Charles Rzepka

Charles Rzepka who teaches at Boston University, is working on a book about Thomas De Quincey and the sublime.

Letter

In It for the Money

20 February 2014

Alice Spawls isn’t correct to describe Sherlock Holmes as a ‘gentleman amateur’: he is in fact a paid private professional (LRB, 20 February). This is made unmistakeably clear when he is first introduced in A Study in Scarlet, where the mystery of his profession is posed, over breakfast, to his new roommate, Dr Watson. One of Holmes’s most distinctive features as a detective is that he has...

Peripheries

Charles Rzepka, 21 March 1991

When I was 14, I had a nightmare. I am standing next to a wall, on the outside of a square enclosure. A man is disappearing around the corner. I pursue him, but before I reach the end of the wall, he has already vanished around the next corner. He continues to outdistance me as we walk round the square. As I am about to return to my starting-point, I realise that the man I am pursuing is now walking right behind me. Fearfully, I turn around. What I behold is my own terrified countenance, as in a mirror. Then I wake up.

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