The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: re-arranging books and reading them

Looking for something to do, and feeling that it was about time I off-loaded some surplus books (never a shortage of those in our house!), I went through my bookshelves last week and came up with a dozen or so that I read ages ago and have no plans to re-read again, especially given that I still have plenty of unread ones. So, such classics as The Day of the Jackal, Royal Flash and The Wench is Dead went to the communal bookshelf at East Finchley Tube station, for the delight of those essential workers who are still relying on public transport and those who pop into the station during their out-of-the-house daily exercise breaks to pick up a copy of Metro.

I then sorted out my remaining books, looking for the ones that I have acquired over the years but not got around to actually reading (everyone has this problem, right?). Now I have all of my unread books ready to go – this picture merely shows the fictional ones! 

Depending on how long this lockdown business lasts, I might finally get around to reading Lorna Doone and Bleak House – although I’ll probably go for The Shadow of Doctor Syn and at least one of the Agatha Christies before either of those...

I started on my unread books with a point of order – regarding the John Buchan book, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories (which I had myself picked up from the communal bookshelf at the Tube station). This recent Penguin Classics Buchan anthology contains 18 of JB’s short stories, eight of which I already have thanks to my owning both volumes of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan so I felt that this one was a bit of a cheat. None of these volumes, by the way, contains the Buchan short story that made it into The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan; all I can deduce from that is the obvious observation that JB wrote a lot of well-regarded short stories! My plan here, I decided, was to read through the JB short stories that weren’t in the books that I already own (if that makes sense). I particularly enjoyed the titular one, a very Buchan-esque piece about a man who steps out of his house one morning ... and is neither seen nor heard of for the next five years.

As for The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, this is an anthology covering the British short story from the age of Swift and Defoe to the early twentieth century, with works by 36 authors. I’ve been dipping into it at leisure. Some names are familiar to me, others less so. Having enjoyed some of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in the past, I made a bee-line for his one, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’ (a lively read, and a story that I feel has great contemporary relevance in the age of fake news and concerns over the extent of the influence of the media; worth comparing, I feel, with Buchan’s ‘The Last Crusade’). I then chose an unknown (to me) author at random, and thus found myself enjoying ‘Holiday Group’, the tale of a vicar and his wife taking their young family on a holiday to the seaside by E.M. Delafield.

Then it was an immersion into the murky world of Tudor politics courtesy of Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall. At just under 500 pages it’s a long read even though it covers a short time-frame, from September 1535 (the point at which Wolf Hall left off) to the execution of Anne Boleyn the following year. I do like the revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, particularly how he deals with the ever-fascinating and ever-dangerous Henry VIII; the part where the King is knocked unconscious during a joust and everyone fears that he has died – this at a time when it was considered treason to speculate on what would happen in the event of the King’s death – is a particular highlight. Then there’s Cromwell’s interaction with the courtiers who think that the low-born Master Secretary (the son, as is often mentioned, of a Putney blacksmith) is beneath them, just like they thought the same of Cromwell’s former mentor Cardinal Wolsey whose ghost haunts the life of his protégé. Oh, how they underestimate him! It’s no coincidence when, as Cromwell moves to bring down Anne Boleyn once it becomes clear to him that the King’s now got eyes for Jane Seymour, he makes sure to take down four noblemen who openly mocked Wolsey after his downfall. Heavy going? Yes, for there is much detail here. That it is very well-researched and very well-written I do not dispute, but although I enjoyed parts of Bring Up the Bodies I do feel that, when it comes to intrigue in the reign of Henry VIII, the Shardlake novels are probably more to my taste.

A lighter read, next. Well, physically lighter at any rate, for Rasselas (full title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia) by Samuel Johnson comes in at 150 pages and about a fifth of that is the introduction (this being the early Eighties Penguin edition, original retail price £1:60). I am something of an admirer of Samuel Johnson, having volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City (and even visited his birthplace in Lichfield) but I had never previously read this, his only novel which I bought – if memory serves – from the 50p shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Winchester. According to Boswell, Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in order to pay the costs of his mother’s funeral, although unfortunately some scholars have cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. The story features characters from Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia) which also piqued my interest (since I went there myself on my African odyssey); Johnson himself was not entirely unfamiliar with this country, one of his earlier works being the translation of a book by a Portuguese missionary who’d been there in the seventeenth century. 

