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:Why is Barnes and Noble performing well as a business while Borders has filed for bankruptcy? What is so different about how they are run? This is a question that many of us at Borders asked ourselves frequently and I think the answer is not a simple one. As someone who has given this a tremendous amount of thought and was Director of Merchandise Planning & Analysis for many years, I've outlined my assessment below…"
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Review of a book on the life of the most famous person to come from Loughbrickland. (Or, well, near Loughbrickland. Near-ish, anyway.)
March Books 13) De Jongen die Varkens Schopte / The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, by Tom Baker
Young F managed to find the Dutch translation of this children’s book by the glorious Tom Baker in our local library, and I’m ashamed to admit that I snatched it from his grasp and devoured the text as rapidly as I can manage a short book in a language I don’t use much. I’ve given it back to him now.
It’s very short – only 120 pages, and half of those are a series of evocative line drawings illustrating the text. The central character, Robert Caligari, is a horrible boy who enjoys causing fatal road accidents, and comes to a suitably disgusting end (this is not a spoiler as the first paragraph says so). It is told with a certain deep and dark humour, which makes the unpleasant protagonist just interesting enough to keep us engaged. The second half is not as good as the first, with a peculiar digression into mocking local radio presenters which doesn’t really work. But it is yet another fascinating insight into Baker’s very peculiar mind.
March Books 12) The Gemini Contagion, by Jason Arnopp
The new Eleventh Doctor audiobook, a story by Jason Arnopp read by Meera Syal, featuring Eleven and Amy dealing with some dubious nanotech-like entities (or “sentient micro-organisms” if you prefer). The usual good fun; Meera Syal’s Amy sounds a bit Ulster at first but settles down, and her portrayal of the lead supporting character, an alien scientist called Korn Palloa, is very good indeed. Definitely worth getting hold of.
Whoniversaries 14 March
14 March 1964: broadcast of “The Wall of Lies”, fourth episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. Marco Polo confiscates the Doctor’s spare Tardis key; Tegana continues to plot against him.
14 March 1970: broadcast of seventh episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The plague is cured, the Silurians return to hibernation, and the Brigadier blows up their caves.
14 March 1981: broadcast of third episode of Logopolis. Nyssa arrives at Logopolis; the Master has sabotaged the city and it collapses. But will he bring the rest of the Universe down with it?
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-13-2011
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"Now, of course, the fellows producing this model are physicists and they are not directly familiar with the socio-political factors that can strengthen or weaken a language, though they did attempt to factor some of these into their results. Their model nevertheless produced some interesting findings. They reckoned that there are three factors that allow two languages to coexist indefinitely in an area. Firstly, there needs to be a significant number of speakers of each language there. Secondly, the languages need to be somewhat similar. And thirdly, there needs to be a large bloc of people who can speak both languages. Their model is apparently fairly good at retrospectively predicting the historical data on the relative strength of Spanish and Galician in northwest Spain. The last requirement is being presented as the most surprising one, but I was struck by their model's suggestion that the two co-existing languages need to be somewhat similar."
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"It is always great to see a brutal dictator like Colonel Gaddafi being overthrown by his people, even if he is a rather colourful character who brings a certain excitement to the normally bland world of international relations. More than that, though, were the treats that could become available to researchers if the regime fell and its archives became accessible."
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"I think the arguments above are mostly pretty solid and convincing, that a no-fly zone would have all sorts of negative consequences and would be in many ways a Bad Thing. What I do not find convincing is that these consequences would be a worse thing than for Ghaddafi to succeed in crushing the rebellion…"
"So, much as I am extremely wary of anything done by western militaries, and especially American, in the end I must come down in favour of imposing a NFZ; possibly alongside other actions, such as jamming Libyan armed forces' communications, and arming the rebels. That is not to deny the potential negative consequences, or that western governments are hypocritical and self-serving in their actions and need to be watched like hawks; but the likely consequences of the alternative are too ghastly to contemplate."
Bunch of Big Finish audios
Almost up to March’s releases, so I shall note the Big Finish audios I’ve listened to in the last few weeks, in continuity order (almost exactly the reverse of the order that I listened to them in).
The Destroyers, starring Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom fighting the Daleks, was Terry Nation’s attempt to market a Dalek show to the US. I thought it was basically pretty good, though sorry that the Sara Kingdom character wasn’t as tough as she later became in The Daleks’ Master Plan and also sorry that it ends on a cliff-hanger which presumably will never now be resolved. A lot of later Dalek stories have done this same sort of thing but it’s interesting to see what the first attempt might have sounded like.
