Review: How Holmes did it – and we can too!

Review of: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Author: Maria Konnikova

Publisher: Viking Penguin

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: A

If your literary heroes include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterly creation, Sherlock Holmes, or even if you just drool over Holmes’s latest incarnation as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, you’ll love psychologist Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.  

Brilliant thinking, she assures us, is not a talent we’re born with, but one we can cultivate – “improving our faculty of mindful thought . . . in order to accomplish more, think better, and decide more optimally.” 

 

Sounds daunting, but Konnikova lays out the steps as clearly as Holmes explained his in elucidating to Dr. Watson how he surmised at first glance that the good doctor had recently arrived from Afghanistan, from observation to imagination, to deduction, to making sure our minds remain youthful and resilient for life.

Along the way she provides illustrations from the Holmes canon, particularly lesser known stories such as “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” and “The Adventure of the Priory School,” that sent me in search of the master detective’s complete works. As enticingly as an accomplished fiction writer – after all, she learned from one of the best – Konnikova withholds any story spoilers. 

She traces her own fascination with Sherlock Holmes to childhood, when her father read the stories to his children before bedtime. Through her own book, she drops small clues to a personal mystery she will reveal at the end – unless we’ve paid enough attention to the Holmesian method to winkle it out for ourselves.

What is that Holmesian method? Perhaps we remember (but she’s kind enough to remind us) that Holmes early own described his mind as an attic, which he was careful to stock with only the best materials. 

The concept of the brain as an attic may sound outdated, but Konnikova notes, “Subsequent research on memory formation, retention, and retrieval has . . . proven itself to be highly amenable to the attic analogy,” as she explores “how its structure and content work at every point – and what we can do to improve that working on a regular basis.”

But while singing the praises of mindful, purposeful thought, Konnikova doesn’t forget that the brain behind both Holmes and his lovably doofus sidekick, Dr. Watson, was Doyle himself. As she reminds us in her late chapter, “We’re Only Human,” if Holmes sometimes went astray, how much more likely it was for Doyle to do so also? Hence, his flip in later life from stories about the rationalist detective to obsessions with such paranormal phenomena as ghosts and fairies. She puts Doyle’s fascinations with the irrational in the context of his time, reminding readers of our own fallibility as well. 

I can’t resist adding an additional discussion of Holmesian (and Doylesian) fallibility, in recommending literary professor Pierre Bayard’s reexamination of a classic Holmes tale. In Sherlock Holmes Got it Wrong, Bayard reexamines the great detective’s reasoning in The Hound of the Baskervilles. And I add my deductions about the reasons behind Doyle’s possible blunder in “Look to the femme, not the chien,” at this site. It could be quite a three-pipe problem. 

Wordcraft -- Count down of readers’ favorite posts

With major changes coming to this blog next year, I’m using these last December weeks of Wordcraft to count down readers’ all-time favorite posts. Today’s entry is the second runner-up among most highly viewed pages.

Beginning the first week in January, this blog will drop the Totally Texas posts and change the posting schedule for Wordcraft and Adventure classics. Wordcraft will move to Tuesdays starting January 6, 2015, and Adventure classics will slip down to Fridays starting January 9.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this discussion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, from March 13, 2013, entitled, “Caution: pterodactyl crossing.”

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My family loves dinosaurs. A grandson went to his first grade class’s “career day” program dressed as the paleontologist from “Dinosaur Train.” My daughter measured her foot against the prints in Texas’ Dinosaur Valley state park. And I remember my disappointment as a child when I realized finds of dinosaur eggs were fossils that would never hatch living baby dinos. So Arthur Conan Doyle’s foray into the world of dinosaurs, The Lost World, had to make my reading list.

Actually, my first introduction to the story was a cartoon version, only one among dozens of offshoots inspired by the prolific story. Including of course, Michael Crichton’s only sequel novel.

The debt modern writers owe goes deeper than a T. rex’s footprint. As the late Michael Crichton noted in his introduction to a new edition of the 1912 tale, it “set the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories since that time. The tone and techniques
that Conan Doyle first refined in The Lost World have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day.”

