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Fiction.
Mystery.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:In 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Henry James come to America together to solve the mystery of the 1885 death of Clover Adams, wife of the esteemed historian Henry Adams ?? member of the Adams family that has given the United States two Presidents. Clover's suicide appears to be more than it at first seemed; the suspected foul play may involve matters of national importance. Holmes is currently on his Great Hiatus ?? his three-year absence after Reichenbach Falls during which time the people of London believe him to be deceased. Holmes has faked his own death because, through his powers of ratiocination, the great detective has come to the conclusion that he is a fictional character. This leads to serious complications for James ?? for if his esteemed fellow investigator is merely a work of fiction, what does that make him? And what can the master storyteller do to fight against the sinister power ?? possibly named Moriarty ?? that may or may not be controlling them fr… (meer)
“In the rainy March 1893 for reasons that no one understands primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story, the London-based American Henry James decided to ..." And thus begins the Fifth Heart❤️ a 2015 novel by Dan Simmons of Hyperion Cantos fame. Two characters, Henry James realist-literary writer of Victorian age and an imaginary contemporary but no less eminent Sherlock Holmes, team up to solve a literary conundrum and detective mystery par excellence. Readers of Simmon's Drood will find familiar elements here but so will anybody who has been introduced to a certain private detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's seminal fiction - which is just about anyone.
Again, Dan Simmons does not disappoint. Not only are his historical and fictional characters skillfully researched, splendidly imagined and by the gifts of this thoroughly talented writer's pen fluidly ensconced in a meticulously researched environment but also woven into plot line that is as just as imaginative as it is convincing. Morover, when halfway through the book, Samuel Clemens - better known as Mark Twain - takes the stage, Mr. Simmons outshines himself. Managing a remake of the literary persona of the imminent American writer, Simmons’ Twain is as humorous and audacious as the trademark Missourian in the flesh, inclusive a fitting Southern plantation accent, if you have access to the audio version that is. Mr. Simmons convincingly recreates the time and localities of the past, the Grantian gilded age where his characters can feel truly at home.
Summa summarum, Mr. Simmons has excelled at his craft, once more. Persistently and consistently he be-gifts us with, once every couple of years, with a quality work of fiction of which this latest work is only proof. He is, however, at the top of his game when he brings close to us the lives of historical characters, well-crafted and embellished to produce a fictional life based on a solid historical fundament. It is then when he tends to deliver a true masterpiece. ( )
While I loved the inclusion of some of my favorite writers, I am not a fan of history rewritten to suit modern sensibilities or to make someone a villain. I found the dialogs tedious and the descriptions overdrawn.
I quit a bit under half-way through the book. It's a Dan Simmons' door-stopper that should have been a novelette. ( )
Simmons plays God in this novel that takes place in the time leading up to the opening of the Columbian Chicago World's Fair in 1893. He brings Sherlock Holmes to life, moves Samuel Clemons and Rudyard Kipling around like puppets to participate in his story, and brings in Paha Sapa, a character from his story"Black Hills," to the fair.
Signs your book might suck: 1. Your narrator disappears midway thru Ch 1; 2. Narrator reappears randomly in Ch 9 to apologize for changing the character POV, explaining he has no explanation for doing so... but he's definitely going to do it again; 3. The premise (so far) is a failed author is traveling with Sherlock Holmes to solve a murder but Holmes is in disguise because he faked his own death when he found out he could be a fictional character; 4. The failed author is the protagonist who is a self-righteous know-it-all... in the company of Sherlock Holmes. ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
This book is dedicated to Richard Curtis, my invaluable agent and dear friend and fellow fan of both baseball and Mr. Henry James.
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
In the rainy March of 1893, for reasons that no one understands (primarily because no one besides us is aware of this story), the London-based American author Henry James decided to spend his April 15 birthday in Paris and there, on or before his birthday, commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine at night.
Citaten
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
“Wives have a way of dying,” said James.
“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James. “No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”
Alice had been a professional invalid for decades and had welcomed the diagnosis of cancer. Death, she’d told her brother Henry, was the event which she’d always been anticipating with the greatest enthusiasm.
Just as Hollywood would beckon literary writers to their doom for more than a century to come, the English theater in the 1890’s was sucking in men of letters who—like Henry James—really had no clue as to how to write a successful stage production for a popular audience.
Henry James would have preferred to stay silent, but he knew he was expected to fulfill his role as interlocutor. “How did you survive that terrible fall, Mr. Holmes?”
James blinked several times despite his best effort to show no reaction to this. “You have no remorse about lying to your best friend? The press has reported that Dr. Watson’s wife has died in the interval since your … disappearance. So presumably the poor man is now mourning the loss of both his wife and his best friend.” Holmes helped himself to more fruit. “I did more than lie, Mr. James. I led Watson on a merry chase—pursuing the mythical Moriarty, you understand—across England and Europe, ending at the fabled waterfall from whose waters neither my body, nor Professor Moriarty’s, shall ever be recovered.” “That was beastly,” said James. “That was necessary,” Holmes said with no anger or emphasis. “I had to disappear completely, you see. Disappear without a trace and in a manner that convinced the multitudes—or at least that small share of the multitudes that has shown interest in my modest adventures—that I was dead.”
“I am dead,” said Sherlock Holmes. “A dead man has little use for discretion.”
“But you must understand that I never base any of my fictional characters on actual living or deceased persons. They are always… an amalgam… of experience and pure fiction.” This was as disingenuous as Henry James could get. All of his important characters—and most of his minor ones—were based exactly and precisely upon living or deceased personages from his own life and experience.
