THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/14/02 -- Vol. 20, No. 50
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Comments on Reading MOBY DICK (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A Mess o' Mystery Reviews (book reviews by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Comments on Reading MOBY DICK (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was reading MOBY DICK again recently and some questions come to
mind. I think of MOBY DICK is a rollicking good adventure with
some interesting symbolism and some semi-religious views of the
human condition, but is weighed down with prose that horribly gets
in the way. Melville would think nothing of using a sentence like
the following:
"So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation
then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed
distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in
a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received a
mortal wound; and that another's mistake and misfortune might
plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death."
Now there is what I would call a totally overloaded sentence. It
deserves a paragraph to itself. I believe that the majority of
readers would become tangled in a sentence like that and when they
extricate themselves from it at the end most of the ideas have
been left behind. The reader breathes a sigh of relief only to
have to plunge into the next sentence which, I assure you, is just
as complex.
Well, this book was published in 1851. Could it be that people
wrote in a different manner? Yes, but this was not the way. If
the contention is that if you woke Herman Melville up at three in
the morning he would speak this way, does anybody believe it?
There is something else going on here. Instead, this style is an
affectation. It is the modern view that prose writing style
should be a lot like speaking style. At the very most it should
be like formal speaking.
Nobody blames Shakespeare for writing in an English that is
heavily stylistic. He is trying to write in poetry. But I am not
sure how heavy style crept into prose writing. It is true that
ponderous old books are ponderous because the writers felt that
style was required for the writing to be good. It became like
style in car design. A lot of that is not for purely practical
reasons, but a desire on the part of the car manufacturers to make
the car look good and be more profitable. And the designers often
have mixed agendas. I remember when they used to recess the
bumper into the front of the car. This supposedly made the car
look better (or as Ralph Nader pointed out, it made the parts
business more profitable since the car was now protecting the
bumper instead of the other way around). It however hampered the
purpose of the bumper. Similarly the writing style of even highly
respected writers was at a highly elevated level at the cost of
getting the idea across.
Just as the hero of the car story above was Ralph Nader, so too
the story of stylistic prose had its hero in Mark Twain. At the
time the man most people might have considered the greatest
contemporary writer was James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper wrote
thumping adventure stories with a high social agenda, the
idolizing of the American Indian, in a style that everybody
assumed was high and elevated. It certainly was hard work to
read. But the action-adventure plotting made people want to read
it. It was for the master cynic Mark Twain to point out that this
was not good writing at all. He wrote an essay entitled "The
Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper." In no uncertain
terms he mocked not just the writing style of Cooper, but of all
writers who let ponderous writing style get in the way of telling
the story. He wrote books like HUCKLEBERRY FINN in what was
supposedly the language of the common people.
I think Damon Runyon may have taken this movement a step further
by asking "which common people?" He writes his stories in the
language of the bookies and petty crooks of Broadway. Everybody
talks like Sheldon Leonard.
But back to MOBY DICK, while I know I am speaking heresy here by
criticizing a beloved author of a beloved novel, but I think the
book suffers from him using the inflated and pretentious prose
that was an affectation of the writers of his time. That may be
one thing that has improved since his time.
Speaking of his time, just when does MOBY DICK take place? This
is a bit of a digression and a trick question. We are given some
information about when MOBY DICK takes place. It apparently took
place late last year some time. And I mean the year 2001.
"And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of
the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time
ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between
more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill
must have run something like this: 'Grand Contested Election for
the Presidency of the United States 'Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael
'Bloody Battle In Affghanistan.'"
This is a direct reference to the news of 2001. When else in
history was there a war in Afghanistan and a contested U.S.
election? I tell you, it proves the not just the truth of Moby
Dick, but that it really can be used to tell the future. I bet if
we looked the book over using the methods used to look at the
Torah Codes, every n-th letter, we would find a lot of interesting
messages. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Mess o' Mystery Reviews (book reviews by Evelyn
C. Leeper)
As part of my retirement, I am reading more (though not as much
more as I had hoped). And some of what I am reading a lot more of
are mysteries. This is due in part, no doubt, to my having
managed to get something like two dozen Dover mysteries for a
couple of dollars during "bag day" at the local library book sale.
But I have read others as well, and so I thought I would do a sort
of collective review of the ones I've read so far this year.
(Also, when people ask, "What do you do with all your time now?",
this will provide a partial answer.)
Dover Books has been publishing inexpensive, well-bound trade
paperbacks of classic mysteries from the 1880-1950 range (give or
take). Most are English, that being the "Golden Age" of English
detective stories. However, it turns out that pretty much all of
the ones I bought have also gone out of print, even from Dover,
which keeps a lot of older works in print. (For example, they
have kept Olaf Stapledon's four major novels in print for at least
thirty years now.) Luckily, most of these mysteries are available
relatively cheaply as used books.
"The Experiences of Loveday Brooke" by Catherine Louisa Pirkis is
one of the more peculiar. It is also one of the more difficult to
shelve, being 6-1/8" by 9-1/4", rather than the standard 5-
3/8"x8". This is because, like all the Dover mysteries, it is a
reproduction of the original publication, including illustrations,
and since that was in a large-format magazine, making it any
smaller would make the print unreadable. Written in 1893, it is
one of the earliest series to feature a woman detective. While a
bit limited by what a lady could do in those days, that is also
part of its appeal. (And, yes, Loveday Brooke is a lady, not just
a woman.) Unfortunately, not only is this now out of print, it is
going for inflated prices as a used book ($27 and up).
