Culture

Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are to be resurrected. Anthony Horowitz, children's novelist and TV writer (Foyle's War, Midsomer Murders), is writing the Holmes novel, while Jeffrey Deaver is following up Sebastian Faulk's Bond effort, Devil May Care, with a new 007 thriller - Carte Blanche. A new Holmes volume is intriguing. The cerebral sleuth is out of step with the gruesomeness of modern, hard-boiled detective narratives. Forget Robert Downey, Jr. or Benedict Cumberbatch: Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories are winsome tales, meandering along in a haze of psychology, subterfuge and pipe smoke. The razor-wielding grizzle of Silent Witness, Law and Order or CSI is chalk to its cheese.

If I were a contemporary novelist, each day I would pray in thanks for unhappy families. Where would new writing be without them? Bunderlin is another of those novels in which families’ secrets are slowly uncovered by those whose lives have been unwittingly shaped by their consequences. The Bunderlin of Bunderlin, is a rather eccentric type who forces his way into the life of the novel’s protagonist, Martin. Bunderlin is a man whom, if I were given to cliché, I would describe as a ‘gentle giant’. Fond of animals, given to wordplay (of a musical if seemingly meaningless nature), Martin first meets him as a schoolboy.

Here is a selection of pieces from the weekend’s literary pages. The Guardian profiles Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. ‘Carolyn Cassady opens the door to her pretty green cottage with a lipsticked grin and a shy handshake. She's 87, but looks a decade younger, dressed neatly in a lavender fleece with matching moccasins. The second wife of Beat muse Neal Cassady – the man immortalised as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's 1957 classic On the Road – Carolyn moved to London in 1983, and relocated here 10 years later. "I was brought up English," she says. "My parents were anglophiles and we had a whole lot of English customs at home. I made the break and I much prefer it.

Mark Amory has written the Bookend column in this week's magazine. Here it is as a blog exclusive In the Christmas issue of The Spectator there was a review of Showtime: A History of Broadway Musicals, a book which ran to 785 pages. Ruth Leon, in The Sound of Musicals, deals with the whole lot, well perhaps 20 in practice, in 128 much smaller ones; so she has to be selective. The top three, in her view, select themselves: Guys and Dolls (1950), My Fair Lady (1954) and West Side Story (1957) - 'almost everyone agrees on this'. She finds respectable reasons for her enthusiasm: Guys and Dolls has an extraordinary sense of place, My Fair Lady deals with 'social injustice, and the struggle for personal freedom' and West Side Story is about 'alienation and belonging'.

As promised, here is Craig Brown's apprieciation of John Gross, published in today's issue of the Spectator. To subscribe, click here. Mark Boxer once drew a caricature of his friend John Gross half-buried beneath piles of hardback books while glancing up from a copy of Tatler. It’s a caricature that contains a nugget of truth — it is rare, these days, for anyone so bookish to keep such a close eye on the toings-and-froings of high society and showbiz — but there is still something not quite right about the rather severe, tight-lipped expression on John’s face. Though he always read  everything with a singular intensity, the moment he looked up he would start talking and smiling, his eyes a winning mixture of benevolence and glee.

John Gross, the literary lion of his generation, died on Monday. The Spectator will publish a piece commemorating his life and work tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a selection of extracts from the deluge of adoring obituaries. The Telegraph: ‘Once described as “the best-read man in Britain”, Gross was probably best known among his literary peers for his first book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 (1969), a racily entertaining romp through the history of literary criticism and its practitioners which won the Duff Cooper Prize and established its author’s reputation as a man whose huge erudition was matched by a well-developed sense of humour.

The spending axe is descending on local government and libraries are poised to close. Campaign groups have mapped probable closures. There’s no key as to what each colour and symbol indicate, but that’s rather beside the point. In reality, the colossal waste in local government means that cuts can be implemented without damaging services. But councils play dirty when defending ‘their’ money, resorting to industrial action, unreliable bin collection and headline grabbing closures. Libraries fall into the latter category, and cherubic children will be hauled before cameras to cast the coalition in the most callous of roles. Of course, learning must never be hindered, especially if Britain is to weather the Asian economic onslaught.

While looking for something interesting to read online recently I stumbled across something boring. Namely, Robert McCrum’s Guardian piece on ‘The best boring books’, listing big, grey bricks of supposedly anaesthetic prose. Two modernist novels had been singled out for critique: James Joyce’s notorious Finnegans Wake and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I began to wonder whether there was something intrinsic to modernism that leant itself towards dullness and tedium in the mind’s eye of the public. Gabriel Josipovici recently asked What Ever Happened to Modernism? As part of an in-depth literary study, he charted the recent decline of modernist literature in opposition to other, more traditional forms of storytelling.