As he did in his pioneering works of detective fiction, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle establishes a larger than life expert, the brilliant, irascible and very eccentric scientist Professor George Challenger. Young journalist Edward Malone plays Watson to Challenger’s Holmes, interpreting the great man’s actions and ideas for the readers of Malone’s newspaper¾ and of course, for us.

When the story opens, Challenger has returned to London from an expedition to South America with the outrageous claim of finding a remote plateau he believes harbors a lost colony of dinosaurs. With Challenger’s photographs and specimens lost in an accident, he has only a sketch in a notebook left to him by dying explorer to support his story. When scientific colleagues demand more proof, an independent expedition with Malone in tow sets out to replicate Challenger’s journey.

Unfortunately for modern readers, reconstruction of dinosaur anatomy and behavior was still in its infancy in the early twentieth century, as you can see from the illustration for this post, a page scan from Conan Doyle’s original edition. Tyrannosaurus rex had received his name around the turn of the century, but still had a reputation for being slow,
cold-blooded, and dim-witted. Even the viciously brainy velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame wouldn’t be discovered until the decade after Conan Doyle’s story.

“Conan Doyle needs a clever antagonist to sustain his narrative,” Crichton wrote, “and with warm-blooded, intelligent dinosaurs still fifty years in the future (he) postulates a race of savage ape-men.” The expedition’s scientists, big-game hunter, and of course, reporter, are barely a match for the atavistic ape-men (“dryopithecus of Java or pithecanthropus” the expedition scientists speculate).

But keep reading for Conan Doyle’s climactic scene of a living pterodactyl set loose in a packed London lecture hall. It’s as outrageously entertaining as any movie show down between T. rex and raptors. Makes me wish that somehow that lonely pterodactyl found its way home.

Conan Doyle’s tale, its copyright extinct as a dinosaur, is available at www.google.books.com/.

The text of Crichton’s introduction is available at www.crichton-official.com/.

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(Next Monday, what’s the first runner-up among readers’ all-time favorite posts? Sorry, you’ll have to wait and see.)

Adventure classics -- Dinosaurs for the kid in all of us

Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton

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I never intended to start this July of science fiction adventures with Michael Crichton’s homage to Arthur Conan Doyle. No, not that Doyle. The Doyle who created super-rational detective Sherlock Holmes. I mean the Doyle of the 1912 adventure, The Lost World (and whose boyishly irascible hero, Professor Challenger, bears more than a passing resemblance to dino entrepreneur John Hammond in the Jurassic Park movies).

Should I have saved a discussion of Jurassic Park the novel until the latest edition of the Jurassic Park movie franchise hits the screens next summer? While I thought about this, giving myself the pleasure of a re-read of Crichton’s cautionary 1990 blockbuster, I was also reading next week’s book, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Actually, I was re-reading Huxley. One of the pleasures of this blog is the excuse it offers to revisit old friends. And Crichton’s laboratory re-creation of extinct dinosaurs reminded me so forcibly of Huxley’s creation of made to order human beings, I determined to run them back to back.

Dinosaurs first: Jurassic Park is ostensibly a cautionary tale about the dangers of genetic engineering, a danger more ominous now than when Crichton first began exploring the idea with a 1983 screenplay.

“The story wasn’t convincing,” Crichton wrote in notes on his official website, www.michaelcrichton.net/. “Finally I decided on a theme park setting, and wrote the novel from the point of view of a young boy who was present when the dinosaurs escaped,“ only to get years of angry reactions from his trusted readers. “Finally, one of the readers said that they were irritated with the story because they wanted it to be from an adult point of view, not a kid point of view. They said, ‘I want this to be a story for me.’”

Luckily for all of us, the adult point of view belongs to Dr. Alan Grant (loosely based on real life paleontologist John Horner), whose wonder at the resurrected dinosaurs is as great as any kid’s.

