The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Review
This volume, authorized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, contains all 4 full-length novels and all 56 short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. At over a thousand pages, the weighty tome is a perfect gift for budding amateur sleuths, and it is an ideal companion for a long stay on a desert island (or a leisurely trip through the English countryside). As the reader wades past the tense introductions of A Study in Scarlet and moves towards such classic tales as The …
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November 8th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
In Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the world’s best known and (arguably) most fully realized literary characters. Since Doyle’s death, there have been plenty of people writing knockoffs of his stories. But with rare exceptions (Nicholas Meyer comes to mind), most have not lived up to the high standards Doyle set in at least the best of his Holmes tales.
This volume includes the complete canon of Doyle’s original stories — four novels and fifty-six short stories, from “A Study in Scarlet” to “His Last Bow.” While there are a handful of cases that bore significantly on international affairs (e.g. “The Bruce-Partington Plans”), most of them are of interest simply because of that touch of the _outre_ that Holmes loved so much and that provided such stimulating material to the ideal reasoner.
There are some clunkers in the canon, of course, but the vast majority of these stories — especially the earliest ones — are just brilliant. If you are reading them for the first time, I envy you; the sturdy Dr. John Watson is about to introduce you to a new world, a world of Victorian gaslight and Stradivarius violins, of hansom cabs and cries of “The game’s afoot!”
For in reading this volume you will find such classic tales as “The Red-Headed League” and “The Man With The Twisted Lip”; you will encounter the famous dog that did nothing in the night-time (”Silver Blaze”) and several versions of Holmes’s favorite maxim (”When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”); and you will meet one of the most fascinating and memorable characters ever to spring from the printed page: Holmes himself.
Perhaps most importantly, you will catch a glimpse of the world as an ideal reasoner might see it — not as a grab-bag of random atomic facts in which our own role is negligible, but as a vast interconnected whole in which each part bears some necessary relation to the rest, and in which the reasoned pursuit of justice in all matters great and small is the business of each and every one of us.
Incidentally, the twentieth-century philosopher who presented that vision most consistently and cogently is, to my own mind, Brand Blanshard, and any Holmes readers who are interested in philosophy may enjoy investigating Blanshard’s works as well.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Thrilled recently to discover the excellent Jeremy Brett filmed episodes of Sherlock Holmes, I then took to reading the original stories and enjoyed virtually every one of them. There are a few plots which nearly duplicate other ones, but the 56 short stories and 4 novels comprise a stunning collection of fiction which evokes the atmosphere of late Victorian era England in a straightforward prose that grabs you instantly and makes you turn page after page and then read story after story. As you get further and further into the world Doyle created, you’ll begin to hear the sounds of horse carriages, smell candles and gas lamps, and also, in the manner of Holmes, to begin to truly NOTICE the small details of life which may end up meaning far more than they seem to at first. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most intriguing characters in all of literature. You’ll end up wishing you could’ve met him or, even better, followed him into the bowels of London or into the English countryside as he probes a mystery, running only on adrenalin. I also recommend Doyle’s fine book of “Round The Fire” stories.