Wednesday 2 October 2019

All Fiction One Long Series?

Successful fiction becomes part of the language of later writers. The following is one minor sequence:

Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes refers to Poe's Dupin;

Ian Fleming's From Russia, With Love refers to Sherlock Holmes (see Enemies' Appraisals);

Poul Anderson refers to Holmes several times and to James Bond once (see here);

Stieg Larsson quotes "From Russia, With Love" (see the second link above) and, in the same volume, -

"The strange thing about the dog is that it did not bark, my dear Watson."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2010), CHAPTER 15, p. 251;

David Lagencrantz continues Larsson's characters.

And that brings us up to date. But Poul Anderson stands in several literary traditions as we have already outlined on this blog. Need I say more?

For the next two days, I will be in Lancaster but busy with other activities.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And that bit about the dog which did not bark has to be one of the most quoted texts from the Holmes canon!

Ad astra! Sean