Sherlock Holmes: I've Read Them All and Glad of It
Having watched several versions of Sherlock Holmes stories over the years, and having visited the home of William Gillette, Gillette Castle in East Haddam, Connecticut, I decided it was time to read the real originals by Arthur Conan Doyle. (Gillette was an actor at the beginning of the 20th century who played Holmes on stage and even in some early silent films, who made a fortune at it and built this extravagant and somewhat creepy mansion on the Connecticut River. When a friend and I were up there, a friend of hers we were visiting told us to go there, so we took his advice.)
It took a while to finish the books, because I am not a fast reader and there are scores of the short stories and novellas, but you can get them for a song on Amazon for your Kindle. Do. You won't regret it.
First, the basic conceit of the stories works quite well. A fiction writer uses a fictional character to be the author and narrator of the tales, so they are all (for the most part) in first person. Very meta, as I like to say, because the fact that the tales were published in the Strand, which they were, is often alluded to by Holmes and Watson.
Second, the character of Holmes as played in popular culture is a misrepresentation, in my opinion. First, he's not a jerk. He treats people nicely overall. He is kind to street boys and most of his clients. He is eccentric and does use cocaine at times, but he has more or less normal relationships with people. Doyle wrote the stories, I think, more with the idea of the fun of the chase then to explore Holmes as some sort of social misfit. The Sherlock of PBS is a travesty in terms of accurate portrayal of a fictional character (and in some other ways, too). Holmes has powers of observation but they are by training, not due to a mental disorder, so Cumberbatch's portrayal of Holmes as having Asperger's or autism is inaccurate and honestly, offensive, to someone who understands the autism spectrum, who has family on it, and who enjoys the real Holmes stories.
The Sherlock of the books does not trust women, though. Often he says they cannot in general be trusted because of their emotionalism and bent toward deception to get their way, but that is not true of all of them and there are many sympathetic women in the stories. That of course leads people today to assume "gayness," but I doubt Doyle would have countenanced that. Holmes lives in a different world, the world of his mind. He is less concerned about right and wrong and justice as he is in solutions. He is an amateur but published chemist and botanist, especially in terms of tobacco. He is a master of disguises, too.
Watson is a medical doctor who actually practices medicine through most of the stories, and had been in military service in the Middle East (that part the PBS show got right). He does marry Mary early in the series but his wife conveniently dies after perhaps five or ten years of marriage (since there is not real chronology to the stories, and they are episodic, that part is unclear). People could conveniently die in Victorian literature; they also could get something called "brain fever" from severe emotional shocks (in fact, I looked it up, and this is exactly what Wikipedia says: brain fever "is encountered most often in Victorian literature, where it typically describes a potentially life-threatening illness brought about by a severe emotional upset" and then it sites five stories of Sherlock Holmes, so Doyle must have loved the idea.
Sherlock does have a brother named Mycroft who hangs out at his "club" but actually does work, of a sort, for the British government because he has a special ability to know things, to put them together. He has friends in high places. Mycroft is, from the descriptions, somewhat obese and doesn't get around much. He only shows up in a few stories, ones that have to do with diplomatic papers being stolen or espionage.
Watson is not stupid, but Holmes treats him like a student he is trying to tutor in the ways of detection and Watson just doesn't get it sometimes. He misses the things Holmes would and frequently is annoyed that Holmes points out his lapses, but at the same time Holmes uses Watson as a surrogate or second pair of eyes and hands. Watson always carries a revolver, so Holmes doesn't have to.
Another huge difference between the typical modern adaptations and the books is Moriarty. Very little page space is devoted to Moriarty. Although at one point it appears that Moriarty kills Sherlock by pulling him to both their deaths in the mountains in Germany, Doyle's character was so popular that he found a way to bring him back (not from the dead, but he wasn't really killed and just disappeared for a while so that Moriarty and his fellow criminals would think he truly was dead). (That was a really long sentence!) Moriarty was based on a criminal leader of the time, but Doyle is not fascinated with the character and is somewhat inconsistent about his depiction. In fact, that is one of the flaws, since the stories were written over decades--sometimes things are not as consistent as they would have been if written in a shorter time frame.
What Doyle does do on at least two occasion is take us on back story to the U.S. In one story (A Study in Scarlett), he takes us after Holmes solution to explain how the situation unfolded with Mormons in Utah, or more specifically, with a man and his daughter trying to escape from Mormons in Utah with whom he had become attached after almost dying. It's quite a tale (Doyle, as his life story would show, had little place for religion, mainstream or otherwise.) He does this even better in The Valley of Fear, which I highly recommend.
