Neglected Favorites

 

I was going into the hospital in November, and I thought I’d better pack a good, big book – think Shogun or Lord of the Rings – and Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy popped into my field of view.  As it turned out, I didn’t read it in the hospital, after all, but it was nice to make his acquaintance again just the same, and I’m now about to sink my teeth into an earlier series, The Dying Earth.

Jack Vance is one of those guys I read quite a lot of, in the late 1970’s, and then stopped reading, I don’t remember why.  This probably isn’t unusual, our enthusiasms aren’t consistent.  I went through almost all of Steinbeck, for instance, in my late teens (the only one I left out was A Cup of Gold), but I haven’t picked up any of the books since.  I can go back and read Irwin Shaw’s short stories, or O’Hara’s, and enjoy them – as well as learn something from them – so it isn’t the period or the fashion, just a lack of curiosity.  I admire Steinbeck’s muscularity, and I think he’s an influence on me, so I can’t explain it, not at least to my own satisfaction.  Jack Vance, though, falls into a different category.  It’s not that he isn’t a stylist, he’s a very graceful writer, if not quite as limpid as Ursula Le Guin, say, or Sylvia Townsend Warner, but no mean shakes.  The thing about Vance is that he’s an extraordinarily convincing world-builder; geography, and cosmology, yes, and politics, but language, and food, and music - ritual, in other words.  This is nothing to be sneezed at.  He’s right up there with Philip José Farmer and Philip K. Dick.  My favorite book of Vance’s has always been The Last Castle, an odd, dystopian novella I gave or lent to many other people, some of whom got it, and some of whom didn’t.

(Speaking of Sylvia Townsend Warner, I think Kingdoms of Elfin is one of the most startling and original books I’ve ever read, but I’ve never been able to get more than half a dozen pages into anything else of hers.  It’s a mystery.)

 

Rediscovering, or revisiting, Jack Vance got me thinking about this question of enthusiasms, and maybe it’s exactly that, that we can blow so hot for a writer, that we can’t help but blow cold, at some point.  J.D. Salinger comes to mind.  There’s that famous quote from Isaac Asimov, which I’ve used before.  He was asked, When was the Golden Age of science fiction?  And he said, Fourteen.

It’s true that we can go back to somebody we adored, in our early reading, and be disappointed; it’s also true that we can go back, and be astonished, not only that they can still cast the spell, but that we see things now that we of course missed, then.  Robert Louis Stevenson is one of these.  The opening chapter of Treasure Island is a masterful piece of compression and suspense; but Treasure Island actually begins before the opening lines, it begins with the frontispiece map.  Another example is Dorothy Sayers.  Most of us would have come to her later on, she’s not for kids, but at the same time, most of us would have raced through the books.  If you go back and read The Nine Tailors, or Murder Must Advertise, which has the reputation of a slighter book, but giving them breathing room, taking your time, they present as novels of manners, as much a highly-colored portrait of the years between the wars as Trollope is of the mid-Victorians.  And Sayers casts an unsettling eye forward; her world may seem serene and comfortably hierarchal, but Wimsey is in some ways strikingly modern.  He clearly suffers from shell-shock, PTSD, and Bunter, who was with him in the trenches, is more than a gentleman’s gentleman, he’s a refuge.

I think we sometimes outgrow writers we once liked.  I don’t think it’s disrespectful.  We still harbor a residual affection for them, which is in some ways a melancholy reflection on who we used to be.  I don’t think any the less of Robert Heinlein, for example, I just don’t think he’s readable, any more – at least for me.  (I could give The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress another shot, I guess, but I’m not that tempted to test my own bandwidth.)

It’s refreshing, on the other hand, to find out you can be hooked again by a writer, just as thoroughly as you were the first time.  Here’s an embarrassing story.  I read Jefferson Parker’s Laguna Heat when it first came out, and then the next book, Little Saigon, and I liked both of them a lot.  And then I had the misfortune of watching the TV movie of Laguna Heat.  I’m sorry, but Harry Hamlin, for all that he seems to be a nice guy, is not a very expressive actor, and even with Jason Robards and Rip Torn and Jimmy Gammon – no.  Least said, soonest mended.  But here’s where I mortify myself.  I stopped reading Jeff Parker.  We all know the writer has zero control of what happens when they sell a book to the movies.  Sure, you got Dutch Leonard, or Dennis Lehane, but the rest of us are up shit creek.  You can open the oven door, and the soufflé will fall, but Jeff wasn’t even in the kitchen when it happened.  It took me fifteen years, before I picked up Silent Joe, and realized what I’d been missing.  I can say now, with all humility, I never would have forgiven myself, if I’d missed A Thousand Steps, or worse, The Rescue.  And what about the Charlie Hood books?  There’s always the satisfaction of knowing you can give yourself a second chance. 

Take this as a cautionary tale.  Fashions change.  Our own tastes.  The way a writer looks at the world, or the way we do.  But don’t pass up a good book.  They sneak up on you. 

