The Sheer Joy of Genre Reading: On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (2011), by Michael Dirda

The great majority of fictional detectives come, strut for a time upon the bloody stage of crime, and then depart, as popular fancy alights on the doings of others.  How many people today have read a tale of an exploit of Lieutenant Valcour or Ludovic Travers?

the imperishable detective duo

Yet Sherlock Holmes remains imperishable.  Just in the last month or so we have had the appearance of a big-grossing Sherlock Holmes film sequel starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law as the Great Man and his perpetually perplexed sidekick, Dr. John Watson; the second season of a highly praised British television series about a present day Holmes and Watson starring a pair of rapidly ascending British actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman; a much publicized authorized Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk; and the subject of this review, the ingratiating small volume produced by the distinguished author and book critic Michael Dirda (for more on Dirda, see http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/12/michael-dirda-dashing-international-man.html

Michael Dirda

Dirda's attractive little book (published by Princeton University Press) manages to range far beyond Sherlock Holmes or even Conan Doyle.  Essentially the book is a paean to imaginative literature and the profound impact it has over the span of readers' lives, from childhood into older age.  Dirda himself concisely explains what he's doing in his preface:

"On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling is a book about the pleasures of reading, a celebration of plot and atmosphere, adventure and romance, and an invitation to go beyond the Sherlock Holmes stories to explore a remarkable body of writing."

My favorite part of On Conan Doyle is Dirda's recollection of his discovery of mystery fiction as a child.  Though I'm a generation younger than Dirda, this section of the book carried me back to my own adolescent encounters with genre literature in the 1970s.  The appeal of such graceful and evocative nostalgic prose as Dirda's surely is, like much of Conan Doyle's own writing, timeless.

I sometimes surprise people when I tell them my first experience with reading mystery tales took place at the age of eight during  a summer in the seventies spent in Mexico City with my parents and teenage sister.  At a Mexico City Sanborns department store my mother bought three Agatha Christie paperbacks (at eight pesos apiece I believe): And Then There Were None, Easy to Kill (Murder Is Easy) and Funerals Are Fatal (After the Funeral).

One of the three Christie paperbacks
from Sanborns, Mexico City

Curled up on the sofa in our apartment, by a big window overlooking a busy city street from high above, I read them all, along with some Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines (I particularly remember a story in one of those magazines called "The Machete Murderer" that was illustrated with cartoonish severed limbs--it rather amazes me that only a couple years earlier I was reading the adventures of Sally, Dick and Jane.  "Run, Sally, Run!" takes on a whole new meaning after one has read "The Machete Murderer").

I was immediately hooked by Agatha Christie, and I read her to this day.  Back then, I watched the 1974 film version of Murder on the Orient Express on the big screen, was saddened when Agatha Christie died in 1976 and read Curtain and Sleeping Murder, the "final cases" of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, when they came out in paperback in 1976 and 1977 respectively.

It was only in that latter year, 1977, that I discovered Sherlock Holmes, when at Christmas I received a slipcase set of all the Sherlock Homes novels and stories (I think it was published by Bantam).  They were rapidly and joyfully devoured!  Besides The Hound of the Baskervilles I especially remember reading for the first time, over that Christmas vacation, "The Five Orange Pips," "Silver Blaze," "The Six Napoleons," "The Red-Headed League," and, of course, "The Speckled Band."

Given these strong and to me very pleasant memories of youthful reading, I was fascinated by Dirda's account of his own experiences with fiction, which date back to the 1950s, the great era of pulp paperbacks and E.C. Comics.  Dirda's seminal childhood reading material was somewhat loftier than, say, Vault of Horror, but he still got from it that same delicious frisson of fright:

no one forgets the first encounter with the hound

"The Hound of the Baskervilles...was the first 'grown-up' book I ever read--and it changed my life...Romantic poets regularly sigh over their childhood memories of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.  But what are daisies and rainbows compared to...sleek and shiny paperbacks?...With a dollar clutched in my fist, I pedaled my red Roadmaster bike to Whalen's drugstor, where I quickly picked out two or three candy bars, a box of Cracker Jack, and a cold bottle of Orange Crush.  After my family had driven off in our new 1958 Ford, I dragged a blanket from my bed, spread it on the reclining chair next to the living room's brass floor lamp, carefully arranged my provisions near to hand, and crawled expectantly under the covers with my paperback of The Hound--just as the heavens began to boom with thunder and the rain to thump against the curtained windows....The Hound of the Baskervilles left its teeth marks in me and seriously aroused my then still slumbering passion for reading.  I was no longer the same ten-year-old when I reached its final pages."

Did it change your life?

