone had failed. Everyone had suffered.”

Finally, I’m not even sure if Archer gets paid. Certainly not enough for the beatings he takes.

It’s written in the same cynically ornate style that stays just this side of parody. As so: “The thin scarp of moon hung in a gap of the mountains, like lemon rind in a tall dark drink of Lethe.” And then there’s tough guy patter delivered up with a seasoning of self-deprecating wit:

There had to be a difference between me and the opposition or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.

Of course, right from the opening sentence Archer is assessing feminine charms, taking Maude Slocum in from top to bottom: “If you didn’t look at her face she was less than thirty, quick-bodied and slim as a girl. Her clothing drew attention to the fact: a tailored sharkskin suit and high heels that tensed her nylon-shadowed calves. . . . About thirty-five, I thought, and still in the running.” Later on he’ll see Maude in a zebra-striped dress, with “her breasts pressed together like round clenched fists in the V of her neckline.” Trust Archer to be able to identity a physical threat.

But Archer is no dumb brute. Ross Macdonald had a Ph.D. in English literature, after all. So when Archer meets a broken gambler in Vegas he refers to him as “the young Dostoevsky,” assuming that the reader will make the connection. And I guess a reader of pulp detective fiction in 1950 might have made it. I suspect fewer people will get it today. When Maude will later tell Archer that her “fairy” husband has retired to his bedroom, there to “spend the rest of his life . . . like Marcel Proust,” and Archer responds “This Marcel something-or-other, is he a friend of yours?” she has no time for his games: “So now you’re going to play dumb again?” She knows he knows his Proust. Though I think he’s being honest when he tells Cathy that he hasn’t read Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection.” Oh, those were literary days indeed in the mid-century. Archer can drop lèse-majesté and impotentia coeundi into sentences as easily as he can tap someone on the head with the butt of his .45.

It’s a fun read that moves quickly. So quickly that at points I lost track of where I was. Then when I went back I found that such information had simply been left out. Where does it say that Archer is being picked up by the police and taken back to the Slocum’s place? They just put him in the car and the next thing we know he’s there, even though we haven’t been told where they were taking him or where “there” is when they get there.

And underlying everything is Archer’s disgust with the circles, high and low, that he moves in. In The Moving Target he had seen L.A. as an “excremental river” and in this book he has a moment of peace and communion with nature while swimming in the Pacific that’s set against the mess men have made of things:

I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.

Ah that was life in 1950 too. An ocean that couldn’t be tainted. Gone now, like everything else.

Archer index