Monday 1 June 2020

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes


Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I seem to recall that I hated The Lost World and regarded Doyle's Professor Challenger as a massive twat, while Doyle himself regarded The Lost World as one of his proper novels, unlike all that populist detective stuff; and Sherlock Holmes seems to have enjoyed a significant resurgence in popularity of late, most of which I've tried to avoid, the exception being a novel by Philip Purser-Hallard because I'd happily pay full price to read an Andy Capp novel if Philip Purser-Hallard had written it. We've had Cucumber as Holmes on the telly, an ingenious update in which Watson is advised to deal with his PTSD by writing a blog, which is well peng and edgy and shit; and we've had Elementary because apparently we'll now watch any old shit described by Netflix as bingeworthy if there's some homeopathic trace of Sherlock in the mix.

So why did I read this thing again?

Firstly, it was free, something which caught my eye at a lockdown bookswap event when not much else did; secondly, because I loved the Basil Rathbone movies when I was a teenager, and even to the point of reading one of the novels, possibly The Sign of Four, which I seem to remember enjoying; and thirdly, I suppose, to see what the fuss was about.

Not much, as it happens. Adventures collects a load of the short stories from The Strand or whatever it was in which they were published, and they're very short - mostly twenty pages or so, which doesn't really allow much room in which anything can happen. That said, Doyle's Holmes is more engaging than his Challenger, and it's quite nice to read something of modest narrative consequence; and they're nicely written with an elegant turn of phrase.

The problem is that at this length, these stories don't have the space in which to be anything more elaborate than crossword puzzles, and so become repetitive very quickly as one proceeds through the collection - possibly depending upon how much one enjoys crossword puzzles. Typically, most of the story is anecdotal, reported to Holmes, or to Watson, or else by one to the other. Usually someone or something will be missing and the details will seem almost ostentatiously resistant to analysis, which of course guarantees that they'll yield in about another fifteen pages; then we find out that Holmes was right, and why, and onto the next tale, repeat to fade…

I'm sure these tales had their charm when in isolation in whatever periodical, but the cramming only serves to expose their flaws, how thin they actually are, how absolutely lacking in ambition they were, wishing only to divert the reader for thirty minutes or so. Here and there we have glimpses of Doyle's thoughts on detection, even how we perceive the world around us, what we notice and what we miss, but in each case, just as it gets interesting, space demands we suddenly think about an intriguingly shaped stain on some cunt's trousers for the next few paragraphs. Being as I don't actually sploodge in my pants every time someone mentions Victorian England, top hats, or most exceedingly delightful difference engines, the appeal of these things began to wear thin for me after the first hundred or so pages, and by the half-way point I was no longer able to keep my concentration affixed to whatever inconsequential observation of nothing particularly interesting was being made upon the page; so I gave up and read something better.

Lesson learned.

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