The Baker Street Phantom

The Baker Street Phantom by Fabrice Bourland

A light and quick read set in 1930s London where a sudden rash of murders seem to replicate famous murders from literary works. What I loved about it was the idea that our passion for literary characters like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Dorian Gray can bring them to life - with their own lusts and evils intact. The two heros were inspired to become private detectives by their love of Holmes and Watson's adventures and their own relationship echoes that of Holmes' duo at times.

Biographical and bibliographical detail about Doyle and his creation, Holmes, are woven into the plot in a mostly satisfying way. The descriptions of the murders and bodies are quite taut and graphic at times, and seem to be viewed by the characters with detachment rather than emphathy. This felt out of place, especially through the eyes of Singleton, who is the more cautious and sensitive of the two protagonists.

The first in an ongoing series featuring Singleton and Trelawney.

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own

This book sat on my shelf unread for nearly ten years. As I've been reading through a history of patriarchy from Kate Millett to Naomi Wolf, it seemed appropriate to finally delve into the work of this infamous mind.

Created as two essays delivered to the Arts Society at Newnham and first published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is a gentle treaty on the need for women to create their own intellectual and creative space.

Beginning with the recounting of being barred from the university library unless in the company of a male university ‘fellow’ or a letter of introduction, it lays out a select history of male thinking on female nature and the obstructive social forces resulting from these.

The list is heartbreaking.

To defeat these, Woolf famously argues, women must have five hundred guinea a year and a room of one’s own with a lock on the door. These two demands are, of course, symbolic. Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that lock on the door stands for the power to think for oneself.

It’s easy to see why Woolf’s work has become a seminal and eternally popular text. She writes with humour and pathos but without recrimination. Men, she argues, hold women inferior only because men need to brace their own superiority as they go about the arduous and difficult daily task of statesmanship and nation building. Under her pen, we feel the ache of a mind longing for access to ideas, books and stories yet also taste her optimism. She lived in a time that promised liberating social change – women had been granted the vote only a few years before and only ten years previous legislation had been passed that allowed them to own property for the fist time in industrial history. Against this backdrop, it is little wonder her argument is optimistic.

There is also a wider selection of ideas that flow through the text. She opens with a number of questions: Why don’t women publish? What effect does poverty have on the mind? What effect does poverty have on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of art? Should women write as women or simply as writers disembodied from gender? On her journey across these, she discusses of the process of patriarchy and the ‘othering’ of women.

A book worth waiting ten years to read.

Feminist theory

Modern Feminist Thought

This text ended my long search to find a book that offered clear explanation of how the main theories of feminism evolved and interacted.

The main schools of thought are covered, running in a loose chronological order beginning with the liberal feminism of Betty Freidan and moving in succession through Marxist and Socialist feminism, radical feminism, lesbian and then black feminism. The strength of the text sits in these chapters, with careful exploration of the differences between Marxist and Socialist feminism, the relationship that the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy and liberal capitalism has with liberal feminism, and the evolution of the status of the personal/public divide so actively challenged in radical feminism. Whelehan also keeps a firm gaze on the general socio-political developments that accompanied each school of thought; ensuring readers get the wider picture of the conditions that provoked feminist groupings of thought.

Part two is a less coherent and more organic exploration of how feminism presented in the 90s and the predicted problems it faces in the future. There’s scathing emphasis on the rise of liberal feminists like Naomi Wolf. The author’s tone changes here, her pen growing more critical and harsh as if registering her own disappointment with the refusal of modern feminist theorists to confront patriarchy.

A notable omission in her discussion on the evolution of thought is the French psychoanalysts like Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous. For me, this highlights the US and UK focus of her canvas. Asian and European thinkers are barely mentioned, despite the explosion of feminist critique in Japan in the late eighties and nineties.

Overall, an accessible journey through the main Anglo schools of thought in second wave feminism.

Whelehan, I. (1995.). Modern Feminist Thought: From Second Wave to 'Post Feminism'. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.

What is a writer's life?

'Negotiating with the dead' by Margaret Atwood

Will this book teach you how to write? No, it won't. Instead it challenge how you see writers. Atwood takes us on an erudite trip through the history of the roles we've expected writers to play, detailing the shift from oral storytelling to the romantic cult of the writer to postmodern equivalent of high art aesthete. With humour and candour, she debates the issue of a writer's duality. Can scribes produce great books and still do the grocery shopping? If so, how do we write books and still afford to buy that grocery shopping? Do writers live lives of constant passion or do they write the life they dare not live?