The Prison in Space was a Second Doctor script, rightly dropped from Season 6. The author was comedy writer Dick Sharples, and it concerns a future Earth where women have taken over. (Like the Two Ronnies’ The Worm that Turned, but not as good, if you can imagine that.) Zoe is brainwashed into thinking that women are superior, until – and I am not making this up – Jamie spanks her. (As he threatened on their first meeting.) The eponymous prison is called the OSCE, here meaning the Outer Space Correctional Establishment though I am more familiar with a different interpretation. It would not have been a tragedy if this had stayed in Fraser Hines’ attic.
I listened to the first three Graceless stories featuring the tracers-in-human-form Zara and Abby (formerly Amy but renamed to avoid confusion with Amy Pond) from the Fifth Doctor Key2Time mini-season, but was not hugely impressed. The middle one, set in a doomed 1912 village, features a good guest turn from David Warner.
The Feast of Axos brings the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn into contact with an Earth spaceship mounting a salvage expedition to Axos, four decades after the Third Doctor left it in a time loop. It’s nice to hear Evelyn alive and well again, and there were some interesting reflections on the Doctor fixing his mistakes, and an amusing extrapolation of how the British space programme of the Who stories of the 1970s might have developed to the 2010s. However I wasn’t really satisfied with the geopolitics and stereotyped treacherous foreigner johnnies.
Prisoner of the Sun is another story with the Doctor as jailbird, this time Eight in a peculiar cell beneath the surface of a star with a succession of android servants who all sound exactly like his erstwhile companion Lucie Miller. It didn’t really make a lot of sense but the cast seemed to know what they were doing, with the notable exception of former child actor and singer Anthony Costa, who seems not to have read the acting instruction manual.
Which brings me to the penultimate of the current run of Eighth Doctor stories, called simply Lucie Miller. I really did enjoy this, and hope that the climax will pay off – the season’s regular and semi-regular characters, Sheridan Smith as Lucie, Graeme Garden as the Meddling Monk, Carole Ann Ford as Susan, and even the ones I felt were weaker, Jake McGann as Alex and Niky Wardley as Tamsin, seem to have picked up a gear. With so many lead characters, the story doesn’t have a lot of Doctor in it but sometimes that is OK.
Big Finish must be absolutely delighted with themselves for picking up Sheridan Smith back in 2007. Her Lucie has been a brilliant adjunct to McGann’s Doctor – as indeed was India Fisher’s Charley, in a somewhat different way. I was amused to see that the Independent ran a big profile of Smith on Friday (I was away from home and my hotel delivered it free to my room). I was even more amused to see that the last paragraph reports “her ambition to be the next assistant in Doctor Who”. She has actually been there and done that. Though I’d love to see her on the TV show too.
Gibbon Chapter XLVI: The Persians, the Avars and Heraclius
This is one of the best chapters we have had for ages – I found myself marking almost every page with some point of interest. Gibbon describes the fatal interaction of the Byzantine and Persian empires in the early seventh century – close personal bonds between the respective emperors, which none the less deteriorate into dreadful combat and slaughter, with each empire’s armies penetrating deep into the other’s territory, to the point that both capitals were seriously threatened at different stages. We also have the Avars coming down the other side of the Black Sea to hit the Byzantines from the northwest. Gibbon seems really energised by it, and of course we end in the 620s, when events which would prove far more significant in terms of world history were unfolding a little to the south.
Belfast’s Malone Road in 1927
Fascinated, via Slugger, to find this photograph taken in Belfast in 1927.
As pointed out by Mark McGregor in comments here, it’s the corner of the Malone Road and Lennoxvale – the stone pillar and big red brick house behind are still there, and there is still a post box on the same site, though alas not the same one.
March Books 11) The Doctor Who Annual 1981
But I can forgive its brevity and the dubious artwork (Romana is mostly brunette, except in the comic strip where she is as shown here), because the stories are actually rather good – for once, we have humour, characterisation, even an in-joke about The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy being a better show than A Midsummer Night’s Dream
March Books 10) The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides / Θουκυδίδης
This is a classic work of history, about the war between Athens and Sparta in the 430s and 420s BC. I’m not terribly interested in the war itself, or the geographical details (though I would have liked it if my Penguin edition had put useful maps in the text closer to the descriptions of events taking place on obscure islands); I hoped to find out from reading it the extent to which Thucydides’ reputation as the first proper historian is justifiable.
