Reading when young (or old)

Once again this summer, The Telegraph offered "The best children’s books for every age group." It's a pretty good list. A few examples:

Four- to five-year-olds

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by AA Milne

In his 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, AA Milne raged at how the “bear of very little brain” had undermined his reputation as a serious writer. For though Milne wrote seven adult novels and 34 plays, the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), with line drawings by EH Shepard, eclipsed any of the Englishman’s other literary efforts. They show Milne to be a brilliant observer of human behaviour, to the extent that the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, be it pompous Owl or melancholic Eeyore, have become part of the cultural lexicon. And just as you’re never too old to read Pooh, you’re never too young: the books will give any inquisitive child an Arcadian first step into plot-driven stories.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) by Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s stories contain all manners of horrors, from Squirrel Nutkin’s tail being broken off by Old Brown the owl to Benjamin Bunny’s young family being kidnapped by a hungry badger. The Tale of Peter Rabbit begins with a particularly gruesome image, as Peter’s mother warns him not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.” Not always a comforting read, then. But Potter’s exquisite illustrations, with their teasing interplay between fantasy and realism, make for some of the most enchanting children’s stories of all time.

Nine- to eleven-year-olds

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by CS Lewis

CS Lewis’s postwar fantasy has inspired more literary analysis than almost any other work of children’s fiction; but it’s part of the novel’s magic that its subtext can be enjoyed in blissful ignorance. Countless fans have reported that they read it for the first time unaware even of its Christian allegory – let alone the academic theories that link the trees in the Narnian woods, like Kerr’s hungry tiger, to the Gestapo. Lewis understood the unbridled power of a child’s imagination: no child who has followed the adventures of the Pevensie children will look on a wardrobe the same way again.

The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame

The poetic language in Grahame’s story, which is set in a bucolic Edwardian England, might strike the modern child as old-fashioned. But they should persevere: the tale of Mole, Ratty, Badger and their trouble-prone friend Toad is a dazzling combination of enchantment and psychological acuity. As with Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have acquired a universal quality. We may not be lucky enough to know a Ratty – but we all know a Toad: “I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”

(more, perhaps only available to subscribers)

Emily Bearn, "The best children’s books for every age group," The Telegraph, July 15, 2025.

Buchan

Although published more than three years ago, I only came across it yesterday while searching for something else. Buchan is one of my favorite early 20^th century authors. From "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer":

If asked to list important lay Christian writers from the twentieth century, people tend to list names such as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. One name that will probably not figure is John Buchan. Yet this omission is unfortunate, because Buchan was one of the twentieth century's most prolific and widely read British Christian authors, and, more importantly, he is an author whose works still have much to teach Christians today.

Buchan is best remembered today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, but there was far more to his life than the writing of this single book. ....

Buchan...stands in the Christian tradition of moral realism. In his writings he teaches us that right and wrong, good and evil, are not mere human political inventions, but have objective existence, and that human beings have to take the right side in the battle between them. ....

[I]n Greenmantle, his hero, Richard Hannay, is rescued by the wife of a woodcutter while lost on an undercover mission in Germany in World War I. Her husband is away in the German army fighting the Russians, and she and her children are poverty-stricken and have very little food. However, out of Christian charity, she unhesitatingly offers food and shelter to Hannay, who is suffering from a bout of malaria, and her example changes Hannay's attitude completely:

'When I saw the splintered shell of Ypres and heard hideous tales of German doings, I used to want to see the whole land of the Boche given up to fire and sword. I thought we could never end the war properly without giving the Hun some of their own medicine. But that woodcutter's cottage cured me of such nightmares. I was for punishing the guilty but letting the innocent go free. It was our business to thank God and keep our hands clean from the ugly blunders to which Germany's madness had driven her. What good would it do Christian folk to burn poor little huts like this and leave children's bodies by the wayside? To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beasts.' .... (more)

Buchan wrote in the inter-war years, and his books sometimes reflect prejudices common in Britain then, particularly anti-Semitism. I have posted about that before, and especially recommend this Gertrude Himmelfarb essay.

Martin Davie, "Important lessons from a neglected Christian writer," Christian Today, April 23, 2022.

