Mycroft Holmes and the mark of genius

Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on November 2, 2016.

“Original discoveries cannot be made casually, not by anyone at any time or anywhere,” the great biologist Edward O. Wilson writes in Letters to a Young Scientist. “The frontier of scientific knowledge, often referred to as the cutting edge, is reached with maps drawn by earlier scientists…Somewhere in these vast unexplored regions you should settle.” This seems like pretty good career advice for scientists and artists alike. But then Wilson makes a striking observation:

But, you may well ask, isn’t the cutting edge a place only for geniuses? No, fortunately. Work accomplished on the frontier defines genius, not just getting there. In fact, both accomplishments along the frontier and the final eureka moment are achieved more by entrepreneurship and hard work than by native intelligence. This is so much the case that in most fields most of the time, extreme brightness may be a detriment. It has occurred to me, after meeting so many successful researchers in so many disciplines, that the ideal scientist is smart only to an intermediate degree: bright enough to see what can be done but not so bright as to become bored doing it.

At first glance, this may not seem all that different from Martin A. Schwartz’s thoughts on the importance of stupidity: “Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice.” In fact, they’re two separate observations—although they turn out to be related in one important respect. Schwartz is talking about “absolute stupidity,” or our collective ignorance in the face of the unknown, and he takes pains to distinguish it from the “relative stupidity” that differentiates students in the same college classes. And while Wilson isn’t talking about relative stupidity here, exactly, he’s certainly discussing relative intelligence, or the idea that the best scientists might be just a little bit less bright than their smartest peers in school. As he goes on to observe:    

What, then, of certified geniuses whose IQs exceed 140, and are as high as 180 or more? Aren’t they the ones who produce the new groundbreaking ideas? I’m sure some do very well in science, but let me suggest that perhaps, instead, many of the IQ-brightest join societies like Mensa and work as auditors and tax consultants. Why should the rule of optimum medium brightness hold? (And I admit this perception of mine is only speculative.) One reason could be that IQ geniuses have it too easy in their early training. They don’t have to sweat the science courses they take in college. They find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data-gathering and analysis. They choose not to take the hard roads to the frontier, over which the rest of us, the lesser intellectual toilers, must travel.

In other words, the real geniuses are reluctant to take on the voluntary stupidity that science demands, and they’re more likely to find sources of satisfaction that don’t require them to constantly confront their own ignorance. This is a vast generalization, of course, but it seems to square with experience. I’ve met a number of geniuses, and what many of them have in common is a highly pragmatic determination to make life as pleasant for themselves as possible. Any other decision, in fact, would call their genius into doubt. If you can rely unthinkingly on your natural intelligence to succeed in a socially acceptable profession, or to minimize the amount of work you have to do at all, you don’t have to be a genius to see that this is a pretty good deal. The fact that Marilyn vos Savant—who allegedly had the highest tested intelligence ever recorded—became a columnist for Parade might be taken as a knock against her genius, but really, it’s the most convincing proof of it that I can imagine. The world’s smartest person should be more than happy to take a cushy gig at a Sunday supplement magazine. Most of the very bright endure their share of miseries during childhood, and their reward, rather than more misery, might as well be an adult life that provides intellectual stimulation in emotional safety. This is why I’ve always felt that Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter older brother, knew exactly how his genius ought to be used. As Sherlock notes drily in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”: “Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honor nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.” 

Yet it’s Sherlock, who was forced to leave the house to find answers to his problems, whom we love more. (He’s also been held up as an exemplar of the perfect scientist.) Mycroft is hampered by both his physical laziness and his mental quickness: when a minister comes to him with a complicated problem involving “the Navy, India, Canada, and the bimetallic question,” Mycroft can provide the answer “offhand,” which doesn’t give him much of an incentive to ever leave his office or the Diogenes Club. As Holmes puts it in “The Greek Interpreter”:

You wonder…why it is that Mycroft does not use his powers for detective work. He is incapable of it…I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solution, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.

Mycroft wasn’t wrong, either. He seems to have lived a very comfortable life. But it’s revealing that Conan Doyle gave the real adventures to the brother with the slightly less scintillating intelligence. In art, just as in science, technical facility can prevent certain artists from making real discoveries. The ones who have to work at it are more likely to find something real. But we can also raise a glass to Mycroft, Marilyn, and the geniuses who are smart enough not to make it too hard on themselves.

The manufacturers of worlds

For the last few days, as part of a deliberate break from writing, I’ve been browsing contentedly through my favorite book, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould. It was meant to be a comforting read that was as far removed from work as possible, but science fiction, unsurprisingly, can’t seem to let me go. Yesterday, I was looking over The Sign of the Four when I noticed a line that I’ve read countless times without really taking note of it. As Holmes leaves Baker Street to pursue a line of the investigation, he says to Watson, who has remained behind: “Let me recommend this book—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. I shall be back in an hour.” Toward the end of the novel, speaking of the difficulty in predicting what any given human being will do, Holmes elaborates:

Winwood Reade is good upon the subject…He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.

This is remarkably like what Isaac Asimov writes of psychohistory, a sociological version of the ideal gas law that can predict the future based on the existence of a huge number—perhaps in the trillions—of individual lives. And it seemed worth checking to see if this passage could cast any light on the origins of the imaginary science that I’ve spent so much time exploring.

It pains me to say that Holmes himself probably wasn’t a direct influence on the Foundation series. There was a considerable overlap between Sherlockians and science fiction writers—prominent members of both camps included Anthony Boucher, Poul Anderson, Fletcher Pratt, and Manly Wade Wellman—but John W. Campbell wasn’t among them, and Asimov was drafted only reluctantly into the Baker Street Irregulars. (He writes in I. Asimov: “Conan Doyle was a slapdash and sloppy writer…I am not really a Holmes enthusiast.”) For insight, we have to go back to Winwood Reade himself, a British historian, explorer, and correspondent of Charles Darwin whose discussion of the statistical predictability of the human race appears, interestingly, in an argument against the efficacy of prayer. Here’s the full passage from The Martyrdom of Man, which was published in 1872:

All phenomena, physical and moral, are subject to laws as invariable as those which regulate the rising and setting of the sun. It is in reality as foolish to pray for rain or a fair wind as it would be to pray that the sun should set in the middle of the day. It is as foolish to pray for the healing of a disease or for daily bread as it is to pray for rain or a fair wind. It is as foolish to pray for a pure heart or for mental repose as it is to pray for help in sickness or misfortune. All the events which occur upon the earth result from Law: even those actions which are entirely dependent on the caprices of the memory, or the impulse of the passions, are shown by statistics to be, when taken in the gross, entirely independent of the human will. As a single atom, man is an enigma; as a whole, he is a mathematical problem. As an individual, he is a free agent; as a species, the offspring of necessity.

At the end of the book, Reade takes his own principles to their logical conclusion, becoming, in effect, an early writer of science fiction. Its closing section, “Intellect,” sketches out a universal history that anticipates Toynbee, but Reade goes further: “When we understand the laws which regulate the complex phenomena of life, we shall be able to predict the future as we are already able to predict comets and eclipses and planetary movements.” He describes three inventions that he believes will lead to an era of global prosperity:

The first is the discovery of a motive force which will take the place of steam, with its cumbrous fuel of oil or coal; secondly, the invention of aerial locomotion which will transport labour at a trifling cost of money and of time to any part of the planet, and which, by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish national distinctions; and thirdly, the manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory, similar to that which is now performed within the bodies of the animals and plants.

And after rhapsodizing over the utopian civilization that will result—in which “poetry and the fine arts will take that place in the heart which religion now holds”—he turns his thoughts to the stars:

And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man then will be perfect; he will then be a creator; he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a god.

Reade was inevitably seen as an atheist, and although he didn’t like the label, he inclined many readers in that direction, as he did in one of the most interesting episodes in this book’s afterlife. The scene is World War II, which tested the idea of psychohistory to its limit, and the speaker is the author of the memoir The Enchanted Places:

The war was on. I was in Italy. From time to time [my father] used to send me parcels of books to read. In one of them were two in the Thinker’s Library series: Renan’s The Life of Jesus and Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. I started with The Life of Jesus and found it quite interesting; I turned to The Martyrdom and found it enthralling…There was no God. God had not created Man in His own image. It was the other way round: Man had created God. And Man was all there was. But it was enough. It was the answer, and it was both totally convincing and totally satisfying. It convinced and satisfied me as I lay in my tent somewhere on the narrow strip of sand that divides Lake Comacchio from the Adriatic; and it has convinced and satisfied me ever since.