What I found was rather different to what I expected. This is not an academic history as we know such things, but a commentary on contemporary international relations, propagandistically crafted for a particular domestic interpretation in Athens, rather like most of the books you can find in shops on the War on Terror or the Cold War. Thucydides’ use of rhetoric, his visibly partial citation of evidence and his dramatic reconstruction of conversations at which he was not present are all familiar tactics from today’s literature. He would have been very much in his intellectual element as a crafter of drama-documentaries. I rate it as fascinating artistically – particularly the complex character of Alcibiades – but barely history.
I blame Thucydides directly for the useless mess that is most academic research into international relations. In Thucydides’ account (the Melian dialogue is the most obviously fictional passage, but there are many others) decisions about war and peace (and, later in the text, internal revolution) are made on the basis of perfect or near-perfect knowledge of the international and local situation, after mature reflection and rational debate of the alternatives. It’s a lovely fairy-tale and it’s not surprising that many people choose to believe it; I had not appreciated, however, that it went back so far. Irrational decisions are only made by the deranged, who are normally anonymous (eg the people of Corcyra in 3.84, or the Syracusans who mistreat the Athenian captives in 7.86-87).
I know I’m not being fair; Thucydides is at the very beginning of recorded history, and it is amazing that a book written 2430 years ago is still lucidly intelligible (and interrogable) on its own terms. Pericles’ funeral oration (2.34-46), in particular, whether by Pericles or Thucydides, is a brilliantly eloquent appeal to the emotions of those who have lost their loved ones in the service of their country, and is far ahead of anything else I have read on that subject in terms of literary quality. But I think his inability, for whatever reason, to examine the cultural context of his time, and to be honest about his own political situation, weakens the truth of the book.
Apart from the general issue of the book’s ideological purpose, there are a lot of interesting points of detail here. As a lapsed astronomer, my eye was caught by the three eclipses mentioned, especially the first, where we are told that “the sun took on the appearance of a crescent and some of the stars became visible before it returned to its normal shape” (1.28). I was a bit surprised about the stars becoming visible even though this was not a total eclipse. A little research, however, got me to Mercury being close to maximum elongation 25 degrees from the Sun, and Venus approaching superior conjunction and 15 degrees from the sun, and I suppose both would have been visible if the Sun was sufficiently dimmed.
In 5.16 we read of accusations that “Pleistoanax… and his brother Aristocles had bribed the priestess at Delphi to give oracles to the Spartan delegations, commanding them to bring home from abroad the seed of the demigod son of Zeus”. The what??? of who??? I checked the original: Διὸς υἱοῦ ἡμιθέου τὸ σπέρμα – what on earth can it be? Edited to add: Thanks to and for providing me with the answer in comments. I was imagining stolen vials filled with supposedly semi-divine semen, but of course Pleistoanax actually just meant himself and his brother.
Snerk in 4.84 about Brasidas, who “was not at all a bad speaker, for a Spartan.”
Anyway, very glad to have finally ploughed through this.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man
Whoniversaries 13 March
13 March 1965: broadcast of “Invasion”, fifth episode of the story we now call The Web Planet (not to be confused with The Invasion, the 1969 Second Doctor story). The Doctor controls a Zarbi with his ring, escapes with Vicki and joins forces with Barbara and the Menoptra.
13 March 1971: broadcast of first episode of The Claws of Axos. Furge thangering muck witchellers rock throbblin’ this time o’ day… Ur bin oughta gone put thickery blarmdasted zones about, gordangun, diddenum? Havver froggin’ law onnum, shouldnum? Eh? Eh? Arn I?
13 March 2009: broadcast of From Raxacoricofallapatorius With Love (SJA), a mini-episode for Comic Relief.
Bookmooch
My Bookmooch account seems to have been deleted. Anyone else having trouble with it?
March Books 9) International Law and the Question of Western Sahara
This is a collection of essays, mainly by international lawyers, published by the International Platform of Jurists for East Timor (IPJET) and edited by Karin Arts and Pedro Pinto Leite. Most are about the subject of the book’s title, though there are two comparative pieces about East Timor (not surprising given who published it) and one on the scandalous 1969 process in West Papua. (It would also have been interesting to see something on Namibia in the 1971-90 period, as another case where a neighbouring state occupied a territory that should have been decolonised, also in defiance of a ruling by the International Court of Justice.)