The stories are very well written and descriptive. They are not cliched; what is written today is cliched because they are following these plots. They are never boring. You can go, of course, to websites and read the snyopses, like this one, but what in the world is the fun in that?
It took a while to finish the books, because I am not a fast reader and there are scores of the short stories and novellas, but you can get them for a song on Amazon for your Kindle. Do. You won't regret it.
First, the basic conceit of the stories works quite well. A fiction writer uses a fictional character to be the author and narrator of the tales, so they are all (for the most part) in first person. Very meta, as I like to say, because the fact that the tales were published in the Strand, which they were, is often alluded to by Holmes and Watson.
Second, the character of Holmes as played in popular culture is a misrepresentation, in my opinion. First, he's not a jerk. He treats people nicely overall. He is kind to street boys and most of his clients. He is eccentric and does use cocaine at times, but he has more or less normal relationships with people. Doyle wrote the stories, I think, more with the idea of the fun of the chase then to explore Holmes as some sort of social misfit. The Sherlock of PBS is a travesty in terms of accurate portrayal of a fictional character (and in some other ways, too). Holmes has powers of observation but they are by training, not due to a mental disorder, so Cumberbatch's portrayal of Holmes as having Asperger's or autism is inaccurate and honestly, offensive, to someone who understands the autism spectrum, who has family on it, and who enjoys the real Holmes stories.
The Sherlock of the books does not trust women, though. Often he says they cannot in general be trusted because of their emotionalism and bent toward deception to get their way, but that is not true of all of them and there are many sympathetic women in the stories. That of course leads people today to assume "gayness," but I doubt Doyle would have countenanced that. Holmes lives in a different world, the world of his mind. He is less concerned about right and wrong and justice as he is in solutions. He is an amateur but published chemist and botanist, especially in terms of tobacco. He is a master of disguises, too.
Watson is a medical doctor who actually practices medicine through most of the stories, and had been in military service in the Middle East (that part the PBS show got right). He does marry Mary early in the series but his wife conveniently dies after perhaps five or ten years of marriage (since there is not real chronology to the stories, and they are episodic, that part is unclear). People could conveniently die in Victorian literature; they also could get something called "brain fever" from severe emotional shocks (in fact, I looked it up, and this is exactly what Wikipedia says: brain fever "is encountered most often in Victorian literature, where it typically describes a potentially life-threatening illness brought about by a severe emotional upset" and then it sites five stories of Sherlock Holmes, so Doyle must have loved the idea.
Sherlock does have a brother named Mycroft who hangs out at his "club" but actually does work, of a sort, for the British government because he has a special ability to know things, to put them together. He has friends in high places. Mycroft is, from the descriptions, somewhat obese and doesn't get around much. He only shows up in a few stories, ones that have to do with diplomatic papers being stolen or espionage.
Watson is not stupid, but Holmes treats him like a student he is trying to tutor in the ways of detection and Watson just doesn't get it sometimes. He misses the things Holmes would and frequently is annoyed that Holmes points out his lapses, but at the same time Holmes uses Watson as a surrogate or second pair of eyes and hands. Watson always carries a revolver, so Holmes doesn't have to.
Another huge difference between the typical modern adaptations and the books is Moriarty. Very little page space is devoted to Moriarty. Although at one point it appears that Moriarty kills Sherlock by pulling him to both their deaths in the mountains in Germany, Doyle's character was so popular that he found a way to bring him back (not from the dead, but he wasn't really killed and just disappeared for a while so that Moriarty and his fellow criminals would think he truly was dead). (That was a really long sentence!) Moriarty was based on a criminal leader of the time, but Doyle is not fascinated with the character and is somewhat inconsistent about his depiction. In fact, that is one of the flaws, since the stories were written over decades--sometimes things are not as consistent as they would have been if written in a shorter time frame.
What Doyle does do on at least two occasion is take us on back story to the U.S. In one story (A Study in Scarlett), he takes us after Holmes solution to explain how the situation unfolded with Mormons in Utah, or more specifically, with a man and his daughter trying to escape from Mormons in Utah with whom he had become attached after almost dying. It's quite a tale (Doyle, as his life story would show, had little place for religion, mainstream or otherwise.) He does this even better in The Valley of Fear, which I highly recommend.
The stories are very well written and descriptive. They are not cliched; what is written today is cliched because they are following these plots. They are never boring. You can go, of course, to websites and read the snyopses, like this one, but what in the world is the fun in that?
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