The titular Rasselas is a young and idealistic prince, raised in a comfortable-yet-isolated community in the mountains known as the happy valley. He is, for want of a better word, bored with his pampered and carefree existence in the valley and desires to see the wider world and find what it is that makes people happy and contented. So, in the company of his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah and a well-travelled poet-philosopher called Imlac who acts as a mentor to the others, Rasselas escapes from the happy valley and travels to Cairo. They meet various people from all levels of society, among them a hermit (who, far from extolling the virtues of a life of solitude as might be expected, decides that he wants to go back to the city), a philosopher who disappoints Rasselas by failing to practice what he preaches (“be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men”) and an astronomer who, although initially taken to be wise, is in fact mad (“perhaps”, opines Imlac, “no human mind is in its right state”). A visit to the Pyramids goes badly when Pekuah, who hadn’t wanted to join the others by going into the Great Pyramid, gets kidnapped – leading the others to reflect on guilt and loss before she is returned to them. Eventually, in the final chapter (entitled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”), they decide to return to Abissinia after realising the futility of their search; complete happiness is, they have found, elusive.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rasselas is a travel story, though. It’s an examination of the human condition, with particular reference to the pursuit of happiness and the age-old question of whether (so to speak) the grass really is greener on the other side. Somewhat cynical about optimism while also reflecting on mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for hope, it’s definitely worth reading, and I feel that it’s a book that can be returned to again and again. And there are, of course, some great Johnsonian pearls of wisdom to be had here, among them:

“A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected” (ch. XII – yes, he used Roman numerals for the chapters!)

“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting is scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (ch. XXIX)

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired … do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world” (ch. XXXV)

Recent reads - four second-hand novels

A fascinating quartet of second-hand novels has been receiving my attention recently…

The Path of the King by John Buchan

Fan of John Buchan though I am, I sometimes come across works of his that I have not previously encountered; he did, after all, write a lot of books and not all of them are still in print. This one, The Path of the King (first published in 1921), comes in the form of a smart-looking red hardback which was published by Thomas Nelson (an Edinburgh publisher, which as well as publishing Buchan’s books employed him as a director; the Thomas Arthur Nelson to whom The Thirty-Nine Steps was dedicated was a descendant of the company’s founder in addition to being a friend of Buchan’s). Later described by Buchan himself (in his autobiography Memory Hold-the-Door) as “my first serious piece of fiction”, it is an interesting tale of how greatness in people can be transmitted down the family tree; sometimes, it  lies dormant for generations before re-igniting at the right time. The story begins with a prologue set some time after the American Civil War, in which three men around a remote campfire theorise on how the “spark” of “masterful men” can be found in the most unlikely places: “The things we call aristocracies and reigning houses are the last places to look for masterful men … who is more likely to inherit the fire – the eldest son with his flesh-pots or the younger son with his fortune to find? … The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn’t begin there.” I guess we modern folk would say it was all about genetics. This story begins with Biorn, a Viking prince, before jumping down a few generations to Jehan, a Norman knight – and so on. Rather like Buchan’s Sir Walter Raleigh, The Path of the King is less a coherent novel than a collection of short stories held together by a unifying thread or theme, which in this case is what happens to Biorn’s descendants down the centuries – men and women, some of them noble, some of them very ignoble indeed, all united by blood and by their possession of a family heirloom in the form of a gold ring, made from the amulet Biorn received from his father and which I suppose acts as the physical manifestation of the “spark”. They get caught up in events like the Norman Conquest, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Popish Plot, and they encounter real people like Joan of Arc, Sir Walter Raleigh, Oliver Cromwell and Daniel Boone. Eventually, the “spark” resurfaces in nineteenth-century America, in the form of Abraham Lincoln who is descended from Biorn on his mother’s side. He loses the gold ring, but it is no longer needed as it is he in whom the long-dormant “spark” will reignite – something his dying mother recognises. The epilogue has three men witness Lincoln’s funeral parade following his assassination; one of them (an American professor) remarks that “there goes the first American”, to which another (a British diplomat) replies: “I dare say you are right, Professor. But I think it is also the last of the Kings.” As novels go, this is very much one for those who are interested in history, and it reflects Buchan’s fascination with the New World and its ancestral links with the Old – particularly in his treatment of Lincoln and the admiration expressed for him by the British character at the end, which can be looked at in the context of people like Buchan looking to promote a spirit of cohesion between English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading this as an historical novel, it has to be noted that the the fact that so many real people and events over different centuries can be successfully woven into the plot in a way that it doesn’t feel like they’ve been crow-barred into it is testimony to Buchan’s great skill as an author.