Action and adventure

Dirda has reappeared at The Washington Post with "What are the best adventure novels?" including a list of books that he would choose:

What are the greatest adventure novels ever written? By “adventure” I don’t mean “exciting” — nearly all fiction should be exciting in some way — but rather stories that emphasize action, danger and heroism. My own nominees — and tastes will certainly differ — would include the following baker’s dozen:

• 
  Homer, The Odyssey
• Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
• H. Rider Haggard, She
• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
• Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
• John Buchan, Greenmantle
• Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood
• P.C. Wren, Beau Geste
• Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
• Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

I haven't read The Odyssey since it was assigned in school. I never got into Haggard or Burroughs, except for a couple of the Tarzan books when I was in grade school. I know nothing about Bengtsson. But I do know the rest, and many are among my favorite reads.

Dirda goes on to consider some of the post-WWII titles he might choose as great adventure novels, and again, it's a list that includes many I've read with pleasure. Most of the rest of the essay is about another author unfamiliar to me, Lionel Davidson, and particularly his The Rose of Tibet.

I am very much looking forward to the book Michael Dirda is working on, an "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain."

Michael Dirda, "What are the best adventure novels? Let’s add a hidden gem to the list," The Washington Post, July 30, 2025.

Frederick Forsyth, RIP

I did enjoy his novels, especially Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War (both made into excellent films). He also narrated the BBC series Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. I used the first episode of that as an introduction to a unit on the military in an international relations class. From the Washington Post obituary:

Frederick Forsyth, a mega-selling British novelist of political thrillers, cunning spy craft and globe-trotting intrigue who used his own background as a foreign correspondent to inspire such page-turners as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, died June 9 at his home in Buckinghamshire, a county in southeast England. He was 86. ....

For a half-century, Mr. Forsyth was one of the most successful authors of the cloak-and-dagger circuit. He wrote more than 20 novels, short stories and other works, reportedly selling more than 75 million copies in more than a dozen languages. ....

.... Mr. Forsyth, who had mulled for years the attempted assassination of De Gaulle as scaffolding for a novel, spent a little over a month at the typewriter and finished the manuscript for The Day of the Jackal with the aid of many packs of Rothmans cigarettes.

The book was about a French paramilitary outfit that hires a remorseless British hit man known only as “the Jackal.” The tensions build on a collision course between the hired killer and an unassuming French police detective racing to stop him. The first four publishers who were pitched “Jackal” didn’t understand the book, Mr. Forsyth later told The Washington Post: “The point was not whodunit, but how, and how close would he get?” ....

In 1972, Mr. Forsyth won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel. An acclaimed 1973 film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, starred Edward Fox as the Jackal and Michael Lonsdale as the French police official. .... (more)

Brian Murphy, "Frederick Forsyth, thriller writer of ‘Day of the Jackal,’ dies at 86," The Washingtyon Post, June 9, 2025.

"Cooler than Cool"

I'm not sure when I first discovered Elmore Leonard, but it was after the time he was writing Westerns (but I do have DVDs of some films based on his Westerns). I believe I own copies of all of his crime novels, all eminently re-readable. I once gave old paperback copies of several of Elmore's books to a graduate student who aspired to be a screenwriter. A new biography of Elmore was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal today. From that review:

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

So reads the 10^th of “10 Rules of Writing” (2007) by Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), the New Orleans-born, Detroit-raised, Hollywood-savvy author who changed the nature of crime stories (in print and on screen) while becoming one of the most successful and highly regarded writers of his genre and generation. ....

Leonard’s style was Hemingway-like in its economy and reveled in the unexpected delights of the American language. His stories often began in the middle of a scene, and where they went after that was anyone’s guess. His opening lines, such as this one from 1980’s Gold Coast, were collectible: “One day Karen DiCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.”

His crime stories, filled with oddball crooks and moody cops, were hard to pigeonhole, but Leonard’s audience grew to bestseller proportions, boosted by screen adaptations and near-idolatrous reviews. Many of his later works—among them LaBrava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), Out of Sight (1996) and Tishomingo Blues (2002)—have been reverently republished via the Library of America. Martin Amis would write that Leonard’s prose rang with the “American rhythms” of Robert Frost and Mark Twain. Ann Beattie compared his fiction, in its moral complexity, to Flannery O’Connor’s. .... (more)

Tom Nolan, "‘Cooler Than Cool’ Review: Elmore Leonard’s Life of Crime," The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2025.

"Romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress..."