Lured by the promise of funding for his research, Grant agrees to a weekend visit at the theme park wealthy eccentric John Hammond is constructing on his private island off the shores of Costa Rica. Hammond has also invited Grant’s colleague, Dr. Ellie Sattler; skeptical mathematics genius Ian Malcolm; and an investment lawyer. Most bizarrely, although Hammond knows the park is having problems, he invites his two grandchildren as well, making front runner for clueless grandpa of the year. 

Too bad computer genius Dennis Nedry has chosen this particular weekend to shut down all the park’s power and computer systems so he can pass frozen dinosaur embryos to a corporate espionage agent. Mix in a brewing tropical storm and a pride of vicious velociraptors, and things start to go very, very wrong.

“You’re going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island?” asks mathematician Malcolm. “Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won’t go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is.”

Crichton had never before written novels in series, but Jurassic Park, novel and movie, were so successful he wrote a sequel, The Lost World, paying more explicit homage to Doyle’s version.

Crichton has now gone where all good writers go, but the dinosaurs live on. My complaint? After viewing numerous trailers of movie number four (Jurassic World) on YouTube, I was disappointed not to see baby T. rexes tricked out in the feathers they are now believed to have worn as juveniles. I can only hope the complete movie will correct the omission.

(Next Wednesday -- John Hammond of Jurassic Park thought he had complete control of his engineered dinosaurs. But as we all know, the creatures didn’t read the script. And they’ve spent two of Crichton’s novels and going on four movies exercising their saurian version of free will to escape beyond the reach of human hubris. Can Huxley’s engineered human beings escape as well? Stay tuned for the next adventure classic, Brave New World.)

Adventure classics -- Look to the femme, not the chien

The Hound of the Baskervilles

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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“From the chamber where she has been locked for hours, the young woman hears shouts and laughter rising from the great dining hall below. . . Her anxiety mounts at the thought of the fate intended for her,” Pierre Bayard writes in his retelling of the legend underlying Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 gothic detective tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

In desperation, the woman climbs out the window of her prison and flees across the moor. Her attacker, Hugo Baskerville, sets his hounds on her track. As she lies dying of fear and exhaustion, her attacker reaches her. Now he becomes the prey, his throat torn out by “a great black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.”

“The thoughts of characters in literature are not forever locked up inside their creators. More alive than many living people, these characters spread themselves through those who read their authors’ work,” Bayard writes.

image: Wikimedia commons

So, with moxie worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself, University of Paris literature professor and psychoanalyst Bayard undertakes to reconstruct the dying woman’s thoughts and trace their influence through Doyle’s book. “There is every reason to suppose that the generally acknowledged solution of the atrocious crimes that bloodied the Devonshire moors simply does not hold up, and that the real murderer escaped justice,” he writes in Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong.

Every Holmes fan knows Doyle killed Holmes in 1893, plunging him over the Reichenbach Falls. But when a friend of Doyle’s told him a corking good story about the legendary Devonshire hound, he realized Holmes was the perfect vehicle for the story. Except that he was dead. Doyle’s solution: set the story in 1888, before Holmes’ death. The idea worked so well Doyle resurrected his legendary detective for real in 1903, when Holmes explained away his supposed suicidal plunge to old pal Dr. Watson.

In the canonical version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the heir to the Baskerville
estate and baronetcy has died under mysterious circumstances. A friend enlists Sherlock Holmes to prevent a similar fate from befalling the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville. Claiming a previous engagement, Holmes sends Watson, who hits on resident lepidopterist, i.e. butterfly chaser, Jack Stapleton--or rather, Stapleton’s mysterious dog--as the murderer. Along the way, Watson notes Stapleton’s alleged sister, the luscious Beryl “a very fascinating and beautiful woman,” but never considers her a suspect. Of course, Holmes fans also know that as a detective, Dr. Watson is a pretty darned good ophthalmologist.

To our surprise as well as professor Bayard’s, when Holmes reappears in the story, he swallows Watson’s theory whole. Like Hercule Poirot to Caroline Sheppard in last week’s post, the usually misogynistic Holmes accords Beryl Stapleton every courtesy. He never checks her alibis, taking all her statements at face value. What gives?