I wrote at once to my father to tell him so and he at once wrote back. And it was then that I learned for the first time that these were his beliefs, too, and that he had always hoped that one day I would come to share them…So he had sent me The Martyrdom. But even then he had wanted to play absolutely fair, and so he had added The Life of Jesus. And then he had been content to leave the verdict to me. Well, he said, the church had done its best. It had had twenty-four years’ start—and it had failed.

The author adds: “If I had to compile a list of books that have influenced my life, high on the list would undoubtedly be Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. And it would probably be equally high on my father’s list too.” The father in question was A.A. Milne. And the son was named Christopher Robin.

Quote of the Day

It is one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze”

My ten great books #1: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes

Note: Four years ago, I published a series of posts here about my ten favorite works of fiction. Since then, the list has evolved, as all such rankings do, and this seems like a good time to revisit it. (I’m not including any science fiction, which I hope to cover in a separate feature later this year.) I’ll be treating them in the order of their original publication, but as it happens, we’ll be starting today with the book I love the most.

I first encountered the best book in the world in the library of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. At the time, I was seventeen, and of course I was already in love with Sherlock Holmes—I’d even been exposed to the subculture of obsessive Holmes fans through the wonderful anthology A Baker Street Dozen, which I still think is the most inviting introduction to the subject for the general reader. What I found in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould was something much more: an entire universe of speculation, whimsy, and longing grown from the rich soil of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. As the narrator relates in Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”:

Two years before I had discovered…a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.

The rules of the game were simple. Holmes, Watson, Mycroft, and the other vivid figures who populated their slice of London had been real men and women; Conan Doyle had been Watson’s literary agent; and the stories were glimpses into a larger narrative that could be reconstructed with enough patience and ingenuity. Given the scraps of information that they provided, you could figure out which building had been the model for 221B Baker Street; piece together the details of Watson’s military record, the location of his war wound, and the identities of his three, or perhaps four, wives; determine the species of the speckled band and whether “The Adventure of the Three Students” took place at Oxford or Cambridge; and pin down, with considerable accuracy, when and where each of the other adventures took place, even as Watson, or Conan Doyle, tried to divert you with “mistakes” that were deliberate misleads or red herrings.

The result of Baring-Gould’s work, which collects nearly a century’s worth of speculation into one enormous, handsomely illustrated volume, is the first book I’d save if I could own only one, and for years, it’s been living on my desk, both as a source of inspiration and as a convenient laptop stand. (Leslie Klinger’s more recent edition is lovely as well, but Baring-Gould will always be closest to my heart.) And it’s taken me a long time to realize why I care about this book so much, aside from the obvious pleasure it affords. It represents a vision of the world, and of reading, that I find immensely seductive. Each story, and often each sentence, opens onto countless others, and if Conan Doyle didn’t mean for his work to be subjected to this level of scrutiny, that’s even better: it allows us to imagine that we aren’t following a trail of clues that the author meant for us to find, but discovering something that was invisibly there all along. “Never has so much been written by so many for so few,” as the great Sherlockian Christopher Morley once said, and it’s true. All these studies are spectacularly useless, and they’re divorced from any real academic or practical value—aside, of course, from the immense benefit of allowing us to spend more time in this world and in the company of two of the most appealing characters in fiction. It’s a way for the story, and the act of reading, to go on forever, and in the end, it transforms us. In the role of a literary detective, or a tireless reader, you become Holmes, or at least a Watson to more capable investigators, thanks to the beauty of the stories themselves. What more can we ask from reading?

“Knowledge of Politics—Feeble”

In A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes adventure, there’s a celebrated passage in which Watson tries to figure out his mystifying roommate. At this point in their relationship, he doesn’t even know what Holmes does for a living, and he’s bewildered by the gaps in his new friend’s knowledge, such as his ignorance of the Copernican model of the solar system. When Watson informs him that the earth goes around the sun, Holmes says: “Now that I do know it, I shall do my best to forget it.” He tells Watson that the human brain is like “a little empty attic,” and that it’s a mistake to assume that the room has elastic walls, concluding: “If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” In fact, it’s clear that he’s gently pulling Watson’s leg: Holmes certainly shows plenty of practical astronomical knowledge in stories like “The Musgrave Ritual,” and he later refers casually to making “allowance for the personal equation, as the astronomers put it.” At the time, Watson wasn’t in on the joke, and he took it all at face value when he made his famous list of Holmes’s limitations. Knowledge of literature, philosophy, and astronomy was estimated as “nil,” while botany was “variable,” geology was “practical, but limited,” chemistry was “profound,” and anatomy—in an expression that I’ve always loved—was “accurate, but unsystematic.”

But the evaluation that has probably inspired the most commentary is “Knowledge of Politics—Feeble.” Ever since, commentators have striven mightily to reconcile this with their conception of Holmes, which usually means forcing him into the image of their own politics. In Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction?, T.S. Blakeney observes that Holmes takes no interest, in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” in “the news of a revolution, of a possible war, and of an impending change of government,” and he concludes:

It is hard to believe that Holmes, who had so close a grip on realities, could ever have taken much interest in the pettiness of party politics, nor could so strong an individualist have anything but contempt for the equalitarian ideals of much modern sociological theory.

S.C. Roberts, in “The Personality of Sherlock Holmes,” objected to the latter point, arguing that Holmes’s speech in “The Naval Treaty” on English boarding schools—“Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future”—is an expression of Victorian liberalism at its finest. Roberts writes:

It is perfectly true that the clash of political opinions and of political parties does not seem to have aroused great interest in Holmes’s mind. But, fundamentally, there can be no doubt that Holmes believed in democracy and progress.

In reality, Holmes’s politics are far from a mystery. As the descendant of “country squires,” he rarely displayed anything less than a High Tory respect for the rights of landed gentry, and he remained loyal to the end to Queen Victoria, the “certain gracious lady in whose interests he had once been fortunate enough to carry out a small commission.” He was obviously an individualist in his personal habits, in the venerable tradition of British eccentrics, which doesn’t mean that his political views—as some have contended—were essentially libertarian. Holmes had a very low regard for the freedom of action of the average human being, and with good reason. The entire series was predicated on the notion that men and women are totally predictable, moving within their established courses so reliably that a trained detective can see into the past and forecast the future. As someone once noted, Holmes’s deductions are based on a chain of perfectly logical inferences that would have been spoiled by a single mistake on the part of the murderer. Holmes didn’t particularly want the world to change, because it was the familiar canvas on which he practiced his art. (His brother Mycroft, after all, was the British government.) The only individuals who break out of the pattern are criminals, and even then, it’s a temporary disruption. You could say that the entire mystery genre is inherently conservative: it’s all about the restoration of order, and in the case of Holmes, it means the order of a world, in Vincent Starrett’s words, “where it is always 1895.”

I love Sherlock Holmes, and in a large part, it’s the nostalgia for that era—especially by those who never had to live with it or its consequences—that makes the stories so appealing. But it’s worth remembering what life was really like at the end of the nineteenth century for those who weren’t as fortunate. (Arthur Conan Doyle identified, incidentally, as a Liberal Unionist, a forgotten political party that was so muddled in its views that it inspired a joke in The Importance of Being Earnest: “What are your politics?” “Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.” And there’s no question that Conan Doyle believed wholeheartedly in the British Empire and all it represented.) Over the last few months, there have been times when I’ve thought approvingly of what Whitfield J. Bell says in “Holmes and History”:

Holmes’s knowledge of politics was anything but weak or partial. Of the hurly-burly of the machines, the petty trade for office and advantage, it is perhaps true that Holmes knew little. But of politics on the highest level, in the grand manner, particularly international politics, no one was better informed.

I can barely stand to look at a newspaper these days, so it’s tempting to take a page from Holmes and ignore “the petty trade for office and advantage.” And I often do. But deep down, it implies an acceptance of the way things are now. And it seems a little feeble.

Mycroft Holmes and the mark of genius

“Original discoveries cannot be made casually, not by anyone at any time or anywhere,” the great biologist Edward O. Wilson writes in Letters to a Young Scientist. “The frontier of scientific knowledge, often referred to as the cutting edge, is reached with maps drawn by earlier scientists…Somewhere in these vast unexplored regions you should settle.” This seems like pretty good career advice for scientists and artists alike. But then Wilson makes a striking observation:

But, you may well ask, isn’t the cutting edge a place only for geniuses? No, fortunately. Work accomplished on the frontier defines genius, not just getting there. In fact, both accomplishments along the frontier and the final eureka moment are achieved more by entrepreneurship and hard work than by native intelligence. This is so much the case that in most fields most of the time, extreme brightness may be a detriment. It has occurred to me, after meeting so many successful researchers in so many disciplines, that the ideal scientist is smart only to an intermediate degree: bright enough to see what can be done but not so bright as to become bored doing it.