Occasioned by a new release of Richard Lester's Three Musketeers comes a review of a film I thoroughly enjoyed in a theater when it was first released, and have owned in some form ever since home video became affordable. The review reminded me that the screenwriter was one of my favorite authors. I just ordered Criterion's new edition, coming next week.

Few works have sparked the cinematic imagination as routinely as Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. A hasty count indicates some 40 movie versions (the first and latest from France, in 1903 and 2023) and many more made just for television. But by common consent, the best yet is Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), originally conceived as a single film with intermission but ultimately released as two separate pictures. ....

Three seasoned actors in their prime—Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain and Frank Finlay—were cast as the world-weary musketeers: Athos, Aramis and Porthos. Michael York, fresh from his central role in the soon-to-be Oscar-winning Cabaret, nabbed the plum part of the callow D’Artagnan (ultimately, the fourth musketeer)....

Raquel Welch, the very essence of feminine sexuality at the time, so her participation—as Constance, the queen’s dressmaker and the object of D’Artagnan’s ceaseless affections—was non-negotiable. Who knew then that this screen goddess, often as not wooden in dramatic parts, had talent as a comedic foil? ....

Landing Faye Dunaway after Bonnie and Clyde but before Chinatown and Network was a coup, and she portrays the ruthless Milady de Winter, an agent of much misery, with such unforgettable hauteur that it’s hard to imagine anyone else inhabiting the role. Christopher Lee lends her lover, the fearsome one-eyed Comte de Rochefort, exactly the kind of menace that made him irreplaceable on screen for so many decades. ....

...[T]he real casting masterstroke was placing Charlton Heston, one of Hollywood’s leading leading men, in the pivotal role of Cardinal Richelieu, the power behind the throne and the figure discreetly controlling most of the saga’s action. Heston plays Richelieu with a welcome light touch, giving just the right weight to sotto-voce comments, asserting authority by never raising his voice and letting an arched eyebrow or a sidelong glance serve his character’s needs. ....

...[T]he Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser, whose early “Flashman” novels, with their outlandish bounder protagonist, served almost as dry runs for his spirited condensing of Dumas’s massive chronicle into two efficient pictures, each running less than two hours. It was Fraser who, when Mr. Lester asked how a particular scene should look, said, “like a Breughel painted by Rembrandt”—a comment the director clearly took to heart.

None of this makes these pictures high art, but they are consummate entertainment. Few of us want a meal of Bergman and Bresson every night. Sometimes, the menu calls for romance, intrigue, broad comedy, gaudy settings, lavish dress, and, of course, sexy women and dashing men. And when you want to dine out on that, Mr. Lester is happy to serve you. (more)

David Mermelstein, "‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘The Four Musketeers’: Richard Lester’s Spirited Swashbucklers," The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2025.

Dirda returns

There are a couple of books I am eagerly anticipating, although publication dates are uncertain. One is Alan Jacobs' biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. His Narnian, about C.S. Lewis, is my favorite book on CSL. The other is Michael Dirda's "appreciation and guide to the popular fiction of late 19^th and early 20^th century Britain." Dirda's "semi-retirement" was my biggest regret about subscribing to the Washington Post. Today, he returned as a guest columnist. He has been reading a lot, avoiding politics, and working on that book.

In it, I reintroduce many influential, if now too seldom read, classics of adventure, mystery, horror and romance. Some of my favorites include the three ornately written mysteries in M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski, Richard Marsh’s astonishingly transgressive horror novel, The Beetle, J.M. Barrie’s multiverse play, Dear Brutus, and a shelf of swashbucklers such as Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste, as well as E.F. Benson’s “spook stories” and Saki’s sardonic Beasts and Super Beasts. There are also long essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood, among others.

I'm particularly interested in what Dirda says about the authors referenced in the last sentence above.

Michael Dirda, "Disillusioned by politics, I read these books to get out of my slump," The Washington Post, May 9, 2025

"The notion of 'Christian fiction' is problematic..."

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and an adult convert to Christianity. From "The promise and peril of the 'Christian novel'":

The notion of 'Christian fiction' is problematic in the same fashion as is the notion of a 'protest song.' Consider: how many good protest songs have you ever heard, in comparison with the number of bad or terrible ones? I would be willing to bet that the latter list was a lot longer, and the reason is simple enough: polemic and poetry don't mix. Making a point or pushing an agenda sits very badly with the task of exploring the complexity of human being in all its fullness. ....

