The three main characters in VN’s novel Pale Fire (1962) are the poet Shade, his commentator Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) and his murderer Gradus (a member of the Shadows, a regicidal organization). According to Kinbote, killing John Shade was Gradus' "crowning blunder:"
Gradus, Jakob, 1915-1959; alias Jack Degree, de Grey, d'Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.; a Jack of small trades and a killer, 12, 17; lynching the wrong people, 80; his approach synchronized with S 's work on the poem, 120, 131; his election and past tribulations, 171; the first lap of his journey, Onhava to Copenhagen, 181, 209; to Paris, and meeting with Oswin Bretwit, 286; to Geneva, and talk with little Gordon at Joe Lavender's place near Lex, 408; calling headquarters from Geneva, 469; his name in a variant, and his wait in Geneva, 596; to Nice, and his wait there, 697; his meeting with Izumrudov in Nice and discovery of the King's address, 741; from Paris to New York, 873; in New York, 949 1; his morning in New York, his journey to New Wye, to the campus, to Dulwich Rd., 949 2; the crowning blunder, 1000. (Index)
In his humorous story A Charlatan! (1840) E. A. Poe mentions Mr. Hague's numerous blunders:
This Hague, then, is a “fortune teller,” one of that hopeful class who get their living by their impositions. His fortune telling powers, are, we suppose, equal to his capacity for predicting the state of the weather, and how great that is we shall presently make manifest. It is, perhaps, not a matter to be treated seriously, especially since the almanac makers, after long and ample experience, have generally relinquished this weather prediction as being utterly unworthy of credence. But Mr. Hague takes up the cast-off trade and attempts to make a fortune-telling profit out of it, with what success let his numerous blunders for March explain.
A friend who cut out his “predictions” and took the trouble of marking them day by day, exhibits the following string of blunders. It is really a matter of no little merriment how the fellow could possibly miss hitting the mark so constantly. Let him, in his next attempt, after manufacturing his impositions, reverse the whole mass and publish precisely the opposite of his predictions. He will then be quite as correct and possibly a little more so...
...But we have no patience to follow out the track of this trash maker to the end. Those who may take the trouble will find it “so forth and so on” to the end of the chapter. Blunder upon blunder marks the entire catalogue. This is a mere matter of course with all impostors, but those who are credulous or weak enough to suffer themselves to be imposed upon, may easily verify a few odd days. This can be done by stringing a bunch of days together and giving a general mixing up, making a lump job of it, like some sage Almanac maker who commences at the top and running down the whole page with “about these days expect a little changeable weather,” or something of that sort. Or those who are particularly anxious to help out the predictions, may take the little end of any day in the month and give the complexion of its half hour or so, as a complete and perfect verification of that day's prophecy. Or by claiming rain somewhere else when there happens to be none here, and sunshine there, when it happens to be otherwise here. This is a singularly convenient process, by the aid of which, you can have it rain or dry, clouds or sunshine, and blow hot or cold, with the same breath, ad libitum et infinitum.