At first glance, this may not seem all that different from Martin A. Schwartz’s thoughts on the importance of stupidity, which I quoted here last week. In fact, they’re two separate observations—although they turn out to be related in one important respect. Schwartz is talking about “absolute stupidity,” or our collective ignorance in the face of the unknown, and he takes pains to distinguish it from the “relative stupidity” that differentiates students in the same college classes. And while Wilson isn’t talking about relative stupidity here, exactly, he’s certainly discussing relative intelligence, or the idea that the best scientists might be just a little bit less bright than their smartest peers in school. As he goes on to observe:    

What, then, of certified geniuses whose IQs exceed 140, and are as high as 180 or more? Aren’t they the ones who produce the new groundbreaking ideas? I’m sure some do very well in science, but let me suggest that perhaps, instead, many of the IQ-brightest join societies like Mensa and work as auditors and tax consultants. Why should the rule of optimum medium brightness hold? (And I admit this perception of mine is only speculative.) One reason could be that IQ geniuses have it too easy in their early training. They don’t have to sweat the science courses they take in college. They find little reward in the necessarily tedious chores of data-gathering and analysis. They choose not to take the hard roads to the frontier, over which the rest of us, the lesser intellectual toilers, must travel.

In other words, the real geniuses are reluctant to take on the voluntary stupidity that science demands, and they’re more likely to find sources of satisfaction that don’t require them to constantly confront their own ignorance. This is a vast generalization, of course, but it seems to square with experience. I’ve met a number of geniuses, and what many of them have in common is a highly pragmatic determination to make life as pleasant for themselves as possible. Any other decision, in fact, would call their genius into doubt. If you can rely unthinkingly on your natural intelligence to succeed in a socially acceptable profession, or to minimize the amount of work you have to do at all, you don’t have to be a genius to see that this is a pretty good deal. The fact that Marilyn vos Savant—who allegedly had the highest tested intelligence ever recorded—became a columnist for Parade might be taken as a knock against her genius, but really, it’s the most convincing proof of it that I can imagine. The world’s smartest person should be more than happy to take a cushy gig at a Sunday supplement magazine. Most of the very bright endure their share of miseries during childhood, and their reward, rather than more misery, might as well be an adult life that provides intellectual stimulation in emotional safety. This is why I’ve always felt that Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s smarter older brother, knew exactly how his genius ought to be used. As Sherlock notes drily in “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”: “Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honor nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.” 

Yet it’s Sherlock, who was forced to leave the house to find answers to his problems, whom we love more. (He’s also been held up as an exemplar of the perfect scientist.) Mycroft is hampered by both his physical laziness and his mental quickness: when a minister comes to him with a complicated problem involving “the Navy, India, Canada, and the bimetallic question,” Mycroft can provide the answer “offhand,” which doesn’t give him much of an incentive to ever leave his office or the Diogenes Club. As Holmes puts it in “The Greek Interpreter”:

You wonder…why it is that Mycroft does not use his powers for detective work. He is incapable of it…I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solution, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.

Mycroft wasn’t wrong, either. He seems to have lived a very comfortable life. But it’s revealing that Conan Doyle gave the real adventures to the brother with the slightly less scintillating intelligence. In art, just as in science, technical facility can prevent certain artists from making real discoveries. The ones who have to work at it are more likely to find something real. But we can also raise a glass to Mycroft, Marilyn, and the geniuses who are smart enough not to make it too hard on themselves.

The monster in the writers room

Note: Spoilers follow for the season finale of Hannibal.

When it comes to making predictions about television shows, my track record is decidedly mixed. I was long convinced, for instance, that Game of Thrones would figure out a way to keep Oberyn Martell around, just because he was such fun to watch, and to say I was wrong about this is something of an understatement. Let the record show, however, that I said here months ago that the third season of Hannibal would end with Will Graham getting a knife through his face:

In The Silence of the Lambs, Crawford says that Graham’s face “looks like damned Picasso drew it.” None of the prior cinematic versions of this story have dared to follow through on this climax, but I have a feeling, given the evidence, that Fuller would embrace it. Taking Hugh Dancy’s face away, or making it hard for it look at, would be the ultimate rupture between the series and its viewers. Given the show’s cancellation, it may well end up being the very last thing we see. It would be a grim note on which to end. But it’s nothing that this series hasn’t taught us to expect.

This wasn’t the hardest prediction in the world to make. One of the most distinctive aspects of Bryan Fuller’s take on the Lecter saga is his willingness to pursue elements of the original novels that other adaptations have avoided, and the denouement of Red Dragon—with Will lying alone, disfigured, and mute in the hospital—is a downer ending that no other version of this story has been willing to touch.

Of course, that wasn’t what we got here, either. Instead of Will in his hospital bed, brooding silently on the indifference of the natural world to murder, we got a hysterical ballet of death, with Will and Hannibal teaming up to dispatch Dolarhyde like the water buffalo at the end of Apocalypse Now, followed by an operatic plunge over the edge of a cliff, with our two star-crossed lovers locked literally in each other’s arms. And it was a worthy finale for a series that has seemed increasingly indifferent to anything but that unholy love story. The details of Lecter’s escape from prison are wildly implausible, and whatever plan they reflect is hilariously undercooked, even for someone like Jack Crawford, who increasingly seems like the world’s worst FBI agent in charge. Hannibal has never been particularly interested its procedural elements, and its final season took that contempt to its final, ludicrous extreme. In the novel Red Dragon, Will, despite his demons, is a competent, inspired investigator, and he’s on the verge of apprehending Dolaryhyde through his own smarts when his quarry turns the tables. In Fuller’s version, unless I missed something along the way, Will doesn’t make a single useful deduction or take any meaningful action that isn’t the result of being manipulated by Hannibal or Jack. He’s a puppet, and dangerously close to what TV Tropes has called a Woobie: a character whom we enjoy seeing tortured so we can wish the pain away.

None of this should be taken as a criticism of the show itself, in which any narrative shortcomings can hardly be separated from Fuller’s conscious decisions. But as enjoyable as the series has always been—and I’ve enjoyed it more than any network drama I’ve seen in at least a decade—it’s something less than an honest reckoning with its material. As a rule of thumb, the stories about Lecter, including Harris’s own novels, have been the most successful when they stick most closely to their roots as police procedurals. Harris started his career as a crime reporter, and his first three books, including Black Sunday, are masterpieces of the slow accumulation of convincing detail, spiced and enriched by a layer of gothic violence. When you remove that foundation of realistic suspense, you end up with a character who is dangerously uncontrollable: it’s Lecter, not Harris, who becomes the author of his own novel. In The Annotated Dracula, Leslie S. Klinger proposes a joke theory that the real author of that book is Dracula himself, who tracked down Bram Stoker and forced him to make certain changes to conceal the fact that he was alive and well and living in Transylvania. It’s an “explanation” that rings equally true of the novels Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, which read suspiciously as if Lecter were dictating elements of his own idealized autobiography to Harris. (As far as I know, nobody has seen or heard from Harris since Hannibal Rising came out almost a decade ago. Are we sure he’s all right?)

And there are times when Hannibal, the show, plays as if Lecter had gotten an executive producer credit sometime between the second and third seasons. If anything, this is a testament to his vividness: when properly acted and written, he dominates his stories to a greater extent than any fictional character since Sherlock Holmes. (In fact, the literary agent hypothesis—in which the credited writer of a series is alleged to be simply serving as a front—originated among fans of Conan Doyle, who often seemed bewildered by the secondary lives his characters assumed.) But there’s something unsettling about how Lecter inevitably takes on the role of a hero. My favorite stretch of Hannibal was the back half of the second season, which looked unflinchingly at Lecter’s true nature as a villain, cannibal, and destroyer of lives. When he left the entire supporting cast to bleed slowly to death at the end of “Mizumono,” it seemed impossible to regard him as an appealing figure ever again. And yet here we are, with an ending that came across as the ultimate act of fan service in a show that has never been shy about appealing to its dwindling circle of devotees. I can’t exactly blame it for this, especially because the slow dance of seduction between Will and Hannibal has always been a source of sick, irresistible fascination. But we’re as far ever from an adaptation that would force us to honestly confront why we’re so attached to a man who eats other people, or why we root for him to triumph over lesser monsters who make the mistake of not being so rich, cultured, or amusing. Lecter came into this season like a lion, but he went out, as always, like a lamb.

