English Mysteries Club discussion

I hated Sherlock Holmes stories from the first time my mom read "The Speckled band" to me as a child. Snakes can't hear. Everyone knows that. Whistling can not summon a snake even in the absurd scenario that you could train something with the brain capacity of a serpent. They feel vibrations, so maybe if the bad guy tapped on the ground it could have made slightly more sense…also a snake can't climb up a rope. They have no legs or hands. They can climb stiff things such as branches. To top it all off, they certainly can not drink milk. No snake would ever consider doing so, and i knew that much just from second grade science class. Too bad Conan Doyle didn't care enough about the drivel he was writing to do ten minutes of research if he was that ignorant.To top it all off….why the devil did that woman stutter "the speckled band"??? Why the HELL wouldn't she have just said "SNAKE" ? What she didn't know what a snake was? She never read the Bible? Never seen a Garter snake? Sherlock the show is even worse. I watched the first season, and sort of ignored the bullshit. But in the second season, i got as far as "His Last Vow" and it was so foolish, i couldn't go on. You can't blackmail people if you have no PHYSICAL proof. If you don't have the letters the lady senator's hubby wrote to an underage woman…then what does it matter if you can remember what they said? Its just an empty accusation.And Magnussen's Appledore was all in his head. Sherlock didn't have to kill the guy. He just had to let people know that he had no physical proof of ANYTHING. Thats so obvious. When will writers actually develop brains?

There's something in what you say; but not much. I sympathize with you when it comes to television (which has always been lightly held to account when it comes to logic). But as far as mystery writing itself; you're tarring a vast genre with a pretty broad, black, brush. Even if you made a career out of this personal pique of yours I doubt you could come up with more than a smattering of examples.

These dishes you just presented: more savory because of the heat emanating from them, than their contents.

(1) Snakes and rope. So are you saying tree snakes can't climb jungle vines? What's the difference between a vine and a rope?

(2) Interesting point about Julia failing to identify the culprit with the correct term, 'snake'. I will grant you some righteousness here. But one could argue that snakes are rare in England and that a young English lady might indeed never have come across one. That same young woman, awakened abruptly in a dark bedroom (by a sharp prick) and then feeling something wrapped tightly around her head ..fumbling to light a candle..maybe only glimpsing the color/pattern of the snake before it released its hold..she might be excused for not having her wits about her.


(3) Milk. Yes, correct. A point for you there.

(4) Hearing. Yes, it's true about the lack of external auditory organs in snakes. You're right.

But remember: Conan Doyle often brought in exotic, villainous elements from remote parts of the British Empire about which he only knew a few basic facts. His readers probably knew a lot less. So he 'winged it' for the sake of the story. It's not worth a crucifixion. It didn't happen often that he fumbled (as he did in 'Speckled Band').

It's also not asking too much that the audience yield up 'a little generosity' --a little 'leeway'-- towards the writer for the sake of being their being entertained. The author is exerting a lot of effort, after all.

Overall: I feel you're missing the whole point of mysteries which is the enjoyment of the whole, rather than worrying about each individual part.

Remember what humorist James Thurber said about men who insist on "facts, facts, and only facts". They don't enjoy life very much. You find them sitting alone at parties, scowling.

Although snakes lack an external ear or ear drum, their skin and bones pick up vibrations and transmit them to a functional inner ear. It was once believed that snakes could only detect vibrations transmitted through the ground, but is now known that they can indeed pick up even airborne sounds this way.

It is apparently believed, or was in the past believed, in India that snakes did drink milk. It's not true, but it's not unreasonable for Doyle to have run across the myth and, since snakes are not common pets in England and he may well never have seen a snake drinking anything, to have believed the myth since those from India should know about snakes, shouldn't they?

http://www.toxicologycentre.com/Engli...

Well said, Feliks.

The information about snakes from all three of you is interesting.

heh heh. Thanks. Yeah, need to cool him down (the OP) somewhat. Enjoyable flecks of spittle though, I must say. I like to see anyone agitated these days; its better than this disturbing 'media coma' everyone seems to dwell in. I applaud someone who complains aloud.

I thought this might apply to this discussion. Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night. "I'm always getting mixed up myself," admitted Harriet. "I've never yet succeeded in producing a plot without at least six major howlers. Fortunately, nine readers out of ten get mixed up too, so it doesn't matter. The tenth writes me a letter, and I promise to make the correction in the second edition, but I never do. After all, my books are only meant for fun; it's not like a work of scholarship." We can assume maybe that this is how Dorothy Sayers felt about it.

Ellen wrote: "I thought this might apply to this discussion. Harriet Vane in Gaudy Night. "I'm always getting mixed up myself," admitted Harriet. "I've never yet succeeded in producing a plot without at least si..."

