Free A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel Page B

for ennui. Balance is, perhaps, the main theme of every detective story. Revenge (a form of balance). Cause and consequence (another). Justice (another).
    P. D. James: “What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.”
TUESDAY
    Back home. The cat who has decided to take up residence here seems offended that I have left her that long, and walks away when I approach her. I leave the door of the library open to tempt her to come in.
    Long ago I discovered a remarkable book by a certain Samuel Rosenberg,
Naked Is the Best Disguise
. Rosenberg worked as a literary consultant for major motion-picture studios, which hired him when they were sued for plagiarism. His job was “to analyze the embattled scripts, andwhen the resemblances between ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ were too close for comfort, I tried to get my employers off the litigious hook by searching for common literary ancestors of both properties.” Using the Holmes canon as his starting-point, Rosenberg manages to link Nietzsche, Melville, Mary Shelley, Boccaccio, Racine, Flaubert and many others to the Sherlockian saga. Rosenberg sees the character of Thaddeus Sholto, in
The Sign of Four
, as a parody or portrait of Oscar Wilde, including the Habsburg lip. (In 1889, Wilde and Conan Doyle met at a dinner given by the American representative of
Lippincott’s Magazine
. As a result, both men became contributors: Wilde with
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and Conan Doyle with Sholto’s adventure.)
    Coincidences:
Conan Doyle’s description of Thaddeus Sholto: “Nature had given him a pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness, he gave the impression of youth.”
Hesketh Pearson’s description of Wilde: He “had thick, purple-tinged sensual lips, uneven discoloured teeth. … it was noticed that when talking he frequently put a bent finger over his mouth which showed that he was conscious of his unattractive teeth.”
    Says Chesterton: “We have to consider not only what is improbable, but what is probable; and especially the coincidences that are overwhelmingly probable.”
THURSDAY
    Spent yesterday rearranging the detective fiction. We’ve put it up in the guest bedroom, now to be known as the Murder Room.
    The Sign of Four:
The phrase as it appears in the story is “the sign of
the
four,” but only someone deaf to cadence would use it in a title, as Conan Doyle did in
Lippincott’s Magazine
in February 1890. Someone or something told him to drop the second “the” when the story was published in book form.
    List of my favourite detective novels:
Nicholas Blake,
The Beast Must Die
Reginald Hill,
Bones & Silence
Ruth Rendell,
A Judgement in Stone
Agatha Christie,
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
John Dickson Carr,
The Black Spectacles
Marco Denevi,
Rosaura a las diez
Margaret Millar,
How Like an Angel
Fruttero & Lucentini:
La Donna della domenica
James Cain,
Mildred Pierce
Philip Kerr, A
Philosophical Investigation
Dorothy L. Sayers,
Gaudy Night
Leo Perutz,
The Master of the Day of Judgment
John Franklin Bardin,
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly
Ellery Queen,
The Tragedy of X
Anthony Berkeley,
Trial and Error
Sebastien Japrisot,
Compartiment tueurs
James McClure,
The Steam Pig
Raymond Postgate,
Verdict of Twelve
Georges Simenon,
Les fiançailles de Monsieur Hire
Patrick Quentin,
My Son the Murderer
Chester Himes,
Cotton Comes to Harlem
FRIDAY
    We hear this morning that our postwoman’s husband has committed suicide. It suddenly seems obscene to be entertained by brutal deaths in fiction.
SUNDAY
    At the end of Chapter 6, Holmes quotes (in German) a line from Goethe
(Faust
, I):
“Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen.”
(“We are accustomed that men will mock what they don’t understand.”) The detective story elicits the possibility of mockery but