In last week’s post, Bayard offered a reason for Poirot’s atypical behavior. He offers no concrete reason for Holmes’ refusal to consider Beryl, who is actually Stapleton’s wife, as a suspect. But every fan of Doyle
’s can suggest an answer. Since 1897 at the latest, Doyle had been romantically, if not physically, involved with family friend Jean Leckie.

Doyle’s wife Louise was dying of tuberculosis. He was too sensitive to his wife’s
feelings--and to Victorian morality--to parade Leckie openly, his hidden relationship haunted him. Did he realize that Leckie, who became the second Mrs. Doyle, had as much of an agenda as Beryl Stapleton (who we, as well as Bayard, know has designs on Sir Henry)? Was it possible Doyle didn’t want to admit either woman’s agenda, even to himself?

In the end, Bayard ingeniously ties his solution the hope for justice that must have passed through the mind of the dying young woman who started the whole business. But I won’t spoil your enjoyment, either of the original Hound or Bayard’s revisionist version. Get to a library, bookstore or Amazon and weigh the evidence for yourself.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a May of historical fiction with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And argue about what constitutes historical fiction.)

Adventure classics -- Caution: pterodactyl crossing

The Lost World

by Arthur Conan Doyle

#

My family loves dinosaurs. A grandson went to his first grade class’s “career day” program dressed as the paleontologist from “Dinosaur Train.” My daughter measured her foot against the prints in Texas’ Dinosaur Valley state park. And I remember my disappointment as a child when I realized finds of dinosaur eggs were fossils that would never hatch living baby dinos. So Arthur Conan Doyle’s foray into the world of dinosaurs, The Lost World, had to make my reading list.

Actually, my first introduction to the story was a cartoon version, only one among dozens of offshoots inspired by the prolific story. Including of course, Michael Crichton’s only sequel novel.

The debt modern writers owe goes deeper than a T. rex’s footprint. As the late Michael Crichton noted in his introduction to a new edition of the 1912 tale, it “set the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories since that time. The tone and techniques that Conan Doyle first refined in The Lost World have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day.”

image: wikimedia commons

As he did in his pioneering works of detective fiction, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle establishes a larger than life expert, the brilliant, irascible and very eccentric scientist Professor George Challenger. Young journalist Edward Malone plays Watson to Challenger’s Holmes, interpreting the great man’s actions and ideas for the readers of Malone’s newspaper -- and of course, for us.

When the story opens, Challenger has returned to London from an expedition to South America with the outrageous claim of finding a remote plateau he believes harbors a lost colony of dinosaurs. With Challenger’s photographs and specimens lost in an accident, he has only a sketch in a notebook left to him by dying explorer to support his story. When scientific colleagues demand more proof, an independent expedition with Malone in tow sets out to replicate Challenger’s journey.

Unfortunately for modern readers, reconstruction of dinosaur anatomy and behavior was still in its infancy in the early twentieth century, as you can see from the illustration for this post, a page scan from Conan Doyle’s original edition. Tyrannosaurus rex had received his name around the turn of the century, but still had a reputation for being slow, cold-blooded, and dim-witted. And the viciously brainy velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame wouldn’t be discovered until the decade after Conan Doyle’s story.

“Conan Doyle needs a clever antagonist to sustain his narrative,“ Crichton wrote, “and with warm-blooded, intelligent dinosaurs still fifty years in the future (he) postulates a race of savage ape-men.” The expedition’s scientists, big-game hunter, and of course, reporter, are barely a match for the atavistic ape-men (“dryopithecus of Java or pithecanthropus” the expedition scientists speculate).

But keep reading for Conan Doyle’s climactic scene of a living pterodactyl set loose in a packed London lecture hall. It’s as outrageously entertaining as any movie show down between T. rex and raptors. Makes me wish that somehow that lonely pterodactyl found its way home.