Dirda goes on to discuss other amazing genre discoveries he made, after Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle showed him the way:

G. K Chesterton's clerical Father Brown ("each story chronicled a crime utterly beyond human ken")

Sax Rohmer's diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu (Dirda writes that he dare not go back and reread the Fu Manchu tales, "lest I be seriously appalled by my youthful taste")

Howard Haycraft's Boys' Book of Great Detective Stories (where Dirda "first read the stunning Thinking Machine classic, 'The Problem of Cell 13' ")

Ernest Bramah's blind detective, Max Carrados (see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/01/all-hail-max-12-cases-for-max-carrados.html 

"The highly scientific Dr. Thorndyke of R. Austin Freeman"

If you're a longtime fan of this amazingly rich period of mystery genre fiction, from the 1890s to World War One and beyond, to the "Golden Age" of the 1920s and 1930s, Dirda's book makes entrancing reading.

But there is more.  Throughout his book Dirda has scattered fascinating observations on the Holmes saga and on Conan Doyle as a man and a writer.  The splendid variety of the author's output, from his detective stories to his supernatural tales to his historical fiction and more, is done justice.  There's also a long section on the Baker Street Irregulars and Dirda's involvement with them that perhaps I'm just not a big enough Holmes fan (fanatic?) to sufficiently appreciate.  But I recommend the book wholeheartedly to all lovers of the great genre literature of yore.

Todd Downing: Murders in Mexico

Todd Downing was born in Atoka, Oklahoma in 1902.  Downing was a quarter Choctaw, the Popular Library informed readers in its paperback edition of Downing's best-known detective novel, The Cat Screams, and his paternal grandmother was a survivor of the Trail of Tears.

Atoka in 1900, two years before Todd Downing's birth

Downing attended the University of Oklahoma, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees.  He taught as an instructor at the university and during summers lived in Mexico and conducted guided tours there.

Todd Downing in the 1930s

Not only was Downing fascinated with Mexican history and culture, however; he also was a voracious reader of detective fiction.  In 1933, he wrote Murder on Tour, his first of a series of detective novels mostly set in Mexico.

Published in the United States by Putnam's, Murder on Tour enjoyed only modest success, but his second Mexican mystery novel, The Cat Screams, won him greater attention.  It was published in the United States by Doubleday, Doran's prestigious Crime Club, which would produce the rest of his novels in the United States as well.

The Crime Club was quite emphatic that it saw The Cat Screams as something of an event:

"Only in exceptional instances is the first book of  a new writer on the Crime Club list made a Crime Club Book of the Month.  Here is the exception.  The author, as a creator of atmosphere, suspense, and horror, is reminiscent of Mignon G. Eberhart.  His plot, though exotic, is plausible and logical and, stylistically, he is far superior to the average mystery writer."

The bookplate (designed by Juanita Gould in 1933) featured below is found in a copy of The Cat Screams.

Downing's next mystery, Vultures in the Sky, set on an eerie train traveling from Texas to Mexico City (think Murder on the Orient Express with less plot and more tension) was also a Crime Club selection.

The Crime Club noted how The Cat Screams had "won high praise from the critics" and declared that its author was "rapidly making his way to the foremost rank of American mystery fiction writing."

Downing went on to publish six more detective novels, including the excellent The Last Trumpet (1937) and Night Over Mexico (1938).  Most of these novels featured as investigator the intrepid U. S. Customs Agent Hugh Rennert.

Yet Downing's last novel appeared in 1941, before he had even reached the age of forty.  Downing, who had once seemed headed to a cosmopolitan literary life in New York City, instead retired not only from that life, but from teaching at the University of Oklahoma.

Downing returned to the small town of Atoka, where he taught high school and later the Choctaw language at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.  He resided in the old family home with his mother, staying on in the house after her death in the 1960s. 

While being treated at the local hospital in early 1974, he died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 71.

Todd Downing in the 1960s

Here is the rest of the series of Crime Club dust jackets for the Todd Downing detective novels.  I particularly like that bull on The Last Trumpet (about the death of a bullfighter) and the surrealistic quality of The Lazy Lawrence Murders.  But all are splendid.

Todd Downing also attained some popularity in Great Britain, where, for example, the esteemed crime fiction critic Torquemada proclaimed Downing "a born detective writer."

Overall, Downing probably is most important in the history of the crime fiction genre for being a notable American "local color" mystery writer of the 1930s.  An admirer of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, Downing attempted to put both atmosphere and narrative dash in his books, along with the Mexican "exoticism" for which he was most celebrated.

The Todd Downing Detective Novels:

Murder on Tour (1933)
The Cat Screams (1934)
Vultures in the Sky (1935)
Murder on the Tropic (1935)
The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (1936)
The Last Trumpet (1937)
Night Over Mexico (1938)
Death Under the Moonflower (1939)
The Lazy Lawrence Murders (1941)