"The entire catalogue" makes one think of a catalogue raisonné discovered by Kinbote in the middle drawer of the desk in Judge Goldsworth's study:
Whatever I touched on the first day of my stay yielded a specimen of Goldsworthiana. I unlocked the medicine chest in the second bathroom, and out fluttered a message advising me that the slit for discarded safety blades was too full to use. I opened the icebox, and it warned me with a bark that "no national specialties with odors hard to get rid of" should be placed therein. I pulled out the middle drawer of the desk in the study - and discovered a catalogue raisonné of its meager contents which included an assortment of ashtrays, a damask paperknife (described as "one ancient dagger brought by Mrs. Goldsworth's father from the Orient"), and an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came around again. Among various detailed notices affixed to a special board in the pantry, such as plumbing instructions, dissertations on electricity, discourses on cactuses and so forth, I found the diet of the black cat that came with the house:
Mon, Wed, Fri: Liver
Tue, Thu, Sat: Fish
Sun: Ground meat
(All it got from me was milk and sardines; it was a likable little creature but after a while its movements began to grate on my nerves and I farmed it out to Mrs. Finley, the cleaning woman.) (note to Lines 47-48)
The Black Cat (1843) is a story by E. A. Poe. On the other hand, Gradus' "crowning blunder" seems to hint at "the crowning horror" mentioned by R. L. Stevenson in his review of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Academy (London), vol. VII, no. 1, January 2, 1875:
It is not the fashion of Poe’s earlier tales to be pointless, however it may be with these sorry ones of the end. Pointlessness is, indeed, the very last charge that could be brought reasonably against them. He has the true story-teller’s instinct. He knows the little nothings that make stories, or mar them. He knows how to enhance the significance of any situation, and give colour and life with seemingly irrelevant particulars. Thus, the whole spirit of “The Cask of Amontillado” depends on Fortunato’s carnival costume of cap and bells and motley. When Poe had once hit upon this device of dressing the victim grotesquely, he had found the key of the story; and so he sends him with uneven steps along the catacombs of the Montresors, and the last sound we hear out of the walled-up recess is the jingling of the bells upon his cap. Admirable, also, is the use he makes of the striking clock at Prince Prospero’s feast, in “The Mask of the Red Death.” Each time the clock struck (the reader will remember), it struck so loudly that the music and the dancing must cease perforce until it had made an end; as the hours ran on towards midnight, those pauses grew naturally longer; the maskers had the more time to think and look at one another, and their thoughts were none the more pleasant. Thus, as each hour struck, there went a jar about the assemblage; until, as the reader will remember, the end comes suddenly. Now, this is quite legitimate; no one need be ashamed of being frightened or excited by such means; the rules of the game have been respected; only, by the true instinct of the story-teller he has told his story to the best advantage, and got full value for his imaginations. This is not so always, however; for sometimes he will take a high note falsetto; sometimes, by a sort of conjuring trick, get more out of his story than he has been able to put into it; and, while the whole garrison is really parading past us on the esplanade, continue to terrify us from the battlements with sham cannon and many fierce-looking shakos upon broom-sticks. For example, in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” after having exhausted his bedevilled imagination in the conception of the pendulum and the red-hot collapsing walls, he finds he can figure forth nothing more horrible for the pit; and yet the pit was to be the crowning horror. This is how he effects his purpose (vol. i. p. 214): —
“Amid the thought of the fiery destruction that impended, the idea of the coolness of the well came over my soul like balm. I rushed to its deadly brink. I threw my straining vision below. The glare from the enkindled roof illumined its inmost recesses. Yet for a wild moment did my spirit refuse to comprehend the meaning of what I saw. At length it forced — it wrestled its way into my soul — it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason. O for a voice to speak! oh horror! oh, any horror but this!”
"The rules of the game" (which have been respected) bring to mind "the rule of a supernal game" mentioned by Kinbote when he describes the activities of Andronnikov and Niagarin (the two Soviet experts hired by the new Zemblan government to find the crown jewels):