The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn by Russell Thorndike

Having recently touched on this particular character when looking into smuggling on Romney Marsh, I was delighted to find a couple of old Doctor Syn paperbacks in a charity shop recently; the adventures of this most extraordinary of fictional clergymen, written by Russell Thorndike, ran to seven in total and have long been out of print. They make no claim to be great literature but as adventure stories they are most definitely up there with the exploits of (say) the Scarlet Pimpernel, Horatio Hornblower and Richard Sharpe. Published in 1939, Courageous Exploits was the fifth Doctor Syn book to be written, but if the novels are to be read in sequence it’s the fourth. By this stage in the series, the Reverend Doctor Syn is well established at Dymchurch as the much-loved local vicar and, under the identity of the ‘Scarecrow’, the ruthless leader of the Night Riders, the local smuggler gang (the secret of his identity is known only to a select few). Exasperated by the Night Riders’ continued success, the Admiralty has sent the ruthless Captain Blain down to Romney Marsh to defeat them and bring the Scarecrow to justice; his men are to be billeted in a local barn, while the captain himself moves into the vicarage! There follows a series of cat-and-mouse adventures, which could stand alone as short stories as well as parts of a coherent whole, as Blain tries to do his duty while Syn, or rather his alter ego the Scarecrow, rises to the challenge by growing ever bolder. A real historical person, the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), makes an appearance – as he does, funnily enough, in the adventures of the other three fictional heroes I have mentioned above. As is the case with “that demmed, elusive Pimpernel”, in Courageous Exploits HRH manages to encounter both Doctor Syn and the Scarecrow and respect the pair of them while at the same time remaining blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are the same person. This is good, old-fashioned adventure; a modern version would doubtless dwell more on the duality of Syn himself, the upstanding community leader who is also its most notorious criminal, and there would doubtless be a lot of trying to impose the values of the present onto late-eighteenth-century England which would mean that it would not be anywhere near as much fun to read. The Doctor Syn books may be out of print, but they are still worth looking into.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

As was the case with John Buchan, I first discovered P.G. Wodehouse when I was in my early teens, at first because of the superb Jeeves and Wooster TV series with Melchett and George from Blackadder – sorry, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie – in the title roles. They were brilliant in that, by the way, and it was but a short step from watching Jeeves and Wooster to discovering the books on which the series was based, of which the school library had a plentiful supply. Oddly, though, I never really progressed much beyond the Jeeves stories – the other Wodehouse creations, like Psmith and the Blandings crowd, didn’t really hold much appeal and while I have tried over the years to expand my horizons in the world of Wodehouse I always find myself coming back to the Jeeves stories. Maybe it’s because they are told in the first person, with that upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster as the narrator, he being not so much an unreliable narrator but one who is not in full grasp of everything that’s going on. Luckily, though, he has Jeeves, the incredibly clever manservant who is able to extract his master, and at times his master’s friends, from the most unlikely and desperate of scenarios, allowing them to continue to amuse themselves, and us readers, at the Drones Club and various country houses. There are a lot of things going on in The Inimitable Jeeves, what with Bertie’s chum Bingo Little falling in love with every woman he meets, his rather scary Aunt Agatha trying to get Bertie married off at every conceivable opportunity, the mental-health specialist Sir Roderick Glossop (who, naturally, thinks Bertie’s off his rocker) putting in the odd appearance and his cousins Claude and Eustace (“the curse of the human race”) getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Unlike some of the Jeeves books, The Inimitable Jeeves is actually not so much a novel as a collection of short stories (they first appeared in The Strand Magazine before coming out in book form in 1923), although some of them do follow on from one another. Some showcase Wodehouse at his best, with the humour deriving from the most unlikely sources. For example, ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ is all about a group of young men, led by Claude and Eustace, placing bets on which of the local vicars in a corner of rural Gloucestershire will preach the longest sermon on a particular Sunday; naturally, Bertie and Jeeves get drawn into the mayhem that ensues. More of the same can be encountered in ‘The Purity of the Turf’ which involves bets being placed on, and attempts being made to rig, the races in a rural parish’s sports day (Mothers’ Sack Race, Choir Boys’ Hundred Yard Handicap, etc). There are some great set-pieces too, like the time Bertie has Sir Roderick for lunch on the same day that Claude and Eustace hide three cats and the top hat that they have stolen from Sir Roderick in Bertie’s flat, Bingo pretending to be a communist and Bertie actually getting one over on Aunt Agatha when the woman she’s been trying to set him up with turns out to be a jewel-thief. Finally, Bertie’s ongoing claim to be an author of romantic fiction under the pen-name of Rosie M. Banks (originally done in order for him to impress Bingo’s uncle so that he can persuade him to increase the ever cash-strapped Bingo’s allowance) gets exposed as a sham when it emerges that the woman whom Bingo has just married is not a waitress as he had supposed but none other than Rosie M. Banks herself. Only Jeeves can sort out this unholy mess. Hilarious.

