Two Old Friends

I recently reread two books that I've thought about a lot in the last couple of years. The first was Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King. It is the seventh book in a series that takes up the life of Sherlock Holmes just at the beginning of the Great War, which is where Conan Doyle left him in the last stories about the eponymous detective who defined the genre. In King's world, Holmes is a retired beekeeper in 1915 when he is stumbled upon (literally) by a precocious fifteen year old orphan who he decides to train and mentor. Over the course of the next few books, their intricate relationship evolves slowly into a professional partnership and a romantic relationship via a series of highly engaging murders, thefts, and world travels. Did I forget to mention that the orphan is female? Oh well she is, and her name is Mary Russell, and she is half-English, half-American, tall, blond, and ridiculously intelligent and charming. I read the first book in the series when I was 15 and instantly connected with Mary, or Russell as she is affectionately called by Holmes. Like me she is always reading, has or will take an advanced degree in theology, and needs constant challenges to avoid boredom. Unlike me, she is female and married to a much older spouse, though my partner is an "older woman," living in a decidedly different age, and gets to daily engage in conversation and problem-solving with the best possible mind on the planet (fictional of course).

Laurie R. King's books can occasionally get bogged down in plot minutiae - the latest entry in the series was disastrously slow-paced and a bit pedantic, and a 'to be continued' which just plain annoyed the shit out of me. But King is easily the best character writer in the business. Her Holmes is better than Conan Doyle's, and Mary Russell may be one of the best multi-dimensional characters in modern literature, which probably annoys the hell of writers of 'serious' literature because I haven't read much recently that even comes close to a multi-dimensional character in any work from the last 20 years. Locked Rooms is one of my favorite books in the series because it is a psychological study of Mary Russell which reveals so many new and interesting things about a character that had been well fleshed out in the previous six books. The plot is slow and is resolved out of nowhere, except for an engaging section where Sherlock Holmes must recruit a new batch of irregulars while in San Francisco with Mary working on the death of her parents many years before. But the slow realization by Mary that she wasn't responsible for the death of her family is quite magnificently worked out, and the peripheral characters that help in this realization are really quite impressive: flappers and other excitable folks living in the high-rolling 1920's when Prohibition was failing so dramatically and comedically. King has a tendency to add prominent fictional and historical characters into her novels to spruce things up, and in Locked Rooms she writes of an incredible encounter between Sherlock Holmes (who I probably forgot to mention is portrayed as a real historical fellow who tends to get quite pissed off when his literary executor Conan Doyle goes around talking to ghosts) and Dashiell Hammet, the tubercular writer who is credited with having taken detective stories and made them 'hard-boiled,' the guy who came up with Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon. Hammet was real, and a fairly admirable fellow in real life, and his encounter with Holmes is absolutely priceless considering that the real Hammet spent some time as a workaday detective for the Pinkerton Agency. Locked Rooms is truly a magficent look at how to write characters with depth and put them in situations where their depth is called upon to drive a book. King does a great job with this in all the ten or more books of hers that I've read. She is truly gifted if a bit unknown outside the mystery 'genre.'

The other book that I reread was written by an incredibly well-known writer who hasn't been overlooked by anyone since writing Wonder Boys and the Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Michael Chabon, who took his own stab at Sherlock Holmes in The Final Solution, is one of the few prominent writers around that has actually berated the literate world for creating categories of literature - things like mystery, science-fiction, and romance. His claim, that writing is about entertainment, which I've explored elsewhere, and is either done well or poorly regardless of genre, is one that has helped me immensely in my own writing and reading. In Gentleman of the Road, which I believe I've written about before as well, and which Chabon had given the working title of Jews with Swords, Chabon writes a delightful action story whose intended audience would probably be a bunch of 12 year old boys with absurdly wonderful vocabularies. The story is even better the second time around, particularly as I was less daunted by his obscure verbiage, and I got a better look at the two characters. Chabon, like King, does a pretty great job at giving his characters depth. Amram and Zelikman, the Jews with Swords, are a bit less multi-dimensional than Mary Russell; however, for a two-hundred page action thriller, they are more like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench than Paris Hilton and Cameron Diaz. Writers like Chabon and King are great precisely because they come up great characters, which seems to be the overall theme of this post, that thrive despite awkward plotting or distracting vocabulary. It is not fashionable these days to talk about literature outside of culture, history, or other interpretive lenses, but I think the farther we get from the core elements of literature like characters, the more we miss the essence of what makes reading a uniquely human and enjoyable activity. I'm all about talking about literature as a humanizing activity, and the best literature is that which helps us connect with others by showing us what our humanity is and how it works. And if you can do that as a writer, then, at the very least, you'll be admired by me.