All this is the rule of a supernal game, all this is the immutable fable of fate, and should not be construed as reflecting on the efficiency of the two Soviet experts - who, anyway, were to be marvelously successful on a later occasion with another job (see note to line 747). Their names (probably fictitious) were Andronnikov and Niagarin. One has seldom seen, at least among waxworks, a pair of more pleasant, presentable chaps. Everybody admired their clean-shaven jaws, elementary facial expressions, wavy hair, and perfect teeth. Tall handsome Andronnikov seldom smiled but the crinkly little rays of his orbital flesh bespoke infinite humor while the twin furrows descending from the sides of his shapely nostrils evoked glamorous associations with flying aces and sagebrush heroes. Niagarin, on the other hand, was of comparatively short stature, had somewhat more rounded, albeit quite manly features, and every now and then would flash a big boyish smile remindful of scoutmasters with something to hide, or those gentlemen who cheat in television quizzes. It was delightful to watch the two splendid Sovietchiks running about in the yard and kicking a chalk-dusty, thumping-tight soccer ball (looking so large and bald in such surroundings). Andronnikov could tap-play it on his toe up and down a dozen times before punting it pocket straight into the melancholy, surprised, bleached, harmless heavens; and Niagarin could imitate to perfection the mannerisms of a certain stupendous Dynamo goalkeeper. They used to hand out to the kitchen boys Russian caramels with plums or cherries depicted on the rich luscious six-cornered wrappers that enclosed a jacket of thinner paper with the mauve mummy inside; and lustful country girls were known to creep up along the drungen (bramble-choked footpaths) to the very foot of the bulwark when the two silhouetted against the now flushed sky sang beautiful sentimental military duets at eventide on the rampart. Niagarin had a soulful tenor voice, and Andronnikov a hearty baritone, and both wore elegant jackboots of a soft black leather, and the sky turned away showing its ethereal vertebrae. (note to line 681)
"A sort of conjuring trick" mentioned by R. L. Stevenson in his review of E. A. Poe's Works reminds one of "What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!" (Kinbote's exclamation when he describes Izumrudov's visit to Gradus in Nice):
On the morning of July 16 (while Shade was working on the 698-746 section of his poem) dull Gradus, dreading another day of enforced inactivity in sardonically, sparkling, stimulatingly noisy Nice, decided that until hunger drove him out he would not budge from a leathern armchair in the simulacrum of a lobby among the brown smells of his dingy hotel. Unhurriedly he went through a heap of old magazines on a nearby table. There he sat, a little monument of taciturnity, sighing, puffing out his cheeks, licking his thumb before turning a page, gaping at the pictures, and moving his lips as he climbed down the columns of printed matter. Having replaced everything in a neat pile, he sank back in his chair closing and opening his gabled hands in various constructions of tedium - when a man who had occupied a seat next to him got up and walked into the outer glare leaving his paper behind. Gradus pulled it into his lap, spread it out - and froze over a strange piece of local news that caught his eye: burglars had broken into Villa Disa and ransacked a bureau, taking from a jewel box a number of valuable old medals.
Here was something to brood upon. Had this vaguely unpleasant incident some bearing on his quest? Should he do something about it? Cable headquarters? Hard to word succinctly a simple fact without having it look like a cryptogram. Airmail a clipping? He was in his room working on the newspaper with a safety razor blade when there was a bright rap-rap at the door. Gradus admitted an unexpected visitor - one of the greater Shadows, whom he had thought to be onhava-onhava ("far, far away"), in wild, misty, almost legendary Zembla! What stunning conjuring tricks our magical mechanical age plays with old mother space and old father time!
He was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him, but he certainly had a keen mind. His name, Izumrudov, sounded rather Russian but actually meant “of the Umruds,” an Eskimo tribe sometimes seen paddling their umyaks (hide-lined boats) on the emerald waters of our northern shores. Grinning, he said friend Gradus must get together his travel documents, including a health certificate, and take the earliest available jet to New York. Bowing, he congratulated him on having indicated with such phenomenal acumen the right place and the right way. Yes, after a thorough perlustration of the loot that Andron and Niagarushka had obtained from the Queen's rosewood writing desk (mostly bills, and treasured snapshots, and those silly medals) a letter from the King did turn up giving his address which was of all places -- Our man, who interrupted the herald of success to say he had never -- was bidden not to display so much modesty. A slip of paper was now produced on which Izumudrov, shaking with laughter (death is hilarious), wrote out for Gradus their client's alias, the name of the university where he taught, and that of the town where it was situated. No, the slip was not for keeps. He could keep it only while memorizing it. This brand of paper (used by macaroon makers) was not only digestible but delicious. The gay green vision withdrew - to resume his whoring no doubt. How one hates such men! (note to Line 741)
A merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow, Izumrudov makes one think of R. L. Stevenson's story The Merry Men (1882). The title derives from the local name given to a group of waves in the story, not from the Merry Men of Robin Hood and his merry men.