Atwood peppers her discussion with stretches of autobiography and anecdotes from her own history. Of particular interest is her sketching of the Canadian poetry scene of the 50s and 60s. For me, this functioned as an illuminating backdrop to her exploration of the differences between the work the writer creates and the image of the writer created by the work. In a small economy, writers are never just writers. Yet as readers we feel cheated by the idea that an author must do unwriterly things in order to write.

These unwriterly things often include academia. In the spirit of this, she launches into a discussion on how the storyteller differs from the writer by borrowing from theorists ranging from Walter Benjamin to Ong and slips in examples from Wilde to Ondaatje to Alice in Wonderland. Writing, she and her favourite theorists' argue, is evidence whereas storytelling is theatre. A storyteller moulds their story in a constant interaction with the audience while a writer does not need to engage with their audience at all if they so choose. Writers feel the pressure to be original, but storytellers are able to utilise stock lines and techniques with impunity and possibly even expectation.

Atwood's work is a swirl of ideas, examples and bursts of colour from her own life. As a result, it feels muddy and circular in parts. It is exactly this element, however, that makes it such an intriguing read.

Communicating psychology

'A Few Short Notes On Tropical Butterflies' by John Murray

Not a crime in sight, but useful character studies.

‘My profession is a shelter and retreat,’ says an aging optomologist in Acts of Memory/Wisdom of Man’.

John Murray’s collection of 8 stories are peopled with characters who hide from the difficulties of life by immersing themselves in their obsessions. Rather than deal with the emotional disorder surrounding them, they bury their uncertainties in the clinical worlds of science, disease and categorical ordering. There is the surgeon who collects and classifies butterflies, the doctor who tries to put a dent in the chaos of cholera, and the son who tracks his runaway father down in an effort to glue his fragmented family back together.

As writers, we have much to learn about building character and a character’s world from Murray’s stories. His characters deliberately lose themselves in order, pour their energies into creating emotional buffers and cocoons into which they can retreat. These manifestations signal to the reader that the characters are inwardly out of control or unable to deal with the world around them. These glaring contradictions between the characters’ outer and inner worlds let the reader see the characters’ conflicts and issues for themselves.

As devices for communicating the inner crisis of character, Murray’s constructions are highly metaphoric. Yet they are also immediate, colourful, and quirky whilst still being universal. We all know of people who use hobbies as a retreat or meditative space. We may even have done this ourselves. Set against a crumbling outside world or failing family lives, this behavior can indicate a person’s desperate desire to run and hide.

Making deviant characters likeable

'The Burglar Who Liked To Quote Kipling' by Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block’s ‘The burglar who liked to quote Kipling’ is the third read in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series. Block’s Rhodenbarr adventures are unique as they are one of the few literary franchises that sit squarely in the genre of ‘criminal fiction’. Sure, there are other authors who use criminals as their main characters. Elmore Leonard is one of the most notable, except that he rarely revisits the same protagonist. So Block faces a rare writerly challenge – how do you make the reader repeatedly sympathise with a character who functions on the wrong side of the law?

The solution? Make his inability to resist crime an addiction, just as smoking or sex is for some people. Rhodenbarr’s fingers start out with a mission, in this case to steal a rare Kipling for a buyer, but they can’t help straying along the way to pocket a few goodies lying around. Of course, he does make an attempt at restraint when he resists the urge to back a truck up to a house and clean the lot out. But overall, we’re given the message that Bernie’s a victim of a badly wired brain.

Block also swings us over to Bernie’s side by only letting him burgle people who are also crooked. There are no innocent victims of Bernie’s crimes, only those who obtained wealth by deception, who are duplicitous to their partners, who are murderers. Even those who seem innocent, such as the elderly owners of the apartment Bernie tumbles into after he’s been drugged and set up for murder, prove they are not what they seem when they exaggerate the number of goods Bernie steals.

Block extends this finger of blame to the poor bystanders whose cars Bernie steals. They are double parked and hydrant hogging lawbreakers themselves. Despite this, Bernie always make a special effort to return their cars in pristine condition – and with a little extra gas in the tank as a thank you.

So what can we learn as writers from Block’s criminal character? That a reader will cheer on anyone as long as they establish their own set of well justified morals and stick by them in a universe where no one else will. No matter how bad he is, make the world worse.


Block, L. (1979) The burglar who liked to quote Kipling. New York. Dutton.