Who Pays the Ferryman? by Michael J. Bird

The TV series of this name was before my time, but I’d vaguely heard about it from somewhere – it is set in the mid-to-late Seventies and concerns Alan Haldane, a middle-aged Englishman returning to Crete, the island where as a young man he spent part of the Second World War fighting in the mountains with the andartes of the Greek Resistance. He wants to try and reconnect with his wartime lover, but soon finds out that she is dead although she did bear him a daughter who is unaware of her true parentage. While many see ‘Leandros’ (Haldane’s nom de guerre among the andartes) as a returning hero there are a few who wish him ill because of what happened during the war. Seeing this in a charity shop, I was interested as I have previously read and enjoyed books about occupation and resistance during the War, both fictional (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Guns of Navarone, etc) and factual (Ill Met by Moonlight, and for what it’s worth the real-life Kriepe kidnapping gets referred to in Who Pays the Ferryman?, the implication being that the fictional Haldane was somehow involved in this operation along with Billy Moss and Paddy Leigh Fermor). The novel version of Who Pays the Ferryman? is based on the TV series, not the other way round (Bird, whose TV dramas were usually set in the Mediterranean, wrote both). It is pretty good, although there are some annoying typos which might indicate that publication was a somewhat rushed job, the TV series having been very popular in its day (1977). As for the plot itself, a slow-burner of a relationship between Haldane and Annika, the sister of his old love (she being unaware that Haldane is her niece’s biological father, and he being reluctant to commit to her for that very reason) plays out alongside sub-plots like an Australian visitor trying to lay the past (in the form of his late Cretan grandfather) to rest, the sudden appearance of Haldane’s (English) ex and Haldane’s restoration of an old caique (sailing-boat), while in the background a vendetta against Haldane establishes itself. The characters are well-rounded and very believable. It’s a good story which shows us that war casts shadows which continue to fall long after the guns have stopped, and that while actions always have consequences, it can sometimes take decades for the consequences to make themselves known. I liked this book enough to find some episodes of the TV series on YouTube, and very good it is too.

When gulls attack

They warn you about the seagulls in Falmouth.

If you’ve got food and are eating it at an exposed place like the quayside, there is every likelihood that the gulls will attack you and steal your food. I’ve heard talk of it in the pubs and the B&Bs, and I have seen it for myself – a young chap who’d got his dinner from the chippy (Harbour Lights, the best one in town) and was heading for a bench with a view out across the harbour when a gull swooped (swept?) down and hit him on the back of the head. He dropped his food, turned round to see who’d hit him, and when he turned back the main part of his dinner – a battered sausage so hot you could still see the steam coming off it – had gone, along with quite a few of the accompanying chips.

