CONTINUITY

by Steven Steinbock

Continuity (noun) con·ti·nu·i·ty. 1. logical sequence, cohesion, or connection; 2. a continuous or connected whole; 3. an uninterrupted succession or flow; a coherent whole.

Last week I was reading selections from volume one of The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship (available from The Baker Street Irregulars). It’s a fantastic book, a collection of sixty-six essays and articles of critical analysis of the Sherlock Holmes stories, covering a half-century of scholarship.

The cornerstone of the book (the table of contents even labels it as such) is an 1912 essay by Ronald Knox, the same man who gave us The Decalogue of Detective Fiction. What struck me as I read Father Knox’s piece was how early – during the lifetime of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – readers were concerned with the continuity of the stories.

Did Sherlock Holmes spend only two years at college? Did he study at Oxford or Cambridge? Was detection a hobby – a game – for Holmes, or was it his livelihood? If his knowledge of literature is nil, why does he sometimes quote the classics? Were there, in fact, two Watsons? These are some of the questions that Knox and subsequent scholars ask. There have been voluminous studies done of which stories occur in which order.

Father Knox was a very clever and witty man, and had a well-tuned sense of humor. His concerns were voiced with his tongue inserted in his cheek. (The “scholars” to whom he refers are all nonsense names). But one wonders if his tongue was inserted only partway. Readers of fiction – series fiction in particular – are often concerned with chronology and continuity. The Baring-Gould Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1967) even reordered the entire canon in what the editor decided was the correct chronology. (Les Klinger’s recent three-volume set put the Canon back in the order that the stories first came out in book form).

Continuity didn’t matter to readers of “The Hardy Boys” or before that, the Dime Novels about Dick and Frank Merriwell. People may read the “Nero Wolfe” novels in the order that Stout wrote them, but not because the characters changed. Perry Mason might have been a little more devious in the early novels, but aside from that, you could probably shuffle a stack of Erle Stanley Gardner novels and read then in any order one wishes without concern for continuity.

Gross discontinuity is a sin in the world of fiction. No question about it. But sometimes I think the modern urge to establish continuity smacks of OCD. In the case of great bodies of literature – be it the Bible, the Sherlock Holmes canon, or the universe of DC comic book superheroes – fundamentalists insist on putting everything in order and rationalizing away any seeming inconsistency. Each day of the six days of Creation was actually eons long. Hal Jordan and Alan Scott were both superheroes called “Green Lantern,” but in alternate parallel universes. The Holmes stories that contain inconsistencies were written by a Deutero-Watson.

Part of me wants to throw up my hands and yell, “They’re stories!” But another part of me is just as guilty.

It’s sloppy editing when a character in a book has blue eyes in one chapter and green eyes later in the book. I discovered a flaw in my own book (work in progress) when a character commented about something that she didn’t learn until later in the same chapter. On film and television, it’s sloppy when a character walks into a shop wearing a striped necktie, but the interior scenes have him with polka dots, or has a bruise or cut in one scene that has miraculously healed in the next.

I don’t know if there are many other “Fringe” viewers among the Criminal Brief readership. I happen to like the show. But they made a horrible blunder when a certain character appeared in the eleventh episode of Season Two even though he died at the beginning of the same season. I, and many other viewers, thought it was the beginning of a bizarrely twisted storyline (which was the case later that year). It was eventually explained that the episode was a “filler” piece left over from the previous year.

THE SIGN OF THREE

I’m reading another non-fiction book about Sherlock Holmes. This one, edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok, looks at the Great Detective through the lens of the philosophy of C.S. Peirce and vice versa. It’s good, but it’s slow-going. I’ll report more when I’m further along.

WHY IS THIS NIGHT. . . ?

Speaking of continuity, a few days from now I’ll be standing at the metaphoric shores of the Red Sea with Moses and Miriam and the rest of the mixed multitude as we cross the sea and come out dry and free and eating Matzah for eight days. See you on the other side of the sea.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

I almost forgot to mention. If our gentle readers care to be gentle listeners, stop by the EQMM/AHMM Podcast Page where you can find short stories out of your favorite magazines being read by your favorite writers.

The newest story is Doug Allyn’s “Famous Last Words” being read by me. Please keep in mind that I’m not a professional voice-artist or narrator. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like it. My son, Sam, after listening to the first three minutes, said, “Dad, you should leave it to the professionals.”

What makes this particular podcast unique is not my reading, but Doug’s singing! Doug Allyn wrote and performed the music that introduces the story.