'Crime Fiction' by John Scraggs

'Crime Fiction' by John Scaggs


An excellent read, the best analysis I've come across so far. It's chronological like most guides, but focuses a lot more on the undercurrents and genre conventions - mirroring, the 'othering' of the criminal, Barthesian readerly/writerly texts and even textual panopticons as well as the usual range of conventions (loner, place as character, street language, flawed characters, the conflict between individual and collective). It moves further than most guides in its examination of the sociological and cultural forces that birthed each stage and subgenre of crime fiction.

Particularly interesting was his section on the police procedural, which he argues emerged from the lawlessness of the hard boiled era as a way of restoring confidence in the collective nature of policing. Yet he argues this evolution still allows for the dual nature of the hero in police procedurals. The hero functions as a team player but still remains the wayward individualist of the hard boiled era.

Scraggs, J. (2005). Crime Fiction. London, Routledge.

'The Captive Muse' by Susan Kolodny

Susan Kolodny's 'The Captive Muse: On Creativity and its Inhibition' is a psychanalytic examination of the reasons writers and artists get blocked. The text and its argument are case studies heavy, with the studies inserted throughout to illustrate the specific events that lead to the blocks, how those blocks manifest and how they were overcome. A worthy read!

Kolodny, S. (2000). The Captive Muse: On Creativity and its inhibition. Connecticut, The Psychosocial Press.

The Modern Loner

'The Power of the Dog' by Don Winslow

A cat and mouse thriller set in Mexico and skips backwards and forwards from the 70s to the present time as it traces the birth, growth and bust of the coke trade into the US and its interaction with US foreign policies to step communism in Latin America. Taken me ages to read and it feels like the length of a phone book!

Some typical crime fiction devices that are present in the narrative:

the hero as loner
The main character, Art Keller, is a half breed Mexican American who feels he belongs to neither culture. Keller finally feels accepted when the CIA take him into the fold but with the end of the Cold War he is reassigned to a CIA unfriendly DEA. Once again he doesn't belong. It's set up immediately that he has few family ties so the reader understands why he is so easily lured into a father-son dependency with a powerful Mexican druglord whom he has grown to call 'uncle' and into brotherhood with the druglord's street smart nephews. As with most heroic journeys, the apprentice is forced to confront his mentor and Art spends much of the novel pursuing the druglord and then the newphews, at the cost of his marriage and colleague's lives. And at the constant risk of his own.

the flawed hero
Keller starts the story in a state of grace - ethical; highly moral; an ex-CIA agent who knows he has to hide his training if he is to find law enforcement work in the more conservative post-cold war world. Yet the closer he gets to capturing the Houdini like druglord, the darker Keller becomes. Soon he is fabricating sources, risking the lives of his underlings and the innocents attached to the drug lords, and taking the law into his own hands.

the streetwise cast of seedy characters
Plenty of Elmore Leonard colour (with a Mexican accent) - the priest who falls in love with a hooker, the Irish Hell's Kitchen gangster/hitman, CIA gman who turns Mafia 'made guy', flamboyant narcocowboys, and of course, the stereotypical hooker with a heart of gold. What's impressive with the drawing of the characters is that each has a lengthly and complex psychological history. Winslow has let these imaginary selves hang out in his head for more than a few beers. We know their explosive lives are going to collide with a crash and can't wait for their tracks to cross.

from a writer's perspective
A number of accomplishments stand out in this work. First is the use of different voices for each of the main protagonists and antagonists. Whilst remaining in third person, each character thinks in different dialects, with sentence constructions that reflect their culture and background. Winslow has clearly spend a long time thinking about these characters in order to make their personalities and socio-cultural identities leap off the page. We meet each when they are in their late teens to early twenties and follow them until the close of the novel, approx twenty-five years after it opens. They are introduced at different stages in the narrative and we live in their minds as they age and weather.

Second is the depth of the plot. We start with simple drug smuggling and end up with an expose of US covert and clothed foreign policies designed to arrest the spread of communism and communist leaders in Latin America. Like all good stories, it starts from a focused point and widens the lens. The poppy field is the trade off for inside information on leftist priests and politicians and the price of using the drug industry's considerable reach to install and keep US-friendly Latino governments in place. So we have events happening quickly that seem to be leading to the simple goal of defeating the drug trade, only to find the classic second act switch of the achievement of the goal leading to deeper problems. The plot offers protagonist Keller ample opportunities to explore the grey moral ground, but as each choice grows darker, he redeems himself by obsessively protecting those whom he has placed in danger. In the final pages, he commits the ultimate act of heroism and is ready to offer his own life. Always just off the page is the sense that the events of the plot are being propelled by Keller's dogged determination to bring down the drug cartel and especially the family that once shielded him.

Winslow, D. The Power of the Dog.