A Prince of Detection

I made the acquaintance of a Prince last week. This was somewhat belated, as Florizel, Prince of Bohemia, had made his London Magazine debut in 1878. Later, seeing his stories plagiarized, Robert Louis Stevenson collected the four stories comprising "The Suicide Club" in the hardback New Arabian Nights.

His Highness is a lively character who forms an interesting comparison to his near contemporary Sherlock Holmes, who appears in 1887. Both inhabit similar, mostly masculine, worlds, have a good-hearted companion, and confront a criminal mastermind.

The Prince lives in London. Despite his marked affection for his homeland, Florizel prefers to reside in the British capitol where he collects interesting experiences and usual characters alongside his Master of Horse, Colonel Geraldine.

In this set up, the Colonel, though younger than the prince and very much the faithful subordinate, is easily the more prudent and sensible of the pair. Indeed, Florizel's adventures would have ended with his initial outing, "Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts", if Geraldine had not, for once, taken matters into his own hand.

Do not, by the way, be deceived by the cozy suggestions of this title. As in the later adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the whimsical and trivial is often reveals some deep and sinister matter. In this case, 'cream tarts' lead direct to the Suicide Club, which, starting with film rights in 1909, has showed up on film, on stage, on TV, and as recently as 2017 in a Caliber Comic.

The Colonel plays a big role in this story, not so in most of the others. Unlike Watson, that most famous of detective companions, Geraldine does not narrate the stories. Rather, his function is to offer good advice and reminders of the political responsibilities of a prince. These Florizel usually ignores, pulling rank and so precipitating the complications that inspire a good story.

Although an intelligent, socially astute, generous, and gentlemanly character, Florizel is young and very far from the coolly analytical Holmes, who was destined not only for monstrous popularity but for a long life post-Doyle, acquiring not only new authors but a wife and child as well.

By contrast Florizel inspired seven stories in New Arabian Nights, all good. In them he is perhaps as much fixer, if that term is not insulting to a royal personage, as investigator. And unlike Holmes, he is not onstage the majority of the time. Indeed, he sometimes appears only toward the end of the narrative to sort matters out.

Florizel is less a sleuth than a collector of interesting people. If they prove to be in difficult straits, he tries to tip the scales toward the good. He is generous with his help but very much the entitled royal when facing the criminal element.

Throughout, Florizel is brave and capable, a man of the world with an admirable sense of humor, a bit of a philosopher, and fond, like Sherlock, of disguises. Since Stevenson was a fine writer, a master of atmosphere, characterization, and plot, and always very much in need of money, the Prince would seem to have been a good candidate for many more stories. Might he also have become a great detective?

Stevenson did bring him back in More New Arabian Nights, written with his wife, Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson, but by this time, Florizel has lost his kingdom after too much time away from Bohemia. He is now running the finest tobacconist shop in London and clearly does not have the resources and agency he enjoyed as prince.

Perhaps the seriously ill Stevenson ran out of energy for Florizel; perhaps the prince's station and character proved limitations, or perhaps Stevenson simply decided to keep him part of an ensemble rather than the star of the show. In any case, Florizel's fame, if lasting, if modest, and, having settled him comfortably as a merchant in his beloved London, Stevenson spared himself the artistic conflicts that so bedeviled his fellow writer, Conan Doyle, who eventually could not rid himself of his greatest creation.

And here, a Stevenson type of story suggests itself: an astute author who spies Conan Doyle's error in sending Holmes over the falls but failing to produce a body. A character can return from the dead, it seems, but not from becoming a tobacconist in London.

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Orientation

Lucian K. Truscott has a terrific column in Salon magazine this week about GPS supplanting physical map-reading skills, and the possible negative consequences should satellite electronics go dark, specifically the issues in a combat environment.

https://www.salon.com/2019/05/04/using-gps-instead-of-maps-is-the-most-consequential-exchange-of-technologies-in-history/

I've always loved atlases, and learning the secrets of the gazeteer was life-changing. I had, later, an excellent National Geographic atlas that didn't use grid coordinates at all, but latitude and longitude - which is actually much more sensible - and it was terrain-based, showing geographical features instead of political boundaries. (Lucian talks about terrain-reading, too, and how shooting azimuths is an inefficient way of navigating your way out of the woods.)

Not that I don't surf Google Earth regularly, whether it's the back streets of Tbilisi or my childhood neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass., and I love the kinetic thrill of it, but I still turn to two-dimensional maps on paper, views of subway systems, urban landscapes, desert hardpan, rumpled uplands. I like the big scale of the Michelins, for cityscapes, and the ONC/JNC, for wider terrain. This second a carry-over from the military, the Operational Navigational Chart scaled at 1:1,000,000, and the Jet Navigational Chart at 1:2,000,000, marked with radar overlaps and aviation hazards. Invaluable.