In praise of mediocrity

Over the last few nights, I’ve been revisiting select episodes from the first season of The X-Files, which was quietly released in high definition earlier this year on Netflix. I started with “Ice,” a germinal effort that still ranks among the best four or five classic casefiles the show ever did, and I was happy to see that it played as well as always. Purists might object to the alterations to the original image, but it looked fantastic to me, and there were only a few moments when I noticed any change in the formatting. It helps that the story sucked me in completely: in terms of pure efficiency, few if any hours of television have ever gotten down to business so quickly. (“Pusher,” the sophomore effort by a young writer named Vince Gilligan, is still my favorite episode of the series, but “Ice” isn’t far behind.) Yesterday, though, when I queued up “Fire,” another installment that I remembered fondly, I discovered that it didn’t hold up as well. My memories of it were colored by a handful of fun guest performances—Mark Sheppard, Amanda Pays, and a nice little vignette by Duncan Fraser as an arson investigator—that still land nicely. Elsewhere, though, the storytelling creaks, and the budgetary limitations of a freshman drama on Fox are woefully apparent, with a roaring hotel inferno represented by a single flame glimpsed from around the corner.

Yet I still enjoyed it. Part of this is due to nostalgia: “Fire” was one of the first episodes of the show I ever saw, and watching it immediately takes me twenty years back in time. But its sheer mediocrity was also endearing. At its best, The X-Files was responsible for some of the greatest episodes of television ever produced—the ones I’ve mentioned above, the four installments written by Darin Morgan, and a handful of other standouts—but it also ground along for season after season with aliens, conspiracies, and miscellaneous boogiemen that failed to make any impression. All the while, the chemistry between the two leads kept things interesting, and there aren’t many episodes from the first five seasons that don’t have flashes of wit and invention. A little mediocrity was to be expected from a series that altered its setting, its supporting cast, and even its tone from week to week, and you could say that the breathing room the middling stories provided made the high water marks possible. And even the more forgettable casefiles are fun. At this point, I’ve long since sucked all the pulp from “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” and “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” so there’s something enticing about going back to revisit, say, “Lazarus” or “Born Again,” which is nothing more to me than a name.

You could even argue that a touch of mediocrity deserves to be a part of any balanced diet, for both creators and audiences, whether it’s in books, movies, or television. I’m not sure I’d want to be friends with someone who read nothing but volumes of the Great Books of the Western World or watched nothing but films from the Sight & Sound poll, any more than someone who had no interest in them at all. If we love great art, as Pauline Kael observed, we need to learn to love great junk as well, or, failing that, at least to appreciate an hour’s diversion on its own merits. Anything else leads to snobbism, cynicism, or worse. There’s something to be said for works of art that leave us untouched, since they allow us to live unimpeded with our own thoughts, while leaving open the possibility of pleasant surprises. As the critic Christopher Morley once wrote:

There is no harm in reading any number of unimportant books for pastime, but the significant books must be taken cautiously. You don’t want them to get in the way of what may perhaps be growing and brooding in yourself, taking its own time.

Morley, a legendary scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle, knew the value of mediocrity well. Of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, perhaps a third benefit from constant rereading; another third are fine but unexceptional; and the last third are best forgotten except by completists. Conan Doyle, who could be seen as the showrunner and sole creative force behind the most lasting procedural series of them all, wrote so many stories that it’s unrealistic to expect all of them to be great. The fact that the best of them, from “Silver Blaze” to “The Red-Headed League,” merely rearrange the standard components into a more perfect form suggests that it was his sheer volume of work that enabled the outliers. If Conan Doyle had sought only to produce masterpieces, we might not have any of these stories at all—and certainly not efforts like “The Reigate Squires” or “The Beryl Coronet,” which may not be standouts, but which provide undeniable comfort on a long winter’s evening. And although most of us don’t devour short detective stories on a regular basis these days, their place has been amply filled by television, which depends on a certain dose of mediocrity to survive. A few select shows, like Mad Men, have managed to deliver nothing but high points, but that can be exhausting in itself. Otherwise, it’s best to keep the words of Shostakovich in mind: “The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.”

“A freezing horror took hold of him…”

Note: This post is the forty-fifth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 44. You can read the earlier installments here. 

I’ve always been fascinated by horror fiction, but I’ve rarely drawn on its conventions for my own work. A few of my short stories—notably “The Boneless One” and “Cryptids”—employ horror tropes, and “Kawataro” is essentially an extended homage to the genre. In my novels, though, there’s little if any trace of it. Part of this is due to the fact that I’ve ended up working in a category that doesn’t accommodate itself easily to that style: suspense fiction, at least of the international kind that I write, operates within a narrow tonal range, with heightened events and purposeful violence described with clinical precision. This air of constraint is both the genre’s limitation and its greatest strength, but it also means that horror sits within it uncomfortably. At its best, horror fiction comes down to variations of tone, with everyday mundanity disrupted by unknown terrors, and a writer like Stephen King is so good at conveying the ordinary that the horror itself can seem less interesting by comparison. (Writers in whom the tone is steeped in dread from the beginning have trouble playing these changes: I love H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, but I can’t say that he scares me.)

The big exception is Chapter 44 of City of Exiles, in which horror comes to the forefront of the narrative to a degree that doesn’t have a parallel in the rest of the series. City of Exiles isn’t a perfect novel, and I’ve been hard on it elsewhere in this commentary, but I still think that the last ten chapters or so represent some of the strongest writing I’ve published, and the sequence kicks off here, as a neurotoxin is released inside a private plane with horrifying results. If the scene works, and I believe it does, it’s largely because of the kind of tonal shift that I describe above. It opens with Powell and Chigorin discovering that there may be a lethal device on board the plane, and for several pages, the action unfolds like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, complete with detailed specs on the ventilation system. (The couple of paragraphs spent discussing the ram system and the mix manifold were the product of a lot of tedious hours paging through aircraft manuals online.) But once the poison is released, the tone shifts abruptly into nightmare, and the result is a page or two like nothing else in these novels.

In describing what Powell sees, I consciously turned back to the likes of King and Lovecraft, and there’s also a sentence or two of deliberate homage to “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” a Sherlock Holmes short story that turns on a similar device. (“The Devil’s Foot” also provides the epigraph to Part III, and there are subtle allusions to it throughout the novel. Justice Roundhay, who sends Ilya to Belmarsh Prison, is named after one of Conan Doyle’s characters, and the two aliases that Karvonen uses—Dale Stern and Trevor Guinness—are nods to the names Sterndale and Tregennis.) The notion that Powell would see a monstrous version of one of the cherubim from Ezekiel’s vision of the merkabah is one of those ideas that seem obvious in retrospect, although it didn’t occur to me until fairly late in the process. It also involves a small cheat, since Powell is never directly privy to Wolfe’s conversations on the subject with Ilya, so I had to insert a short line in a previous chapter to explain why he’d have Ezekiel on his mind.

And although the result works well, at least to my eyes, I’m glad that it’s restricted to this chapter and nowhere else. Horror, as we all know well, is more effective the less it’s described, and as it stands, the description of Powell’s hallucination goes on just as long as necessary. It doesn’t feel like anything else in these books, which is part of the point: it’s a momentary disruption of the evenhanded tone I try to maintain even in scenes of great violence or intensity, and it casts a shadow over the more conventionally suspenseful scenes that follow. I’d love to write a real horror novel someday, mostly for the challenge of sustaining that kind of mood over a longer stretch of narrative: the number of novels that really pull it off would fill maybe a single shelf, and it’s no accident that King’s short stories are often so much scarier than his books. Still, I suspect that this scene works as well as it does because it’s embedded within a novel that otherwise seems so removed from the emotions that true horror evokes. And as with the poison that triggers these visions, a small dose is usually more than enough…

“I’d like to buy a ticket for today’s tournament…”

Note: This post is the eighteenth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 17. You can read the earlier installments here.)

When you write a novel, you’re hoping  to control as much of the process as possible, but some of the most important factors will always be out of your hands, which is exactly how it should be. In the case of The Icon Thief, for instance, I never would have guessed that the massive stock market crash and ensuing downtown that occurred halfway through my first draft would end up deeply influencing almost every word I wrote over the next four years. I’d conceived this novel from the beginning as a thriller set in the New York art world, and for months, I’d conducted diligent research into the art market, auctions, galleries, and the underground trade in stolen paintings. The financial crisis changed everything. Art is often touted as an alternative form of wealth that will retain its value when other investments are falling, but when the entire system implodes, art suffers as much as anything else. Within a few weeks, articles were already warning of  a prolonged slowdown in the art market, which meant that one of the core premises of my novel—a hedge fund that would treat art like any other asset class—no longer seemed even remotely plausible.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried: the art market turned out to be considerably more resilient than the rest of the economy, and by the time The Icon Thief was finally published, auction prices were back at record highs. Still, I didn’t know this at the time, so I was faced with several uncomfortable choices. I could ignore the problem; I could scrap the art fund angle entirely; or I could make the story a period piece that was set at a specific historical moment before the crisis. This last option was by far the most appealing, since it would both address my immediate narrative problem and provide a useful measure of historical irony, as the reader realized that the world in which these characters lived would change drastically in a matter of months. In the end, that’s what I ended up doing, and the approach worked just fine. Yet it also opened up another set of challenges that I couldn’t have anticipated. I’d conceived this novel as a standalone work, but it unexpectedly turned into the first book in a series. And since the first installment would serve as a template for the rest, it meant that every other novel in the trilogy would also have to take place during a specific stretch of time in the recent past.