Should note that Harriet Vane is a writer of detective fiction.

I'm not sure Sayers thought that way about her work. She was a very serious scholar, and my sense is that she brought that mind to her Lord Peter writing. In Five Red Herrings, for example, her description of the countryside is spot on, as is her attention to the schedules of the trains that run through it. In the Nine Tailors, I'm told by those who understand change ringing that she has it all exactly right. I think she was pretty accurate in her writing, though of course any author, however careful, is capable of making mistakes.

Feliks wrote: "...I like to see anyone agitated these days; its better than this disturbing 'media coma' everyone seems to dwell in."

This comment made me laugh. And it's so true! A little bracing umbrage won't do any of us any harm.

Interesting comment from Sayers. It is fatally easy to miss logical inconsistencies, though I'm sure most mystery writers try very hard to avoid them.

I hope the OP doesn't stop his rant with crime shows. Lot more TV territory to cover. I'm more than willing to listen to him harangue Gilligan's Island for its breaking of the rules of climatology, meteorology, volcanism, aerodynamics, marine science, and zoology.

Feliks wrote: "I hope the OP doesn't stop his rant with crime shows. Lot more TV territory to cover. I'm more than willing to listen to him harangue Gilligan's Island for its breaking of the rules of climatology..."

LOL. Absolutely.

After Gilligan's Island please watch all seasons of LOST and then report back on ... you know ... whatever that show was really about.

One can, can one not, get truly mesmerised by one's own vast knowledge? Of COURSE Conan Doyle made mistakes! What writer, author, scrivener does not?! However, "experts" who analyze and negatively criticise are often MORE prone to doing so.

In the truly incredible Jeremy Brett-starring series on BBC, even with all of the research that the "other" John Madden and his fellow producers and directors did, in the very case criticized in the opening comment of this string, they flubbed. There ARE cheetahs in India, have been for millennia. Also, as noted in another post above, what snakes do and do not eat, how they behave, and the physical capabilities they own, common and not-so-common, are NOT commonly known in grammar school science classes, lessons. The physical attributes of many different types of wildlife which we associate with "hearing," "sight," "smell," etc. are very often accomplished using VERy different physiological mechanisms, and usually MUCH more sensitive than our own senses.

If you demand absolute precision and accuracy in all that you read, hear, and watch, I am afraid that you will wind up blocking out most of what YOUR senses would take in. Fallacies exist not only in fiction, but in the many provinces of "science."

There's something in what you say, of course. An even -tempered call for moderation is always welcome.

p.s. I thought cheetahs were only in India because they were brought there; not because they were native to that subcontinent. Are its origins not African?

Leslie wrote: "Although snakes lack an external ear or ear drum, their skin and bones pick up vibrations and transmit them to a functional inner ear. It was once believed that snakes could only detect vibrations ..."

No they don't. Snakes can not hear. I looked it up. They also can not climb ropes, and no, they can't climb a free hanging vine. Look in Wiki if you don't believe that. I love Gilligans Island, actually. Its Conan Doyle thats useless. The whole point of Gilligans island is comedy, which they deliver. The whole point of a murder mystery is the details of the murder. So if a guy kills someone by training a snake( impossible) by rewarding it with milk( impossible) and wasn't caught because no one noticed a snake bite( completely impossible, a snake bite would cause severe swelling and discoloration, the bite marks would be oozing and red.so everyone would know what Julia died from) then you don't have anything left. The murder in the murder mystery doesn't work.
Look at Wikipedis regarding snakes and hearing, they can feel vibrations from the ground. Thats why snake charmers tap their feet, while pretending to charm the snake with the flute. They can not hear any kind of whistling or music. That is simply a fact. The snake wouldn't climb anything on command, it would simply escape, go catch a mouse to eat, and never come back.

Well, if you read it on Wikipedia that naturally settles everything. I must have missed that--did you mention this earlier? This case closed. Hey everyone, he says he read it on Wikipedia. Let's pick up our marbles and go home.

p.s. Oops... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysopelea
Oops... http://phys.org/news/2010-11-snakes-r...

Feliks wrote: "Well, if you read it on Wikipedia that naturally settles everything. I must have missed that--did you mention this earlier? This case closed. Hey everyone, he says he read it on Wikipedia. Let's pi..."

Feliks, I think you owe Mari a public apology.

I agree that Wikipedia is not always a perfectly accurate authority, but that sort of offensive, sneering response is uncalled for.

The basic philosophy of my group here on Goodreads is to "disagree without being disagreeable," and it makes for very productive and constructive discussions. I know that's not officially the rule here, but perhaps it should be.