The good people of Falmouth – Britain’s most south-westerly port and a great place to visit – do not like the seagulls. They’d rather like there to be a cull, or some sort of means of keeping gull numbers under control, and earlier this year a West Country MP even managed to ask a question in the House of Commons about whether gulls could be culled. The answer was no, because internationally most species of gull are declining in numbers as there is less and less food for them at sea; perhaps that is why so many of them have started to look inland for something to eat. One species, the Herring Gull, has even made it onto the RSPB’s ‘Red List’ of threatened bird species, while the rest are on the ‘Amber List’ as their numbers have moderately declined over the last few years. Not that that’s any consolation to the lad who had his battered sausage nicked … by a Herring Gull.

There are four species of gulls that you will most likely encounter in this country. There’s the Herring Gull, which is easily recognisable with its light grey back and wings and the distinctive yellow beak with a red spot. It will go just about anywhere for food; my copy of the RSPB Handbook of British Birds (third edition, 2010) describes it as having a “wide range of food, from offal and carrion to seeds and fruits … eats the young and eggs of other birds, catches small mammals, scavenges on shorelines and rubbish tips”. Smaller is the Black-headed Gull, so-called for the chocolate-brown hood that it has during the summer (don’t ask). Although they’re gulls, they’ve been fairly common inland for as long as I’ve been birding. And then there are the two black-backed ones, the Lesser Black-backed Gull (which has a dark grey back and wings) and the Greater Black-backed Gull (this one, our biggest gull, does indeed have a black back and wings). The Greater Black-backed Gull can be really vicious – it “hunts in a variety of ways and takes a wide range of food. Kills and eats young seabirds … robs others of their food, will catch fish or feed on carrion, either in the water or washed up on the shore … has been observed scavenging road kills. It will kill and eat mammals, such as rabbits.”

Although I’ve been told that gull attacks have been on the rise, they’re not a new thing by any means. At least, not in Cornwall. Back in the early Fifties, Daphne du Maurier wrote a short story, ‘The Birds’, about what happens when the birds – not just the gulls, but the crows and all manner of little garden birds – somehow co-ordinate attacks on people; “birds that by nature’s law kept to their own flock and their own territory, and now, joining with one another in their urge for battle”. Seen from the point of view of a Cornish farm labourer who tries to defend his family against the attacks, it’s a tale of suspense in which no-one seems to realise that, somehow, evolution is turning against mankind: “As he jumped the stile he heard the whirr of wings. A black-backed gull dived down at him from the sky, missed, swerved in flight, and rose to dive again. In a moment it was joined by others, six, seven, a dozen, black-backed and herring mixed … Covering his head with his arms he ran towards the cottage. They kept coming at him from the air…”

Some say that Daphne du Maurier got the idea for this story after seeing someone attacked by a gull in St Ives, but the lady herself told the following story (in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall) of how ‘The Birds’ came to be: “Walking down from Menabilly to the farm one day, I caught sight of the farmer on his tractor ploughing the fields, a cloud of screaming gulls circling above his head, and thought, ‘Supposing the gulls attacked!’ That picture started the brewing process...”

Alfred Hitchcock later made it into a famous film, and although he set that film in California (he being based in Hollywood) the fact remains that the original story is set, and was inspired by something that Daphne du Maurier saw and subsequently thought, in Cornwall.

I am not quite sure where the story about Daphne du Maurier witnessing someone being attacked by a gull in St Ives comes from, but to many it does ring true, for the gulls who frequent St Ives are to this day regarded as the worst offenders in terms of attacking people for food. Woe betide anyone who tries to eat their pastie while walking alongside the harbour there! It has to be said, though, that their Falmouth equivalents are catching them up.

They warn you about the seagulls in Falmouth.

Watching and reading at Christmas

‘Tis the season – for watching Christmas movies. Some are good, some are pretty ropey and a few manage to divide opinion, in some cases on the topic of whether or not they can even be classified as Christmas movies. My own view on this is that if there’s a way in which a given film can be linked to Christmas, however tenuously, then why not? I take a similar view with literature – if a novel or short story has a Christmas link, then it can be a Christmas story.

Maybe I’m getting set in my ways in my late thirties, but over the past few years things have evolved to the point where there are four films, a TV show and three (short) works of literature that have to be seen or read at Christmas time.

