Dan Conrad is a valued friend. He can always be trusted to be thoughtful
and to offer honest opinions. He is a national pioneer in service learning. 
He managed to get his name on Nixon's "Enemies List" and become #54 of George
H.W. Bush's "Thousand Points of Light". His eclectic taste in literature is 
matched by the variety of his skills. He came later in life to basketball 
coaching than nearly any coach and recently produced his first iMovie. 
He claims to be so busy in retirement that he hasn't a clue about how he had 
time to teach in the good old days.

A few months later, Dan offered this reflection on Batya Gur and others.

"This is old news, but it's a nagging irritation in the back of my mind. The last contribution I sent to Reading included a line something like '...and the only mystery writer whose work I look forward to enough to purchase it in hardcover when it first comes out is an Israeli literature professor named Batya Gur.'

"Well, wouldn't you know I bought her latest book last fall and thought it was terrible, a complete reversal from her earlier books, being now full of all the stuff I dislike in mystery novels (way, way too much on a poorly imagined personal life of the detective, boring but space-filling conflicts with the PR hungry supervisor, etc., ad nauseum).

"Oh well, lesson learned. Back to the library. By the way another previously good mystery writer fell into the same trap, Arturo PÈrez-Reverte, the guy who wrote Flanders Panel (and another good one) into which he wove seamlessly interesting information about some esoteric subculture.

"But the Fencing Master was all about fencing and the love life of the fencing master with no hint of a mystery up to about page 100 when I gave it up.

"Is there a literary Peter Principle in which writers who might be pretty good in one genre suddenly think they can write like George Elliot and turn out crap instead?"

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Most recently, Dan reacted to my seconding of Dale Stahl's recommendation of a modern mystery.

"In the last issue you seconded a recommendation by Dale Stahl of the mystery: A Small Death in Lisbon.

"Now when two respected friends praise a book you can't go wrong. Wrong.

"I hated it. I ploughed through more than a hundred pages before heaving it across the room.

"I don't much like comprehending the world through the mind of a Nazi; I like sex less explicit; violence less graphic and frequent.

"I'm a nineteenth century kind of reader to whom the worldliness of Sue, in Hardy's Jude the Obscure, is clearly enough revealed by her secretive purchase of statues of Venus and Apollo and her turning, on the Sabbath, to read a chapter in Gibbon on Julian the Apostate.

"If that's not graphic enough, consider the shocking revelation from the Confessional in Corvo's Hadrian the Seventh when the future Pope confesses "that two or three times in my life I have delighted in impure thoughts inspired by some lines in Cicero's Oration for M. Coelius..."

"Whew. I'm sweating and have to quit. Later tonight, when no one's looking, (shh) it's Balzac!

"P.S. Actually, I rather like finding a point of disagreement. Part of the fun of reading and talking about books is that no two readers read exactly the same book. Who was it, Lichtenstien? that wrote "A book is like a mirror. If a monkey looks in, no apostle will look out."

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My response to Dan was, "Gotta banana?"

Another example of Dan's enthusiasm for 19th century literature
(and a good reason for it) came in his comments on and quotations from 
what I thought was an obscure novel. (See the list of web sites at the 
end of this section that give lie to that label.)  Dan wrote,

"I haven't run across that much in my reading of late -- then hit the jackpot with a Wilkie Collins novel titled No Name (A.L. Burt, NY Publisher, no publishing date in book but about 1860).

"Not a mystery (as Moonstone and Woman in White) but, as ever, well written with interesting characters and a compelling (if not always believable) story. Best of all were the attached (I trust) comments on life, on economics and on philosophy.

"[Mr. Clare, an old curmudgeon, referred to in the novel as "the philosopher" is speaking about a new opportunity that has come to his son who has squandered all previous chances.]

"I have always maintained that the one important phenomenon presented by modern society is--the enormous prosperity of Fools. Show me an individual Fool, and I will show you an aggregate Society which gives that highly favored personage nine chances out of ten--and grudges the tenth to the wisest man in existence. Look where you will, in every high place there sits an Ass, settled beyond the reach of all the greatest Intellects in this world to pull him down. Over our whole social system, complacent Imbecility rules supreme--snuffs out the searching light of Intelligence with total impunity--and hoots, owl-like, in answer to every form of protest: See how well we all do in the dark! One of these days that audacious assertion will be practically contradicted, and the whole rotten system of modern society will come down with a crash.

"'God forbid!' cried Mr. Vanstone, looking about him as if the crash was coming already.

"'With a crash!' repeated Mr. Clare. 'There is my theory in a few words. Now for the remarkable application of it, which, this letter suggests. Here is my lout of a boy--'

"'You don't mean that Frank has got another chance?' exclaimed Mr. Vanstone.

"'Here is this perfectly hopeless booby, Frank,' pursued the philosopher. 'He has never done anything in his life to help himself, and, as a necessary consequence, Society is in a conspiracy to carry him to the top of the tree. He has hardly had time to throw away that chance you gave him, before this letter comes, and puts the ball at his foot for the second time. My rich cousin (who is intellectually fit to be at the tail of the family, and who is therefore, as a matter of course, at the head of it) has been good enough to remember my existence, and has offered his influence to serve my eldest boy. My rich cousin is a booby who thrives on landed property; he has done something for another booby who thrives on Politics, who knows a third booby who thrives on Commerce, who can do something for a fourth booby, thriving at present on nothing, whose name is Frank. So the mill goes. So the cream of all human rewards is sipped in endless succession by the Fools. I shall pack Frank off to-morrow. In course of time, he'll come back again on our hands, like a bad shilling: more chances will fall in his way, as a necessary consequence of his meritorious imbecility. Years will go on--I may not live to see it, no more may you--it doesn't matter; Frank's future is equally certain either way--put him into the army, the Church, politics, what you please, and let him drift: he'll end in being a general, a bishop, or a minister of state, by dint of the great modern qualification of doing nothing whatsoever to deserve his place.' With this summary of his son's worldly prospects, Mr. Clare tossed the letter contemptuously across the table, and poured himself out another cup of tea." pp. 63-64

[Musings on entering a poorer section of London] "In this district, as in other districts remote from the wealthy quarters of the metropolis, the hideous London vagabond--with the filth of the street outmatched in his speech, with the mud of the street out dirtied in his clothes--lounges, lowering and brutal, at the street corner and the gin-shop door--the public disgrace of his country, the unheeded warning of social troubles that are yet to come. Here the loud self-assertion of Modern Progress--which has reformed so much in manners and altered so little in men--meets the flat contradiction that scatters its pretensions to the winds. here while the national prosperity feasts, like another Belshazzar, on the spectacle of its own magnificence, is the Writing on the Wall, which warns the monarch, Money, that his glory is weighed in the balance, and his power is found wanting." p. 220

[A family governess musing on the possible futures of the two newly-orphaned girls she is suddenly responsible for] "Does there exist in every human being, beneath that outward and visible character which is shaped into form by the social influences surrounding us, an inward, invisible disposition, which is part of ourselves, which education may indirectly modify, but can never hope to change?

"Is the philosophy which denies this, and asserts that we are born with dispositions like blank sheets of paper, a philosophy which has failed to remark that we are not born with blank faces--a philosophy which has never compared together two infants of a few days old, and has never observed that those infants are not born with blank tempers for mothers and nurses to fill up at will?

"Are there, infinitely varying with each individual, inbred forces of Good and Evil in all of us, deep down below the reach of mortal encouragement and mortal repression--hidden Good and hidden Evil, both alike at the mercy of the liberating opportunity and the sufficient temptation? Within these earthly limits is earthly Circumstance ever the key, and can no human vigilance warn us beforehand of the forces imprisoned in ourselves which that key may unlock?" p. 125

Ah, the gems one finds in rare little corners of the literary world. 
How did Wilkie Collins know about George W. Bush and political debates 
about welfare limits taking place in 2001?

Wilkie Collins Web Sites
• The Wilkie Collins Web Site

• The Wilkie Collins Appreciation Page

• The Wilkie Collins Etext page
  • Where you'll find a link to the text of No Name

• A Wilkie Collins web page in Japan (one of many)

• The Online Literature Library Wilkie Collins page

• The Books and Writers Web Site on William Wilkie Collins

• Authologies: Wilkie Collins (from a site in France)

• The Wilkie Collins Society Journal (web site hosted by Wasada University, Tokyo)

• Concordances of 22 works by Wilkie Collins

• Aus der StadtBibliothekKöln, ein Wilkie Collins siete

• An essay on No Name by Philip v. Allingham, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web, Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario

• The Victorian Web on Wilkie Collins

• Go to Google.com if you'd like to find more Wilkie Collins pages. There are many.

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