Book, movie, television note: Nick Carter, House, Sherlock Holmes

By a rather roundabout way (starting with a search engine set for "literary sleuth"...), I've just discovered that I've had the wrong idea about a book series. We've sold a fair number of used books in the Nick Carter: Killmaster series, but not being the sort of person who finds something with "Killmaster" in its identity appealing - and the cover art not changing my mind - I've not paid much attention to them. I guess I assumed they were just one of many men's adventure series cooked up in recent decades, the masculine counterpart to the short romance novels cranked out hand over fist for women.

Wrong. Nick Carter apparently sprang up as a scientific detective in 1886, making him more or less a contemporary of, and fellow spirit of sorts to, Sherlock Holmes. (Some references I've read today say Nick Carter came first, others say he sprang up on the heels of Holmes. Since A Study in Scarlet appears to have come out in 1887, I'd have to, grudgingly, concede an earlier launch date to Carter unless someone comes along with a solid reference saying otherwise. For whatever that's worth...)

Carter's been presented over and over and over again in books, on radio, in movies, on television, sometimes being faithful to the original idea, sometimes "updated." Walter Pidgeon, one of my favorite actors, played him in a 1939 movie called, as it happens, "Nick Carter, Master Detective."

There's even a story that "In his dime novel days, the hero was so popular that, as James Thurber relates, an American tourist was able to scatter a group of Paris toughs by exclaiming "Je suis Nick Carter!" ("I am Nick Carter!")."

Oh, wait. I'd heard that story... (BTW: That link has a surprising amount of info in a short space, including a list of authors who wrote under the Nick Carter byline for the Killmaster series. Should I be surprised that Martin Cruz Smith is among them? I've never read any Martin Cruz Smith books either, so don't have any reference point on this.)

I guess I just never tied all the Nick Carter stories together in my mind. I guess at least part of the trouble was that in the early days he appears to have been aimed, at least somewhat, at a Sherlock Holmes audience (albeit at the dime novel level), while in the books that customers traded in at our bookstore he was altered to compete with James Bond. You'll pardon me, I hope, that I didn't recognize him as the same fellow...

A side note: While trying to pin down whether Nick Carter sprang up independently of Holmes or was inspired by him, I came across Sherlockian.Net, which had, to my mild surprise, a link to a website for the television show House M.D., which has a page listing Connections Between House and Holmes, and a page about Differences between Holmes and House, and even a House and Holmes blog.

I prefer a life with little to no television in it (I always seem to have more time in the day when I keep the tube off, and I don't much enjoy being offended on a regular basis, either), but I know some serious House fans in this blog neighborhood, and I don't know if they've made the literary connection yet. So, there it is.

And since I also seem to have more hours in the day when I don't follow links around willy-nilly, ahem, I think I'll get back to work now... :)