The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

I returned to / skimmed / reread parts of Patricia Highsmith's THE GLASS CELL (1964), mentioned before. Such a remarkable book - in describing such extreme personal events with such plainness, never seeming shocked by anything. Nothing flowery either, scarcely any metaphor in the whole novel. Just the protagonist reacting to and thinking about things. His moment by moment reactions to things that people say are so superbly perceived and rendered by the author. The whole novel could be said to invert other kinds of crime fiction - in that it starts with the innocent protagonist in prison, then he gets out and commits a crime, then a detective fails to convict him; a reversal of a paradigm.

I’m also reading a Highsmith currently, The Blunderer.

gyac – have you read the Bullpen Gospels?

great post gyac

Big Sleep (the movie) definitely improves on Big Sleep (the book) - the bookstore scene! The Long Goodbye (the book) is Chandler’s masterpiece and imo even the Altman movie doesn’t better it (although they’re almost entirely different stories).

(Xposts)

gyac – have you read the Bullpen Gospels?

There are two different versions of The Big Sleep (film) in circulation

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038355/alternateversions

Also of course the Michael Winner masterpiece.

Back on Charles J. Rzepka, DETECTIVE FICTION (2005) - a book I've used before and the best book about the genre I've ever read.

Loads of material, often good judgments, clear and lively writing. Also a first chapter which digs into the profound questions of detection narrative, the way it moves backwards in moving forwards (cf Todorov, Brooks), and a second on the rise of science, history and psychology as intellectual bases for the genre. Such a sophisticated, substantial, yet brisk and readable book.

I can't be so bothered with C18 Newgate writing, though, and am inclined to skip to the detailed account of Poe's 1840s stories. I've come to realise that it's curious how Poe sort of founded a genre, but in such an offhand, haphazard, eccentric way.

Agreed, pinefox. The solution to the mystery of Rue Morgue is def not, erhm, the most solid blueprint for the whodunnits to come.

I have not - should I?!

Ty, ob!

if you like the clubhouse culture stuff, i'd highly recommend. "Out Of My League" is good too, but I liked Hayhurst's first book the best.

I read Geoff Dyer's *Paris Trance* and enjoyed it. It's the first of Dyer's fiction I've read but, as suspected, fiction only loosely describes what Dyer is doing.

Everything is covered with a sheen of irony: the classic Dyer armour, which, if I were being a cynic, he wears to avoid being accused of ever actually meaning anything. That title. The fact that it's based on *Tender is the Night*, basing the story around two couples falling in love; it quotes directly from *The Sun Also Rises* but in a deliberately banal way. It doesn't really have a plot. It plays fast and loose with narrative perspective - the 'we' is sometimes a direct character perspective, sometimes like an emanation from the entwined relationships.

For all that, it's affecting, the sex is great and it moves to a conclusion that is dislocating and weirdly Ballardian in its disassociation - of self and landscape, of time and place.

Now reading Jacquetta Hawkes' *A Land*. It's a book I've had for a long time but have decided to give it a go as part of my (poor attempt at) deliberately avoiding reading anything associated with JB Priestley. Hawkes was Priestley's second wife and a fundamental part of his move late in life towards Jungian mysticism. They authored a bunch of books together. Hawkes wrote a huge amount; was the first woman to study the Archaeology & Anthropology degree course at the University of Cambridge.

This book is broadly landscape mysticism I guess, tracing the geological and archaeological history of Britain. She starts from her home in North London and moves inwards, outwards, backwards - spanning epochs and genealogies to arrive, well, I'm not sure where. It's more literary than scientific, though the science is sound (for the time) and shows obvious deep learning. It's weird and I'm enjoying it.

Why are you attempting to avoid reading anything associated with JB Priestley?

And if you are attempting this, why are you reading a book by his wife?

I'm being daft. I have to teach Priestley and, outside of the necessary knowledge to teach, have always thought him stuffy and not worth bothering with. A bit of other contextual reading has led me to read a couple of memoirs and a novel and, as with most things, I was wrong - he's good company, a decent novelist and an interesting character.

She sounds a bit like Annie Dillard

Aye, fair comparison. Albeit, Hawkes doesn't achieve that almost psychedelic pitch of transcendence that Dillard reaches.

Helen DeWitt - The English Understand Wool.

Forgot I read this a few nights ago, but it is only about 60 pages. Delightful!

