truepenny | R-E-S-P-E-C-T (for genre fiction)

Random thoughts about Georgette Heyer and Arthur Conan Doyle and "serious" fiction. General spoileriness for Conan Doyle's work (should there be anyone reading this who still can be spoiled for Sherlock Holmes), plus definite spoilers for Stephen King's Misery ('cause I need a quote). (And, yes, Dorothy Sayers is probably going to make a cameo. As per usual.) Might as well stick 'em here.

This comes off a conversation over on

papersky's journal about ranking Heyer books, and she articulated something I'd noticed myself and not really thought about, namely that Heyer's worst books are her "serious" historicals (An Infamous Army, Royal Escape, etc.) and her attempt at "serious" contemporary fiction, Penhallow. This cross-connected for me with the way Arthur Conan Doyle's work shakes down, a matter which I have given a good deal of thought to.

As You Know, Bob, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't want to be remembered as the author of Sherlock Holmes stories. He wanted to write "serious" historical novels and be appreciated as a "serious" author. (I know the sarcastic quote marks are getting a little dense, but I have a point to make about that later on.) This ambition is why three of his four Sherlock Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and The Valley of Fear) are disfigured by long historical flashbacks in which neither Holmes nor Watson features, and which, I discovered as a child, you can drop out of the story and be none the worse off. I don't think I've ever made it through the laborious historical drudgery in The Valley of Fear, and I know I only skimmed the Mormon bits in A Study in Scarlet. The stories don't need 'em; it's just Conan Doyle's determination to make people read his "serious" work weighing down the novels like concrete shoes. The Hound of the Baskervilles is mercifully free from such irruptions, and I don't think it's any coincidence that Hound is the most popular of the Holmes novels.

Stephen King has a bit about this in Misery. His protagonist, Paul Sheldon, famed author of bodice-ripper Gothics, has spent the last two years slaving over a "serious" novel of which he is remarkably proud. At a late point in the novel, after Paul has been forced violently to reassess his own writing, he thinks:

So what was the truth? The truth, should you insist, was that the increasing dismissal of his work in the critical press as that of a "popular writer" (which was, as he understood it, one step--a small one--above a "hack") had hurt him quite badly. It didn't jibe with his self-image as a Serious Writer who was only churning out these shitty romances in order to subsidize his (flourish of trumpets, please!) REAL WORK! Had he hated Misery? Had he, really? ... Perhaps all he had hated was the fact that her face on the dust jackets had overshadowed his own in his author photographs, not allowing the critics to see that they were dealing with a young Mailer or Cheever here--that they were dealing with a heavyweight here. As a result, hadn't his "serious fiction" become steadily more self-conscious, a sort of scream?

Clearly this is not free from autobiography, but Misery's plot (or part of its plot) also deliberately evokes Sherlock Holmes and the Reichenbach. King may or may not have intended a commentary on Conan Doyle, but Paul Sheldon's thoughts here do echo Conan Doyle's increasing impatience with his brainchild.

Impatience which shows through in the stories.

My father started reading me Sherlock Holmes stories when I was, at a guess, five. I have loved them ever since; I celebrated passing my Master's exam by buying myself, used, the Annotated Sherlock Holmes by W. S. Baring-Gould. But there's still no denying that the oeuvre, as a whole, is an exemplar of shoddy craftsmanship by a genius. They're brilliant stories, yes, but I find it insanely frustrating to think of how much better they could have been if Conan Doyle could have been bothered to put his back into it, if he could have been brought to recognize that these were his serious work, and that they deserved the love and lavish care he gave to books that now no one reads.

This is where Dorothy Sayers came in, because Dorothy Sayers made that mental leap. One of the ongoing arguments in Gaudy Night is about finding and embracing one's "proper job." Harriet's (and Sayers's behind her) is detective novels, and that job, and improving in that job, is a matter treated without condescension, false modesty, or defensiveness. Thus, Gaudy Night, which both embraces and transcends its genre. It is a detective story, yes, but it is also a serious novel (and a "serious" one). There's nothing self-conscious about it, as there is about Penhallow and Conan Doyle's meticulous, tedious historical interludes. Sprezzetura again.

Conan Doyle was blind to his own brilliance because he bought into cultural assumptions about what "brilliance" looks like. Those of us who love genre fiction are still fighting against those same assumptions (Ursula K. Le Guin has some eloquent and bitter essays on the subject in The Language of the Night). And this mini-essay is suddenly developing an unexpected and not entirely welcome Moral, so I think I will abandon it here.

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WORKS CITED
King, Stephen. Misery. New York: Viking, 1987. p. 263.