Everett F. Bleiler's "Three Victorian Detective Novels" is a real
bargain, with three for the price of one: Andrew Forrester's "The
Unknown Weapon", Wilkie Collins's "My Lady's Money", and Israel
Zangwill's "The Big Bow Mystery". "The Unknown Weapon" (1864) is
probably the first modern detective story to have a female
detective. Unfortunately, the denouement seems too much like
pulling a rabbit out of a hat, although that may be a function of
the more modern policy of providing all the necessary clues to the
reader. "My Lady's Money" (1877) is a very early "drawing room"
mystery, and more satisfying. And "The Big Bow Mystery" (1891) is
the first real "locked room" mystery, and handles that aspect in a
very deft manner. I will point out that although "The Big Bow
Mystery" has its share of lower-class characters, it is not set in
the London-Jewish milieu that Zangwill is best known for.
In Douglas G. Browne's "What Beckoning Ghost" (1947) the mystery
is whether the supposedly supernatural happenings are really
supernatural (a mystery that to some extent implies its own
answer), and a chase through the London sewers that might have
inspired Graham Greene's "The Third Man".
John Ferguson's "Death Comes to Perigord" (1931) is set on one of
the Channel Islands. Ferguson is Scottish, so this isn't,
strictly speaking, an English mystery, but it is interesting that
he wrote about the other end of Britain rather than Scotland.
This one is notable mostly for the setting, though the
mystery/forensic aspect is handled well enough.
Mary Fitt's "Death and the Pleasant Voices" (1946) is full of
mistaken identities and various wills which may or may not exist,
but still seems somewhat mechanical in its plotting.
"The Middle Temple Murder" by J. S. Fletcher (1918) introduces
some of the more important characters a bit farther into the story
than modern readers might be used to, but is still better written
and more engaging than a lot of the more recent works. (Maybe for
me, the Golden Age ended around 1920.)
I found "Suicide Excepted" (1954) by Cyril Hare way too obvious--I
knew who the guilty party was a quarter of the way through, with
confirming clues showing up every few chapters after that as well.
I don't think it's just because reading a lot of mysteries makes
them easier--others are still just as surprising as before.
Not all the mysteries I read are old, but most seem to be set in
an earlier time. For example, I follow the various Sherlock
Holmes pastiches. The first in Larry Millett's "Holmes in
Minnesota" series, "Sherlock Holmes & the Red Demon", was actually
the third of the series I had read. (The other two were "Sherlock
Holmes & the Ice Palace Murders" and "Sherlock Holmes & the Rune
Stone Mystery", and a fourth "Sherlock Holmes & the Secret
Alliance" is now out and "in process" at my local library.) It
was passable, though a tad too "modern" in terms of attitudes for
me. Martin H. Greenberg's "Murder in Baker Street" is another
original anthology of stories of varying quality, but certainly
worth a read for Holmes fans.
And speaking of too modern, Alan Vanneman has his take on one of
the most famous asides in Sherlock, "Sherlock Holmes and the Giant
Rat of Sumatra," this one with way too much sex (with Watson, not
Holmes) to be at all true to the character of the original
stories.
And when you get bored with Sherlock Holmes, there's Mycroft
Holmes, in Quinn Fawcett's series. I had to go to Toronto to
discover these (in The Sleuth of Baker Street) even though they're
published by Tor here in the United States, because I don't really
check the mystery sections in the bookstore, and because the first
was published as mass-market originals, it didn't show up on the
library's new book shelves. The first two, "Against the
Brotherhood" and "Embassy Row", were acceptable, though the
recurring premise of an evil brotherhood and a correspondingly
good lodge fighting them didn't thrill me, and when I tried the
third one, "The Flying Scotsman", I just couldn't get into it.
(In spite of the photo and biography of "Quinn Fawcett" on the
book flaps, Quinn Fawcett is a pseudonym for the writing team of
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Bill Fawcett.)
I'm not sure where Peter J. Heck got the idea for having Mark
Twain be a detective, but it seems to work. The fourth and fifth
books, "Guilty Abroad" and "The Mysterious Strangler", continue
the premise, and Heck seems to portray Clemens reasonably
accurately without resorting to filling the book with caricatures
and familiar quotes. These are among the most enjoyable mysteries
I've read (though being a big Mark Twain fan probably affects my
judgment).
Among the most unlikely literary detectives might be Will
Shakespeare, in Simon Hawke's series. The second one, "The
Slaying of the Shrew", has nothing to add to either detection or
Shakespeare and seems to be designed mostly to cash in on
Shakespeare's recent burst of popularity. (And even being a fan
of Shakespeare didn't help me here.)
Though Edith Skom's book is titled "The George Eliot Murders", the
only connection with Eliot is some parallels between "Middlemarch"
and the murders. This is just your basic "take-to-the-beach-junk-
food" mystery--not very well written, a bit obvious in spots, a
bit contrived in spots (okay, a lot contrived in spots), and
having the completely unbelievable setting of a midwestern
professor vacationing at a *really* expensive Hawaiian resort. In
spite of all this, though, I must admit it as a "guilty pleasure,"
probably because people in it were talking about George Eliot,
"Middlemarch", and even Mark Twain.
This still leaves a couple of John Dickson Carrs, some Jewish-
themed mysteries, and some "literary" mysteries (not about
literary characters, but marketed as literary books), but they
will have to wait for another time. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers.
Many people of average intelligence are skilled
thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the
way the car is driven.
-- Edward de Bono
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