"I have to teach Priestley" - interesting - in what context? Multiple classes or lectures about Priestley? Sounds unusual.

I’ll have to find a book of hers, Chinaski.

I finished Jean Day’s new book, ‘The Night Before the Day on Which,’ which shows the continuing turn toward a more legible lyric that Day’s work has taken over the years. There’s still a fair amount of parataxis and strangeness, but the poems feel more grounded and precise in the concreteness of their images. Excellent book, she remains a favorite.

I also had a sudden urge to read John Wieners, so reread the posthumous ‘a book of PROPHECIES’ yesterday. His poverty and instability shown through more on this read than my previous, but as expected, so did his genius.

Maggie O'Farrell - Hamnet
Tom Breihan - The Number Ones

I teach secondary English at a state comprehensive, pinefox, where *An Inspector Calls* is still canon. In truth, I don't need 'more' Priestley to teach the text at all, but I always like to have a wider sense of an author in the (erroneous I'm sure) belief that it thickens the texture of my teaching and, well, for my own sanity.

richard osman : THE BULLET THAT MISSED. really enjoy his books even though none of the characters are even slightly believable.

Deniable Contact Niall o Dochartaigh
Book by a lecturer at local university that I saw a talk by during the Druid's Ball exhibition. It's about back channel communication attempting to create peace during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. & the reasons why this failed. The British stablishment only pretending to take the IRA seriously for one thing and wanting to maintain control etc.
Quite interesting and unfortunately this seems to be the one copy of the book that is allowed to be lent out in the Irish library system. It's am academic press book so I think buying a copy would be expensive.
Wanted to read it after seeing the talk to get a better grounding. Worthwhile read anyway.

The narrator of Graham Greene'sThe End of The Affair is a novelist who can't see his way to the end of anything, and eventually thinks of his characters who refuse to respond to their creator's touch, who have to be tortured into coming alive (often the ones that reviewers cite as the "best-drawn," which he associates with "drawn and quartered" etc.). He wonders if this is what God is doing to him, if there is a God, or is there just a sudden pile-up of coincidence? There's no way to know, of course---why do ya think they call if faith, brother-man?--but I found myself upset as well, thinking that Greene was coming to rely way too much on this gmmicky spirtual melodrama as 4th Quarter play. Now, on rewind, the particulars of these truly shady events become more recognizable for their inferably comic qualities: the stubborn one is getting a whoopee cushion, a hotfoot, a radio in the bathtub, unplugged before too much damage---or did the cord just come out of the outlet, aieee (the particulars aren't in such broad strokes; Greene's too sneaky for that, if he's going for this kind of possibly-comic thing at all---it seems too [deliberately?} reduced to be thought of as "tragicomic," or doesn't deserve to be---Greene the writer also of what he calls "entertainments, " thrillers etc. comes off closer to a carny or pickpocket pro in these coincidences-or-More.)
Not quite, so far, as satisfying a balance of art and entertainment as Brighton Rock---and very probably not up The Power and the Glory, wnich I haven't read since the late 70s---but there are a lot of lines and passages that leave their marks, and lead me on---like I just now realized that this fictional testimonial, concocted by a believer, anticipates by twenty years Lennon's "God is a concept by which we measure our pain/Say it again---"
(Sour-grapes narrator can't forget that his lover found some weird beauty in there too, for all the good it did her, and he's still jealous dammit.)

Not any of the genre-structural sense of "entertainment" as in the hustle of Brighton Rock, but some WWII boom-boom for civilians as familiarity and more, also for sure some moments of comic relief leading somewhere else (also possibly comic, for the reader, not the characters), and love and hate and sex and death and alcohol and so on, mostly more serious than bullshit Serious---I think---I want to believe, because when he's unquestionably good he's real good, and if he didn't push his luck he wouldn't be as Greene.

in reverse chronological order of reading, with the first in progress:
Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth
Crying in Hmart by Michelle Zauner
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth
(I think I did not credit the writer of the third, a realization that came after starting the first, and wonder if I commonly make the mistake of conflating writers with narrators or characters when it comes to certain genders or races and if this is a form of implicit racism.)

(or gender bias)

LONG LIVE THE POST HORN! sounds uncannily close to THE CRYING OF LOT 49.

Still reading Charles J. Rzepka on Sherlock Holmes.

funnily enough just ripped through the novels and the first two collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Any highlights from what you're reading pf?