I’ve spoken elsewhere about the difficulties that this posed, especially for Eternal Empire, which was set against the backdrop of the London riots. For City of Exiles, it meant that I had to square the events of my novel as much as possible with the facts of the timeline that I’d chosen. Early in the process, for example, I’d conceived of an extended suspense sequence taking place at a chess tournament, following the Alfred Hitchcock rule that a story that takes place in Switzerland has to include the Alps, lakes, and chocolates: I was writing about Russia, and it seemed inevitable that I’d build part of the story around chess. (I’d already covered ballet in the previous book, and if the series had continued into a fourth novel, it’s possible that I would have ended up with a major subplot about pairs skating.) Since the story was set in London, the obvious choice was to set the scene at the London Chess Classic, which imposed certain constraints on the time of year in which the story could take place. And because the example set by the first book dictated that the events would occur at a particular point in the past, this meant that I had to stage everything at the actual tournament that was held in 2010—I was writing this, remember, in early 2011, so this was the most recent date that made sense.

I hadn’t been to the London Chess Classic myself, of course, but I was fortunate enough to find a trove of photographs, videos, and floor plans from the previous year’s tournament on its official site. Naturally, I spent hours poring over this material, taking notes on background detail, schedules, and the details of the games themselves. Later, on my research trip to London, I paid a visit to the Olympia Exhibition Center, the results of which are displayed in Chapter 17, in which Ilya walks the same route. (On the day I was there, the conference center was hosting the LondonEdge exhibition of punk, burlesque, and gothic fashion, which provided me with some of the trip’s most interesting souvenirs.) Obviously, few readers will bother verifying that the timeline of the novel matches the real tournament so closely, but as a writer, sticking to the facts as much as I could provided a useful framework for structuring the action of the story itself. I also may have been inspired by the example of Sherlock Holmes fans, who will notice if Conan Doyle happens to set a story on a balmy weekend in London in 1886 when the weather was really rainy. I probably got a lot of things wrong, but I hope that I got at least a few right. And in any case, the tournament is about to take a rather different turn from what really happened that day…

“Wolfe had been watching the front gate…”

Note: This post is the seventeenth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 16. You can read the earlier installments here.)

A while back, I was walking out of a theater with a friend who expressed wonder at the fact that for movie after movie, screenwriters keep coming up with variations on the ultimate heist: a seemingly unbreakable safe, vault, or alarm system, set against a team of thieves who manage to circumvent the security measures in some ingenious—and preferably stylish—fashion. The movie we’d just seen was Ocean’s 11, which seemed, thirteen years ago, like a film that would set a capstone on the entire genre. Obviously, that wasn’t true: since then, we’ve seen countless other caper films, from Heist to The Italian Job to Now You See Me, that continue to pit a team of likable crooks against the usual vibration-sensitive floor and grid of laser beams. But if movies keep coming up with new variations on the same theme, it’s no mystery as to how. The screenwriter controls both halves of the equation: he can establish a seemingly insurmountable problem for the hero to solve, then give him exactly the resources he needs to address it, which is why all these impregnable citadels have a ventilation duct or airshaft that remains inexplicably unguarded.

And the heist movie is only the most obvious example of how writers quietly rig the rules to their own advantage. Mystery fiction, for instance, is built on the author’s ability to construct a puzzle that can be solved within the logic of the story itself, which often means tweaking the situation to the protagonist’s advantage in ways that should remain invisible to the reader. Reading over Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, as I’ve been doing a lot over the last couple of weeks, I’m struck again by how conveniently they unfold. Holmes is a genius, but he’s also on the receiving end of a mystery that his creator intends him to solve, to the point where I sometimes agree with Ronald Knox’s observation: “A single blunder on the part of the guilty man would have thrown all Holmes’s deductions out of joint.” You see the same tendency, although handled with much less grace, in the work of an author like Dan Brown—if you want to convince me that your lead character is a master of deduction, you’ll need to do more than give him a few anagrams to rearrange. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a character shield that keeps the star of the show alive: it may be necessary, but we’re often all too aware of the author’s hand at work.

Of course, sometimes you just need a character to be lucky, or for a shot in the dark to pay off, to move the story along. Like so many other narrative clichés, it’s a matter of convenience: it’s easier to have your hero proceed from one good hunch to another than to show the laborious grind of real police work. The trick is to make the process seem organic, which is why a good mystery writer builds a few delays and reversals into the plot while maintaining the overall momentum. When we look back at the story, we can appreciate how beautifully the clues were laid out, but we shouldn’t be thinking in those terms when we first read it through. And at best, every detail serves multiple purposes: it fleshes out a character or provides additional color even as it serves the plot. In City of Exiles, for example, I had a specific narrative problem to solve. On the one hand, I had my antihero, Ilya, on the loose in London; on the other, I had Wolfe, who had to track him down and follow him for the upcoming climax to make sense. The means I used to get to this point weren’t all that important in themselves—in theory, I could have just had Wolfe run into Ilya randomly on the street—but the need to make the details serve double duty helped guide my thinking in the right direction.

When it came time to tackle this problem, my only guidelines were that the solution be quick and efficient; that it reveal something about both characters; and that it show a bit of ingenuity of Wolfe’s part. After some thinking, I came up with the idea of Wolfe, who knows that Ilya is a book collector with an interest in Judaica, staking out the best Jewish bookstore in London, on the assumption that Ilya will eventually make an appearance there, as he finally does in Chapter 17. (The bookstore, incidentally, is a real one, and I spent a happy afternoon browsing there in Golders Green, while quietly plotting out the action at the same time. I’ll also admit that looking for a fugitive based on an analysis of his tastes and shopping list isn’t entirely original to me—Thomas Harris does something similar, although at much greater length, in Hannibal.) For the purposes of the story, it obviously had to be sooner rather than later, although I tried to structure it so that it didn’t seem overly convenient. I’m still not sure if I entirely succeeded, but I think the result works on its own terms. And now that all the pieces are in place, we can finally get to the good stuff…

My ten great books #1: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes

(Note: For the next two weeks, I’m going to be chronologically counting down the ten works of fiction that have had the greatest influence on my life as an author. It isn’t necessarily a list of my favorite books, or even my favorite novels—for a slightly dated ranking, please see here. It’s a celebration of the ten books that I’ve found myself unable to forget after a lifetime of reading, and which continue to appear in disguised form in every word I write. And although I’ll be treating them in the order of their original publication, as it happens, we’ll be starting today with the book I love the most.) 

I first encountered the best book in the world in the library of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. At the time, I was seventeen, and of course I was already in love with Sherlock Holmes: I’d even been exposed to the subculture of obsessive Holmes fans through the wonderful anthology A Baker Street Dozen, which I still think is the best introduction to Holmes and his world. What I found in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould was something much more, an entire universe of speculation, whimsy, and longing, like the Orbis Tertius of Jorge Luis Borges, built on the rich soil of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. The rules of the game were simple. Holmes, Watson, and the vivid figures who populated their slice of London had been real men and women; Conan Doyle had been Watson’s literary agent; and the published stories themselves were glimpses into a larger narrative that could be reconstructed with enough patience and ingenuity. Given the scraps of information that the stories provided, you could figure out which building had been the model for 221B Baker Street; you could piece together the details of Watson’s military record, the location of his war wound, and the identities of his three, or perhaps four, wives; you could determine the species of the speckled band and whether “The Adventures of the Three Students” took place at Oxford or Cambridge; and you could pin down, with considerable accuracy, when and where each of the other adventures took place, even as Watson—or Conan Doyle—tried to divert us with “mistakes” that were deliberate misleads or red herrings.

The result of Baring-Gould’s work, which collects nearly a century’s worth of speculation into one massive, handsomely illustrated volume, is the first book I’d save if I could own only one, and for years, it’s been living on my desk, both as a source of inspiration and as a convenient laptop stand. (Leslie Klinger’s more recent edition is lovely as well, but Baring-Gould will always be closest to my heart.) And it’s taken me a long time to realize why I care about this book so much, aside from the huge obvious pleasure it affords. It represents a vision of the world—and of reading—that I find immensely seductive. Each story, and often each sentence, opens onto countless others, and if Conan Doyle didn’t mean for his work to be subjected to such scrutiny, that’s even better: it allows us to imagine that we aren’t following a trail of clues that the author meant for us to find, but discovering something that was invisibly there all along. “Never has so much been written by so many for so few,” as the great Sherlockian Christopher Morley once said, and it’s true. These studies are spectacularly useless, and they’re divorced from any academic or practical value, aside, of course, from the immense benefit of allowing us to spend more time in this world and in the company of two of the most appealing characters in fiction. It’s a way for the story, and the act of reading, to go on forever, and in the end, it transforms us. In the role of a literary detective, of a tireless investigator, you become Holmes, or at least the Watson to so many more capable readers, thanks to the beauty of the stories themselves. What more can we ask from reading?