Conan Doyle’s tale, its copyright extinct as a dinosaur, is available at
www.google.books.com/.

The text of Crichton’s introduction is available at www.crichton-official.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at another monstrously influential adventure story, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.)

Adventure classics -- Letter found, questions remain

"The Purloined Letter”

by Edgar Allan Poe

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I was probably about ten when I first read Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. I know a collected volume was my companion on the train trip to visit my desperately-ill grandmother that year. And like many things we read as children, I found them very different upon re-reading.

It was embarrassing, for instance, to realize the fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of Poe’s “stories of ratiocination” would have considered me only of average intellect. (Hey -- I was just a kid!)

I was so average at the age of ten, in fact, as to be overwhelmed by Dupin’s brilliant reasoning that the almost equally-brilliant, sinister Minister D-- had hidden the letter in question in plain sight.

Even if you also think you know the story, it rewards another reading. Minister D-- steals an incriminating letter to an “exalted personage” -- apparently the queen -- under her own eyes, to use as blackmail. But the queen dares not confront D-- because, well, her husband also walk in, and the letter definitely isn’t from him.

And despite the inevitability that D-- keeps the letter near him, the secret police have not been able to find it. So the bumbling police prefect tells his friend Dupin, describing in detail the efforts of his force to recover the letter without letting D-- know they’re trying to recover it. A quandary Dupin solves by reasoning and a couple of casual visits to D--,
a close but not dear, acquaintance.

Although Merriam-Webster lists the first use of the word “detective” in 1732, it was not used in the sense of the detective fiction genre when Poe wrote the first of his Dupin stories in 1841. Instead, he preferred the term “ratiocination,” meaning simply, “close reasoning.”

However, despite the occasional use of the reasoning process by other nineteenth century writers such as Wilkie Collins, the genre of “detective fiction” languished until Arthur Conan Doyle revived it with his first Sherlock Holmes story about a detective as unofficial as Dupin in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.

A comparison of the similarities between the Dupin and Holmes stories needs more space than this post allows. Holmes himself appeared sufficiently aware of the similarities to denigrate Dupin as “a very inferior fellow.”

(A view Holmes’ creator Conan Doyle begs to differ with, describing Poe as “to my mind, the supreme original short story writer of all time,” in his literary memoir, Through the Magic Door.)

All of which leaves me with quandaries such as, if the police turned over every page of
every book in Minister D--’s library, why didn’t they also turn over the pages of his letters, including the one hanging, in Dupin’s description, “from a trumpery filigree card-rack of paste-board” ?

Or why did D-- have a letter similar to the exalted personage’s in his pocket when he visited her? And who exactly is the exalted personage meant to be? (I’m voting for Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine -- although definitely not queen of France at the time of Poe’s writing.) And how on earth, while Dupin and the prefect sat in the darkened library of the opening scene, did the prefect find enough light to read a detailed description of the letter?

The story is readily available on the internet, if you want to try your own intellect at solutions.

(Next Friday: When you know dozens of ways to kill people, do you ever think of doing it in real life? To someone you dislike? Agatha Christie apparently did, to the woman who tried to prevent her marriage to Max Mallowan, in Murder in Mesopotamia.)

Adventure classics -- Sherlock's first return

The Sign of the Four

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Considering the uncountable number of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs in the one hundred and twenty-five years since Arthur Conan Doyle published his first story about the “unofficial consulting detective,” it seems wildly improbable that the character almost died stillborn.

But we know what Holmes would say about truth. And the truth is, the first story about him, A Study in Scarlet, was rejected three times before a fourth publisher accepted it in late October 1886. But as mystery writer Daniel Stashower reports in his biography, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, even then, they declined to publish it immediately, “as the market,” they wrote to the author, “is flooded at present with cheap fiction.”

Perhaps in desperation, Conan Doyle sold his entire copyright in A Study in Scarlet for twenty-five pounds. But even after publication in 1887, the story sank almost without notice. Not until 1890, after promising reviews for an unrelated novel, did Conan Doyle resuscitate the detective in The Sign of the Four (under much more favorable terms).

