Watson And Goodwin (And Falcon)

Operation Luna, 20.

Steve Matuchek guesses that a discrete courier is:

"'...from a private detective firm. Watson and Goodwin, I'll bet. Their operatives are expert at self-effacement.'" (p. 179)

Perhaps "self-effacement" suggests that the reference is not to central characters but to their assistants - especially since everyone recognizes "Watson" in this context? I had to google Goodwin because I have not read any Rex Stout.

An unrealistic aspect of much fiction is that a narrator often recites verbatim an extended conversation that in real life would have had to be summarized. This is done not only by the first person narrator of a novel but also sometimes by one character informing another of a conversation with a third party. In the latter case, double quotation marks are used. Thus:

"'...the Mother Superior arrived and I told her Lord St. Amont was dead.'
"'Did she go in?'
"'Yes.'
"'Alone?'
"'No. I went in with her and stood by the door.'
"'Was anything touched?'
"'I don't think so.'
"'Were the tablets still in the spoon?'
"'No.'
"'And then?'
"'The Mother Superior asked what I had to say: and I told her that I had known nothing until I came into the room.'
"'And then?'
"'The House Surgeon arrived.'
"'And then?'
"'He - he made an examination...'"
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), pp. 35-36.

In this dialogue, Yates' fictional detective, Superintendent Falcon, even reproduces a hesitation and the repetition of the word, "He..." To quote this passage correctly, I should have added yet another set of quotation marks to show that I was quoting from Yates' text in which Falcon, addressing Richard and Jenny Chandos and Jonathan Mansel, recounts his conversation with a witness.

Very occasionally, an author recognizes and rationalizes the absurdity of his characters reciting previous conversations as if they were human tape recorders. Thus, in the Wikipedia article about Archie Goodwin, linked above, we read:

Archie is a skilled observer and has trained his memory so that he can make verbatim reports, oral or typewritten, of extended conversations.
-copied from here.

Similarly, after we have accepted Falcon's recitals as a convention of fiction, Jenny Chandos asks him how he is able to remember and to repeat conversations word for word and he replies that he has trained himself to do this because he cannot establish a rapport with a witness when he is continually writing notes.

These observations have taken us away from Poul Anderson but into the interesting company of Rex Stout and Dornford Yates.