Agree with both you and Daniel that Poe essentially discovering the basics of the modern crime and detection novel in Rue Morgue is piquant. origins in the grotesque and arabesque - and the solution to Rue Morgue is certainly grotesque - gives a different angle to the genre (not a complete view by any means, but an interesting angle certainly): that it is a case of bringing rationally available (if recondite) evidence to bear on apparently supernaturally evil or morally absurd (ie grotesque) occurrences.

Am reading Sherlock Holmes w my 10 year old at the moment and surprised by how often the vague apparition of "gypsies" seems to swim into view, but always as a red herring, which is nice I think. Racism as a kind of irrational superstition that the modern sleuth must discard in the search for the truth.

Also quite a bit of thrills, danger, violence.. hadn't really remembered all that.

i was astonished at the one where the main character nearly gets crushed to death in a hydraulic press

and

is also suprisingly relaxed about losing his thumb

given his moment and who he overlaps with there's another dimension to holmes always worth digging into: conan doyle isn't a decadent but SH sometimes very much is (lassitude, shooting up, plays the violin). viz holmes as lawrence llewellyn-bowen as oscar "this wallpaper will be the death of me" wilde -- a horrible murder is the private detective's excuse to break open an englishman's home/castle to public view and there deploy snark abt his horrible curtains as the "solution" to the "crime" (of course for wilde and llewellyn-bowen they ARE the crime)

i mean lestrade aren't going to solve the mystery via attention to drapery

lol s/b lestrade isn't

“lestrade aren’t” to become canon plz

but holmes as decadent aesthete i think is correct. and there are strong fin de siecle elements in the stories more generally. eg if you take Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights as an essential model.

Charles J. Rzepka specifically compares Holmes to Wilde (p.131) and, more surprisingly to me, states that DORIAN GRAY and THE SIGN OF FOUR were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same luncheon.

Rzepka's book is very good on centuries of detective fiction, and has whole sections on Poe and Holmes. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a critical and historical book on this material.

Fizzles, re Holmes he a) gives good professional and scientific context for Doyle, b) articulates Watson's qualifications for being the sidekick, and an idea of 'bohemianism'; c) explores ideas of 'rivalry' between Holmes and other detectives and thus the reader; d) produces quite a detailed reading of THE SIGN OF FOUR.

FWIW he also gives a very elaborate reading of Poe's 'Rue Morgue'. I think he mentions that Paris had no Rue Morgue avenue at the time (but New Orleans did? Or Dylan and Lloyd Cole later sang about one anyway).

I haven't got back into The Sign Of Four with my son because the length is a little daunting. Does this thread rate it?

i think all the novels are a long slog in places

(hound maybe least so?)

Truth is, I haven't even read THE SIGN OF FOUR yet!

I have read SCARLET and would say: it's not long at all, but - as previously discussed with Mark S, and agreed by Rzepka - it has a preposterous proportionately long Mormon interlude which has basically nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, which is not ideal for a ... Sherlock Holmes novel.

Rzepka actually states that this bad fictional structure is directly drawn from Gaboriau's Lecoq mystery, THE HONOUR OF THE NAME (unknown to me, but incidentally J-F Lyotard ends his most famous essay with that phrase).

well like A Study In Scarlet, the first crime and Holmes parts are the best and the “here is a long explanatory narrative set in our former territories and dominions” less so. that said the whole victorian attitude to the mormons is kind of fascinating.

Baskervilles remains the best imo as it has the least of this and Dartmoor is a brilliant setting, also used in the excellent Silver Blaze of. it’s surprisingly underused as a literary landscape - its laureate Eden Philpotts aside, who needs to go on the “authors no one reads any more” thread), Sign of Four is v enjoyable as they race around London, and ASS (sorry) introduces Holmes, so all good.

that first para referring to The Sign of Four. (consistently referred to as The sign of the four in the text)

Confusing divergence that!

apologies! comes from lazily/inattentively posting on my phone

Silver Blaze is so good.

Fizzles, though I do often find your posts quite difficult, in this particular instance I was just remarking that it's an odd divergence that people variously refer to THE SIGN OF FOUR and THE SIGN OF THE FOUR. Think this may actually have been a US / UK publishing divergence.

I would now like to go back and read many more of these stories. Though there seems only to have been 3 years of them in the first instance.

there is a considerable decline in quality after Conan Doyle brings him back.

I thought I had read all of the stories, but I have read the plot summary of "Silver Blaze" and for the life of me I don't remember it.