Tous mes voeux pour cette nouvelle année à vous et à vos proches; puisse-t-elle vous apporter tout ce que vous souhaiter... et vous épargner le reste.
I wish you and your family and friends a happy new year, complete with everything you may want and more.
Michael Sims on amateur detectives:
"This tradition goes through Miss Marple and Murder She Wrote — that amateurs would have this arcane, genius talent as if they were musicians or mathematicians or something. It's a hilarious idea if you stop and think about it."
Well, not really. The amateur detective appeared at a time - the nineteenth century - which saw many instances of amateurs/outsiders outwitting the professionals. Darwin was not a biologist. Pasteur was not a doctor. Early egyptologists/archaelogists like Maspero or Schliemann were self-taught. The idea that an amateur detective could challenge and outperforming the coppers thus made sense, especially given everyone's low regard for the official police.
Romanticism was also a key influence, with its notion that the Poet as some kind of a superman who can feel and see things invisible to mere mortals. Dupin is as much an embodiment of that ideal (and maybe more so) than of reason. Same goes for Holmes who, for all his professed rationalism, looks and behaves much like your standard romantic.
Of course in our highly specialized and less than romantic times, the whole stuff sounds, in Sims's words, "hilarious". But looking absurd now doesn't mean it was absurd then.
Besides, evaluating the "greatness" of a detective is way trickier than seems firsthand for lack of an universal system of measurement. Every fictional sleuth is the greatest one in his own universe, being ideally and uniquely suited to solve the problems he is submitted. Ellery Queen's cases are not the same as Dr. Fell which on the other hand are different from, say, Philip Marlowe's and we don't know whether they could switch successfully. Neither can we be sure that Sherlock Holmes could solve the murder of Roger Ackroyd, or Hercule Poirot would escape from Cell 13. Only by having them all existing in a same universe and investigating the same case could we eventually work out who's best.
So in the end when making such lists we're not listing "greatest" detectives so much as those whose exploits most impressed us - and it might then be more helpful to specify which particular "performance" owes them their ranking.
Using this system, who would be your ten favorite detectives?
There are only three, but they're major ones:
Finally overcoming that damn reader's block.
I read so little this year - so little mysteries that is, for I read a lot of comics, the only things not falling from my hands - that for the first time in memory I can't compile a Top 10 - and naming a best book of the year would be meaningless given the low number of candidates*. I sincerely hope for 2012 heralding a return to form.
Blogging on a more regular basis.
Obviously my reader's block didn't help me posting more often. But then it's a historical/theoretical blog, not a journal of my reads, so that excuse doesn't (quite) hold water. In 2012 I'll try to achieve a post at least every two weeks, come what may.
Poster davantage en français.
Je suis français et, à en croire les statistiques de ce blog, un certain nombre de mes lecteurs le sont également. Il serait donc logique que je m'exprime davantage dans notre belle langue. C'est donc mon troisième objectif pour la nouvelle année.
Easier said than done, but who knows...
* Still, if I was to name the best mystery I read this year, the honour would go to Albert Harding's "Death on Ravens' Scar". I know nothing of this author and Internet seems not to know much either, but it's an excellent book with a very good plot and equally good setting and characterization. Too bad Harding apparently never wrote anything else.