Let’s do the films first. We start with two old-school black-and-white classics from the 1940s: Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I tend to prefer the original version of the former which has a lot of charm with the New York department-store Santa called Kris Kringle who seems to be the ‘real’ thing – a role for which Edmund Gwynn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, while Maureen O’Hara (who died earlier this year, aged 95) is on top form playing a career-oriented, divorced single mother which must’ve been very ahead of its time in the 1940s. The court scene at the end, with the judge worried about re-election and the posties using it as an excuse to get rid of all the letters to Father Christmas that they’ve accumulated, is hilarious every time. On doing some background reading for this film, I was surprised to learn that it was originally released in the summer, with the Christmas element being downplayed in the advertising (20^th Century Fox’s logic being that they’d make more money with a summer release).

Less overtly Christmassy is that Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, set in charming small-town America with Jimmy Stewart’s selfless everyman standing up to the bad guy who comes in the form of the Scrooge-esque Mr Potter. George Bailey may get the girl but the rest of his life gets put on hold in a never-ending struggle on behalf of the less fortunate, and it takes a heavenly intervention when he’s at his lowest to show him how much of a positive impact he’s made on many lives. Yes, there’s a lot of ‘life’ before you get to the ‘wonderful’ bit (it’s actually fairly depressing in parts until the last ten minutes), but it really is a lovely film that shows just how much of a difference one person can make.

Moving swiftly to the late twentieth century and changing the tempo somewhat (although the notion of how much of a difference one person can make remains), it’s time for an action movie and, working on the principle that any movie with a link to Christmas can be a Christmas movie, there is indeed such a thing as a Christmas action movie: Die Hard (1988). Like many a Christmas movie protagonist, New York cop John McClane just wants to spend the festive season with his family (which is why he flies out to LA on Christmas Eve), but first of all there’s the small matter of meeting up with his estranged wife at the Nakatomi Corporation’s office party. If you’ve ever been to a work Christmas do that doesn’t quite go according to plan, be thankful that you’ve not had it interrupted by a bunch of heavily armed terrorists and then sit back and enjoy the mayhem as McClane takes them on without wearing any shoes. This film was so big it spawned four sequels, many imitations and redefined Bruce Willis’s career (before this, he was apparently considered more of a comedy actor) as well as marking out Alan Rickman as an actor who plays the baddies very well.

Finally, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and there are many options here with stand-out performances as Ebenezer Scrooge over the years coming from the likes of Alastair Sim and Patrick Stewart. My favourite, though, is the Muppets’ musical version from 1992 which is incredibly faithful to the original source material to the extent of providing much of the narrative word-for-word thanks to having Gonzo as Charles Dickens – a truly inspired piece of casting. Elsewhere, Kermit is Bob Cratchett to Michael Caine’s Scrooge – a rare example of a human character in a Muppet-based film not being overshadowed by the Muppets themselves. I guess I had to have Michael Caine make an appearance somewhere.

While we’re on the subject of A Christmas Carol, the TV show that is required viewing by yours truly is of course Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) which inverts Dickens’s plot; in this, Ebenezer Blackadder is a nice and generous man who gets taken advantage of by everyone except Baldrick. A night-time visit from the Spirit of Christmas inadvertently prompts him to change his ways. This one’s got quite a good cast; as well as Blackadder regulars – Rowan Atkinson et al – do look out for Robbie Coltraine and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles, as the Spirit and Prince Albert respectively.

On the reading front, I have three perennial favourites which I (try to) read each year. Obviously, there’s A Christmas Carol which blends comedy and horror to perform two roles – celebrating Christmas while highlighting the condition of the poor. 172 years after it was written, the name of the main character is still used to refer to anyone who feels a bit cynical or jaded about Christmas. Dickens, who defined how we think of Christmas to the point where most cinematic depiction of London at this time of year tend to involve snow (despite actual white Christmases in London being few and far between) is one of those authors who seems to have a timeless feel, with quite a few of his books feeling surprisingly undated when compared to some of his contemporaries; Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a reading of the first and best of his Christmas stories.