C.S. Lewis once claimed that it was much harder to present the Christian story to a post-Christian culture than to a pre-Christian one, and today we can see how true this claim is. Where I come from, people are largely inoculated against Christianity, or what they imagine Christianity to be. The history, the cultural baggage, the half-formed prejudices: all of these are compounded by a stark lack of understanding of what the Christian Way really is. Recently I was admonished by an editor for making a reference to one of Jesus's well-known parables in an article I was writing. 'Young readers today', she said, 'won't understand the reference.' I was shocked. When I was young, we all knew these things even if we didn't believe them. No more. The shared stories we once took for granted are blowing away on the wind. For all of these reasons, a Christian who wants to write a novel which even touches on his or her faith faces a steep climb. ....

How could a Christian write a novel in times like these, and what models might we have? Recently I read C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, which I thought was a brave attempt to disguise the Christian pattern of the universe in sci-fi clothing. Some of it was inspiring or intriguing: the treatment of space as heaven — literally — and the portrait of an Earth occluded by evil spirits and thus cut off from God since ancient times, offers up powerful images to the imagination. That Hideous Strength, the final novel in the trilogy, points at our current spiritual dilemma with perspicacity. Lewis's ambitious, grand sweep of a tale showed me how a conceptual trilogy about the spiritual realities of Heaven and Earth could be constructed. But the novels are dated now, as any book written about space exploration in the 1940s would be. ....

Last year I was approached by the editor of the Buechner Review, a publication dedicated to the work of an author I had never heard of, and asked if I would write something for them. What they told me about him piqued my interest: Buechner was a novelist who had become a Christian — indeed, a Christian pastor — and then had to answer for himself the question of how to reconcile the two callings. So I said yes, and then I sat down with Buechner’s 1980 novel, Godric, which is a fictionalised account of the life of  St Godric of Finchale. ....

What he does is, in some ways, almost at the opposite end of the spectrum to the one that Lewis was inhabiting. While the Space Trilogy spreads itself over the widest vista imaginable, both literally and conceptually, Godric is a small book, in its scope if not its concerns — or its writing. Buechner sets out to tell the story of one obscure saint in one period of time in one particular place, and through that to illuminate the spiritual struggle that is the Christian Way. He does so, in my opinion, with great success. .... (more)

Paul Kingsnorth, "The promise and peril of the 'Christian novel,'" The Abbey of Misrule, April 9, 2025.

When the world looks dark

Michael Dirda is just about the only reason I subscribed to The Washington Post and now he has retired. I do, however, have access to an archive of his columns and reviews. This was from just after the 2024 election:

This fall has showcased D.C. weather at its very best — temperatures in the 70s, day after day of luminous blue skies and dry, crisp air, lovely afternoons for strolling in parks or hiking along the Potomac and in Rock Creek Park. Overall, God couldn’t have ordered a better lead-up to my birthday on Nov. 6. As it turned out, though, I spent most of that day in quiet despondency, thinking about the future of this country and the world.

More personally — it was my birthday after all — I also thought about how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise. Should I follow the advice of Voltaire’s Candide and simply cultivate my garden, in effect just turn my back on the world outside? There are, after all, books I’ve never gotten to ....

The best course is immersion in some great or compelling works of the past. Some people may turn to scripture for hope and consolation; others to philosophy or poetry. But there are other, less obvious options for self-care when the soul is roiled and the world looks dark.

The sun is always shining on Blandings Castle, and the comic fiction of P.G. Wodehouse can brighten even the gloomiest moods. Classic mysteries, featuring detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Nero Wolfe, provide clear-cut puzzles to soothe the most vexed and troubled spirit. There’s a reason detective stories were called “the normal recreation of noble minds.” During the Blitz, the British kept calm and carried on, in part by occasionally escaping into long Victorian novels and novel sequences, such as the Barsetshire chronicles of Anthony Trollope. ....

Will you turn for comfort to Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances or to a favorite poet, say George Herbert or Emily Dickinson? Or might you, perhaps, aim to acquire a cooler, more Olympian perspective on the present moment by reading various novels, all well received, that re-create the lives, peccadilloes and intrigues of the best-known Roman emperors: Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March, John Williams’s Augustus, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian....