The basic message of the book is very simple: the Western Sahara is illegally occupied by Morocco. A slew of international statements (the 1975 ICJ ruling, the 2002 Opinion of UN Legal Counsel Hans Corell, and repeated UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions) make that absolutely clear, and yet the international community remains tolerant of this massive breach of international law – a friend pointed out to me the other day that the Western Sahara is the largest single area of disputed territory on the planet (leaving aside the peculiar situation of Antarctica).
The authors do differ among each other, on the precise role and responsibilities of the international actors – the UN, Spain, and the European Union – which has disgracefully colluded with the theft of Western Sahara’s natural resources (particularly its rich fishing grounds). But the basic message is consistent: Morocco and its collaborators are behaving illegally, and not a single country in the world recognises Morocco’s annexation of the Western Sahara.
Declaration of interest: I’m working with the Frente Polisario to assist them in the liberation of their country, and I’m proud to do so.
March Books 8) The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
It’s actually only about five years since I last read this collection of Holmes stories. I was struck then by the several incidents of freaks of nature, and also the succession of fiery Latin American ladies, and by the way in which Holmes offers absolution rather than justice; this last point struck me even more forcibly on this reading, as Holmes has moved from being the problem-solver who mocks the establishment of the earliest stories to being a powerful moral force on his own merits. The other important difference is that while the early stories had him as a cutting-edge user of the latest technology, these last stories, set twenty years or more before they were written, now have him as a figure of Victorian nostalgia from a time when the world seemed a more certain place. It’s a sad ending.
Whoniversaries 12 March
12 March 1966: broadcast of “The Plague”, second episode of the story we now call The Ark. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo are on trial; but the Doctor is able to find a cure for the plague, and all watch as the Earth is destroyed.
12 March 1977: broadcast of third episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Leela watches as Weng Chiang kidnaps a girl and drains her of her vital essence, and flees to the sewers.
12 March 1999: broadcast of The Curse of Fatal Death, Steven Moffat’s first Doctor Who script, starring Jonathan Price as the Master, Julia Sawalha as Emma, and Rowan Atkinson (and also Richard E. Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley) as the Doctor.
12 March 2008: broadcast of From Out Of The Rain (Torchwood), the one with the creepy cinema/
March Books 7) His Last Bow, by Arthur Conan Doyle
I finished this several days ago, but have been on the road all week. It struck me that a lot of the stories in this collection were a bit longer, allowing Doyle to work through his ideas in a slightly more thorough way without resorting to the padding which fills up space in three of the four novels. This collection includes “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, which so memorably features an Underground train, and (in my edition) “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”, in which the said box, containing two gruesome objects packed in salt, is sent by post to London from, of all places, Belfast (where I am at this very moment boarding a plane). Unfortunately the title story, in which Holmes penetrates a German spy-ring by going into deep cover as an Irish revolutionary, is a tad silly, but the rest are all good.
Whoniversaries 11 March
Two significant events on 11 March 1967…
11 March 1945: birth of Graeme Harper, director of three Old Who stories (including a large part of Warriors’ Gate, for which he was not credited), ten New Who stories (counting Time Crash) and three Sarah Jane Adventures stories.
11 March 1952: birth of Douglas Adams, writer of The Pirate Planet (1978) and Shada (unbroadcast but would have been 1980), co-author of City of Death (1979) and script editor for Season 17 (1979-80); best known, of course, for other things.
11 March 1963: birth of Alex Kingston, who plays Professor River Song in New Who (2008, 2010).
11 March 1967: birth of John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack Harkness in New Who and Torchwood.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
Also 11 March 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Macra Terror, which is the first to use the new opening sequence and therefore the first time that the current Doctor’s face appears on screen before the story starts. The Tardis lands in a colony where people are behaving very strangely and are not on any account allowed to talk about the giant crabs.
11 March 1972: broadcast of third episode of The Sea Devils. The Master summons the Sea Devils from the sea; the Doctor repels them from the beach but they attack the prison.
11 March 1978: broadcast of sixth episode of The Invasion of Time, ending Season 15. The Doctor destroys the Sontarans with a D-Mat gun – hooray! Leela stays on Gallifrey with Andred – Boo!
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-10-2011
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Ursula Le guin on swearing.
Guess where I am?
Whoniversaries 10 March
10 March 1956: birth of Lesley Dunlop, who played Norna (with her very ’80s haircut) in Frontios (1984) and Susan Q in The Happiness Patrol (1988).
