reading entrails

"Crime stories are one of the oldest literary genres, dating back at least as far as Cain and Abel. But the genre that concerns me here is the crime story’s modern descendant, in which a felony is committed in mysterious circumstances and then an individual follows clues and makes deductions to discover what happened.
     This is a relative innovation: the first modern detective novel is usually attributed either to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), or to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). There is no doubt, however, that the 1860s saw the arrival of detective fiction as a whole. This was the decade that saw the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), ‘the first, the longest and the best modern English detective novel’, in the opinion of T S Eliot.

     Why should detective fiction have emerged at this time? There are some conspicuous material factors. Industrialisation and the growth of literacy meant that more people than ever before were able to read. To satisfy this new market, new machinery was developed that could produce cheap books in vast numbers. Booksellers in Britain set up stalls in stations. Their best-sellers were sensationalist, the kind of stories sneered at by literary types: 'the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations,’ the poet and critic Matthew Arnold complained in 1880, ‘and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle class, for people with a low standard of life’. Unabashed, ordinary readers were hungry for this kind of stuff; when the first detective novels came along, they lapped them up.
     […] But why did detective stories become such huge best-sellers almost overnight? What accounted for the sudden fascination with the figure of the detective? The unlucky Francis Kent’s father happened to be a government factory inspector, another profession that emerged at around this time, and yet factory inspectors didn’t suddenly become heroes of the popular imagination.
     The solution can be found if we ask ourselves what a detective actually does. If nothing else, he (and, later, she) is a problem-solver; someone who can restore order where there is chaos. Faced with the worst crime (what could be more existentially troubling than a murder?), the detective gives us answers to the most pressing and urgent questions: not only whodunit, but how and why and what it means. He does all this by taking us on a journey, discovering pieces of evidence, seeking out hints and clues. In the best examples of this game, we see everything that the detective sees, yet we are unable to solve the crime ourselves. Only the detective, in a final display of mastery, can reach the correct conclusion. We need him, with his special knowledge and abilities, to make sense of it all.
     In other words, a detective is a kind of priest. […]"
— Jason Webster, Aeon
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Fog of War

"Thousands are dying every day in the trenches as the First World War rages so one more corpse is hardly going to be investigated or even remarked upon.

     Yet eventually it is and says one character: 'When we signed up for this, we thought we knew who the enemy was. Over there. Fritz. The Hun. But who’s the enemy now… The enemy might be the bloke next to you, the one bringing the tea, even your lieutenant.'
     The detective, who at the beginning of this novel is taken up into the air in a hot air balloon to survey the blasted horror of no man’s land and the sweeping field of Flanders beyond is none other than Dr (Major) Watson, formerly of Baker Street and formerly Sherlock Holmes’s devoted sidekick."
—Jennifer Selway, Daily Express
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Holmes for the Holidays

"Midwinter is a potent time for fans of Sherlock Holmes. Along with its evocative weather and palliative hearths, readers can expect the latest slew of biographies, criticism, reissues, bastardizations and assorted Sherlockiana that publishers traditionally lavish on the public in the long run-up to Christmas.
     [...] Only Charles Dickens has greater seasonal appeal and this winter, despite a bicentenary, even he can barely compete with the enduring attraction of 'the world’s foremost detective mind' and his oft-reluctant creator. Three 'forgotten' Doylean manuscripts, two fictional, one real, including the first 'official' Holmes novel since the author’s death, join a film, a memoir, a biography and a glut of other literature, some of it ingenious, some strained, and all too bounteous to be given due notice here, from Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy, a selection of essays edited by Josef Steiff, which explains, among other things, why the celebrated sleuth is 'like a good hip-hop song,' to Kim Newman’s Moriarty: The hound of the D’Urbervilles, which attempts a Frankensteinean splicing of gothic expectations.
     [...] With such a daunting legacy to live up to, surely only a very bold person would take on the first 'official' Sherlock Holmes novel since the author’s death in 1930. Fortunately, Anthony Horowitz is that person and The House of Silk is a worthy addition to the canon. Like the best Holmes stories, it treads the line, in both narrative and language, between cliché and creativity, and is by turns gripping, playful, tortuous and cosily predictable, though the great detective himself would doubtless dismiss it as nothing but 'vulgar romanticism.'"
— Toby Lichtig, The Times Literary Supplement
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Setting, Setting, Setting

