Tag Archives: Arthur Conan Doyle

Invoking the Sanity Clause

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Fiorello: Hey, wait, wait. What does this say here, this thing here?
Driftwood: Oh, that? Oh, that’s the usual clause that’s in every contract. That just says, uh, it says, uh, if any of the parties participating in this contract are shown not to be in their right mind, the entire agreement is automatically nullified.
Fiorello: Well, I don’t know…
Driftwood: It’s all right. That’s, that’s in every contract. That’s, that’s what they call a sanity clause.
Fiorello: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Clause!

The first film that the Marx Brothers made for MGM, A Night at the Opera is on my list of top-5 films. The scene above never fails to brighten my mood.

I am invoking the Sanity Clause on my participation in the Art of the Novella Reading Challenge. Thirteen books down, I am beyond Passionate. With the last novella, I reached my delight ceiling and this challenge began to feel less like fun and more like hard slog. For the rest of the month I’ll be cheerleading Frances in her continued attempt to read all 42 novellas in the series.

The thirteen books I read for the Art of the Novella Reading Challenge were:

  1. Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
  2. First Love by Ivan Turgenev
  3. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain
  4. The Duel by Joseph Conrad
  5. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
  6. My Life by Chekhov
  7. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson
  8. Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance by Sholem Aleichem
  9. The Devil by Tolstoy
  10. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  11. The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy
  12. The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl by Italo Svevo
  13. Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
Two of the thirteen I disliked, and two I thought first-rate. The others brought pleasure. There are some brilliant stories in the remaining twenty-nine novellas, which I look forward to reading at a more leisurely pace. For now, having digested thirteen new stories and many more memorable characters, I have binged on fiction. It is time for a little poetry, some diaries perhaps and non-fiction.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Echoes. A convict on the moors. Inevitable memories of a better story: Great Expectations. But the location of The Hound of the Baskervilles is infinitely more haunted than the marshes of London and Kent. I have walked across Dartmoor, one of my favourite places, unchanged since Doyle placed his hound there. It is not hard to conjure a fire-breathing hound, or places where prisoners of malicious intent could hide for ever.

I grew away from Doyle’s absurd Sherlock Holmes stories, and their improbable coincidences, whilst still in my pre-nage years, but it is easy to get sucked in. Enjoyable yarns, of a sort best read aloud on a winter’s night, by fireside. No plot summary is needed for The Hound of the Baskervilles, the story is known to all, regardless of whether we have read the story, or seen one of the many film adaptations. It is Dartmoor that is the true hero of Doyle’s tale.

Echoes:

H: ‘It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without posessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.’
He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure.
H: ‘I am afraid, my dear W. that most of your conclusions were erroneous.’

My own adaptation of the Holmes-Watson banter, but reminiscent of Lars Iyer’s book, Spurious.

[Read as part of Frances’s and Melville House’s The Art of the Novella Reading Challenge.]