The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
256 pages
© 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Has it been five years since I read a Holmes collection? I remember picking up Memoirs shortly after reading The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, not nothing that Memoirs was published well before that, but I fell into distraction at some point. More's the pity, because here collected are eleven classic stories that include both the beginning and the (first) end of Holmes' career, "The Gloria Scott" and "The Final Problem".   It contains a few iconic scenes; Holmes stalking about in his cape and seeming to read Watson's mind, as well as some of his best lines:

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
 "That was the curious incident."

Some Trek author inserted those lines into a novel years ago and it absolutely mystified me. Well, glad to have cleared that up. (On that Trek note, I must say that The Next Generation deceived me in regards to Professor Moriarty. He's charming onscreen, but decidedly uncharismatic here. Granted ,his only appearance is to threaten Holmes with death if he doesn't keep plotting the 'Napoleon of Crime's" Waterloo.)  Memoirs has the same engaging writing as the previous collections, and adds some interesting aspects to Holmes' character, namely his eccentric home decor (storing cigars in Persian slippers, using the wall as target practice).

A few of the mysteries:

• "Silver Blaze": A prize horse has gone missing. (Okay, granted, it's not as ambitious as the missing train from Further Adventures, but it's still very mysterious.)
• "The Musgrave Ritual": A brilliant butler vanishes after being caught studying nonsensical couplets used in an initiation ritual. Could it be that he divined some meaning into the lines?
• "The Gloria Scott":  What secret does a cranky sailor have over this nervous country squire?
• "The Greek Interpeter": A man is driven into the middle of nowhere and used to question a Greek man being held against his will --- why?
• "The Cardboard Box":  Who ordered two human ears packed in salt? 

I think I've gone through all the short stories my library has access to, so when next I visit Baker Street, it will be for a full novel!

This Week at the Library...

Well, welcome to November! October seems to have been a busy month for reading, as well as a satisfying one. In addition to the books which I commented on in the last week, I also read The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as The Astral by Kate Christensen. I'll be giving The Astral more extended comments later, but suffice it to say, the book proved a most intriguing novel and I would have checked out another by Christensen if I could have remembered her last name's spelling while in fiction.

As for The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: it collects a dozen or so Holmes stories, most set in the latter part of the great detective's career, including  the chronologically "last" in the series in which Holmes foils a German spy on the cusp of the Great War. The afterward comments that such a story is a fitting end to the Holmes series, as the Great War completely destroyed the Victorian world that Holmes was most at home in.  In addition to conventional mysteries, the collection included four rather usual stories. Two were mysteries that Watson reports on, but not as Holmes' assistant: indeed, Holmes never appears by name, and his anonymous attempts to solve the mysteries both propose solutions which turn out to be wrong. They're impressive guesses, but wrong all the same. One of these stories, involving a missing train, happened to be my favorite -- largely because how does a train go missing?  The last two stories, including "How Watson Learned the Trick", were almost disappointing in their brevity. Indeed, they're not stories so much as brief scenes in which Doyle pokes fun at his detective's style of logical deduction -- or so the afterward tells me.  Even so, that style is most impressive: in a story I'm reading now, Holmes figures the speed of the train by noting the rate at which telegraph poles are passing by. Since he knows the distance between each pole,  he can count the miles and speed without reference to a speedometer or mile posts.

At the library this week, I picked up...

• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which is another Readers Digestion collection of Holmes stories like the last two I read, in the same handsome binding with an attractive font and illustrations. 
• The Age of Louis XIV, Will Durant. Time for another big helping of European history.
• Sharpe's Sword, Bernard Cornwell. I've watched the movie version of this before,  but the Sharpe movies and Sharpe books vary wildly so I don't think I've been too much spoiled beyond "Sharpe deals with loathsome aristocrats, Sharpe fights a really big battle and almost dies"...but those are elements of every Sharpe novel. 
• The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough. McCullough is a popular and well-acclaimed historian, most famous for his 1776 and a large biography of John Adams.  This appeared in the library's new acquisitions section, and I picked it up out of curiosity.
• The Book of Guys, Garrison Keiler. As a regular NPR listener, I'm accustomed to his voice and humor but have never read one of his books. 