10 March 1975: birth of Yee Jee Tso, who played Chang Lee in Doctor Who: The TV Movie (1996)
ii) broadcast anniversary
10 March 1973: broadcast of third episode of Frontier in Space. The Master appears in the guise of a Commissioner from Sirius IV; meanwhile the Doctor is imprisoned on the Moon.
iii) date specified in canon
10 March 1942: setting of Sub-species, Eleventh Doctor/Amy/Rory comic strip in Doctor Who Adventures #202 (2010).
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-9-2011
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My map of LinkedIn contacts. I love this sort of thing.
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The history of science fiction, depicted as a whale. Really.
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The maps of Europe.
The ten years meme
This is a fun meme, and I’m doing it anyway even though I have only once myself filled in a UK census form and am unlikely ever to do so again.
March 2011 – living with
March 2001 – living with
March 1991 – living at 49 Chesterton Road in Cambridge with five fellow students, doing my M Phil in medieval astrology, going out with
March 1981 – living in the house I grew up in in South Belfast with my parents and siblings. That was the year that they stopped the Northern Ireland census early, after the IRA shot and killed a census-taker. The hunger strikes were getting under way and my French teacher took a lot of time off because she kept getting arrested. (She’s now the Sinn Fein MEP for Northern Ireland.)
March 1971 – as in 1981, though my sister had not been born yet (she arrived in October). Apparently one of my first words was ‘allyagga’ for ‘helicopter’, because of the visible and audible military surveillance from above (our area was relatively quiet but we were not far from places that weren’t).
I’m going back to Belfast later today, doing stuff related to the coming elections and staying till Friday. Possibly available for socialising tomorrow evening, if anyone is interested.
Whoniversaries 9 March
9 March 1951: birth of Chris Clough, who directed Terror of the Vervoids (1986), The Ultimate Foe (1986), Delta and the Bannermen (1987), Dragonfire (1987), The Happiness Patrol (1988) and Silver Nemesis (1988).
9 March 1997: death of Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, writer of The Daleks (1963-64), The Keys of Marinus (1964), The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), The Chase (1965), Mission to the Unknown (1965), The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66, with Dennis Spooner who always claimed to have done most of the work), Planet of the Daleks (1973), Death to the Daleks (1974), Genesis of the Daleks (1975), The Android Invasion (1976) and Destiny of the Daleks (1979), as well as the Peter Cushing films Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966). Not to mention Blake’s 7.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
9 March 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of The Web of Fear. The Doctor’s friends rescue him from the Intelligence, but he is annoyed; he had reversed the circuits to drain its mind instead.
9 March 1974: broadcast of third episode of Death to the Daleks. The Doctor and Bellal penetrate the City of the Exxilons.
9 March 1982: broadcast of second episode of Earthshock. The Doctor tracks the androids’ signal to a space freighter, goes there by Tardis and is arrested.
9 March 1983: broadcast of fourth episode of Enlightenment. The Doctor and Turlough win the race, and are awarded Enlightenment.
9 March 1984: broadcast of second episode of The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor and Peri have been rescued by Sharaz Jek; they escape him and get mixed up with Stotz’s smugglers.
9 March 1985: broadcast of first episode of Timelash. The Doctor and Peri land on Karfel, and the Doctor is forced to go back in time to 1885 to retrieve an amulet.
This is the sixth of the seven dates in the year on which six episodes of Old Who were broadcast.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-8-2011
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"Have you ever seen a piece of paper clean a bathroom? I'd love to see that."
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The Little Match Girl
Whoniversaries 8 March
8 March 1969: broadcast of first episode of The Space Pirates. Space Pirates are destroying navigational beacons; the Tardis lands on one and the pirates blow it up.
8 March 1975: broadcast of first episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Time Lords send the Doctor, Harry and Sarah to Skaro, where Davros is experimenting.
8 March 1982: broadcast of first episode of Earthshock. Paleontologists disappear and the Tardis appears in an underground cave system, attacked by androids under Cyber-control.
8 March 1983: broadcast of third episode of Enlightenment. Turlough is rescued by the Buccaneer, whose captain invites the others over for a party.
8 March 1984: broadcast of first episode of The Caves of Androzani. The Doctor and Peri get poisoned, captured and (apparently) executed.
8 March 2002: webcast of “The Child, Part 1”, fifth episode of Death Comes to Time. I’m just going to note the anniversaries to this in future, the plot is too peculiar to summarise.
ii) date specified in canon
8 March 1702: setting of Big Finish audio Phatasmagoria (1999)
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-7-2011
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Wow, I wish I'd been in those seminars.
