Going to have to work at this topic more slowly and judiciously than I’d planned. My own computer infrastructure is teetering on the brink of a stall as even input of new material gets harder to do by the day. An interesting irony with respect to the age issue. All my digital tools are agèd and limping and short term in memory while on a good day my mind feels as if it’s operating at a peak performance level of some kind.
Where was I when I wandered off the Reservation on “The Reality Divide”? I had just brought Sherlock and Middle Earth into the discussion.
I was going to talk about the fact that by the time I discovered him, Sherlock Holmes had already become as real as a fictional character can get. Conveniently dead, he still had a flat at 221Baker Street you could visit and see how he left it. He had also become his own cottage industry of sorts for other detective novelists, some of whom had achieved great prominence by starting out from the Sherlock template and simply reworking the profile. Rex Stout was admirably aboveboard about his own debt. He was an open member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and if anyone had earned the right to make a negative photocopy of Himes he had. London becomes New York, Watson becomes Archie Goodwin, Mrs. Hudson becomes Fritz the Chef, Gregson becomes Inspector Cramer, Lestrade becomes Lieutenant Rowan (corr. Rowcliff, just remembered), and the faceless gang of Holmesian undercover accomplices becomes Saul Panzer, Fred Durbin, and Orrie Cather. Nero Wolfe himself is a classic concatenation of opposites. Thin becomes fat (‘an eighth of a ton’), tobacco and cocaine become beer, the violin becomes orchids (Wolfe hates music… gilding the lily?), motley attire becomes impeccable suitings, and the two real character standouts in the stories — Moriarty and Irene Adler — become Arnold Zuck and Phoebe Gunther (“The Woman” who died solving the mystery for Wolfe in the best of all the novels, The Silent Speaker. Check, check, check, check, check…
Am I showing off? Maybe. I did not to have to look up any name on that list but Phoebe Gunther (spondee, trochee) because we barely got to see her in person and she was the ‘silent speaker’ of the title.
[That’s not where my memory is changing its mode of operation. I recall an enormous number of names from my life and my readings and my entertainment watching. The names that drop out are, surprisingly, ones that are easily recovered by clever searches on the Internet (e.g., historical or show biz related) usually resulting in additional information about even people I admired with knowing basic facts about them. It seems that when I develop a memory block about someone I have good reason to remember, it’s an indication I haven’t looked far enough beneath the surface of my experience with them as a student or fan. Christopher Walken and John Malkovich are both exemplary in this respect. They happen to be two of the four actors I marvel at because they are so often making a different movie than the director and the others in the cast. Why there was more to learn about the two on the list who weren’t Marlon Brando or Nicholas Cage.]
You’re always allowed to skip the square bracket asides if they seem distracting. Sometimes they just put themselves in.
Rex Stout isn’t the only one. Agatha Christie, bless her brilliant soul, took on the Sherlock challenge herself in a big way. Just to show she could do it, I expect. For a decidedly British detective novelist, she went Belgian with Hercule Poirot, whose sidekick was a Watson-esque Hastings and whose appraisal of his own powers was every bit as lofty as Holmes’s (or Wolfe’s). Like Stout, she turned away from the obsession with deduction to a more intuitive species of genius represented by Poirot as “little gray cells” doing their own thing, not dissimilarly to Wolfe’s lips puckering in, out, in out, whike he seemed buried in a near coma.
What all three writers captured to a delightful degree was the joy of watching the phenom at work. Which somehow doesn’t get as tiresome as the serendipitous romantic involvements of a Travis McGee or the sighing ennui of Inspector Dalgleish as roundabout approaches to cracking the murderer’s code. Distant third places go to the breakneck pace crowd, who think they are living up to the standard set by Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer, all of whom are one-offs for the quality of the writing and other style points of outstanding writers. We never needed the first-person go-gettems of Lew Archer, Kinsey Milhone, or Dr. Fay Scarpetta. Although to be fair, I owe a debt to P. D. James, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell because I spoofed their detectives at Moon Books in Shuteye Town.
I have at least admitted my debt and made use of aspects of the Holmes crossing of the Reality Divide by endowing the post-1985 punk writers with their own set of “Irregulars” in the now forcibly terminated Max Lute website…
The existence of the Irregulars is confirmed at the one remaining page (of 15) at the murdered punk Simplesite, “The Gallery of Gypsy.” The South Street Irregulars were not the only surviving source of information about the past and present activities of punk writers, as covered by a Max Lute site investigating what became of the movement after the massacre in May1985. This graphic has also been separately retained from the loss.
In fact, the Irregulars and these other sources are still working behind the scenes, just not as readily accessible on the Internet. What does remain of their third-person confirmation of punk writer reality, with a credibility enhanced by the fact that their communication vehicle suffered from censorship while it was active and was subsequently done in by sinister external maneuverings is now reduced to this remnant of the Simplesite “The South Street Mystery.” (1 of 15 pages).
Another one-page screencaps from before the site went down but was under pressure…
The site was removed shortly thereafter.
I’ve previously mentioned and linked other punk-related sites and what you’d have to call “hunters,” because they are starting from farther behind than sources like this and this. The Mark Frelinger experiment in literary archaeology continues, in dribs and drabs so far, but always with an eye toward provocative skepticism about matters considered settled.
One of my FB friends, The Rifleman, just received a Messenger post from Mark Frelinger about some scrap he’s uncovered in his dad Frank’s papers. The graphic is supposedly taken from a YT video posted half a dozen years ago by Johnny Dodge…
The Max Lute reference is disingenuous. I don’t trust Mark Frelinger.
Surprise surprise. Turned out to be another external placement by Apple on my iPad disk. At intervals, they invade my image files and use some kind of AI selection mechanism they to create a video showing off the superior functional features of their video apps. Usually, they give themselves away with non-sequitur inclusions, work-in-process frames with blank spaces to be filled in during further editing, and pointless repetitions of the same shot. This was better than most. Best of all, it somehow contained a lot of my misplaced historical MOVE photography.
Yes, there was a MOVE bombing. And that was the very night black ops commandos invaded South Street to kill the punks and steal their AI technology. Recovered for me by unrequested AI assistance. Do I have friends I don’t know about?
Guess I’ll stop there for now. Next up (probably), the improbable importance of J.R.R.Tolien’s Kord of the airings in my grapplings with Reality Divide. Particularly the least read parts of his legacy, the Appendixes and the Silmarillion. Indispensable.
That’s right. It’s D-Day. No wonder I’m thinking about military invasions…
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