Since we're coming up on 5 November, I really should have checked out something on English history to continue my yearly tradition of reading culture-related books on nationalish holidays.  I've been struggling to get that tradition off the ground -- there hasn't been a year when I've done all four (American, 4 July; French, 14 July;  German, 3 October; England, 5 November) successfully, this year included. I never finished my Fourth of July Reading, didn't finish my Bastille Day Reading until August, and now don't have a proper Guy Fawkes reading. I suppose Sharpe could count, being a work by an English author and starring an English main character,  and Sherlock Holmes is an English creation as well...but it feels like cheating, because I would have read them anyway.

A question to English readers -- might St. George's day be more appropriate for me to do an English-culture related reading?  I know Guy Fawkes Night isn't a "national" holiday, but I chose it because it was the only national-ish holiday I knew of.  Whenever I mention this book/culture project of mine at forums, English commenters seem to think my choice of dates is an odd one.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Illustrations by Richard Lebenson
Afterword by Fred Strebeigh
© 1987, The Reader's Digest Association.

‎"You? Who are you? How could you know anything about the matter?"

"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."

Lately I've been wanting to read a good mystery, but put down a police novel after realizing I'm rather tired of books that begin with dead bodies. I wanted a mystery with some class, with some dignity -- a gentleman's mystery, like Isaac Asimov's Black Widow puzzlers.  Finding no one who could recommend such a work, I decided to examine the most legendary detective in literature: Sherlock Holmes. This handsome volume of twelve stories met my taste exactly, and I am licking my chops at the prospect of having fifty more such stories to read in other volumes.

There are few people in the industrialized world who would not recognize the name Sherlock Holmes, I imagine. His profile -- a deerstalker hat and pipe -- are cultural icons, as his saying, "Elementary, my dear Watson..." Holmes is is a brilliant and ruthlessly logical detective residing in Victorian London, whose clientele ranges from the dregs of society to kings. Regardless of social status or wealth, all who come to Holmes see him as their last possible hope. He only asks that his cases present him with a challenge, and he masters each with his impressive powers of observation, taking in every fact and producing bewilderingly accurate analysis based on that.  Twelve of those stories are chronicled here by Holmes' lone friend and companion, Dr. Watson:  "A Scandal in Bohemia", "The Red-Headed League", "A Case of Identity", "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", "The Five Orange Pis", "The Man with the Twisted Lip", "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb", "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor", "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet", and "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches".

I fell for Doyle's style of writing immediately; there's such elegance to his prose that I found myself reading aloud simply for the pleasure of it. The stories, too, offered much variety: although there are a few corpses scattered here and there, these aren't death-mysteries. Some of them do not even involve legal crimes. Although a friend told me that Doyle wrote these stories in such a way as to invite the reader to solve them before Holmes, I scarcely think this possible: while the detective's feats of logic are easy enough to follow in retrospect, and readers versed in literary tropes may guess at solutions, Holmes' concrete evidence is often information the readers are not privy to, or can't possibly grasp the significance of. This doesn't in any way detract from the pleasure of following Holmes' footsteps, and the stories are more varied than most modern police-detective mysteries I've read.

The book itself is well-done: the sepia-toned illustrations complement each piece nicely, the font is simple and stylish, and the book ends with a piece from Smithsonian on the widespread cultish following Holmes has. That following is part of the reason why I thought of Doyle's detective when I itched for a mystery: Isaac Asimov was a devoted Sherlockian,  mentioning him in his Widowers stories and writing an essay analyzing Holmes' skills as a chemist.

When I return to the library this week, my first stop will be fiction -- D for "Doyle"!