It's my settled habit to have a map pinned to the wall, or leaning on an easel, for whatever specific geography I'm writing about. I had the Euro Berlin opened up, some three feet square, 1:25,000, for Black Traffic, the Khyber Pass and environs for The Bone Harvest. Right now, for Absolute Zero, it's El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, and that stretch of southern Chihuahuan desert I've chosen to call The Dooms, a borderland that's entirely invention.

There's the old rule that you can break the rules if you know what they are. It's true of grammar, it's true of narrative conventions, it's true of dialogue, it's true of landscape. You just need to know it well enough. You want to inhabit it, you want it lived in, you want it familiar.

A map is only an approximation of the terrain, but it lays out physical relationships, distance and elevation, good roads and bad, watercourses and obstacles, the path of least resistance. The feel of the country, the smell of juniper and pinon, the heat, the texture, that's up to you. I find the map comforting, is what I think I mean. It's not the level of detail, it's the context. It's a perspective. I look at the map, I can walk the perimeter. It's not the place itself, it's a metaphor of place. A map is our point of departure.

I don't think it's any accident that when Robert Louis Stevenson started Treasure Island, the first thing he did was draw a map of the island itself, and his hand-drawn map is at the very front of the book.

Resurrection Men

by David Edgerley Gates

Ian Rankin published his thirteenth Inspector John Rebus novel, RESURRECTION MEN, in 2002. The story is about a group of cops in a rehab facility - sent down in disgrace because of alcohol or domestic violence issues, or they've fallen afoul of Internal Affairs - but being Rankin, the book is of course about a lot more than that. The title is double-edged, a turn of phrase with a dark history.


In the early 19th century, medical schools relied on the dead bodies of executed criminals for anatomy studies. It was illegal, in that day and age, to leave your body to science. but the supply began to dry up, and it gave rise to a trade in fresh cadavers, and the graves of the newly buried were dug up by body-snatchers, who sold the dead for necropsies. They were known as Resurrection Men. 

Two of these entrepreneurs, Burke and Hare, resident in Edinburgh in late 1827, improved their market share by skipping exhumation and turning to murder. Their victims were the derelict, the sickly, women of the street - people who wouldn't be missed. Over the course of the next year, they killed at least sixteen people, and shopped their corpses to a surgeon named Knox, to use in his anatomical lectures. How much Knox knew, or suspected, is an open question, but certainly he turned a blind eye. After they were caught, Hare turned King's Evidence, in return for immunity, and Burke was hanged. His body, as it happens, was then publicly dissected at the University of Edinburgh. Knox, the doctor, was never prosecuted.

"A wretch who isn't worth a farthing while alive," Sir Walter Scott remarked, "becomes a valuable article when knocked on the head and carried to an anatomist." Scott was being ironic about economies of scale, but as far as I know, he never used this incident as material. Dickens wasn't so shy. One of

his characters in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Jerry Cruncher, is explicitly a grave-robber. And in 1884, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story called "The Body-Snatcher," which stops just short of naming Knox as a knowing accomplice. Stevenson's DR.

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is a reimagining of the Whitechapel murders, and there's been some conflation, in books and movies, of Burke and Hare's crimes with Jack the Ripper. The serial killer, as a figure of fear, is a mid-Victorian invention, I believe. Not that somebody might not claim many victims, but that he does it for the sick thrill.

Psychopathology wasn't well-understood, in the 1800's - the term didn't even come into general use until the early 20th century. One of the narrative engines of David Morrell's gripping recent novel, MURDER AS A FINE ART, which takes place in 1854 London, is the lack of any practical forensic approach, and the inability to process, let alone inhabit, the mindset of a serial murderer. It's not simply an unknown, but unimaginable, like an empty space on an old map, which simply states: Here Be Monsters. Burke and Hare took up their trade for the easy money, but the seeming

effortlessness of the murders gives you pause. They displayed no remorse. Burke, in fact, before he went to the scaffold, asked whether Dr. Knox would give him the five pounds he was owed for his last victim, so Burke could buy a new suit of clothes to be hanged in. 

"To know my deed, 'twere best not to know myself," Macbeth says. Burke and Hare apparently avoided any kind of self-knowledge. They denied the humanity of the men and women, and at least one child, that they murdered, but did they deny their own? Neither one of them were crazy, so far as we know, although they were probably a few cards short of a full deck. They were paid five to ten pounds for each dead body they delivered. In today's numbers, between six and twelve hundred bucks. Not too shabby, if you're desecrating a grave in the wee hours, but for a capital crime? The odd thing about these guys is that they were very far from the pathology of the Ripper. There was actually nothing out of the ordinary about them. They were simply dumb enough to get caught.

Maybe that's the thing. It isn't that Burke and Hare live on in our imagination because they were criminal deviants who've evaded detection for 125 years - is the Ripper case solved? More, perhaps,

that Burke and Hare touched a popular nerve at the time, and that a writer like Dickens or Stevenson gives them shelf life. (Burke's skeleton is still on display at the Edinburgh Medical School.) No, the dread lies in the open grave. 

http://www.davidedgerleygates.com/