The other two are – not surprising given my literary tastes – detective stories. Both happen to feature a seasonal plot based on finding out who nicked a precious stone which has been found hidden in a festive food item. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on the hunt for whoever stole the eponymous diamond which has been hidden in a Christmas goose which somehow finds its way into Holmes’s possession; after some hat-based deduction, their quest takes them from Baker Street to Covent Garden Market (which I always thought used to be a fruit and veg market, but according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it had traders selling poultry as well). I rather like this one because of the seemingly improbable hat deduction sequence and the confrontation at Covent Garden in which Holmes tricks the trader into revealing where he got the goose from. This story first appeared in 1892 and can be found in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Several decades later, Hercule Poirot – the little Belgian chap with the little grey cells – finds himself staying at an English country house during the festive season in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. He’s there to recover another stolen precious stone – a ruby this time – which turns up in some seasonal food (no prizes for guessing what). Needless to say, Poirot is dealing with a criminal who, rather like Hans Gruber, hasn’t bargained for having a detective on the scene. This is one of Agatha Christie’s later works (it first appeared in 1960 in the short story compilation of the same name) and while the identity of the thief is a bit obvious there’s entertainment to be had with talk of pudding-making (with reference being made to the ‘stir up’ collect which was and presumably still is said at church services on the Sunday before Advent, serving as a signal that that was the day on which the pudding should be made) and a fun sub-plot about a fake murder alongside Christie’s extolling of a traditional Christmas at the sort of venue where a lot of her murders took place.

Ah, Christmas stories. Now, where’s that Blackadder DVD?

More studies in Sherlock

Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four Sherlock Holmes novels and 56 short stories, the adventures of this great fictional detective in print do not end there. Since the demise of his creator, many authors have taken up the pen (or the typewriter, or even the laptop) to continue the great detective’s career. Strictly speaking, these are regarded as ‘non-Canonical’ adventures (the ‘Canon’ in a Holmesian context being the works of Conan Doyle and no-one else).

This even happened during Conan Doyle’s lifetime. When his friend William Gillette asked him for permission to write a Sherlock Holmes stage play in 1899, in which he wanted to take a few liberties with the character, Conan Doyle famously replied: "You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him"; incidentally, that play, which was called Sherlock Holmes, was the first time that the phrase "elementary, my dear Watson", later popularised by the Basil Rathbone filmes, was used.

Of the various Holmes pastiches over the years, two have really stood out for me – a short story and a novel. The former is Colin Dexter’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’, not a stab at telling one of the many ‘untold’ tales that Conan Doyle alluded to in Dr Watson’s narratives but never wrote (which is what most would-be Holmes authors do, most notably June Thomson who has written a very good series of books) but a clever retelling of ‘A Case of Identity’ which is buried in the short story collection Morse’s Greatest Mystery. The novel is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, which purports to have been written by Watson in old age and tells the ‘real’ story behind the Great Hiatus (the gap in the adventures between Holme’s ‘death’ in ‘The Final Problem’ and his return in ‘The Empty House’); in Meyer’s version, Watson becomes so concerned about Holmes’s drug problem that he and brother Mycroft trick the great detective into travelling to Vienna, where he becomes a patient of Sigmund Freud.

Other stories have him involved in various crossovers with other works of late nineteenth-century fiction, getting involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper (a particularly popular subject-area), going to America for a whole series of adventures, fathering a child with Irene Adler (it’s a boy, who grows up to become Nero Wolfe) and continuing to solve crimes after retiring to do some beekeeping in a cottage on the Sussex Downs. A recent fictional biography – a work of fiction written in the style of a biography of a famous fictional character, taking the conceit of said character being a real person to the extreme – by Nick Rennison has him playing a key role in the early development of MI5 and MI6 (in this interpretation, Professor Moriarty becomes an Irish nationalist whose importance is overstated by the Holmes brothers). Many well-known people from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make guest appearances, and in turn Holmes and Watson have themselves made a cameo appearance in one of the Flashman books. Recently, and rather timely given the impending centenary of the First World War, there’s even one in which Watson rejoins the Army in 1914 and ends up investigating a series of murders committed on the Western Front.

This brings me to the main subject of this post, which is a review of two Holmes pastiches, namely The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz and The Holmes Affair by Graham Moore.

As with the novels mentioned above, The House of Silk is presented as having been written by Watson in old age (and subsequently consigned, as these things are, to his tin dispatch box in the vaults of Cox & Company at Charing Cross), when he looks back on a case that he couldn’t write about in the 1890s because of the sensitive nature of the case, although there are no Victorian celebrity appearances here. Moriarty plays a cameo role, but he’s not central to the plot.