Writing a thriller in the real world

When I began researching The Icon Thief in March of 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 12,500 points, and it was about to go much higher. Exactly one year later, while I was revising the rough draft, it had plunged to 6,600, and although it slowly recovered from there, it remained far below its previous heights even after the novel was released. (In fact, it wasn’t until after the release of my second novel that the market earned back its losses from the crash.) For most books, this wouldn’t have been an issue, but it presented me with a peculiar problem: my book was set in the New York art world, which was hit especially hard by the downturn, and many of my assumptions about the art market and art investing—not to mention that state of Russia—were no longer correct. I could have tried to revise the entire manuscript to take these events into account, but I chose a different strategy: I recast the novel to take place explicitly in the months before the financial crisis, which I’d address directly only in the epilogue. That way, I’d be able to retain most of the story I’d written, and setting it in a specific period would lend the plot a useful degree of historical irony.

In retrospect, I needn’t have worried: by the time The Icon Thief was finally released in early 2012, the markets had largely recovered, and the art world—especially on the auction side—had returned to business as usual. Still, it made for a better novel, and it also set a template for the installments that followed, which, for the sake of consistency, I decided to also set on specific dates in the recent past. Of course, this approach has pitfalls of its own. A casual reader isn’t likely to pick up on any chronological inconsistencies, but I’ve always been mindful of the example of obsessive Sherlock Holmes fans, who argue endlessly over the date on which the stories take place and ruthlessly pick apart Arthur Conan Doyle for his “mistakes”—which can be as minor as incorrectly describing the London weather or train schedule for a particular weekend in 1895. As a result, I resolved early on to make the details as accurate as I could. For each of these novels, I’ve put together a calendar to make sure that the action unfolds in a logical way, and I’ve tried to account for things like railway schedules, weekends, and holidays. (Occasionally, there will be a small discrepancy, such as the fact that July 4 comes and goes in The Icon Thief without anyone taking notice of it.)

This becomes particularly difficult whenever I make use of real historical events. For City of Exiles, this was a minor consideration: the only real limiting factor was the timing of the annual London Chess Classic, which ended up being the event around which the chronology of the rest of the novel was structured. Things got a little more complicated for the third book. Shortly after I returned from a research trip to London for the second novel, the country erupted in riots, and I knew at once that they were something I wanted to incorporate into a future book. Ultimately, I conceived a lengthy sequence covering several chapters in Eternal Empire that unfolds against the backdrop of the riots. When I sat down to write it, however, I found that keeping the action accurate would be a real challenge. I went back and worked out the chronology of the riots as thoroughly as I could, going hour by hour when necessary, and I tried to make the description of the events as close to the facts as possible, although I ended up fudging a few details here and there for the sake of the story. And I’m very proud of the result, which I think is one of the strongest set pieces in the entire trilogy.

The second major historical event that I wanted to include was the series of demonstrations against the Putin regime that occurred in Russia at the end of 2011. Here, my task was a little easier, since the protests took place outside of the main timeframe of the action, and I could hold off on addressing them until the end of the novel. All the same, the novel builds toward these events in many ways, both subtle and unsubtle, and they provided me with a pivotal historical moment that, in retrospect, the entire series seems to anticipate. In the end, of course, the demonstrations didn’t achieve much, and their ultimate significance is more symbolic than real. But having a factual event waiting for me at the conclusion of the novel guided my choices and shaped the characters in ways that wouldn’t have happened if I’d set the story at some indefinite time in the present, and there’s no question that all three novels have been enriched by the historical context in which they were set and written. Like many aspects of this series, this quality began as an accident, then became central to my ambitions for these books. And although I’m not sure I’ll ever try anything quite like it again, I can’t imagine these novels in any other way.

A reader’s family tree

When we think of our favorite books, we tend to picture a tidy shelf or a ranked list, but they’re really more like a family tree, with authors sprouting haphazardly from those who came before. In my case, the first books I remember loving with a fanboy’s passion were the works of Charles Schulz. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled with vintage Peanuts paperbacks, which meant that even as the strip was starting its long daily decline, I was reading one of the great extended works of art of the twentieth century. What caught me was its tone: it was immediately appealing to kids, but written for adults, with storylines that were a complicated mix of psychology, whimsy, and despair. (I remember surprising my mother when I complained, at the age of nine, that I was suffering from a post-Christmas letdown.) In some ways, Peanuts set the stage for all that followed: it taught me that even as you’re caught up in the lives of fictional but maddeningly persuasive human beings, you can feel your mind expanding. The best years of the strip still make me feel that way, which is why I plan on introducing them to my own daughter as soon as she’s old enough to read on her own.

The next big branch consisted of a handful of authors who would be shelved these days in the young adult section: Madeleine L’Engle, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Ellen Raskin, E.L. Konigsburg, and others, most of them women. L’Engle caught my attention first, and looking back, I think it’s because A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels were my introduction to serious science fiction, with astrophysics and relativity interwoven with ethics, theology, and family drama. I moved from there to fantasy—I don’t think any book has ever moved me as much as The High King—and the usual string of Hardy Boys adventures. (Oddly, I also read two authors who didn’t affect me nearly as much then as they did later. The Phantom Tollbooth only became my favorite children’s novel after I was already an adult and could appreciate how much wisdom it contained, and although I loved Sherlock Holmes, I didn’t become obsessed with him until I was about to go to college, and discovered William S. Baring-Gould’s incredible annotations.) And the writer who took me to the next level, as he has for so many others, was George Orwell: after Animal Farm and 1984, I knew there was no going back.

Next comes an author whose influence I’ve only recently begun to acknowledge, although he’s been a big part of my life for a long time. I read The Talisman somewhere at the beginning of middle school, and over the next year or so, I devoured most of the books from Stephen King’s classic period. These are still the novels I’d recommend to someone who wanted to get into the habit of reading for the first time: they still grab me as they did then, and they’ve aged far better than most popular fiction. King also marked a turning point in another important respect. Until then, I’d been reading the books that most teens my age or slightly older were reading, though perhaps with greater intensity, but now that my destiny had locked into place—I knew I wanted to be a writer—I found myself faced with many possible paths. It’s really only by chance that I stumbled next onto Umberto Eco: it could have been any number of other writers, and I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if I’d been drawn to, say, Hemingway or Updike. In any case, I read The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum right when I was most vulnerable to being deeply influenced, and I’m still feeling the effects.

Later, in high school, I fell under the spell of Norman Mailer, as much for the life he seemed to embody as for the books he wrote. (I still haven’t read The Naked and the Dead, and the Mailer novels that made the biggest impression on me were those weird, monumental outliers Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost.) Borges came slightly later. Since then, the family tree seems to have smoothed itself out: there are many leaves, but fewer branches. Most of the books I now call my favorites are ones that I read during or after college, but although I’ll occasionally go through a period when I want to read everything an author has written—McEwan, Forsyth, Updike finally—the sense of a reading life that grows unchecked has mostly fallen away. It used to be a jungle; now it’s more like a garden, as I search out the great books that I’ve missed before and check off them off my list. I used to read like a child, and now I read like a grownup, or, worse, a writer. And that’s something of a loss. I still find books that excite me tremendously, even if I’ve been putting them off for years, but if I want to recover that early sense of contentment, I often pick up Conan Doyle, or King, or even Peanuts. But I’m always secretly hopeful that I’ll get that feeling again. The tree still has room to grow.

The challenges of series fiction

It would be nice if writing a series of novels came down to publishing a bunch of books with vaguely similar covers, but unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. Series fiction, especially in suspense, is inherently problematic because it violates an important aspect of what we know about the world. It’s true that life doesn’t lend itself to being confined easily within four hundred pages, and any story can be extended indefinitely in either direction—life rarely affords us the luxury of tidy endings. (As Sydney Pollack points out in Eyes Wide Shut: “Life goes on. It always does. Until it doesn’t.”) But series fiction pushes this sense of continuity in artificial directions, by assuming that not only does life go on, but it rhymes. In most mystery series, the protagonist doesn’t change appreciably from book to book, is confronted with the same kind of case in each installment, and usually ends up more or less where he started. Events in one book rarely have any impact on the next. And while this sort of structure is acceptable on television—although it took me a while to accept the lack of narrative memory on shows like The X-Files—it often rings false in fiction, and can even become enervating for the author himself. Conan Doyle famously killed off his own creation, and one occasionally senses a touch of exhaustion in such otherwise excellent writers like Daniel Silva, whose publishers have gently nudged him back toward his trademark character when he might have preferred to move on.

