Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

“The Friends of the Friends” (originally titled “The Way It Came”) predates “The Turn of the Screw” by a year and yet it works as not only a preparation but also a key to understanding its successor. If “The Turn of the Screw” exemplifies the ghost story in the hands of Henry James, “The Friends of the Friends” offers a revealing insight into how the author thinks of ghosts. “The Turn of the Screw” has fascinated readers for over a century and the debate over whether the ghosts are literal manifestations or products of the mind of a disturbed child and a sexually repressed governess rages on. While “The Friends of the Friends” doesn’t offer a definitive answer to the question that has haunted literary scholars and fans of Henry James for decades, it does offer both the most relevant insight and the strongest clue in how to seek the answer. “The Friends of the Friends” is a far simpler narrative than “Turn of the Screw”. Neither the main narrator, a woman of society, and her two...

  Tucked away and somehow forgotten in Rudyard Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book is one of Kipling’s best short stories that does not involve Mowgli and is animal friends. And yet, in many ways, “The Undertakers” is quintessential Kipling. The bulk of the story involves a conversation between three residents of India’s Wainganga River (said in the Mowgli stories to be the home of Shere Khan)at the time the British were building a railway bridge over its waters, a golden jackal, a stork and a mugger crocodile. Their conversations will be familiar to readers of the best remembered Jungle Book stories, hierarchies within the animal kingdom (the jackal appreciates the crocodile so long as he leaves enough of his kill to scavenge on) to the relationship between man and nature and what the coming of the railway means to life in the Wainganga. All this with the common thread of order and rank and the space each player plays in the established hierarchy, be it human, animal or both. F...

  “The Final Problem” was, it is has become clearer with each passing decade since its publication in 1893, one of the first exposures of what fandom can do. It also was a testament to the attachment readers had formed not only for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes but to the universe he created around him, his friendship with Watson, his connections in London and Scotland Yard, and an accumulating narrative. Unlike more recent examples, Doyle didn’t have a precedence to test his readers (it could be argued he set the precedence with this story). He simply didn’t care enough what they thought. His mind was made up to kill his famous sleuth to, as he wrote to his mother, pursue other callings even at the expense of his bread and butter. Fandom, however, was then a relatively unknown phenomenon and the shocking death of the detective he had been writing about for six years set off a literary fury the likes of which had not be seen outside of scandalous writing. However ...

  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...