It is difficult not to like the Sherlock Holmes books. Doyle writes exceedingly well — eloquent, clear and concise, though the cases may be clever, the reader won’t struggle for the pacing of these stories. But I wonder how many readers actually would spend the time to go through each of the stories in the book (any Holmes book) and reread the previous pages over and over again until he is clear of who’s the guilty party.
Personally, I have never solved a Holmes case, and I wonder if any readers would do this approach. I guess it would be the same with any mystery novel — it is a carefully constructed escape room, with clues thrown around in passages here and there. The most offhand passing comment about a character can be an important clue, the most glaring motives are often mere red herrings. Maybe I’m just stupid that I couldn’t solve these stories. Neither have I been in an escape room. But I’d like to think that I’d be intelligent enough to barrage my way through one.
Then again, it makes me question sometimes why these novels exist. Crime novels are written a penny a dozen nowadays, not all of them are good, most of them are forgettable. But I think that it points out to something more profound, something less tangible and abstract but just as important if it were. I’d argue that murder is the result of the most extreme of human emotions — whether they are fear, greed, jealousy, or curiosity. It is any of these taken to the most extreme of consequences.
Not all of Holmes’s cases are murders of course, but these emotions have also sparked Holmes’s clients to procure his services. In “Yellow Mask”, the jealous of husband of a former widow was intensely afraid of being cuckolded, in “The Naval Treaty”, the crime committed was a theft of a missing document, highly important for national security, but which caused its victim a severe nervous breakdown. Holmes’s cases never suffer being boring, the motives are always interesting, the suspects colourful and Holmes’s way of framing his solutions out of the way of conventional thought.
As per each of his short stories there are some that you’d prefer than others. Everything is a personal preference. Holmes’s hypothesis was incorrect in “The Yellow Face” and this is my pick of the lot — it balances the element of suspense, horror and humanity into the same story. The resolution for the story is as satisfying as any of the Sherlock Holmes’s story that I can remember. And without spoiling too much, it is a story which defies racial prejudices prevalent at the time.
This is in similar vein to the “Greek Interpreter”, where the interpreter was brought to a kidnapped Greek man who had no means of escaping due to his inability to communicate in English. We easily sympathise with the kidnapped victim. This in contrast however, with “The Crooked Man”, where soldiers of the regiments in India are subject to be kidnapped and enslaved by their native captors. For the world outside, and those who are supposed to be British subjects particularly in the subcontinents, they are still jaded by the prevalent orientalism of the time. This viewpoint plagued the mainstream thought, even up to a century later when Churchill starved the Indian population in the Bengal famine. But I cannot blame Doyle’s mindset for this: it is what it is.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is crucial in the canon as it introduces the reader to Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, who’s a better analytical and deductive thinker but does not follow through on his investigations, which earned him the label “armchair detective”. It is also the introduction to Professor Moriarty, made more infamous in the Guy Ritchie adaptation in the movie, and gave Sherlock a nemesis albeit in a story much too brief for what should be a vital element to Holmes’s identity. Moriarty makes a comeback later in The Last Bow, but I only have that waiting in my TBR.
Spoiler: Then there’s the death of Sherlock Holmes, but we don’t want to talk about that. Neither did the public. But not to worry, he of course comes back from the dead just as John Wick should for cash-cow-profit purposes in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
