Case of the Curious Q

So, here's what I'm reading, an unexpected reissue of The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen.  This is the 17th number in the new series, Penguin Drop Caps, handsome little hardcovers all, with designs by "typography wunderkind," Jessica Hische.

I must just say, I'm enjoying this, the novel, I mean.

First then, a bit about the book.  I don't know that I'd ever read an Ellery Queen novel before. Short stories I've certainly read: in the old Ellery Queen Magazine, and in many an anthology, including two they did for the Modern Library, 101 Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841 - 1941, and The Female of the Species: Great Women Detectives and Criminals, from 1943, both of which I own and treasure for those restless evenings between books.  Almost entirely reliable -- though I do remember and exceptionally thin Christie met with in one or the other.  I am old enough of course to remember the Jim Hutton television series (1975-1976), but not so old as to really remember the various other film adaptations, radio serials and the like.  Still, the "brand" as it were, is familiar. 

"Ellery Queen" was in fact two cousins, Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (1905 – 1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (1905 – 1971.)  Together they not only created the eponymous detective and put him into more than 30 books, but also edited the magazine and a variety of other titles, including the classic anthologies already mentioned.  They wrote and produced for the radio and early television (an interesting bit of trivia, my beloved Helene Hanff paid for her dental work by scripting The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1950 - 1952.)  For a good long while there, Ellery Queen was the most popular fictional American detective and nearly as familiar to the domestic reader as Sherlock Holmes.  Not so much, now.  (Worth noting, as we come closer to the question to be raised here, that I can not find a single, current reference to the authors online or in print that does not mention the cousins' given names as well as their nom de plume and the fact that they were from Brooklyn.  While nowhere made more explicit that I could find, and in case you missed it, the reader is presumably meant to deduce that the writers were Jewish, whereas their detective was distinctly not.  On the one hand this reinforces the admirable trajectory of an American success story, I suppose, -- Brooklyn boys made good -- but it may also be meant by today's Ellery Queen apologists to excuse some of the more unhappy passages in the genre writing of the day, The Greek Coffin Mystery not excepted.  Read on.)

While there is still a devoted fan-base, and, as I'm learning, good fun still to be had from Ellery Q., like many a whodunit of the Golden Age, there is more than a whiff of the musty slang and creaky cliches of the pulps about them.  Only 50 pages into my first and I've already encountered cops thick as walls, a comic Dutchman, etc. More unfortunately still, and typical of the time, a leggy young secretary when questioned giggles and complains of her "nerves," and a Greek interpreter is called "greasy" no less than three times on a single page!  Exactly the kind of sexual and ethnic shorthand that so distastefully dates many an antique mystery and which might, in part, explain something of their justifiably faded popularity.  (If any further proof was needed of the day of Ellery Queen having passed, at best into quaintness, I also learn to my surprise that our athletic young hero sports glinting pince-nez!  "'Shakes of Astarte!' murmured Ellery.")

I was then in a way made both curious and more than a little confused to find Ellery Queen selected to represent the letter "Q" in this latest series of hardcover classics from Penguin.  While I will be the first to admit that the pickings are slim when it comes to that least likely of English letters, the Drop Caps series had actually already disappointed a little, at least in the beginning of their run, by the most predictable and ubiquitous selection of authors and titles; "A" being not only Austen, but Pride and Prejudice, "B" being Bronte, Charlotte, but also the all but inevitable Jane Eyre, and so on.  Austen and Bronte I'll grant them, but why not Emma (my favorite) or Persuasion, which I am not alone in thinking the first lady's best?  Why not Vilette or Shirley for the latter lady?  Why always the most obvious or at least the most familiar title?  Why so seldom a genuine discovery or at least some variation?

But then, not all surprises are good.  It's a problem, that designation of "classic," particularly when limiting the reissue of great authors to a single, representative title.  Usually means just the one book, endlessly reissued.  Gets a bit boring, that.  Why not mix it up a little?  Why not indeed?  Again, be careful what you wish for, readers.  This time, not long after the letter "G", here represented a little more interestingly by William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the whole enterprise goes rather wildly off the rails.  "H" is for Hesse's Siddhartha, for which a good case may still be made, but then "I" is an early title from an author still very much alive and writing, namely Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, and while "J" is for Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, come to "K" and, well... we get Sue Monk Kidd and The Secret Life of Bees and any pretence to the claim of "classic" has clearly been abandoned altogether. 

Like what must by now be more than a million others, in book clubs and out, I read The Secret Life of Bees.  For me, it was just part of the job, which requires at least a passing familiarity with what's on the bestseller lists and buzzing around the suburban reading circles.  As popular fiction goes, there was, as I remember it, much to recommend Kidd's book as a socially responsible and entertaining late example of the Magical American Negro novel in which spiritually superior and earnestly earthy African Americans teach a little white girl to love life and so on, and on.  As will be obvious by now, not a favorite of mine.  I don't think anything that might best be summarized as largely inoffensive prose in service of a heartwarming racial cliche rises to the level of a classic novel.  I don't think, with very few exceptions (Catch 22 comes first to mind, or more relevantly here, To Kill a Mockingbird,) that such a thing is possible for a contemporary novel within the lifetime of the author, and the possibility in this case seems particularly remote.  One has only to review the mid-century selections of the Modern Library to see title after title subsequently consigned to forgetfulness for proof of the wobbly power of prediction, to say nothing here of the lasting power of a Pulitzer Prize, say, or even a Nobel.

So even if one were willing concede Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club for "T" without mentioning Thackeray, Trollope, or Twain, how then Kidd for "K" in preference to Kafka, Kipling, Kerouac, Kingsley, Kosinski, Kawabata or Knowles, or come to that, Kristof, Kundera or Kureishi?!

Which brings me back to the case of the curious "Q".  The possibilities are nearly as thin as "X", which at least presents some old style translations of Chinese names.  While I was personally tickled to find Ellery Queen and bought my first retail copy of the series as a result, this title and the whole enterprise of the Drop Caps have all too clearly illustrated the general debasement of that word "classic," -- a problem to which I regularly and unthinkingly have contributed in my own small way, even here.  What then is a "classic"?

I haven't an answer to offer in any way other than the negative, obviously, by saying what I think it ain't, but that is less than adequate to even my case.  So, there we are.

Personally, I blush a bit to be seen with even Ellery Queen masquerading as same, but I absolutely draw the line at least at the empty calories of s'mores like The Secret Life of Bees.  Jeez Louise, Penguin.