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 throy, 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.