In any case, please issue an apology. Assuming, of course, that you agree that you were out of line. If you don't agree, then certainly don't apologize, but it will tell me, and perhaps others here, something valuable to know about you.

And, by the way, Mari is a she, not a he.

This is the most fun conversation going!

Feliks wrote: "I like to see anyone agitated these days; its better than this disturbing 'media coma' everyone seems to dwell in. I applaud someone who complains aloud."

I agree completely. Passion is a missing ingredient in today's society.

I never cared for 'The Speckled Band' as a story, but I didn't know all that about snakes either. Good to learn something new. :)

To me, Feliks's tone isn't demeaning or insulting (of course I'm not Mari) -- but then too, if you're going to post a passionate rant, you should expect a like response.

Mari wrote: "Leslie wrote: "Although snakes lack an external ear or ear drum, their skin and bones pick up vibrations and transmit them to a functional inner ear. It was once believed that snakes could only det..."

I did not say that snakes can hear, I said that they can sense vibrations. See the article in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2012 entitled "Hearing with an atympanic ear: good vibration and poor sound-pressure detection in the royal python, Python regius"

Totally agree, elizabeth

Everyman wrote: "Feliks, I think you owe Mari a public apology..."

What? You're kidding, right?

Everyman wrote: "...a public apology..."

But we're not 'in public' and we're not in a freshman-debate-club. This is the internet.

Everyman wrote: "I agree that Wikipedia is not always a perfectly accurate authority, but that sort of offensive, sneering response is uncalled for..."

Wikipedia is of course, a joke. Its nonsense. By definition, its a user-manipulated website, it is not any kind of academic resource to be taken seriously. It has no credibility whatsoever. Its a convenience to 'cite' in an internet chat only because that is what the internet restricts us to.

But that was not what drew my facetious response. I'm surprised to hear you feel I 'sneered'--but in any case, the target of my humor was not Wikipedia but Mari, themselves.

I appreciate your concern for frail bruised womanhood, but this is approaching absurdity. Does the belligerent Mari look like they need an apology? In what other style should I have reacted to their oddball style of debate? I mean, do you really think there's nothing *goofy* or *quirky* in their highly-intransigent speeches?

Everyman wrote: "The basic philosophy of my group here on Goodreads is to "disagree without being disagreeable," and it makes for very productive and constructive discussions..."

But as far as I can tell, this is not your group. In any group you do moderate, I would certainly honor your sentiments. You clearly have a strenuous, zealous sense of what are 'good internet manners'--and were I under your rule, I'd certainly adhere to those ideals.

I actually come from a school of much 'harder knocks'. One might say I'm a product of the most heated arenas the internet has to offer. Even so, I was hardly 'in conflict' in this instance with Mari.

Gentle sarcasm--making a guffaw--is never an 'attack' and doesn't require anyone's apology. It isn't that I don't think I did something wrong, I'm not being defensive: there was nothing wrong. Not by any measure.


Everyman wrote: "In any case, please issue an apology..."

Let the group moderator ask me. Any group where my last reply to Mari would be said to be 'too excessive' is certainly not a group I should be in, and if the moderator here agrees with you I would immediately depart. I have red blood in my veins, not milk. I'm a man, not a eunuch or a friar.

Everyman wrote: "Assuming, of course, that you agree that you were out of line..."

No, of course I don't.

Everyman wrote: "If you don't agree, then certainly don't apologize, but it will tell me, and perhaps others here, something valuable to know about you..."

You can draw any conclusion you wish. If you really think some such notion like that --laid at my door--has any validity, I wouldn't know what to say. It'd be beneath you, to do so. You're a member of all the super-intellectual groups on Goodreads, yet you'd make hollow/empty/baseless personal assumptions about the character of a total stranger ...over the internet?

Anyway, thank you Everyman. Always happy to listen to whatever you've got to say, but really don't know where you're coming from in this case. You actually felt my little snicker to Mari so virulent that it warranted you stepping in to say something? As if a crime was going down? Good grief.


2

Elizabeth wrote: "To me, Feliks's tone isn't demeaning or insulting (of course I'm not Mari) -- but then too, if you're going to post a passionate rant, you should expect a like response...."

Thanks. I'd really like to know, what is it about my tone-of-voice or delivery-of-sarcasm which grates on some people and makes them style me as a miscreant? In this exchange, Mari is plainly the individual with the chip-on-their-shoulder. They are near-ranting, insistent, strident, stringent, hot-under-the-collar, umbrageous. So why am I getting blame? Even for Goodreads, this is bizarre-o.

Jean-Luke wrote: "Feliks has been removed form the group. I made an effort to tolerate him, we all express ourselves differently after all, but he has become absolutely rude and intolerable. I apologize that I let h..."

I'm glad I got to this post before I wasted time responding to his diatribe.

