Detective Fiction: From Victorian Sleuths to the Present

During my holiday absence, I slowed my typical consumption of academic materials. Even though the postings in my little blog are not, by their very nature, a job (despite the laborious effort), I needed a short break! To paraphrase the old adage, however, the brain wants what the brain wants. I found myself slipping away from my preoccupation with remaining unoccupied: Listening to lectures on my mp3 player while others at family gatherings sat around espousing the worst kind of tripe about the American government, the United Nations, the Pope, etc.

I tried to pick a lecture series that seemed to be more entertaining fare than my typical consumption. Thus, with very little forethought, I began The Modern Scholar course Detective Fiction: From Victorian Sleuths to the Present.  Like Scholar lecture series I have completed before, Detective Fiction is divided into 14 lectures each with a length of approximately 30 minutes. The lecture series contains the following lectures: Lecture 1 Mysterious Origins, Lecture 2 Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and the Victorian Era, Lecture 3 The Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie and the Golden Age, Lecture 4 Gifted Amateurs: Academics to Zoologists, Lecture 5 Private Investigators and Hard-boiled Heroes, Lecture 6 Cops, Capers, and Police Procedurals, Lecture 7 Spies Among Us: Espionage and Techno-thrillers, Lecture 8 In the Teeth of the Evidence: Lawyers and Legal Eagles, Lecture 9 Medicine for Murder: The Medical Mystery, Lecture 10 Probing the Past: Historical Detective Fiction, Lecture 11 Women of Mystery: Beyond Female Intuition, Lecture 12 International Intrigue: Detective Fiction Goes Global, Lecture 13 Investigating Identity: Ethnic Sleuths, and Lecture 14 Regional Sleuths and Future Trends in Detective Fiction.

The presenter for the course was M. Lee Alexander, Ph D., a visiting assistant professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Her CV indicated that she teaches detective fiction, creative writing, and “Tolkien and His Circle,” a course about the group of authors called “the Inklings.” Professor Alexander also teaches English as a second language (ESL) courses for graduate students. She has authored many scholarly articles and poems, and a chapbook of poetry called Observatory (2007). Dr. Alexander has presented scholarly papers concerning detective fiction, emphasizing the links between modern popular culture and the classic tradition at international conferences, including “Mr. Monk Meets Sherlock Holmes: Disability and the Consulting Detective” at Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes: Their Cultural Afterlives Conference at the University of Hull, England (2009), and “To Make a House a Holmes: Sherlockian Subtext of House, MD” at Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His Worlds Conference, Bennington College, Vermont (2010).

Detective fiction, as we know it, has its beginnings in American literature. Some of the first instances are Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” and “The Purloined Letter” in Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. However, William Godwin, an English journalist, political philosopher, and writer, is considered by many to have written the first detective novel, Caleb Williams in 1794. It describes the story of a wealthy squire named Ferdinando Falkland. Falkland tries to ruin the life of his secretary Caleb Williams after he discovers a secret about his employer’s past.

The big name in detective fiction, is, of course, Sherlock Holmes—the iconic character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Holmes stories were written in the Victorian era. Holmes defining characteristic as a detective was observation and deduction. The character was always the smartest man in the room. Other interesting facets of Holmes’ character were his eccentricities. Modern psychology might consider him to have Asperger's syndrome with a healthy dose of narcissism bordering on personality disorder. While these characteristics might have been debilitating in “real life” they often serve as catalysts for Holmes’ amazing abilities. Holmes often self-medicates, particularly with opium.

The rest of the course looks at how diverse detective fiction has grown since the time of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. There are numerous subgenres of detective fiction—some for animal lovers, some for would-be lawyers, international sleuths—you name it, there is probably a book out there incorporating whatever interest, hobby, or disability possible into the work of professional, private, and amateur detectives. The field shows no sign of slowing its expansion.

As a side note, I was surprised to find that many detective fiction authors have created works that are considered genuine literature. I found it surprising because it is more often thought of as “pulp” or cheap fiction. Overall, I found this to be a fun and inspiring course. I am even considering writing a detective fiction novel myself. I think it would be quite interesting work, as I loved being a professional investigator when I worked for a governmental agency. I think most avid readers would find this series of lectures to be interesting and enriching.

Oh, and happy learning!!!

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

My wife and I regularly read a book together, typically a classic from American literature, and discuss it as we go through the pages. Some past selections are The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and The Catcher in the Rye. Recently, we finished William Faulkner’s As I Lay  Dying.

We approached the novel with some trepidation. I had previously tried reading it when I was in my late teens but I found its labyrinthine first-person, stream-of-consciousness multiple narratives almost entirely incomprehensible. This time, reading it with another person proved to be much more fruitful.

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying over the course of only 6 weeks while he was employed at a power plant. It was published in 1930. The title is taken from Homer’s The Odyssey: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades." Chapter lengths vary, each one presented in the first person by a new narrator.

