Kerry,
Re your comments below:
> Funny, but I've never equated "cozy" with
> "traditional" (that was you Jim,
> I think.) Maybe I'm not adequately acquainted
with
> their contemporaries,
> but I felt Doyle very different from Christie.
I
> always thought Holmes
> appeal lay more with a popular fascination
with
> science, more like the
> later procedurals (though Holmes was not a cop,
of
> course) and the current
> forensics formulas. Poirot applied his "little
grey
> cells" too, of course,
> but more toward the behaviour of the upper
classes
> than the tracks they
> left about.
The only time Holmes ever really used scietific detection was
in the first story, A STUDY IN SCARLET, when he a Watson are
introduced just as Holmes has discovered a formula for
detecting whether or not a bloodstain in human or animal. And
that experiment never had anything to do with the main
plot.
Rather than being a practical scientist, Holmes was the
embodiment of the idea that any problem could be solved by
pure reason, and is, on that account, the precursor of
characters like Futrelle's S.F.X. Van Dusen, (aka "The
Thinking Machine") or Christie's Hercule Poirot with his
"little grey cells." Most of the cases involved Holmes with
the priveleged class, and gave the impression of crime being
an unnatural interruption of the natural order of
things.
Agatha Christie certainly seemed to think that she was
following in the Holmes tradition. As if to point up her debt
to Conan Doyle, she gave Poirot a less intelligent partner to
narrate the stories (captain Hastings), and, in one entry in
the series, even introduces Poirot's more brilliant, but
sedentary, older brother.
For genuine descriptions of forensic investigation the go-to
guy was R. Austin Freeman, whose medico-legal sleuth, Dr.
John Thorndyke, was, in some ways, the precursor of today's
Dr. Scarpetta and C.S.I. But even these had a "cozy,"
traditional feel in which there was a formality in the use of
language, and a sense of an ordered world in which crime was
an anomaly, as opposed to the hard-boiled world in which
crime and injustice are rampant and order must be
imposed.
The "Big Three" of the Cozy, Christie, Sayers, and Marsh,
perhaps EXAGGERATED the traditions of Holmes, but it seems
quite clear to me that they, and the other "traditionalists"
of the Golden Age were following that tradition.
> Now Lestrade, he was hardboiled, and damned bad
at
> it.
Maybe, but he and Gregson were the best of a bad lot.
JIM DOHERTY
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