Preparations

Oh, what sweet pleasures go on in service of Film Bin! I will have watched 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai' three times over the course of this weekend: Once listening to the official commentary, once without, and once while recording our own commentary. It's going to be fun, I think, with some great reactions to the preposterousness of it all. Go, Buckaroo, go! It's really an awesome and divisive film that defies convention, embraces cheesiness in a heartfelt manner, and is stupid at numerous points. There shall be a review.

Words are not flowing. It's like being coated in molasses. Argh. It was a strange week. Today I was wandering around Morrisons and picked up 'The Brady Bunch Movie' for two pounds, fighting the impulse the whole time. Really, I can not understand articulation problems as I've been reading a lot this week and that should compensate for too much mathematics or scientific thinking. 'Strong Poison' was a pretty good novel, by Dorothy L Sayers, and Glen Cook's 'Sweet Silver Blues' is proving to be mildly diverting but the stand out novel of recent weeks has been a rereading of 'The Sign of the Four'. That last book was so good as to demand a review of its own. It is just awesome and is perhaps the most significant Sherlock Holmes story of all, yielding just as much Watson story as it does Holmes. Oh, everyone should read it and 'The Speckled Band'.

It probably hasn't featured much on the Quirky Muffin but I am a proper Sherlock Holmes fan and go nowhere without the stories. The first three novellas and the first two sets of short stories are as close to creative perfection as is possible, with the exception of a particularly dull historical interlude in the very first 'A Study In Scarlet'. There is literally nothing to compare to those stories anywhere. Some of the GK Chesterton Father Brown stories are good but fill a different niche, Dashiell Hammett's short stories are awesome but less romantic, and Stanley Ellin did some remarkable pieces but they were more tragic and not detective stories. Conan Doyle created a one-off masterpiece and then eventually milked it for all the living money he could. But every story before he officially resurrected Sherlock Holmes is a gem and cast in gold.

Looking back on memories new and old it is fascinating to note how few sets of stories have really struck home and registered with me. Jasper Fforde's 'Nursery Crimes' books, Sherlock Holmes, David Eddings and his 'Belgariad', Dashiell Hammett, 'The Three Musketeers', 'A Tale of Two Cities'... I was expecting Pratchett's 'Discworld' to be more important but somehow it's more of a bystander in the world of personally important fiction. 'The Seven-Per-Cent Solution' by Nicholas Meyer is good, and the 'Star Trek' adaptations by James Blish are excellent. Actually... those are on a par with the Sherlock Holmes stories. The third season adaptations especially really make you wish more effort had been put into the screen versions. Really, I would recommend the James Blish 'Star Trek' stories, based as they are on early versions of the scripts rather than the polished final products. They are subtly different!

Has that established my mock-literary credentials? No? 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' and 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'. Done deal.

O.

PS On further thought James Blish strikes again when you consider 'Cities In Flight' as a whole. Here endeth the lesson.