When I was young, I learned about first person and third person. Some books were told by “I,” and some were not. That was simple.

Later, I learned about third person limited — third person but limited to what one person sees and experiences. Inherent Vice, for example, is in third person limited. I used it in Stevie One.

But today it occurred to me that there are different types of first person, too. I’ve been reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories. They are very entertaining, but what I want to talk about here is how they’re told.

The narrator is a newspaper reporter named Edward Malone, and the books are written as Malone wrote them for publication, describing the amazing adventures he had with Professor Challenger. Malone even includes occasional asides to his editor. For one climactic scene in The Lost World, Malone even quotes the newspaper reports of the event (written by a colleague of his — including a few parenthetical remarks by Malone disparaging his friend’s writing).

Doyle did this in the Holmes stories also — Holmes sometimes complains about how Watson’ published stories make their cases appear sensational and sentimental, as opposed to the cerebral exercises that they should be.

So, Watson is writing and publishing the stories within the world of the stories. Some of the stories refer adventures which cannot be told yet, or they mention some details which are being deliberately hidden from the reader.

I think this was a common device at the time — the presentation of the story as something which actually happened in the real world. Balthazar, the second book of The Alexandria Quartet, starts with a description of the publication of Justine, the first book, on some of the characters.

There are a lot of ways to achieve this effect. In the Edgar Allan Poe stories about C. Auguste Dupin, for example, years and character names are elided, and newspaper reports are quoted. I’ve seen books where characters talk about the circumstances under which they are writing the story, often year or decades after the fact.

I think this is much less common now. It seems stodgy, like starting a movie as if it was a play — showing the audience filing into the theater, and then gradually pulling the action off of the stage and into the “real” world.

Which of course makes me wonder about how I could use it most effectively…