Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Initial publication, 1892.
This edition, The Oxford University Press, 1993

We’re reading some of the Sherlock Holmes stories, also (as with Agatha Christie) in preparation for the Road Scholar (formerly elderhostel) event we will be participating in soon.  This is the first collection, of Holmes short stories, but not the first published works—it’s preceded by A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890).  I suspect, though, that for many people, the shorts were their first introduction to Holmes and Watson.  The Oxford University Press edition is part of an excellent compilation of the complete Holmes, with useful introductions to the specific works and to the entire body of work.  The text is also usefully (and unobtrusively) end-noted; unlike footnotes, the use of end notes makes it a simple matter for the reader to ignore them, or not, fairly easily.

I have read (and re-read) all of the Holmes stories, and much prefer the short stories to the novels.  (Of the four novels, only The Hound of the Baskervilles works at all well for me.)  And it’s easy to see why, even at the time of their initial publication, the short stories were so well received.  Holmes is a remarkable character, and Watson (if a bit—OK, a lot—too dim) makes a fine narrator and chronicler.  The stories themselves vary quite a bit in quality (which is not surprising), but, at their worst are fairly compelling.  Also, given today’s taste in subject matter, it’s interesting to reflect that some of the stories do not include any crime and that many of them do not involve a murder.

The Adventures… begins with what is (in my opinion) one of the best of the entire run of stories—“A Scandal In Bohemia.”  Both how Holmes discovers the threat to the King of Bohemia and how Holmes is then himself thwarted is really nicely done.

The level of this entire collection is quite high, although there are a couple of instances either in which the mystery is not very mysterious (“The Copper Beeches”) on in which there is, it seems to me, a thread left hanging (“The Noble Bachelor”).  And in a number of instances, Holmes solves the mystery, but the malefactors (just reading these things has me referring to “malefactors” instead of “bad guys”) are not brought to (conventional) justice (“The Five Orange Pips,” for one).  And, of course, in reading all 12 of the stories together, I became aware of a great deal of repetition in the openings.  There are, after all, only a few ways for Watson—who is, for most of the stories, a practicing physician with a wife and family—to introduce (or re-introduce) us to Holmes and lead us into the events of the cases.  So I would recommend spacing them out a bit.  And, for my taste, the “official” detectives are too stupid to be worthy adversaries in detection.

But I would definitely recommend either acquainting or reacquainting yourself with Holmes and Watson.