The plot centers on the Bundren family in rural Mississippi at what seems to be the turn of the 20^th century. The mother of the family, Addie, is dying. She is presented at first in a somewhat pious fashion, we learn about her demons later. Her husband, Anse, is self-pitying opportunist whose first comment after his wife passes is something like, “Well, maybe now I can get them teeth.” (He claims to have been edentulous for 15 years.) Her children are Cash (a carpenter), Darl and Dewey Dell (twins), Jewell (foul-mouthed and ill-tempered), and Vardaman (who is still at least an adolescent).

The basic plot seems to be inspired by ancient epics although in a more absurdist vein than a heroic one. Addie’s dying wish was to be buried miles away among “her people” in Jefferson, Mississippi. Recent rains have left the rivers flooded and as the family loads her into the coffin and onto their wagon it becomes quite apparent that the journey will be fraught with misadventure.

I will not recount the entire plot here. Instead I will give some general impressions that both my wife and I took from the novel. First and foremost, Anse Bundren is a despicable, annoying, and pathetic human being. Second, Faulkner’s contrast of the simple vernacular of these people with rich, complex inner monologues serves to demonstrate that just because they might seem simple-minded doesn’t mean that they actually are.

Darl is particularly articulate and there are hints that he has a “second sight” that is off-putting to most of his neighbors and even family members. He stands in stark contrast to his younger brother Jewell, who was the “apple” of his mother’s eye. Darl is thoughtful, Jewell is pragmatic. Darl is analytical, Jewell plays his cards close to his chest.

In the end, however, each of these strong characters portrayed in the children gives some part of their very being to see that their mother receives a proper burial. Only Anse gets away clean, looking dirtier than ever.

Read this novel.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Recently, I stumbled upon an article on the Web (http://www.listmuse.com/how-well-read-short-novels.php) that purports to help one to be “well-read” through a list of 40 books. I find such lists very appealing; however, I have my own general idea about the kinds of “classics” that make one well-read. I browsed through the volumes composing the list and discovered I had read approximately 1/3 of them already. It seemed a reasonable conjecture, based on this correlation, that this list might prove very useful. This idea is not unique. A close friend of mine had the collection The Harvard Classics or the essential bookshelf or something like that. I read a couple of volumes from his collection, most notably The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which made a considerable impression upon me.

The first volume on the list that I had not read before was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Going into the reading, the only familiarity I had with Ms. Woolf was through the 1966 film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That film struck me as an intense study of the breakdown of a relationship, particularly a marriage of two intellectuals. It had even been quite a long time since I had seen the film—on AMC when AMC actually showed more quality, classic films instead of original programming like Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Let me be clear, I have no problem with either of these shows and the latter is one of my favorite series of all time. I mean simply that AMC and Bravo channels used to function as a sort of distance study film school but original and reality programming has changed that forever.

I didn’t do much investigating about the character of the author Ms. Woolf prior to tackling the novel. That might have been a mistake. Ms. Woolf writes in what is generally referred to as a “stream of consciousness” style. Thus, To the Lighthouse is filled with page after page of interior monologue—the “self talk” that goes on and on. I mean that literally, the voluminous verbosity of each of the significant characters in the book makes you wish these people would take up Buddhist meditation, to try and quiet the mind a bit.

To the Lighthouse runs around 320 pages and was first printed in 1927. More than anything, the novel is a character study of what appears to be an intellectual, upper middle-class family during the period between World War I and World War II. The central characters of the novel are Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay is highly intellectual and keeps his focus on the few achievements in his life. He wonders whether anything he’s done will have lasting value for the human race. At one point he says that even a stone will outlive the works of Shakespeare. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, seems to “suffer in silence” at the behest of her husbands tremendous yet fragile ego. She takes comfort in caring for her children, supporting her husband, and making sure their house guests (many of whom are frequent, long-term occupants) are properly fed and cared for.

The novel is pretty short on plot. There is some focus on the youngest son James’s desire to visit the lighthouse near to their vacation home. However, the novel’s main focus is on the dynamics of relationships: The relationship of the individual to him or herself as well as the interrelationship of each of the characters.

Ms. Woolf’s writing style might be compared to that of James Joyce in novels such as Ulysses—a book I have tried to get around to reading for years. I think the politics of relationships would lend Ms. Woolf’s work to an easy critique from either the Marxist, feminist, or deconstructionist traditions of literary criticism. Luckily, that is beyond the scope of my little blog post here. I tend to prefer non-fiction in general but I do recognize the value inherent in a careful examination of classic fiction. As of now, I plan to continue to read (in order) those titles that I have not yet read on the 40-volume list.

Do you have any suggestions for books, documentaries, or free courses I might checkout? If so, I welcome these responses by e-mail or in the comments section of the blog forum. As always, happy learning!