Michael Dirda, "Feeling despondent? So am I. Then I remembered, books can help," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2024.

Some good reading

Standard EBooks continues to add to its library of beautifully formatted, downloadable, out-of-copyright, and thus free eBooks. This month, I noticed R. Austin Freeman's The D’Arblay Mystery, the ninth in their Doctor Thorndyke series. I've posted about the Dr. Thorndyke books several times before. Another is a book I haven't read since childhood, The Swiss Family Robinson.

Johann David Wyss was inspired by Robinson Crusoe but wanted a story his own children could learn from. Thus the novel’s various adventures are really lessons on topics as varied as farming, cooperation, animal husbandry, and frugality. The novel became a favorite of the castaway genre....

But my favorite discovery this month is the first book in which Albert Campion appears, Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929).

George Abbershaw has been invited to a party at the gloomy old English mansion of a friend, along with a few people he knows, a few he doesn’t, and one he is sweet on. A suspicious death means George has to determine who can be trusted and who can’t, including a bespectacled young man named Albert Campion who seems to have shown up at the party uninvited. When things take a decided turn for the worse, George and the rest of the guests have to band together in an effort to extricate themselves from an increasingly perilous situation.

Although only a supporting player here, Albert Campion would be the protagonist of another sixteen novels and over twenty short stories, contributing to Margery Allingham being considered one of the four “Queens of Crime,” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

Standard EBooks seems to intend to publish more of the Campion books as they become available.

Standard EBooks

A sense of sin

W.H. Auden observed that many mystery fans "have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy." That largely describes me. Apart from mysteries, my only interest in fantasy has been Lewis and Tolkien. I do like some authors of historical fiction.

In a good essay about the appeal of murder mysteries, Alan Jacobs reflects on his enjoyment of such television series as Inspector Morse and its sequel Lewis. He writes "These shows are, it’s often said, old people’s television: Inspector Morse was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, and I’d be surprised if Her Majesty didn’t keep up with the later developments," and he "wonder[s] whether the detective story as a genre is made for people with more than a few years behind them." Jacobs:

...W.H. Auden, in a famous essay about detective fiction, speculated that the fundamental logic of such fiction involves the portrayal of an apparent Eden that is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored—but not the original order since the dead cannot be brought back to life. “Murder is unique” among crimes, Auden says, “in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness.” This is a kind of legal fiction, this substitution of the society itself for one who can no longer seek, or benefit from, justice: in a broken world, things can never be what they were. But partial restoration is better than none, and hope for it is a reasonable aspiration, one claimed by those who have known what the poet James Wright calls “The change of tone, the human hope gone gray.” The satisfactions of the murder mystery are real but somewhat grim, in ways that perhaps best suit the no-longer-young. They are anything but utopian.

In the murder mystery, society does not simply stand in for the victim, it undergoes its own development, for if the story begins in a seemingly orderly and peaceful world, the operative word in that description is “seemingly.” Its initial state is, Auden says, one of “false innocence,” and a murder does not bring evil into society but rather reveals the evil that is already there. The human tendency to take complacent pleasure in a fictional innocence is something that can best be seen in a small and mostly closed society, which is why so many classic detective novels are set in places like English country houses or long-distance railways or isolated villages....

In Auden’s essay on detective fiction he muses on the curious fact that many of its fans have no interest in other “genre” stories—romances, Westerns, science fiction, fantasy—and he speculates that the mystery offers something unique: “I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin.” ....

And so we’re left with a world in which justice is hoped for but never fully achieved, in which sin and crime can be exposed and punished but never, never quite, paid for—at least not by us. Hard lessons, but ones we all learn if we live long enough. .... (more)

Murder in Paradise | The American Conservative

Rooting for justice

Alan Jacobs is writing a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. Today he considers a distinction she makes between stories of crime and stories of detection:

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. ....

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E.M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. ....

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers. (more)

I enjoy recent authors like Elmore Leonard, but my favorite authors, Dorothy L. Sayers among them,  wrote in the Golden Age.

The book cover above is my copy of the book in which the essay was published.

Alan Jacobs, "The Integrity of the System," The Homebound Symphony, Feb. 10, 2025.

