Category: Books

Previously unknown Agatha Christie story found

Books, Modern(ish)

It’s called The Capture Of Cerberus. Christie wrote it in 1939, thinking it would be part of her Labours of Hercules short story series in Strand magazine.

Publishers turned it down, probably because there’s a rather unfortunate German dictator in there and Poirot has to solve the mystery of who shot him.

The Capture Of Cerberus (she wrote a completely different short story with the same title in 1947) revolves around a dictator called August Hertzlein, who is clearly Adolf Hitler.

In the course of the plot, Christie expresses the naive hope that Hitler could have been converted to Christianity and begun preaching love and peace.

There really were people in the Thirties who believed this. One of them was Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group, a hugely influential movement which has gone under various titles, including Moral Rearmament and Festival Of Light.

The story was found in her longhand notebooks by John Curran, a Christie enthusiast and author in his own right.

You can read the Hertzlein excerpt in the Daily Mail. (It begins about abruptly with a bold paragraph about a quarter of the page down.) The short story will be serialized in subsequent Saturday editions.

The whole of Cerberus and The Mystery of the Dog’s Ball, another unpublished story Curran found in Christie’s attic, will be published along with her notebooks in Curran’s latest book.

Incidentally, don’t believe the Mail’s gloss that Poirot’s ever so mild expressions of horniness might have scared off the publishers. His attraction to flamboyant redheads of dubious morality — the Countess Vera Rosakoff in particular — is a recurring theme in Poirot stories.

Some famous people on the classics

Ancient, Books, Modern(ish)

Forbes magazine is promoting a book Steve Forbes and some other guy wrote about the commonalities between leaders in the ancient world and leaders today. I know, I know… Dorky and vainglorious, I’m sure. It’s not on my Amazon wishlist, suffice it to say.

However, in the process of promoting it they’ve interviewed some luminaries from various fields asking them what effect the ancients have had on them. Now that’s good reading. (Scroll down to the list of “Leaders on the Classics” to read the interviews.)

From author Rita Mae Brown:

Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

There hasn’t been a day in my life since I started Latin in ninth grade that I haven’t benefited by the lives of the ancients. Yesterday Seneca contributed to my success. I’d cut my leg and didn’t much feel like going to work. Seneca wrote, “Scorn pain, either it goes away or you do.” I went to work.

Greeks or Romans?

All those years when I stood alone, the example of Horatio at the bridge pulled me through. The nod goes to the Romans.

Rita’s a girl after my own heart.

From Teller, of Penn & Teller (yes, he does speak):

Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

I make my living humbly, doing live shows. Western theater hasn’t changed very much since the Greeks invented it. It’s still very primitive: A bunch of people watch some other people tell stories. So when I first read Aristotle’s Poetics in college–especially his very nuts-and-bolts dissection of what makes a sound plot rich in ironic surprises–this changed everything I subsequently did. I often laugh that would-be writers spend a fortune on specious screenwriting seminars when they could get the real goods from Aristotle with a quick Web search.

That’s the book The Venerable Jorge poisoned in The Name of the Rose to keep people safe from he sin of laughter, so you know it has to be good.

The British Library “mislays” 9,000 books

Books, Medieval, Modern(ish), Social policy

Over 9,000 actually, ranging from medieval treatises to first editions of 20th century novels. Library officials think they’re just lost in the stacks, not stolen or removed from the premises.

One item, an essay entitled Of the Lawful and Unlawful Usurie Amongest Christians, by 16th-century German theologian Wolfgang Musculus, is valued by the library at £20,000, and has not been seen for almost two years. Others are precious only to a specialist market, such as a set of tables of 1930s London cab fares, or the 1925 souvenir history of Portsmouth Football Club.

Although the library has not listed any value for thousands of the books, a quick Guardian tot-up of the market price of nine collectible volumes came to well over £3,000 – including £1,300 for a first edition of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891, missing from the library’s shelves since 1961. […]

Most of the losses are 19th and 20th century texts, including first editions of novels by Charles Dickens and John Updike, although many older books have also vanished, including a 1555 edition of 12th-century Jewish scholar Moses ben Maimon’s Letter on Astrology, missing since 1977, and a 17th-century guide to Rome.

Many of the books turned up missing in and around 1998, the year the library moved from the British Museum to St Pancras, so it’s very possible they were put on the wrong shelves in the confusion of the move.

Still, some of these have been missing for decades. You can declare a missing person dead after 7 years. How long before they admit that the first edition of Dorian Gray is gone for good?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Books

Jane Austen was a great writer, sure, but I think we can all agree there was a severe paucity of zombies in her oeuvre.

Now, thanks to Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith, this historic injustice will finally be redressed.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

The edition will also include zombified illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock, the illustrator of Austen’s original editions.

Yes, of course I have pre-ordered it. And now so will you, don’t deny it.

Writer’s Rooms

Books, Modern(ish)

There’s a neat article in the Guardian with wonderful pictures and descriptions of the rooms in which some well-known British writers past and present have put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

Roald Dahl’s writing shedRoald Dahl’s raggedy little shack brought a tear to my eye, because on the walls you can see letters from schools and fans that he saved for years. I sent him a letter when I was in 5th grade and got the most wonderful personal reply from him. The 5th grade students the year after wrote him when the teacher was reading “The Witches”, and he answered them too.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm’s room is another favorite of mine. It’s layered in books and papers, and Hobsbawm’s description is endearing as hell.

Some of the shelves visible on the picture behind the two desks contain books on subjects I still work on: nationalism, the history of banditry. Most of them, however, are filled with the foreign editions of my books. Their numbers amaze and please me and they still keep coming as new titles are translated and some fresh vernacular markets – Hindi, Vietnamese – open up. As I can’t read most of them, they serve no purpose other than as a bibliographic record and, in moments of discouragement, as a reminder that an old cosmopolitan has not entirely failed in 50 years of trying to communicate history to the world’s readers. And as an encouragement to go on while I still can.

:love: