Literary matters

Two matters.

First, I have, for the first time, caught Simenon out in a continuity error in that the detective Torrance murdered in the first story - 'Pietr-le-Letton' - reappears in lots of subsequent stories, probably after a decent interval. Checking with reference 1, I find that there are people out there busily checking the oeuvre for other errors of the same sort. I also have a memory that Torrance is the chap who takes over Maigret's job when the latter retires, but I have not been able to confirm that. I also associate to a memory about the fat encyclopaedia prepared for the various writers on the Star Trek franchise to protect them (and us) from solecisms of this sort.

Second, I have now more or less finished my skim read of Huxley's 'Point Counter Point' - in a Penguin edition which looks much older than it is, dating from no longer ago than 1957. Probably my second or third copy. As it turned out, more interesting on this read for the strange people who inhabited Huxley's world in the late 1920's than for the music. For the rather silly antics that people with too much education and too much time on their hands get up to. Including the way that writers of the time happily savaged each other, and themselves, in print. Maybe, if I read more modern fiction, I would find that things have not changed that much. Although I believe that they have changed to the extent that few people around now have had the sort of good quality general education offered by the better public schools and universities of Huxley's day. In his case, Eton, where he went on to teach for a bit before he found his feet as a professional writer. Followed by Oxford. Is it significant that our illustrious PM, who went to the same two places, has also made a lot of money as a scribbler?

A book rather spoilt, to my mind, by the inclusion of too many slabs of didactic material which might have been better offloaded into essays - which should not have been too difficult given that Huxley published both stories and essays.

Reference 1: http://www.trussel.com/maig/maig.htm.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/art-fair.html.