“THE WEASEL” WENSLEY—A LESTRADE COLLEAGUE?
ONE OF THE ATTRACTIONS of Stephen Browning’s On the Trail of Sherlock Holmes is its encouraging me to perform added sleuthing. For example, Browning’s “Walk 7: East End” introduced me … Continue reading
WRITER BASES HIS FICTIONAL DETECTIVE ON REAL PERSON PART 2
YESTERDAY IN PART 1, we learned about Charles Dickens and his Metropolitan Police pal Charles Frederik Field prowling London’s seedier districts. Today, Dickens honors his pal with two fictional personages. … Continue reading
WRITER BASES HIS FICTIONAL DETECTIVE ON REAL PERSON PART 1
GEE. IS THIS GOING TO BE another recounting of Arthur Conan Doyle, medical-school mentor Joseph Bell, and Sherlock Holmes? Or Edgar Allan Poe and whoever gave him the idea for … Continue reading
ST PAUL’S LORE PART 1
I WAS STROLLING with the world’s first Consulting Detective and his able chronicler past St. Paul’s Cathedral; this, encouraged by Stephen Browning’s On the Trail of Sherlock Holmes. Browning describes … Continue reading
EXISTENTIALISM, NOIR, AND THE BIG SLEEP
I AM SAVORING MY WAY through The Annotated Big Sleep. See “As Hard-boiled as a Shamus’s Simile” and “On Chandler’s Greatness” and “Sleeping with Virginia Woolf, Dreaming About a Naked … Continue reading
AN AFFABLE AND PORTLY HOLMES PART 2
ALL OF THIS STARTED with my viewing Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet, 1933 (when only a year before he had portrayed Watson). Today in Part 2, we find … Continue reading