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The famous libel case brought over an online review: "On March 3, 2011, the Tribunal de Grand Instance de Paris issued its decision in the Criminal Libel Case brought against me based on a complaint by Dr Karine Calvo-Goller. It would appear that the Court ruled in our favor on all issues."
Whoniversaries 7 March
7 March 1930: birth of Brian Hayles, author of The Celestial Toymaker (1966), The Smugglers (1966), The Ice Warriors (1967), The Seeds of Death (1969), The Curse of Peladon (1972) and The Monster of Peladon (1974) as well as of the novelisations of The Ice Warriors and The Curse of Peladon.
7 March 1934: birth of of Gordon Flemyng, director of Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
7 March 1964: broadcast of “Five Hundred Eyes”, third episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. Ping-Cho tells the story of Ala-eddin; Barbara is trapped in the cave of Five Hundred Eyes.
7 March 1970: broadcast of sixth episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The Doctor finds a cure for the Silurians’ plague, but they capture him.
7 March 1981: broadcast of second episode of Logopolis. The Doctor and Adric travel to Logopolis on the instructions of the Watcher, not realising that they have brought Tegan with them and that the Master has followed them.
March Books 6) The Fall of the House of Usher and other Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe
I was completely unfamiliar with Poe’s prose before launching into this collection of his complete stories. I must say that I wish I had bought a ‘Best Of Poe’ rather than a Complete Poe. The sad truth is that a lot of the stories are pretty rubbish. His philosophising about death and aesthetics is dull, his humourous pieces range from self-indulgent to racist (the Dutch being particular targets) and the early romantic horror pieces are suffused with the icky self-loathing that you might get from an author who married his thirteen-year-old cousin and was then habitually unfaithful to her.
It’s not all bad. Most of the really famous stories, the ones I had previously heard of, were indeed worth reading – Arthur Gordon Pym (I smiled when I saw the letters familiar to me from Ethiopia), the Dupin stories (though Sherlock rightly observes that he himself is better), the Fall of the House of Usher, the Cask of Amontillado, and basically everything that Zelazny references in his A Dark Travelling. Two stories I had not heard of that I also enjoyed were the end-of-the-world tale of Eiros and Charmion, and the doppelganger yarn of William Wilson. But Poe wrote an awful lot of rubbish as well, and you can skip it in good conscience.
March Books 5) Matrix, by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker
I’ve been fortunate with my Doctor Who books so far this month; Matrix is a Seventh Doctor / Ace Past Doctors Adventure, set not long after Survival, which couldn’t really have been done as a New Adventure because by the time the series had matured to the stage where a story like this could have fitted, Ace’s continuity had moved on. It has a remarkable section featuring an alternate Ian Chester and Barbara Wright in whose world the UK has been annexed by the USA, and also manages to breathe fresh life into the Sixth Doctor’s trial and the Cheetah Planet, neither of which is normally my favourite bit of continuity, with Jack the Ripper and the Wandering Jew thrown in. Perry and Tucker keep it remarkably well disciplined. I couldn’t recommend it unless you are familiar both with the Trial of a Time Lord season and Survival, but if you are, it is well worth reading.
March Books 4) The Valley of Fear, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Having just read the best of the Holmes novels, I turn now to what is definitely the worst. There is one really good twist, as Holmes works out what really happened in the shooting incident (though I must say I’d have expected a bit more evidence of it at the scene of the crime). But we take quite a long time getting there, and several other bits of the story have been done better before; Holmes and Watson are off-stage for quite a lot of the book; and we never quite sort out the Moriarty connection either.
It’s clear that Doyle drew on two real-life crime stories for the back-story to The Valley of Fear – interesting that both of them are in fact stories of Irish political violence (and Moriarty is of course a Kerry name). Ireland is not very visible in the Sherlock Holmes canon, but this is an exception. (Both Doyle’s parents were Irish Catholics though he grew up in Edinburgh.) The story of McMurdo/Edwards/Douglas and the Scowrers is almost identical to that of Armagh man James McParland penetrating the Molly Maguires in the 1870s; and the mysterious murder on a ship off the coast of Africa at the end of the story is drawn from the fate of James Carey, who informed on the Invincibles responsible for the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882. It is instructive that Doyle wasn’t really able to make this rather factually based story work terribly well – he is much better when he sticks to the products of his own imagination.