The Art of Detection<\/a> from the library as soon as it appeared, and read it first of that group of library books. I was frustrated and annoyed, perhaps disappointed, and I enjoyed it a fair amount anyway.\nThe main thing that was annoying—unbelievably annoying, I mean, curse at the book whilst reading annoying—was that the interpolated Sherlock Holmes novella was taken as authentic Arthur Conan Doyle. The whole thing about Ms. King’s Sherlock Holmes books is that they are not about Mr. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but about Ms. King’s Sherlock Holmes. I’ve kvetched at length about this, and I won’t go on further here, and let’s be clear: I like her Sherlock Holmes better than the original. But it’s different<\/I>.\n
The plot (such as it is) of Art<\/I> involves a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, a professional in antiques, ephemera and nostalgia, coming across a typescript and realizing, just about instantly, that it is echt<\/I> Holmes, despite the obvious differences in style, content, characterization, and tone. He then tracks down the provenance, shaky but plausible, and prepares for the storm of publicity and money. The problem is that the story (which is a lot of fun, actually, and involves Sherlock Holmes (unfortunately without Mary Russell) investigating a murder in San Francisco in 1924, with cross-dressing, prostitution, homosexuality and all that good stuff) is a lot like Ms. King’s work, and not anything even remotely like Mr. Conan Doyle’s—like the novels, like I’ve been saying. And for the novels, that’s fine, that’s even great, the conceit that Mr. Conan Doyle had egregiously misrepresented Mr. Holmes, and that the real<\/I> Sherlock Holmes was the one we are just now getting to know. But when you bring that back to the world of people who have the original stories and novels pretty near memorized, and posit that they will claim this new character, tone, and content as just like the original<\/I>, well, what that does is it just ruins it for everybody<\/I>.\n
And, by the way, this is connected with the problem of writers who introduce into their stories a fictional poem, or story, or book, or essay, that is simply the Most Wonderful Thing Ever, that completely changes the life of everybody who even glances at it, and then has to actually include some substantial part of the thing, where the reader has already been warned that the thing is wonderful. We don’t think it’s all that<\/I> wonderful, our lives aren’t changed by it, and then the whole plot falls apart. If you can manage it without showing us the thing in question—Inkheart does this, as does the Deadly Joke skit, and I’m sure I’ve seen it well-handled in another place or two I can’t recall at the moment, perhaps because the manuscript is burned at the end?—it can work very well indeed. Or you can make the art in question visual or auditory (or gustatory, it occurs to me), and describe it using vague superlatives but concentrate entirely on the reaction. But if our lives would be changed by reading a letter, and we get to read the letter, and our lives aren’t changed, then we will want our money back.\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gentle Readers will have noticed that the Mary Russell books by Laurie R. King are amongst my favorite rereads. I probably reread at least one a month, which is rather a lot, really. I have also enjoyed her Kate Martinelli…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17885,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10354\/revisions\/17885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}