Sherlock Holmes

The characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson have endured in the public mind for over a century, most recently appearing in a feature film and a BBC television show. Over the past year or so, I have been working my way through all of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. This comprises a total of 4 novellas and 5 short story collections. I have to say, while they are sometimes slightly repetitive and predictable if you take them all in at once, they are enjoyable reads. The short stories make excellent little things to read before you go to sleep or while you are waiting for the bus. The first two novellas, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four (which has a boat chase!) could be considered complete books, one a sequel for the other but the second two novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear, are basically just longer versions of the short stories.

Instead of detailing my thoughts about all of the stories and novellas, I am just going to discuss my favorite in each of the categories in this post.  Perhaps I will come back to others at a later date.

My favorite of the novellas was The Study in Scarlet. This was the first story published and the characters of Holmes and Watson get some fleshing out that they do not get very much of in the later stories. However, what really made this novel shine for me was, unlike most of the other Sherlock Holmes stories, which are generally narrated by Watson in the first person, this one has an entire section on the criminal's background in the third person. This section could make a compelling, if short, western by itself and was a surprising bonus.

My favorite of the short stories was The Adventure of the Illustrious Client. This came from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, which is widely declared to be the worst of the short story collections; however, I did not find it bad at all. In the Adventure of the Illustrious Client, like in so many other Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson is used as a distraction while Holmes does something else. Unlike those other stories, in this one Watson knows he is a distraction and has time to prepare for the role. Also, unlike many other Sherlock Holmes stories, in this one Holmes is not out to solve a mystery but to influence an opinion.

Overall, while there are some repetitive themes in the stories (Watson being a distraction, people believed dead being still alive, among others) each story brings something unique to the table and I am glad that I read them all, rather than just a selection of them.

While some of  the stories are good and others are bad (which is completely understandable considering the sheer volume of stories Doyle wrote) I would give the overall series an 80% with certain stories being all the way up to a 95% and some down to 70%.