Major Acid's E-Rag
What Else Is There?
Volume 1, Number 7
Magic in The Strand
If you’re in the magazine business and not selling a million copies an
issue, you’re in tough. It’s not easy even if you are. Still, people
will try. Saturday Night, for example, just won’t admit death. SN is a
recognized name. It has a history. Somewhere, some when, SN must have
been successful, and that makes it susceptible to magic. The only kind
of magic most of us admit to practicing is theft through association.
Get close to a celebrity; shake hands with a politician; resurrect a
once successful publishing name; in other words, get close and steal a
little magic. As it goes for SN – that is, for mainstream magazines – so
it goes for the small on the margins of the trade. So it is, for
example, with The Strand Magazine.
The Strand Magazine – the original – has a claim to fame that even SN
might envy: in its pages in 1891, Sherlock Holmes appeared in “A Scandal
in Bohemia,” the short story that the effectively launched the great
detective’s career and solidified The Strand’s.
Time passed, of course. Holmes faced Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls
and disappeared. He returned, of course, but inevitably his real-life
puppet master, Doyle, died. In the rest of the world time passed, too,
with events including two world wars. Paper shortages and other demands
finally put down The Strand, although it struggled gamely until 1950.
Like its most famous fiction mainstay, The Strand returned from the dead
in 1998, presumably driven by some of those who believe magic rests in a
name. Issue XI of the resurrection is on your favourite magazine stands
now, and it is something of a curiosity. It is replete with big,
writerly names – John Mortimer, Ray Bradbury, Ruth Rendell, and Martin
Edwards, as examples. Martin who?
Edwards. As in one of an apparently numberless legion of writers who
churn out “new” Sherlock Holmes tales. Edwards’ effort is “The Case of
the Sentimental Tobacconist.” Happily, it is a solid, Doylesque effort
with no real stink of revisionism in it (a trait common to those who
believe Watson was hard done by).
As for the rest, the Bradbury offering is a throwaway, an effort I
suspect would never have been published without that magic in a name
principle – Bradbury still sells. Rendell’s effort is better crafted but
not particularly mysterious. A disenchanted, bitter man loses control
and searches for solace in a new Garden of Eden. In his backyard.
The Mortimer effort is longer and more satisfying. Rumpole is back with
a (bitter, disenchanted) police officer in the dock. Along with the
story, Mortimer also gets a feature interview that would be fine except
for a quirk in the interviewer’s style that just becomes aggravating, a
quirk also evident in the issue’s other interview (with actor Joss
Ackland – you’ll recognize the face if not the name). “So tell me …” the
interviewer says. “So when you ….” “So is there ….” “So what are ….”
Yes, reportorial integrity is a good thing, but nothing would be lost by
editing out that endless and endlessly annoying “so.”
Quirks aside, however, The Strand Magazine is a pleasant diversion, and
it is one of the first of the “holiday” issues now flowing onto the
stands. As in Christmas holidays. Canadian Thanksgiving is already a
misty memory. Halloween lingers only in small piles of leftover candy or
in decaying pumpkins still on back steps and frost blackened gardens.
American Thanksgiving looms, but it’s already been overwhelmed by
Christmas decorations, mind-numbing seasonal music, and the army of
Santa Claus clones descending on the malls.
Christmas, people will insist, is a magical season. The Strand Magazine
understands magic, the magic inherent in its own name, in the names of
its authors, in the very mention of Sherlock Holmes, in the fantasy of
its seasonal cover illustration – “Picadilly Circus at Night, 1911” by
Thomas Prytherch. For many that cover will evoke (wrongly by several
decades) a misty-eyed Victorian Christmas, perhaps with Scrooge himself
stumping through the crowd on the way to his personal, magical epiphany.
Small magic it is, but workable. It was the cover that caught my eye,
triggering a Pavlovian association with Christmas; it was “The Case of
Sentimental Tobacconist” that sealed the purchase, appealing to the easy
justice of Sherlock Holmes.
If only Saturday Night had a similar magic to lean on. Mind you, it
tries. The current issue’s cover is of the Ghost of Christmas Past –
Jean Chretien waving what Paul Martin can only hope is the final good
bye.
The Strand Magazine’s magic is both more potent and more real.
The Strand Magazine is published quarterly and sells for $6.95 Canadian
and $5.95 American.