Instead, the sensitivity concerns the nature of the mysterious establishment of the title – which I will not divulge here for fear of spoiling what is a pretty good plot, but safe to say that it’s a dark secret that is as offensive to our own time as it would have been to the Victorians.

When it comes to crime writing, Horowitz has a good pedigree, having worked on the screenplays for TV shows like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Foyle’s War in addition to his fiction which is mostly aimed at the teenage market.

Conan Doyle’s style was well-mimicked, although some modern-day sensitivities did creep in. For example, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes’s gang of cheeky street-urchins, are portrayed in a way that shows the harshness of their lives, living rough on the mean streets of late-Victorian London.  Indeed, this version of Watson makes much of the social issues of the day which adds a new dimension to the story.

My quibbles are minor. Horowitz says in the notes at the end that he wanted to portray Holmes going into an opium den because Conan Doyle had never done this, although I seem to recall Watson discovering Holmes undercover in one in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (which in turn formed the basis for the crack-house scene in the most recent series of Sherlock). He also presents a list of rules for anyone else wishing to have a go at writing their own Holmes adventure, although he does spoil the effect of these by admitting that he didn’t entirely keep to them himself.

All in all, a good effort that is certainly superior to most Holmes pastiches that have been published over the years.

Moore takes a different approach, balancing two parallel plots – the first is set in 1900 and involves Conan Doyle himself, while the second is set in the present day (well, 2010) and concerns members of a Sherlock Holmes appreciation society (itself quite the contemporary topic, what with the increase in interest in the stories thanks to the TV series). In 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle (he didn’t get knighted until 1902) investigates a series of murders in London after receiving a letter-bomb in the post; meanwhile, in 2010 avid Holmes fan Harold White attends a prestigious ‘Sherlockian’ gathering in a New York hotel, which is marred when one of the society’s leading members is found dead in his room; this leads onto a hunt for a missing part of Conan Doyle’s diary which covers the part of his life which is being played out in the 1900 plot.

Now I’m not a fan of this split-plot device – I’d much rather just have one thread to concentrate on. That said, it can make for a very good story if it’s done well.

This, alas, isn’t. Of the two plots, I personally preferred the 1900 adventure with Holmes’s creator. Still trying to move away from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes seven years after killing him off, Arthur (as he is referred to throughout the proceedings) finds himself having to use the detection skills he bestowed upon his fictional creation, with his friend Bram Stoker acting as a sort-of ‘Watson’. Throughout his adventure, during which he visits Whitechapel, dresses up as a woman to infiltrate a women’s suffrage meeting and is temporarily incarcerated in Newgate Prison, he meets people who tell him how much they enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, much to his own irritation.

By contrast, the 2010 plot stutters and I for one found it to be less interesting; like Arthur back in 1900, Harold is forced by circumstances to have a go at being a detective, and uses his knowledge of the afore-mentioned Canon to make his deductions while dealing with a freelance journalist (who, naturally, may not be all that she seems) and a (fictional) descendant of Conan Doyle himself.

Stories centring on Conan Doyle are not unknown – these are usually about how he came to write The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first Holmes adventure he wrote since he’d given the detective the Reichenbach Falls treatment. Moore’s story touches on this, as the events that take place do indeed prompt Conan Doyle to resurrect his famous detective.

There are also a few things Moore gets wrong; American words and spelling abound, and while I don’t find this as distracting as I used to there are a couple of howlers which jar the 1900 plot; Moore manages to have a London policeman in 1900 addressed as ‘officer’ rather than ‘constable’, and there’s a laboured joke at the expense of women’s suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett that centres on the assumption that Londoners in 1900 would have used the word ‘faucet’ instead of ‘tap’. More seriously, in the present-day story Moore somehow manages to have the body of a man found dead in suspicious circumstances in New York repatriated to Britain and buried within two days. This is obviously impossible, and it’s the sort of detail that a crime novelist needs to iron out before their books are sent to the publisher.

In conclusion, I’d be interested if Horowitz writes another Holmes adventure. Not sure I’ll be on the look-out for any of Moore’s other works, though.