When it came time to write the sequel to The Icon Thief, I wanted to avoid this trap as best as I could. I was determined, for instance, that City of Exiles change the stakes of the series in tangible ways, and when I realized, early in the planning process, that I was simply repeating the same pattern as before—of Ilya staying just barely ahead of his pursuers—I decided to move forcefully in the opposite direction, with consequences that readers of the novel will discover for themselves. In some ways, I was aided by the fact that I’d never intended my debut novel to be the first installment in a series. In an excellent essay published in the classic mystery companion Murder Ink, the novelist Peter Dickinson draws a useful distinction between novels that were conceived with a series character in mind and those that stumbled into it by accident. A deliberate series hero, he observes, often starts out with a list of quirky character markers designed mostly to set him apart from similar protagonists (“Let’s say he has a club-foot and rides an enormous bike…”), while the accidental hero evolves in a more organic way, based on the needs of the first novel in which he appears:

These are the detectives who come into existence because the author wants to write a particular book. The book itself demands a detective, and he grows into being, quite slowly, finding his shape and nature from the needs of the book and the author’s own needs.

This is essentially what happened with Ilya, as well as with my beloved Rachel Wolfe. I didn’t intend to bring them back, and when I did, I found that I was stuck with the attributes I’d invented for them in the first novel—which ended up being a source of fruitful ideas and constraints. The single greatest trick I’ve learned from writing a series involves finding where the real essence of a novel, or a character, lies, and not confusing this with more superficial qualities. Ilya was conceived as a resourceful thief and assassin, but in the second novel, he doesn’t steal much of anything and kills only out of necessity. As a result, I was forced to dig deeper, and by following some hints from the first novel—his bookishness, his fascination with Jewish mysticism, and his discovery that everything he believed about his sense of honor was a lie—I was able to see him more clearly than before, as a man trying to come to terms with the division between the two halves of his personality. Similarly, if my only goal had been to write a novel with a story resembling that of the first, I would have centered it on another enigmatic work of art, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Instead, I looked at the novel slantwise, and saw that it was really about the problem of interpretation, and the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us. This led me to concentrate on historical mysteries instead, and ultimately led me into the Dyatlov Pass.

Series fiction also turned out to be a testing ground for my ideas about backstory. Usually, I deal with my aversion to backstory by refusing to create it in the first place, to the point where important details of my characters’ backgrounds are left deliberately vague, even to me. For my second book, not only did this backstory already exist, but there was an entire novel’s worth of it, so I had to decide early on how much of this previous material to include. My solution, which probably won’t come as a surprise to regular readers, was to refer to the earlier book as little as possible, which ended up being both a philosophical and a pragmatic decision. The second book in a series occupies a peculiar position: it needs to reward those who have read the first novel, but also be accessible and interesting to those encountering these characters for the first time. Finding the right balance between telling a completely self-contained story and honoring the complicated history of the first novel was a real challenge, and it taught me a lot about what information is essential and what can be safely dropped—a lesson that I’ve put into practice for the third and final novel in the series, Eternal Empire, and hope to draw upon for any books I write in the future. The result, I’d like to think, is a pair of novels that read perfectly well on their own, but gain additional richness and resonance when taken as part of a larger whole. Tomorrow, on the day City of Exiles finally comes out, I’ll try to pull all of this together, and explain what I learned from writing my second novel.

The oops file

After thirty yards, the road curved and the shade trees vanished. To his left, the hedge continued as before. On his right, the houses disappeared, replaced by a pond trimmed with reeds and pitch pines. Ospreys floated on the calm surface of the water.

This description comes from Chapter 6 of The Icon Thief, when Ilya is casing the mansion where he and another thief will shortly stage an elaborate heist, and it strikes me as a nice image, one that clearly evokes the setting, a peaceful neighborhood in the Hamptons. It isn’t flashy, but the writing is efficient and clear. The trouble, unfortunately, is that it contains a mistake, as a reader pointed out to me in a terse email, which read in its entirety: “Ospreys do not rest on the water; they rest in trees (preferably dead ones).” Well, I hope he liked the rest of the book. But I can’t deny that it’s a definite error on my part. In the months since The Icon Thief was first published, I’ve noticed a few factual lapses like this, some of which I’d rather not mention, although I’d like to correct the record to reflect that the woman to whom I refer, in passing, as “a dead patron of the arts” is actually very much alive.

And yet I’m strangely relieved that there aren’t more mistakes. The Icon Thief contains hundreds of factual statements that, even outside the context of the story, can be independently checked, verified, or disproved, and so far, the errors I’ve been told about or seen on my own amount to only a handful. I’ve been especially gratified to hear from a number of readers in the art world, including two experts on Duchamp, who would be more than capable of pointing out any inaccuracies. So far, if they’ve found any serious ones, they’ve been too polite to say so—allowing, of course, for the occasional liberties I’ve taken in the interest of constructing a fictional narrative. (I should also confess that my readers caught a number of similar mistakes before the book was published, which only demonstrates the necessity of subjecting any manuscript to thoughtful critical review.) But I’ve put a lot of effort into making sure, within human reason, that this book is correct in its details, even in points that are likely to elude the attention, or interest, of even the most diligent reader.

In this regard, I was motivated throughout by the example of the ferociously observant readers of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Arthur Conan Doyle was not what we’d call a great researcher, and he had trouble keeping even his own continuity straight. The most delightful aspect of the field of Sherlockian studies is the energy that these readers invest in both fact-checking and justifying any discrepancies they uncover, which include issues ranging from the location of Watson’s wound to the species of the speckled band to whether the weather in London was, in fact, drizzly and gray on a particular morning in 1895. (Sometimes they go a little too far: I’ve gone on record as saying that The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould is the best book in the world, but if it has one shortcoming, it’s that the editor rearranges the stories into his own eccentric chronology, ignoring narrative logic and character development to order them based on, say, contemporary weather reports.) And whenever I go back to check my own work, it’s with an eye to such a reader: highly intelligent, endlessly skeptical, and blessed with a seemingly unlimited amount of time.

Of course, the odds of my novels ever receiving even a fraction of the attention of the Holmes stories is pretty remote. All the same, the habit of reading your own work with this kind of audience in mind is a useful one. As I’ve noted before, all novels, especially in the suspense genre, tend to use factual information and accuracy in small details as a kind of synecdoche for the credibility of the plot as a whole, and any lapse will throw not just the disputed passage but the entire story into question. Even the tiniest mistake will pull the reader out of the fictional dream. As a result, I’ve found myself checking weather reports for the day in which a certain scene takes place, usually with the assistance of the invaluable Wolfram Alpha, and poring over maps and photographs—or, better yet, visiting locations in person—to make sure the action is plausible, or at least physically possible. While writing Ulysses, James Joyce wrote a letter to his aunt asking her to verify that an ordinary man could climb over the fence at No. 7 Eccles Street, and it’s that kind of diligence toward which we should strive. And all the while, we should remember that, unlike the Navajos, there’s no need for us to weave deliberate flaws into our blankets—they’ll have plenty of flaws of their own.

Quote of the Day

It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man With the Twisted Lip”

Sherlock Holmes and the case of living by one’s wits

“But I understand, Holmes, that you are turning to practical ends those powers with which you used to amaze us?”
“Yes,” said I, “I have taken to living by my wits.”

The first speaker in the passage above is Reginald Musgrave, a much wealthier college acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes, and the story is “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual,” an account of one of Holmes’s earliest cases. It’s easily one of my ten favorite Holmes stories, and I especially love this exchange, which gives us a window both into Holmes’s early career and into how he was regarded by his friends. It could almost be taken as a conversation between two contemporary college classmates, one of whom has gone profitably into consulting or investment banking, while the other is pursuing something vaguely absurd, like writing or performance art, in an outer-borough neighborhood. (We sometimes forget that the Holmes depicted in the original stories is dangerously close to a Bohemian—no, not that kind—and that the rooms in Baker Street, which since have been so lovingly recreated, wouldn’t be out of place in a ratty brownstone in Williamsburg.)

Musgrave seems amused to hear that Holmes is trying to make a living from his powers of observation, and in this portrayal, it isn’t hard to sense Conan Doyle’s own feelings toward those who looked with skepticism at his early literary aspirations. Anyone who decides to make a living in the arts is looking for support from skills that we tend to think of as diversions, hobbies, or parlor tricks—acting, singing, storytelling. When Holmes was in college, it’s possible that he regarded his own gifts in much the same light, the way some of us might have dabbled in undergraduate theater, and only later began to consider turning them toward more practical applications. And while working as a consulting detective may seem more interesting than, say, being a writer, in practice, they were equally exotic professions: the first true freelance writers in England, the denizens of Grub Street, had emerged just over a century before.