Holmes had told Watson more than once that when he, Sherlock Holmes, retired, he was going to write his opus—The Whole Art of Detection. But the book he should really write, Holmes knew, was How to Get Away with a Murder. Rule No. 8 would be—Never take away anything of the victim’s. Nothing at all.
There was something professorial in the man’s dress and slightly hunched manner, but also something predatory in the way the sharp-featured face protruded forward with the black shoulders rising behind it. As formal as the man’s pose was, James thought he could see a strange glimpse of the man’s tongue, caught in the act of flicking out over just-visible, small, disturbingly sharp teeth.
Sherlock Holmes was not a man who usually went out of his way to be impressed either by works of nature or works of man. The latter he found largely irrelevant to his work except for the layouts of interior murder scenes and the like; the former he always considered ephemeral in terms of the expanse of time and mankind’s tiny part in it. Holmes had studied his Darwin when he was a boy and it had left him not only with the feeling that he and everyone he might know had their place in the world, and then would know it no more, in a blink of an eye, but even the Pyramids and other “great works” were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.
As a writer, Henry James often—more frequently than not if truth be told—felt somewhat detached from events and conversations occurring around him. Even as he worked at being a man on whom nothing was lost, the world often seemed more like a template for fiction than something that should be indulged in for its own sake.
“Saint-Gaudens’s native language is stone, not words.”
Waiting for him again, James wondered idly if Holmes’s friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, spent much of his time waiting for Holmes to come out of his deep-thought fugues.
“It’s an interesting age we live in,” said Adams. “In a few years… or at least it seems like only a few years to an Ancient such as myself… we’ve gone from watching the Indians wipe out Custer’s entire troop and terrorizing the western territories to paying to watch Sitting Bull play-acting himself in Mr. Cody’s Wild West Show. A massacre with no blood. A battle with no death.”
With small eyes squinting out from behind pince-nez, a military-trimmed mustache, and rows of teeth that seemed strangely aligned top and bottom, a horse’s teeth, a fierce stallion’s pre-breeding grimace, and powerful, coiled, compact body that made athlete Del Hay’s tall form seem to shrink by comparison, the grinning Theodore Roosevelt seemed prepared to attack everyone at the table. Or eat them whole, thought Holmes.
Say nothing, James commanded himself. Several times in the last few days, he’d already stepped out of the character of “Henry James, Author” that he’d created over almost fifty years. Time to come back to himself again. The watcher, not the initiator. The wary listener, not the yammering fool.
“I’ve never seen Theodore Roosevelt remorseful to anyone over anything he said, did, stabbed, or shot.”
“Can I get you something to help you feel better?” asked James. “A .40-caliber six-shooter so that I can blow my brains out,” said Sam Clemens. “Or, since I am a devout coward, perhaps some painless poison that tastes like lemonade.”
Henry James had never in his life felt the urge to kill anyone—save for a few brief stabs of that emotion aimed at his older brother William—but now he felt he could take a carving knife to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He went into the smoking room and found a seat as far from the detective as he could get in the long carriage.
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
"In the meantime, my friend," said Holmes, "this could turn out to be a very interesting journey after all."
Fiction.
Mystery.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:In 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Henry James come to America together to solve the mystery of the 1885 death of Clover Adams, wife of the esteemed historian Henry Adams ?? member of the Adams family that has given the United States two Presidents. Clover's suicide appears to be more than it at first seemed; the suspected foul play may involve matters of national importance. Holmes is currently on his Great Hiatus ?? his three-year absence after Reichenbach Falls during which time the people of London believe him to be deceased. Holmes has faked his own death because, through his powers of ratiocination, the great detective has come to the conclusion that he is a fictional character. This leads to serious complications for James ?? for if his esteemed fellow investigator is merely a work of fiction, what does that make him? And what can the master storyteller do to fight against the sinister power ?? possibly named Moriarty ?? that may or may not be controlling them fr
And thus begins the Fifth Heart❤️ a 2015 novel by Dan Simmons of Hyperion Cantos fame.
Two characters, Henry James realist-literary writer of Victorian age and an imaginary contemporary but no less eminent Sherlock Holmes, team up to solve a literary conundrum and detective mystery par excellence.
Readers of Simmon's Drood will find familiar elements here but so will anybody who has been introduced to a certain private detective of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's seminal fiction - which is just about anyone.
Again, Dan Simmons does not disappoint. Not only are his historical and fictional characters skillfully researched, splendidly imagined and by the gifts of this thoroughly talented writer's pen fluidly ensconced in a meticulously researched environment but also woven into plot line that is as just as imaginative as it is convincing. Morover, when halfway through the book, Samuel Clemens - better known as Mark Twain - takes the stage, Mr. Simmons outshines himself. Managing a remake of the literary persona of the imminent American writer, Simmons’ Twain is as humorous and audacious as the trademark Missourian in the flesh, inclusive a fitting Southern plantation accent, if you have access to the audio version that is. Mr. Simmons convincingly recreates the time and localities of the past, the Grantian gilded age where his characters can feel truly at home.
Summa summarum, Mr. Simmons has excelled at his craft, once more. Persistently and consistently he be-gifts us with, once every couple of years, with a quality work of fiction of which this latest work is only proof. He is, however, at the top of his game when he brings close to us the lives of historical characters, well-crafted and embellished to produce a fictional life based on a solid historical fundament. It is then when he tends to deliver a true masterpiece. ( )