A while back I said I’d keep you updated as I work my way through In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of little-known detective fiction contemporary with Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. I haven’t, because so far the stories have been largely bland and unimaginative. That all changed last night when I slogged through an 1895 landmark of ineptitude called “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” by M.P. Shiel. It should be impossible for a 13-page mystery to be a slog, but Shiel somehow blundered into writing kind of an anti-mystery that manages to be both severely underwritten and so maniacally overwritten that one wonders why it isn’t on display alongside the paintings by the criminally insane in the Collection de l’Art Brut.
Shiel’s tale is one of four chronicling, in prose as elegantly understated as a Liberace Day parade, the non-adventures of his haughty detective Prince Zaleski. It begins1 with the narrator (Zaleski’s unnamed Watson surrogate) transcribing the diary of an English nobleman who’s hysterical with fear that his big-toothed Persian manservant is trying to steal a precious gem from his bedroom. The journal recounts a compelling narrative of two dimwitted elderly men shadowing each other around an empty mansion in nightgowns, while the prized stone is stolen and replaced not once, not twice, but four times.
That’s about the extent of the diary. Yet after reading it, Zaleski immediately launches into an unprovoked seven-page soliloquy positing a subsequent murder/suicide between the two men. He painfully details the background, causes, and culmination of his imaginary crime with the most pedantic and convoluted theory ever thrust upon an unsuspecting W.H. Smith patron. His premise involves, among other things, seven centuries of Middle Eastern history, the evolution and rebirth of “the glyptic arts,” a little bit of South Pacific botany, and the latest trends in pajama craftsmanship. Zaleski periodically checks to make sure we plebeian boneheads haven’t dozed off or been distracted by a passing bird by interrupting his discourse with charming asides like, “You are surprised! Your mind refuses to conceive it!”
No sooner does the detective wind down his bullshit fountain then his butler appears with that morning’s newspaper detailing, wouldja believe it, the discovery of the lord and the Persian dead in a murder/suicide exactly as Zaleski described, right down to the methods of death and precise location of the bodies! So M.P. Shiel thereby masterly spares us, the readers, from the boring chore of speculating who committed a crime, or wondering how the villain might have pulled it off, or for that matter of even knowing that a crime was committed at all, by having his asshole protagonist explain all of that to us before anything actually happens and then ending the story so we can get back to more important things, like mucking out donkey barns or whatever it is we people do.
Anyway, all of the above was just an excuse for me to reprint this description of Prince Zaleski from page 2, the most delightful gastrointestinal explosion of a sentence I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. This is verbatim, without editor’s notes:
He was nothing if not superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very extravaganza of hyperbole–now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched, Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of thought–now laying down law of the Medes for the actual world of today–had oft-times the strange effect of bringing back to my mind the singular old-epic epithet, [Greek: ænemoen]–airy–as applied to human thought.
“The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” is in the public domain, if you want to get started on the screenplay.
POSTSCRIPT: Just as I was getting ready to click “publish,” I glanced at the Wikipedia entry for M.P. Shiel. The man’s history is so wonderfully awful that it might have been invented by Prince Zaleski while dosed on wormwood. Shiel claimed to have been, at the age of 15, crowned king of Redonda, a 1000 ft.-wide glorified rock off the coast of Montserrat. In 1914, at about the age of 49, he was sent to prison for what until recently was believed to be fraud. But in 2008 an academic uncovered that Shiel actually was sentenced to 16 months of hard labor for “indecently assaulting and carnally knowing his 12 year old de facto stepdaughter.” He apparently remained unrepentant until his death at the age of 81, hopefully from a particularly agonizing venom delivered via the blowgun of a vengeful Redondan.
----- After a bonkers 350-word, semi-metaphorical rant about England being a continent while Russia is an island, which has nothing to do with anything that follows. [↩]
