The Buffista Book Club: the Harry Potter iteration
This thread is a focused discussion group. Please see the first post below for the current topic and upcoming book discussions. While natter will inevitably happen, we encourage you to treat this like a virtual book club and try to keep your posts in that spirit.
By consensus, this thread is reopened specifically to discuss Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will be closed again once that discussion has run its course.
***SPOILER ALERT***
- **Spoilers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows lie here. Read at your own risk***
Imagine the difference between that audience, who most likely felt most sympathy for the guy who was fleeced by the League, and the modern audience, who actually likes (or enjoys watching) Hannibal Lechter, and doesn't feel one way or the other about many of his victims.
That's so true. I almost felt contempt for the red-headed guy for being such a gullible mark, and some level of admiration for John Clay for devising and executing such a cunning scheme.
I might be a little bit twisted.
...and the theory that when all other possibilities have been discarded, the one remaining, however improbable, must be correct.
I always thought this was Doyle/Holmes. But that is really interesting about Poe, he's not really thought of as a mystery writer. Just out of curiousity, where is that factoid from?
The birth of the detective story is usually dated to 1841, the year the first of Edgar Allan Poe's three Auguste Dupin tales was published. In Poe's tales of ratiocination, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter," Dupin exhibited the combination of observation and reasoning ability that became the staple of the mystery novel, and Conan Doyle said that these tales were one inspiration in creating Sherlock Holmes.
The first "whodunit" novel is considered to be
L'Affaire Lerouge
(1866) by Emile Gaboriau. His detective, Lecoq, is fashioned after the popular memoirs of the real-life French detective Vidocq.
Holmes was aware of his fictional counterparts:
"Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."
"Lecoq was a miserable bungler. He had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify and unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a textbook for detectives to teach them what to avoid."
There is a whodunit subplot in Charles Dickens'
Bleak House
(1853), and Inspector Bucket in
Bleak House
is probably the first police detective to investigate a crime in fiction. Wilkie Collins'
The Woman in White
(1860) is generally consided to be the first significant mystery novel, and it brings together a number of aspects that were to become staples in the British mystery novel, including a country house, bungling local police, a reconstruction of the crime and a final plot twist.
Conan Doyle borrowed from all of these, but Sherlock Holmes was the first to really capture the public's attention.
Imagine the difference between that audience, who most likely felt most sympathy for the guy who was fleeced by the League
Do you really think so? I thought he was represented as venal (Holmes questioning him regarding not having to pay his employee full wages, etc.) and stupid (not recognizing there was a reason for it); and I assumed readers of any age would recognize that. I sometimes wonder if part of the attraction of Holmes is that he can be so dismissive, almost (sometimes more than almost) rude, about unattractive foibles, thus letting the reader be rude as well.
Do you really think so? I thought he was represented as venal ... and stupid...
I don't think readers would have necessarily *liked* him, but as a more or less upstanding British citizen, he would have elicited their sympathy, I think. In that "but no one should *do* those sorts of things to us!" way.
I still need to read The Woman in White.
It's pretty common in the stories that both the client and the bad guy are both motivated by greed and arrogance, at least in the case of the male clients. Holmes seems to generally believe that you can't cheat an honest man.
I'm kind of shocked that people don't know that Poe invented the modern mystery. And horror/SF, for that matter. People, give props to Poe!
Dupin also has a roommate who is the narrator -- and I think that isn't to provide a more sympathetic face so much as because the mechanics of the mystery demand it. If the genius detective narrates, you have a very boring story (as Doyle eventually demonstrated). The narrator is there to be confused, to provide misdirection, to demand explanations, and to be properly awed by the result. Watson tends to be a doofus in movie/tv adaptations because in those media, you don't need a narrator. So he's transformed into comic relief to give him something to do.
Oh, The Adventure of the Three Garridebs is one of the last published stories -- 1924. The mystery itself is almost identical to the Red-Headed League, actually.
Imagine the difference between that audience, who most likely felt most sympathy for the guy who was fleeced by the League, and the modern audience, who actually likes (or enjoys watching) Hannibal Lechter, and doesn't feel one way or the other about many of his victims.
I'm skeptical that there is that great a difference. People weren't fascinated by Jack the Ripper simply because they felt sympathy for the whores he butchered.
I'm skeptical that there is that great a difference. People weren't fascinated by Jack the Ripper simply because they felt sympathy for the whores he butchered.
Well, no, but that was real, that was actually happening. I think the reality of it was part of the fascination there, as well as the butchery.
Yeah, but fictional or real, people are always interested in a nice dose of id. I just don't think that identifying with villains is unique to the modern era. It helps to be charming, of course; "Richard III" is what comes to my mind.
Watson tends to be a doofus in movie/tv adaptations because in those media, you don't need a narrator
Which always annoys me. The man had enough brains to be a doctor, after all, and he was no coward. He just has the bad luck to be an average guy paired up with a genius.
Just out of curiousity, where is that factoid from?
The presentation I had to do in my 19th Century Literature class last year.
I would bet that the Dupin stories are up on the web somewhere. And I keep meaning to read Bleak House, but it requires a fairly substantial investment.
