Incoherent Memoirs

An example of Dr Watson's incredible diagnosis skill from 'The Solitary Cyclist' in which he finds: "..a terrible cut upon his head. He was insensible, but alive. A glance at his wound told me that it had not penetrated the bone." Oh well that's alright then! Watson's own records of his exploits don't always give the best impression as to his medical prowess. Here he comes upon a man with a terrible wound and just leaves him, rushing off with Holmes to protect the damsel in distress, one of the canon's many Violets (I forget which). Gallant to the lady - rather heartless to the young man! I'm not a medical man myself and my observations on Watson's skills are limited mostly to how many times he uses brandy to rouse stricken victims. I must therefore glance at the Annotated whenever something medically odd pops up - and, alas, Watson is usually found wanting. His biggest clangers (plural) must be in 'The Engineer's Thumb' , wher...

Now that I've finished the Penguin Modern Classics omnibus 'Quantum of Solace ' I can now say I have read every James Bond story (by Ian Fleming). In some ways the last story proper 'The Living Daylights' is a case of saving the best for last. But it's not just one of the best-written Bond tales - it's one of the most realistic in the way it compresses the danger and excitement of Bond's job role into a few short, tense moments surrounded by hour after hour of boredom. Arriving in Berlin to act as sniper-cover for an escaping agent, Bond is told this agent's window for escape is between 6-7pm on one of three consecutive nights. As per sod's law he eventually makes his attempt on the third night, making for a combination of long boring stretches of daytime, tense excitement for an hour or two, then more tedium: "The next day, and the next night watch, were duplicates of the first [...] the rest was a killing of time and a tightening of the ...

In Part 1 we saw some examples of HPL using musical and 'anti-musical' description to evoke weird moods. In one of his most famous short stories music isn't merely a throwaway detail but is very much first and foremost. This is of course 'The Music of Erich Zann' . * The title character is introduced to us as "an old German viol-player [...] who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra" . Living upstairs from the narrator, it is the music he plays in his room that first piques the narrator's curiosity. But what kind of music does he actually play? HPL, for the most part, doesn't tell us (there is a specific exemption to this right at the end). Remembering his own lack of interest in music (see Part 1 ) it's interesting that he adopts the get out clause of having his narrator admit to us that he knows nothing about music: "Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had hea...

Dr Watson was never much one for blowing his own trumpet, but more biographical data would have been welcome. No doubt he thought we wouldn't be interested (how wrong he was!). There is the physical description he (inadvertently?) allows via the description of a 'suspect' in the break-in at Appledore Towers ( 'Charles Augustus Milverton '). But I wonder if another description didn't slip past his conscious inner editor: "He was a fine creature, this man of the old English soil - simple, straight, and gentle, with his great, earnest blue eyes and broad, comely face. His love for his wife and his trust in her shone in his features." ('The Dancing Men') The description given here by Watson is actually that of Holmes' client, Hilton Cubitt.. but it is well known that like attracts like. Is it fanciful to consider that in his appreciation of this other man's qualities Watson was also describing... himself? (the mention of Cubbitt's love ...

As we have seen, and as is pretty well known, HPL's writing is full of "the unnamable" - descriptors that attempt to describe the indescribable. Most of the time this is because the thing being described is so weird or demonic that his narrators struggle (supposedly) to find the right words for it. But there is a much more apparently down to Earth linguistic struggle that goes on in his fiction - music. In 'The Hound' the narrator tells us of he and his (literal) partner in crime's artistic diversions. The scene is an odd one. Surrounded in their secret museum by unusual, mystical and profane objects pilfered from graves and the like, they also indulge in playing their own musical compositions. But this is not music as most of his original readership would understand it: "There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness....