Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Among the finest of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box was cut and mutilated almost as much as the two murder victims whose severed ears were discovered in the titular box.   Published in January of 1893 on both sides of the Atlantic the story, however, was omitted from the works collected in the first British edition The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes , published later that year. Inexplicably, it was included in the US edition of the collection published in February of 1894 but omitted in the immediately following printings. Why? Indeed, this is arguably the grisliest of the Sherlock Holmes stories and may have caused a bit of a stir upon its publication in both editions of The Strand and Harper’s Weekly . There is no evidence of this, however, and fearful may have taken out their scissors preemptively. It’s a pity in either case as the story is first rate Sherlock. There may have been a change of heart or even a change of time and the s...

Rudyard Kipling remains amongst the most elusive writers who have escaped easy labeling. One is tempted, more than 90 years after his death, to level charges of “colonial apologist”, “jingoist” and “culturally obtuse” and while it is foolish to claim that such inferences are impossible to draw from Kipling’s work it is at least as foolish to claim that such adjectives present a complete and incontestable portrait of the man. In truth, Kipling’s sentiments in areas ranging from the military to the cultures of the many lands he set foot in are enigmatic and even contradictory. If nothing else, he demonstrated a fascination with the customs of India and South Africa, albeit through the lenses of a Western Imperialist. Nowhere is the conflicting spectrum of Kipling’s work more evident that in his military poetry, the best of it published in the collection Barrack-Room Ballads in 1892 (though some of the included poems were written in 1890). The collection owes its existence to his...

  Sherlock Holmes afficionados, myself included, cannot help but become hooked to the Sherlockian Game. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created such a tantalizing tease of clues throughout the canon, often contradictory ones, that it has become something of a frustrating fascination to chronicle the canon.             The Red-Headed League , the first short story featuring Holmes and Watson, can be said to be the starting point as it offers a conflicting timeline within the narrative. Fans, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, have come up with their own adjustments to this and other points (most notably Wisteria Lodge which is dated as having taken place between the death of Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem and Watson finding out his friend was alive and well and in hiding).     But now I am on to a new game which has received far less attention, at most just a passing note at the discrepancy in an annotated edition. The sto...

  Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was one of the earliest time travel novels and yet Twain writes with a polish that has apparently long since disappeared in the genre. A decade later H.G. Wells’s Time Machine would use time travel as a cautionary tale and popularized many of the tropes familiar to science-fiction and fantasy lovers today. Indeed, time travel novels have seldom strayed far from warnings of dystopia. In this regard , A Connecticut Yankee started the mold by telling of things to come but, writing before the genre developed its own expectations, Twain had some wiggle room. The Past Middle Ages paints an unflattering parable to then contemporary America and Britain. Twain swims through the as yet unestablished laws and conventions of time travel fiction with remarkable ease for a pioneer in the genre. Arguably, the embryo of time travel fiction was Dickens’s Christmas Carol and, though the future looked bleak enough to warn Scrooge of h...

The White Mountains and the surrounding town of Lincoln are that rare wonderland of nature far enough from any major city to offer a real feel of escape and yet close enough for us New England city folk to call our own. For many of us raised here family trips to Loon Mountain, the Lost River or the Polar Caves are a rite of passage. For me they continued for many years and now my wife and I have made them a fall tradition. After a year of missing out on our traditions, the places we love and my wife being cheated out of her birthday we decided to take a drive up to Franconia Notch in the spring. There is a healing force to the great outdoors that not even the sorrow of a pandemic can endure. The drive north to New Hampshire is an adventure on its own. Watching the buildings and factories gradually give way to timber and, ultimately, mountains creates a threshold into the world of nature. Undoubtedly, it is a transformation best appreciated in the fall, the season of transformat...

  Actually, the Super Mario Bros . game marked its 35 th anniversary last fall (it was released in Japan in September of 1985 and a month or so after in North America). Mario the lovable mustachioed plumber who became a hero for the denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom and to millions of children around the world, dates back to 1981 when he appeared as the antagonist for the arcade game Donkey Kong (which was then ported to Atari, Commodore 64 and Nintendo among other systems). Long before Bowser and, later, his conniving counterpart Wario, the titular dimwitted ape became the first primary rival for the red overalls sporting “Jump Man”, as he was called. But, Donkey Kong’s nemesis was soon showing signs of larger aspirations. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Donkey Kong, did not initially see much of a future for the character and seemed to have little use for him aside from brief appearances in the Donkey Kong spin-offs, a Nintendo version of Pinball and assorted sports titles s...