And Holmes’s response to Musgrave is revealing as well. “Living by one’s wits” has always had a rather sinister connotation, as if you’re surviving through cunning rather than hard work. As W.H. Auden memorably writes:

All those whose success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but upon “inspiration,” the lucky hazard of ideas, live by their wits, a phrase which carries a slightly pejorative meaning. Every “original” genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or madman.

By phrasing it the way he does, Holmes is putting himself in with the card sharps, the buskers, the fortune-tellers, and the writers. And this gives us another glimpse of his creator. Conan Doyle may have claimed that he disliked the Holmes stories, and that he was more interested in his painstaking historical fictions and, later, his investigations into spiritualism, but at heart, he was one of the greatest of all working writers, turning out mysteries, science fiction, Napoleonic tales, ghost stories, and more with the sort of invention and productivity that can only arise from the peculiar life of a freelancer, living, like Holmes, by his wits.

And some of that same disreputability still clings to any kind of artistic freelancing. When you’re just starting out, in particular, it’s hard for others to take you seriously—and they aren’t necessary wrong in this—and even later, there’s a sense of incredulity, as if they suspect that you’re secretly engaged in something more shady. (I’m always amazed by how candidly people will ask about my sales figures and advances, when they wouldn’t dream of asking about someone else’s salary—but what they’re really doing, I think, is trying to verify that this is a real job at all.) But such a life has its own satisfactions. Holmes was famously willing to take on cases for free, but he also took great relish in being paid for his work—”I am a poor man,” he says at the end of “The Priory School,” affectionately patting his check—and that’s something that any freelancer can appreciate. The result is, undeniably, a rather strange, unconventional existence. But if it’s good enough for Holmes, it’s good enough for me.

(Note: If you’re in the East Bay, don’t forget to come see me read at 7:00 pm tonight at the Hayward Area Historical Society. More details here.)

How to take a shortcut

Done, as a certain social media company likes to remind us, is better than perfect. Not everything we do can be flawless in every respect, and in many cases, it’s better to take shortcuts where possible in order to focus on what really matters. Yesterday, I quoted the historian Arnold Hauser on the pragmatism of Shakespeare, who took certain creative approaches “only because they represented the most simple, convenient, and quickest solution of a difficulty to which the dramatist did not find it worth his while to devote any further trouble.” This Olympian ability to zero in on what counts, rather than becoming distracted by side issues, simply magnifies one of the qualities that we find in nearly all great popular writers: the willingness to use a shortcut, or even blatant sleight of hand, to get from one point in a story to another, and the understanding that such measures not only don’t detract from the quality of the work, but may even add to its richness and unpredictability.

One obvious example is the use of stock characters, which remain as useful today as they did in Shakespeare’s time. Stereotypes have no place among one’s leads, of course, but it’s hard to think of a complex work of art, from the Iliad to Downton Abbey, that doesn’t rely, to some extent, on stock types to people its world. For one thing, it saves time. Here’s Roger Ebert on The Godfather:

Although The Godfather is a long, minutely detailed movie of some three hours, there naturally isn’t time to go into the backgrounds and identities of [all the] characters…Coppola and producer Al Ruddy skirt this problem with understated typecasting. As the Irish cop, for example, they simply slide in Sterling Hayden and let the character go about his business.

Every writer sometimes finds it necessary, when pressed for time, to let a stock character go about his business without further introduction. And while most of us don’t have the chance to “simply slide in Sterling Hayden“—if only we could!—there’s no reason to feel guilty about using stock types in small parts. If anything, a fully rounded character in an insignificant part can be a flaw in the narrative: if we mention that the clerk at the hotel where the hero is staying is named Bill, for instance, this sets up an expectation in the reader’s mind that Bill will return in some significant way. If he doesn’t, it’s an unnecessary distraction, when an anonymous clerk would simply have been accepted as part of the fabric of the story.

The same rule holds for many of those clichés or conventions that can annoy attentive readers, as chronicled exhaustively on TV Tropes. We all have our own private list of the amusing ways in which fiction diverges from reality: the fact that the hero can always find a parking space, for instance, or inevitably has the correct change for a taxi. As William Goldman points out in Which Lie Did I Tell?, however, all these conventions have something in common: they’re all about speed. They save time. And they allow the story to get on with it, gliding past what isn’t important to focus on what is. And although such shortcuts may irritate nitpickers after the fact, if we’re caught up in the story, we don’t care. Once again, it’s about knowing what matters, as in editor Walter Murch’s famous Rule of Six, in which everything from continuity to visual logic is subordinated to the emotion of the moment. Because emotion is the one place where shortcuts can’t be taken.

And if the emotional aspects of a story are sound, the remaining shortcuts can create pockets of space for the reader’s imagination to explore. This is true of nearly all great works of art, which, on closer examination, resemble Citizen Kane, which evokes the vast spaces of Xanadu with a bare set, lighting, and a few simple props, and in the process creates a place that feels much more real to us than all the lavishly detailed sets of Cleopatra. In a similar way, Conan Doyle manifestly didn’t care about the continuity of small details in the Sherlock Holmes stories, like the location of Watson’s wound, which only allowed his readers to furnish the rest of the world on their own. A work of art in which every detail has been determined by the writer, if it sees the light of day at all, will often seem airless and uninviting. But if the writer takes the right kind of shortcuts, not only will he reach his own destination, but the reader will come along for the ride.

The Passion of St. Edgar

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, the patron saint of all those who write for a living. More than two centuries after his birth, Poe remains a fascinating figure, largely because few authors have presented us with so stark a contrast between the rational and irrational sides of a writer’s personality. When we think of Poe, we tend to think of the obsessive, alcoholic, manic-depressive eccentric, but he was also deeply learned, an ingenious plotmaker, and a talented cryptologist who challenged readers to submit ciphers for him to solve. Poe was arguably the first professional American writer of lasting interest, at a time when he had few, if any, models for such a career. As such, he could hardly have been anything less than prodigiously hardworking and talented. He remains the epitome of the popular writer, and the model for all those who followed: clever, opportunistic, but with more than a touch of madness to be writing for a living at all.

Every critic knows that Poe was a prolific inventor of genres, above all that of the detective story, but not everyone understands why. Genre, as I’ve said before, is the result of a sort of dialogue between an author and his audience, a process of trial and error as writers figure out what elements get the best response. Because Poe was among the first writers whose survival depended entirely on a popular readership, he embodied that process singlehandedly: while he was undoubtedly driven by his own obsessions, he was also willing to try anything once. Browsing in Poe’s collected stories is like watching natural selection at work, with successful innovations alternating with wild shots in the dark. It’s no accident that of the three short stories featuring the detective Dupin, the first and last, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” have become classics, while the second, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” survives, if at all, as a weird, basically unreadable experiment. Here as elsewhere, Poe tried something new, checked to see if it worked, and if it didn’t, he moved on. And that’s how genres are made.

Earlier this week, I mentioned Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” which nicely sums up the two halves of his, or any writer’s, creative personality. In it, he makes a show of breaking down “The Raven” into its constituent parts, claiming that every choice he made was the result of a rational process—that he chose to write about the death of a beautiful woman, for instance, because it is unquestionably “the most poetical topic in the world,” and selected the refrain “Nevermore” because of “the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant.” Critics tend to believe that the essay is a parody of close literary analysis, and indeed, Poe often seems to be winking slyly at the reader. Yet I have the feeling that what Poe describes is not entirely removed from his real creative process. It seems quite likely that Poe initially conceived of a poem with the refrain “Nevermore,” then worked it out forward and backward, proceeding with the intuition of the craftsman, not the mystic. And the result is a poem that produces its uncanny effects in unexpectedly rational ways.

Poe’s influence is incalculable—”He is never wrong,” as Paul Valéry said—but these days, it’s easier to admire him for his plots and originality than for the actual experience of reading his fiction. The core of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an astonishingly modern detective story, at least in terms of its red herrings and high-concept solution, but it takes a long time to get there, opening with an interminable two-page essay on the nature of analysis before introducing the characters themselves. A few decades later, Arthur Conan Doyle would refine and perfect this model to the point where we can still read his stories with undiminished delight, but even he acknowledged that he wouldn’t be anywhere without Poe. Nor would any of us. In mystery, in horror, in science fiction, in suspense: in the end, we’re all working from the example left for us by Poe, the great original, who knew what it meant to write like your life depended on it.