Marple

Last night I watched two of the Joan Hickson Miss Marple mysteries. I think Hickson is by far the best Marple on screen. I've owned the DVDs of that series for some time but last night, I watched streaming on Britbox and was glad I did — the episodes have been restored and are beautiful. I saw "The Moving Finger" and "A Pocket Full of Rye," neither of which I had watched recently and much longer since read. Speaking of the books, today I came across one reader's ranking of the twelve Agatha Christie's in which Miss Marple appears:

• 
  A Murder is Announced (1950)
• The Moving Finger (1942)
• The Body in the Library (1942)
• A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
• The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
• Sleeping Murder (1976)
• The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
• A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
• 4.50 from Paddington (1957)
• They Do It with Mirrors (1952)
• Nemesis (1971)
• At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)

Not bad, although I would rank The 4:50 from Paddington a bit higher.

Jose Ignacio Escribano, "My Ranking of the Twelve Miss Marple Novels," A Crime is Afoot, Feb. 4, 2025.

A personal library

Robert Caro is the author of "titanic biographies of Robert Moses (which took seven years) and Lyndon B. Johnson (a multivolume project that began in 1976 and is still ongoing)." The Washington Post has just published an article about his very extensive personal library. I particularly enjoyed this:

.... Lower [in his bookcase] in much easier reach, sit the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester, about the ascent of a British Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The young Caro loved the series so much that, whenever the public library got the latest installment, he would plop down on the building’s metal steps and start reading right there. As a gift, his wife, Ina, who has worked as his researcher on all his books, had Caro’s set rebound in blue, with anchors and naval insignia on the spines.

“I had them all my life,” he said. “It means a lot to have the very pages — because I read these books so many times that I sort of know where the words are on the page. And I’m ashamed to tell you how often I reread them.”

“Oh dear,” he said, his eyes falling on a different stamp, on the top edge of one volume: the faded words “East Meadow Public Library.” “Well, that’s quite true, I was not always good at returning these books. This is going to look really bad! It’s too late.” ....

“Sometimes you look at these bookshelves,” Caro said, “and I have all these memories, all wrapped up in them.” .... (more)

The book cover illustrated above is of one of the Hornblower books in my library.

Sophia Nguyen, "A peek inside Robert Caro’s home library, hidden shelves and all," The Washington Post, Jan 17, 2025.

Alone against a warship

I've seen the film and own a DVD of Sailor Of The King, a pretty good film based on a book by C.S. Forester, Brown on Resolution, that just entered the public domain. It was one of the first Forester books dealing with nautical subjects. The text is available at Standard Books with this description:

Albert Brown was fated to enlist in the British Navy, his destiny set by his unusual birth and upbringing. While on operations in the Pacific during the First World War, his ship is sunk—but he survives, and is taken on board the German cruiser that sank them. It too has suffered damage, and heads to the Galapagos Islands to effect repairs. In this unlikely and hostile setting, Brown, alone, pits himself against the German ship and its crew, seeking to delay its progress while British naval reinforcements make their way to the region.

C.S. Forester became famous for his Horatio Hornblower series, but Brown on Resolution is among the first of his works of nautical fiction. In it, he weaves together the gritty social themes of his earlier work with meticulous accounts of naval adventure.

The book is set during World War I but the film moves the story to World War II.

In the public domain

Every January 1^st more works go out of copyright and enter the public domain. This year, in the United States, the songs, books, and films, are those published in 1929. Standard Books selects twenty of the "best," books available on their site including, for instance, The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and others, including several by authors I always enjoy:

• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett
• The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie
• The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan
• The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey
• Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester

Each of the above is linked to a page where it can be downloaded or read online. All but one are mysteries. The non-mystery is the C.S. Forester, a WWI naval thriller. The Buchan is a Richard Hannay I haven't yet read but will soon.

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days"

From Dickens' Pickwick Papers.

...[N]umerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!

We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home! ....

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Chapter 28.

Read "The Lord of the Rings"

Five Books recommends reading Tolkien because the books are a different experience than the films:

These are stories of adventure that have the epic feel that the movies capture, but against a backdrop of conviviality and the pleasures of eating, drinking and telling stories by the fireside as you gather with your companions. Notably, the books are filled with poems that are composed and told by the main characters and pay homage to an oral storytelling tradition that has largely disappeared from our culture but Tolkien clearly admired.