The plot of The Sign of the Four begins with an apparently simple problem that grows to include a search for fabulous stolen treasure and a gruesome “locked room” murder. But the most remarkable -- and unexplained -- mystery is the transformation in Holmes.

From the man of A Study in Scarlet whose knowledge of literature and philosophy was -- to quote narrator Dr. Watson -- “nil,” by the time The Sign of the Four appeared, Holmes had become a reader of antique books and student of the German Romantic movement.

He still remained notable for his emotional detachment -- his latest twenty-first century incarnation is described as a “high-functioning sociopath.” But by his second appearance, he could sympathize to some degree with Dr. Watson’s distress over his
assessment of a family member’s character, based on an examination of the man’s pocket watch.

“I could not have believed that you would have descended to this,” Dr. Watson declares with considerable bitterness in the opening chapter of The Sign of the Four. “You have made inquiries into the history of my unhappy brother. . . .”

Holmes, amazingly, offers an apology. Not for his deductions, but for his insensitivity.

Conan Doyle offered no explanation for the change in Holmes, any more than for Watson’s wandering war wound, which moved over the course of the years from shoulder to leg. But the result of Holmes’ personal growth is, of course, a character with the depth to continue his remarkable adventures for decades to come -- and delight fans into two more centuries.

As Conan Doyle wrote in 1927, nearly forty years after Holmes’ first appearance, “I’ve written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do, but my hand was been rather forced by kind friends who continually wanted to know more.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a month of mysteries with a look at the originator of detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Purloined Letter.”)

Adventure classics -- murder most cozy

Whose Body?

by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Moving to a classic British cozy (and what other nationality did cozy so well?) from last week’s epitome of noir crime fiction is like stepping onto a brightly-lit operetta stage full of patter songs after emerging from a dark tunnel.  Making murder into a comedy as Sayers does, at least in the opening of her introduction to the inimitable Lord Peter Wimsey, seems, at first glance, offensive.  But even The Maltese Falcon, with its cast of grotesque eccentrics and risible opening scene of an adulterer unable to escape the embraces of a now-unwanted lover, is only a small step away from comedy.  And in the morality of murder mysteries, in which the sin of murder must be avenged, one of the worst punishments evil can face is to be made ridiculous.

Whose Body? introduces Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin – an aristocrat without a day job who solved puzzles of deduction as a game.  Such amateurs seemed more likely in the early nineteenth century, before the work of law enforcement reformers such as Sir Robert Peel in 1829.  But by the end of that century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes described himself acerbically as a professional “consulting detective,” relying on casework for his income, and deriding Dupin’s famous reproduction of a companion’s train of thought (a feat Holmes then replicated with Dr. Watson).

But the pendulum swung again.  Whether through the influx of women into the workforce following the First World War or the wave of democratic feeling that followed that war’s housecleaning of empires, amateur detectives returned in force in the early twentieth century.  And young Dorothy Sayers used the trend to plot a more lucrative use for her master of arts degree from Oxford than by writing poetry.  The rage at the time was for oddity, both in the crime and the detective, and Whose Body? has oddity in both departments.

A letter Sayers wrote in early 1921 contains the seed of the plot – “begin(ning) brightly, with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez.  Now why did she wear pince-nez in her bath?  If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer. . . ”

Sayers’ whimsical Lord Peter, even more than Dupin, engendered a line of mostly amateur detectives that contended for fans with the hard-boiled professionals of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  Usually combining Sherlockian skills of observation and forensic training with personal flaws both irritating and endearing, they find followers even today among readers who like their detection with a side of fun.  Who agree with the words Sayers put into Lord Peter’s mouth, “. . .this man possessed what most criminals lack – a sense of humour.”

(I had mentally divided mysteries into cozies and not-cozies, so a check of Duotrope’s Digest surprised me with its variety of mystery subgenres, including crime fiction, historic, supernatural and cross-genre.  What’s your favorite?  Next week – hard-boiled but with panache – Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.)