I Know You'll Catch that Villain

Detective stories are a literary genre which has long intrigued me.  When I was young, I loved the whole “Can I solve the mystery before the answer is revealed?” game.  I read every Encyclopedia Brown book in the local library.  I owned every Hardy Boys book.  When my aunt told me about Agatha Christie, I thought I died and went to Literary Heaven.  But, over the years, my enthusiasm waned as more and more I realized that for many of these Whodunit books, there was no real way to solve the mystery before the detective did so.  The solution hinged on some esoteric bit of trivia or some fact which was not really explained. 

All of which is merely prelude (note the clever use of “prelude” as if there is actually a deliberate design in the construction of these ruminations which really began as I sat down, stared at the book (or, as will be soon revealed, books, plural—a shocking plot twist which will surely delight the reader) to be reviewed and mused upon what might be said about the tome.  I thought about discussing cocaine, but realized that I don’t have all that much interesting to say about cocaine (well, other than that it is not nearly as addictive as you think it is (unless you actually know how addictive it is, in which case it is exactly as addictive as you think it is)).  But then (here comes the plot twist), I realized that the tome in question combined with another tome awaiting ruminations (out of a large stack—going two weeks without writing on this blog (ah, the start of the semester…) causes the stack of books to grow to heights threatening teetering (you know, I should chose books to read by their length—the higher the stack of books awaiting review, the longer the next book is)) might make for some interesting reflections).

The original book: Doyle, The Sign of Four

The partner book: Augustyn, Gotham by Gaslight

Both books set in the Victorian era.  Doyle’s book is the second Sherlock Holmes novel.  Structurally, it is interesting.  One can see what Doyle was thinking; he invented this really interesting character in A Study in Scarlet and decided, presumably because the first volume sold well, that the character should come back.  He followed the pattern of the first novel—detective solves mystery stapled together with anther mini-novel in which the culprit tells his life story.  (Incidentally, after these two novels, the next volume is short stories in which the secondary book is dropped and we just get Holmes solving mysteries.)  The quick review: it’s a good story, but there is no doubt Sherlock Holmes does much better in the short stories than in the early novels.

Augustyn’s book is a Batman story—non-canonical because in this story Bruce Wayne is living in the late 19^th century.  Jack the Ripper is running wild, and Batman stops him—in Gotham, not London.  The short review: It’s OK.  The idea is clever, but the story is weak.  The art is interesting, it all looks like the comic book equivalent of faded newspapers. 

So, what makes these two books comparable beside the temporal setting?  In neither case does the solution to the mystery really require all that much cleverness by the detective.  As for the Batman story, while the character was originally conceived to be a Detective (indeed, his first appearance was in a series entitled Detective Comics), it is not all that surprising to read a story in which his detective skills rely more on noticing an absurd coincident than on actual, you know, deduction.  For Holmes, however, the fact that a good part of the solution relies less on deduction and more on an improbable series of leaps of faith which just so happen to turn out correct is a bit more striking.  Now many Holmes stories are like this, it turns out.  They look like things the reader should figure out, but in reality, Holmes’ reasoning is less than airtight.  There is, in other words, a bit of a logical failing in many Holmes stories.  Doyle carries off the sleight of hand because Homes and Watson are so amusing, so you have to pay careful attention to notice that Holmes’ deductions are not always the only possible explanation.  But, truth be told, the BBC Sherlock series is having a harder time with this—the characters are good (very good, actually), but the plots are, on the whole, a bit painful—this is surely a real testament to Doyle’s artistry.

The comparison interests me—the thing that makes The Sign of Four much better than Gotham by Gaslight has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the mystery at the center of the tale.  In my appreciation of this genre, artistry trumps mystery now.  This is not a terribly shocking conclusion, to be sure.  But, it is a conclusion which would have amazed me many decades ago when I was eagerly reading Encyclopedia Brown or even later when I fell in love with Hercule Poirot.

Mysteries on TV used to interest me too.  While it was nowhere near my favorite when I was young, in retrospect, it isn’t hard to figure out the greatest mystery series of all time.  It even has a great theme song.