I don't normally approve of banning people, but in this case, I'm glad you acted as you did.

Thanks.

Leslie wrote: "Although snakes lack an external ear or ear drum, their skin and bones pick up vibrations and transmit them to a functional inner ear. It was once believed that snakes could only detect vibrations ..."

I am sure you are going to hate me too, but facts are facts and I have to speak up. I hate to rack up the muck. But no, snakes can't hear. They just can not. There is no new discovery. Unless its extremely recent, in which case, it would be easy to find reference, and there is none I looked. If you know of where you read of this new discovery? ….There are perfectly good citation on Wiki. I checked the references listed. They are legit. Mari pointed out that they feel vibrations, but that is a limited thing. They can't feel vibrations in the ground, and they SMELL by flicking their tongue. Don't get mad at the messanger! But Mari is 100 percent correct. Also, they can not climb. They can't climb a rope, nor a vine, they can not wrap around a rope like you seem to think. Even worse news; I don't think it would be possible for a grown English woman to not know what a snake looks like! There are plenty snakes in England, tho not poison. Garter snakes are all over. Also, if she ever read the illustrated Bible story, she would know. I have never known of anyone living anywhre that could not identify such a common, famous animal. That would be like saying a grown up that lives in the city would not know what a cow looks like if they saw it. Its completely unlikely, as to be impossible. Sorry.

Everyman wrote: "It is apparently believed, or was in the past believed, in India that snakes did drink milk. It's not true, but it's not unreasonable for Doyle to have run across the myth and, since snakes are not..."

The myth was most likely started by this story, don't you think. You will notice that article doesn't say anything about when or where the myth came from. The many mistakes Mari mentions seem pretty glaring, and mostly true. The problem is that these mistakes are not just colorful window dressing. They are the very heart of the story. And most English people know what snakes are, and what they do. Snakes exist everywhere* except in ireland, they say) It is a Mystery; So the heart is the crime, and the clues that solve it. A bowl of milk? A little leash? Absurd. No one would look at those and go…of course, its a serpent that has been trained with milk and a whistle….because neither of those are possible activities for snakes. The crime as described is impossible to have happened. The clues are equally ludicrous. Seriously? "speckled band" ? What would she have said if it were a dog? "furry bench with ears"? So, my question is what does that leave? The interaction of Holmes and Watson? Its not like the motive is particularly interesting. The doctor needed money, as he had animals,m and the gypsies depending on him for a place to live…which doesn't make him abhorrent in my eyes. If anything more deserving then the simpering step daughters. On top of that Watson shoots a cheetah with no remorse, beats the snake, and finally they shoot it even though they could have trapped it. I don't like animal haters, so I really don't see how you would enjoy this, given that the mystery is bunk. That is what I thought when I read it.

The title of this thread caught my attention when activity resumed here.

I totally agree there is a lack of logic in Sherlock Holmes. He is totally unbelievable and in real life probably intolerable!

But this is fiction and fiction has different requirements. Without his idiosyncrasies and queer behavior, Sherlock Holmes would be boring.

Actually I think I might put Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot in the same category as Sherlock Holmes. They are superb as literary characters, but possibly annoying in real life.

Thanks for all the comments! Fun discussion!

I think the real issue for me with errors is that they throw me out of the story. I mean, if I'm reading along and see something I know is untrue, it always jars me out of whatever world I'm in, and it's very irritating. Big errors in logic or huge plot holes do the same thing, and I tend not to scrutinize plots in mysteries terribly closely, so they have to be pretty huge to be disturbing.

The worst book I read like that was a mystery where the main character was a librarian (as I am) and there were many, many errors about libraries and librarians and huge plot holes and a lot of very unconvincing characters. I would have stopped reading it but I was on a plane (I bought the book in the airport) and it was the only book I had. It wasn't one of the popular series with librarian characters, but I can't tell you the title because after I finished the book and got off the plane, I actually threw the book in the trash.

I've noticed that TV mysteries feel free to include at least 1 jolting improbability, apparently on the assumption we're all so caught up in the story that we won't mind, & drama's more important than accuracy, & if a character says it convincingly, we won't notice it's nonsense. So much easier on a tight deadline than fixing the problem! But for me, as a writer obsessed with making my mysteries accurate & plausible, it's annoying--not least because it gives legitimacy to half-assed work.

Let me play devil's advocate. Some errors grate on you and some are ok in a literary sense. How do you distinguish between the two and where is the line between the two. If it is pure facts, a literary piece of work may be boring. But if fraught with error and implausibilities, that is equally annoying and off putting.

This discussion took some crazy turns. My 2 cents: I watch tv passively for the most part. Unless it's a really outrageous mistake, I just enjoy the show.