The Hobbit is the recommended first read. I have known people who could not get through it and consequently went no further. I did read it first and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Hobbit introduces the creature known as a hobbit, about half the height of a human, beardless, and with hairy feet. In particular, the book introduces the figure of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit in his 50s who enjoys eating, smoking his pipe and taking it easy, and who is very emphatically NOT in search of an adventure. Unfortunately, a visit from Gandalf, a wizard, and 13 dwarves changes all that. Mr Baggins is dragged off from his comfortable home on a quest to recover a treasure.

The Hobbit is fun and light-hearted but has a slightly two-dimensional feel—featuring elves, goblins and dragons: creatures you might expect in a magical story for kids. It does not yet have the epic and ‘real’ feel of The Lord of the Rings. However, it’s in The Hobbit that a magical ring first makes its appearance, as does the creature who is obsessed with it—called Gollum because of the strange noise he makes in his throat when he talks. It’s clear that the ring’s power and the role it would play in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings had yet to take shape in Tolkien’s mind.

Continue "Lord of the Rings Books in Order" here. If you have read the books there are no surprises. But the descriptions may intrigue those who haven't without giving too much away.

"Lord of the Rings Books in Order," Best Books for Kids, Nov. 2, 2024.

Fame in Heaven

Jake Meador writes "A Tale of Three Pastors" today and at one point quotes a line from C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. I last read that book a long time ago even though it is a favorite. This is where Meador's quotation from Lewis appears:

.... First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers soundlessly falling, lightly drifting flowers, though by the standards of the ghost-world each petal would have weighed a hundred-weight and their fall would have been like the crashing of boulders. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done.

I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye.

But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

"Is it? ... is it?" I whispered to my guide.

"Not at all," said he. "It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green."

"She seems to be ... well, a person of particular importance?"

"Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things."

"And who are these gigantic people ... look! They're like emeralds ... who are dancing and throwing flowers before her?"

"Haven't ye read your Milton? A thousand livened angels lackey her...."

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1946. A pdf of the book can be found here.

"The quintessential spy thriller"

About John Buchan's first thriller and its subsequent influences:

A century after publication, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps remains the quintessential spy thriller. There is no need to rediscover this novel, since it has never gone away. No work of fiction published during the Edwardian period is more widely available in bookstores in as many mass-market and scholarly editions. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is the forerunner to countless subsequent spy thrillers and action movies where a lone hero is pitted against the forces of darkness, which is the scenario used by virtually all of them.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has spawned four feature-film adaptations, the first and best-known of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935. ....

A refreshingly uncomplicated tale of a manhunt that lasts a couple weeks, is set mostly in the Scottish Highlands and is told in around 40,000 words, The Thirty-Nine Steps has proved, so to speak, a runaway success. Indeed, the imperative of brevity and speed was something new and notable that Buchan brought to the thriller genre. ....

The Thirty-Nine Steps is remarkably cinematic for a novel published in the early days of the silent-film era. Certainly the thriller formula developed by Buchan had a profound influence on Hitchcock, who knew Buchan and whose “wrong man” style of thriller is derived from the model of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Hitchcock’s own film version of the book forms the basis for several of his subsequent Hollywood films, most notably the 1958 masterpiece North by Northwest.

In that film, as in Buchan’s original, the protagonist, played by Cary Grant, is caught up in a wider international conspiracy and through a series of unfortunate events is obliged to avoid both sinister foreign agents and the local police. He realises that he has become a decoy in a full-scale espionage operation designed to expose enemy spies operating on home soil.

The influence of The Thirty-Nine Steps on Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest may be seen not just in the manhunt theme common to both. In North by Northwest, the Buchan influence is felt also in set-piece scenes such as the crop-duster attack upon the fugitive protagonist at the isolated bus stop. In the original novel, Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay is pursued across the Highland wilderness by a monoplane. ....

Interestingly, the novel ends with Hannay leaving England to serve as a junior officer on the Western Front. Although Hannay was the only man who could have saved the day in The Thirty-Nine Steps, after the German plot has been thwarted he is just another British soldier. It would not be long, however, before he is employed again as an independent secret agent in Buchan’s follow-up adventure, Greenmantle. (more)

Simon Caterson, "A Century of The 39 Steps," Quadrant, Sept. 21, 2024.