From: netgiant

"The Kings Point estate said to have been the inspiration for the West Egg mansion in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has sold, according to a press release by the real estate firm that listed the property.
     The price has not yet been made public. Neither has the name of the buyer.
     John Handler last owned the home, known as the Brickman estate. Handler was found dead there in 2008; he was 57. His wife, Jennifer Eley-Handler, who was principal pianist for the Long Island Philharmonic, died two years earlier in an accident.
     On the market since September 2010, the 20-acre property was most recently listed for $39.5 million."
— Lisa Doll Bruno, The Miami Herald
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From: Sherlockipedia

"221B Baker Street is the London address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the United Kingdom, postal addresses with a number followed by a letter may indicate a separate address within a larger, often residential building. Baker Street in Holmes' time was a high-class residential district, and Holmes' apartment was probably part of a Georgian terrace.
     At the time the Holmes stories were published, addresses in Baker Street did not go as high as 221. Baker Street was later extended, and in 1932 the Abbey National Building Society moved into premises at 219–229 Baker Street. For many years, Abbey National employed a full-time secretary to answer mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes. In 1990, a blue plaque signifying 221B Baker Street was installed at the Sherlock Holmes Museum, situated elsewhere on the same block, and there followed a 15-year dispute between Abbey National and the Holmes Museum for the right to receive mail addressed to 221B Baker Street. Since the closure of Abbey House in 2005, ownership of the address by the Holmes Museum has not been challenged, despite its location between 237 and 241 Baker Street."
— Wikipedia
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Diagnosing Literature

"Plucky, ailing Tiny Tim is one of the most enduring characters to come out of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. But Dickens never explains why Tiny Tim wears leg braces and uses a crutch, nor does he make clear what will kill the young boy if the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge doesn't change his ways. [...]
     Tiny Tim's life in cramped, polluted London would have set him up for both rickets and tuberculosis, [Dr. Russell] Chesney said. At the time, 60 percent of children of working-class London families had rickets, brought on by poor nutrition and lack of sunlight. (London's coal-choked skies blocked the sun's ultraviolet light that helps the body synthesize vitamin D.)
     At the same time, half of working-class kids had signs of tuberculosis, Chesney reported Monday (March 5) in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Tiny Tim's rickets could have been reversed — and his tuberculosis improved — by sunshine, a better diet and cod liver oil, a supplement rich in vitamin D, Chesney said."
— Huffington Post
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"It's tough to pin down the exact personality traits of Sherlock Holmes, since his story has been recycled in so many incarnations. He's the most-portrayed fictional character in the world, running the gamut from Basil Rathbone playing a jolly English gentleman who fights Nazis to Robert Downey Jr.'s Victorian Rain Man/MMA fighter. But there are some key characteristics in the original Arthur Conan Doyle version that tend to crop up again and again, and they all indicate a severe case of Asperger's. [...]
     The first thing to keep in mind is that the character isn't just portrayed as being really smart -- he is obsessed with certain subjects and totally excludes all others. In one of the Holmes stories, A Study in Scarlet, he doesn't know that the Earth revolves around the sun (because, he says, the information doesn't have any effect on his everyday life). These uneven obsessions with random topics -- in Holmes' case, things like tobacco ashes and regional soil consistency -- are not signs of an enthusiast; they are symptoms of a disorder. Or, as the Yale Child Study Center puts it, Asperger's sufferers show '...a narrow range of capacities for memorizing lists or trivial information, calendar calculation, visual-spatial skills such as drawing, or musical skills involving a perfect pitch or playing a piece of music after hearing it only once.'"
— Chris Radomile, Amanda Miller, Cracked.com
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"It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, in two essays, that any attempt was made to account for Holden [Caulfield, the 16-year-old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye] in primarily psychological terms. E. H. Miller wrote in 1982 that 'most critics have tended to accept Holden's evaluation of the world as phony, when in fact his attitudes are symptomatic of a serious psychological problem.' Miller, 'instead of treating the novel as a commentary by an innocent young man rebelling against an insensitive world or as a study of a youth's moral growth,' tries to show that Holden's 'rebelliousness is his only means of dealing with his inability to come to terms with the death of his brother.'
     In contrast, the other psychoanalytic critic, James Bryan—who theorizes that Holden is ruled by a suppressed incest wish directed toward his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe—does not conclude that Holden's insights are undermined by his having psychological difficulties. The psychological approach, then, though it insists on a fairly serious diagnosis of Holden, does not definitively establish the grounds either for dismissal or endorsement of his social critique. What it does establish is that Holden's observations and his mental state are manifestly related to one another. [...]"
— Peter Shaw, Literature Resources Center
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