Richard Lederer - Richard Lederers Literary Trivia

Richard Lederers Literary Trivia

Richard Lederer

Illustrations by Barry Blitt

Richard Lederers Literary Trivia

Digital Edition 1.0

Text 2007 Richard Lederer

Illustrations 2007 Barry Blitt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Gibbs Smith

P.O. Box 667

Layton, Utah 84041

Orders: 1.800.835.4993

www.gibbs-smith.com

ISBN: 978-1-4236-3771-4

To my Haverford College English professors, who helped me to discover who I am and why I was put on this planet

Literature lives. Literature endures. Literature prevails. Thats because readers bestow a special kind of life upon people who have existed only in books. Figments though they may be, literary characters can assume a vitality and longevity that pulse more powerfully than flesh and blood.

After many years, the publishers of the childrens classic Charlottes Web persuaded E. B. White to record his book on tape. So caught had the author become in the web of his arachnid heroines life that it took nineteen tapings before White could read aloud the passage about Charlottes death without his voice cracking.

A century earlier, another writer had been deeply affected by the fate of his heroine. Like most of Charles Dickenss works, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was published in serial form. The novel won a vast readership on both sides of the Atlantic, and as interest in the fate of the heroine, Little Nell, grew intense, circulation reached the staggering figure of 100,000, a record unequaled by any other of Dickenss major novels. In New York, 6,000 people crowded the wharf where the ship carrying the final Master Humphreys Clock magazine installment was due to dock. As it approached, the crowds impatience grew to such a pitch that they cried out as one to the sailors, Does Little Nell die?

Alas, Little Nell did die, and tens of thousands of readers hearts broke. The often ferocious literary critic Lord Jeffrey was found weeping with his head on his library table. Youll be sorry to hear, he sobbed to a friend, that little Nelly, Bozs little Nelly, is dead. Daniel OConnell, an Irish M.P., burst out crying, He should not have killed her, and then, in anguish, threw the book out of the window of the train in which he was traveling. A diary of the time records another reader lamenting, The villain! The rascal! The bloodthirsty scoundrel! He killed my little Nell! He killed my sweet little child!

That bloodthirsty scoundrel was himself shattered by the loss of his heroine. In a letter to a friend Dickens wrote, I am the wretchedest of the wretched. It [Nells death] casts the most horrible shadow upon me, and it is as much as I can do to keep moving at all. Nobody will miss her like I shall.

Even more famous than Charlotte and Little Nell is Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes, the worlds first consulting detective. The intrepid sleuths deerstalker hat, Inverness cape, calabash pipe, and magnifying glass are recognized by readers everywhere, and the stories have been translated into more than sixty languages, from Arabic to Yiddish.

In December of 1887, Sherlock Holmes came into the world as an unheralded and unnoticed Yuletide child in Beetons Christmas Annual. When, not long after, The Strand Magazine began the monthly serialization of the first dozen short stories entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the issues sold tens of thousands and the public furiously clamored for more.

At the height of success, however, the creator wearied of his creation. He yearned for higher writing and felt his special calling to be the historical novel. In December 1893, Doyle introduced the arch criminal Professor James Moriarty into the last story in the Memoirs series. In The Final Problem, Holmes and the evil professor wrestle at a cliffs edge in Switzerland. Grasping each other frantically, sleuth and villain plummet to their watery deaths at the foot of the Reichenbach Falls.

With Holmes forever destroyed, Doyle felt he could abandon his mystery stories and turn his authorial eyes to the romantic landscapes of the Middle Ages. He longed to chronicle the clangor of medieval battles, the derring-do of brave knights, and the sighs of lovesick maidens. But the writers tour back in time would not be that easily booked: Sherlock Holmes had taken on a life of his own, something larger than the will of his creator. The normally staid, stiff-upper-lipped British public was first bereaved, then outraged. Conservative London stockbrokers went to work wearing black armbands in mourning for the loss of their heroic detective. Citizens poured out torrents of letters to editors complaining of Holmess fate. One woman picketed Doyles home with a sign branding him a murderer.

The appeals of The Strand s publishers to Doyles sensibilities and purse went unheeded. For the next eight years Holmes lay dead at the bottom of the Swiss falls while Doyle branched out into historical fiction, science-fiction, horror stories, and medical stories. But he wasnt very good at higher writing.

Finally, Doyle could resist the pressures from publisher and public no more. The Return of Sherlock Holmes, the series of thirteen stories that brought back Doyles hero, was greeted eagerly by patient British readers, and the author continued writing stories of his detective right into 1927. When, in 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died at age 71, readers around the world mourned his passing. Newspaper cartoons portraying a grieving Sherlock Holmes captured the publics sense of irreparable loss.

Such is the power of mythic literature that the creation has outlived his creator. Letters and packages from all over the world still come addressed to Sherlock Holmes at 221-B Baker Street, where they are answered by a full-time secretary. Only Santa Claus gets more mail, at least just before Christmastime. More movies, well over three hundred of them, have been made about Holmes than about Dracula, Frankenstein, Robin Hood, and Rocky combined. Sherlock Holmes stories written by post-Doylean authors now vastly outnumber the sixty that Doyle produced. More than one hundred and fifty societies in homage to Sherlock Holmes are active in the United States alone.

However many times the progenitor tried to finish off his hero, by murder or retirement or flat refusal to write any more adventures, the Great Detective lives, vigilant and deductive as ever, protecting the humble from the evils that lurk in the very heart of our so-called civilization. Despite his death more than a hundred years ago, Sherlock Holmes has never died. Readers around the world simply wont let him.

If you have read this far in this introduction, you are almost certainly a person for whom the people who live in books are very much alive. Literary Trivia will show just how much fun the study of greatand sometimes more-popular-than-greatliterature can be. When you are done reading this book and playing the games, you may be inspired to read or reread some of the masterpieces mentioned along the way. If you are, rundont walkto your nearest library.

Richard Lederer

San Diego, California

richard.lederer@pobox.com

Authors

Authorial Anecdotes