Continuation novels
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I've been catching up on Robert Goldsborough's most recent Nero Wolfe mysteries. I hadn't read the last three that were published.
I always have this love/hate thing with the new Wolfe books. While I love that Wolfe and Archie are having new adventures, that they're still "alive", I keep finding myself stopping and thinking "Archie wouldn't have done that" or "Wolfe wouldn't have said that". Rex Stout was a masterful writer. I mean, how many writers just put it down on paper and don't go back and edit? Goldsborough has done a very good job, but somehow the books are not quite up to the level of the originals. It's a combination of the language used and the character and the plot development.
I've also read Laurie King's Mary Russell books, which bring Sherlock Holmes back. Somehow I feel more comfortable with how she's handled the continuing adventures of Holmes. I wonder if that's because I was never as "into" the Arthur Conan Doyle stories as I am the Wolfe books.
King has also brought a whole new central character into the mix with Russell. Goldsborough has stuck with the ones that Stout invented.
Do you read any continuation books? Do you find any of them satisfying, or do you keep thinking they're just not up to the originals?
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I’ve read every book Rex Stout ever wrote. Loved them.
I tried one of the Nero Wolfe continuation stories and didn’t like it. Never read another one.
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I've never read a Nero Wolfe book, but I suspect I'd enjoy them. I have a few vague memories of the television show with William Conrad in the 1980s - especially one scene where Conrad/Wolfe is sitting in an easy chair talking with Inspector Cramer, who is sitting in a matching chair opposite, and Cramer intentionally gets under Wolfe's skin by getting up out of the chair without using his hands - something impossible for the stout Wolfe to do, hilariously irritating him to no end. For some weird reason that scene stuck with me, and to this day I almost always get up out of a chair without using my hands, thinking of that scene. I was just describing that scene to the Luthiest Luthier the other day.
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I'd give my eyeteeth to write one of the continuing Agatha Christie books. I want to write a sequel to one work in particular. The odds that I could figure out a way to get permission are low, not zero. You'll see it first here.
When I teach fiction writing, I assign a lot of reading, and I like to assign current works that are based on classic work. The students grumble less about having to read the classics when they see how they are being interpreted by writers from their own time.
I've taught the first Laurie R. King's first Mary Russell after assigning selections from A STUDY IN SCARLET and showing scenes from ELEMENTARY and the Cumberbatch SHERLOCK in class.
I have them read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and follow it with THE PALE BLUE EYE, which is a novel featuring Poe that imagines him helping solve a murder at West Point, which he did actually attend as a young man.
After reading Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, we read Rachel Howzell Hall's THEY ALL FALL DOWN, which is an homage to the original, the bestselling novel of all time, while also tackling topics that the original book sometimes treated in ways that are pretty problematic--race, class, colonialism, gender. And we talk about all the "terrible people trapped in a tight space" descendants over the years, a trope that's really having a moment right now--the KNIVES OUT movies, THE MENU, MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD, NINE PERFECT STRANGERS.
Everything old is new again....
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@DeweyLOU said in Continuation novels:
I've never read a Nero Wolfe book, but I suspect I'd enjoy them.
Give THE DOORBELL RANG a shot. I think you'll be hooked.
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@wtg Ordered.
