It's odd but until this week's
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bibliogoth meet I'd not read any Sherlock Holmes stories. I'd also mostly avoided watching any of the dramatizations of the stories. When I was 13 and we first moved back to England I had to read
Hound of the Baskervilles at school and I just didn't get in to it, much preferring Agatha Christie at the time, and had avoided Holmes ever since. However, since my new found love of Victorian literature started it seemed like something I should probably read.
The Sign of the Four was the novel we had to read for this month's meeting. It was barely a 100 pages long and I quite enjoyed reading it. The thing that struck me the most was how different Holmes and Watson appeared from the iconic representations and as a result I ended up enjoying the book much more than I thought I would. I was a bit surprised by Watson's attitude towards Holmes. I'd always perceived him to be this small uninteresting man who just followed Holmes around in a state of idol worship. So for me a lot of the most interesting parts of the book were when the two characters disagreed over something and Watson clearly thought that Holmes was wrong or at least a little insane.
The story itself was a little short and simple. The great mystery being not who did it but rather how Holmes figured out who had done it. (Probably why I didn't like it as much when I was younger). This detached story telling often seemed a little dry. However I found "the explanation" by the guy who did it all about his time in India to be much more interesting and more of an actual story.
The group discussion on Sunday brought up the different prejudices that were evident in the story. It was interesting to look at the fact that they were distributed among the characters. Holmes had no real social prejudices, being able to get on very well with the "lower orders" which clearly made Watson a little uncomfortable. However, his views on the nature of women were less than equal and Watson clearly disagreed with him on this point. Hard to know exactly what if anything Conan Doyle had meant by this. Everyone except the villain had a strong prejudice against anyone not English. The villian was the only character who saw them as true men and was willing to die, murder and give away a fortune for their sake.
The Sign of the Four was also the first book to deal with Holmes more junkie nature and that was definitely some of the more interesting reading for me. And, I think made for one of the most amusing closing paragraphs ever.
I then read
A Study in Scarlet which was actually written first. It was a little strange. The thing that struck me the most was how young the characters were, they were only it appeared in their early 20's not in their 40's or 50's. It made for a more interesting view considering they were young upstartish men not stodgy old ones. I found the actual case of
A study in Scarlet to be more interesting than that of
The Sign of the Four. The murder was more evocative and there seemed to be more actually done to solve the case beyond mere theorizing. Unfortunately "the explanation" part was rather unwieldy. It was a third of the book and had some rather crazy Mormons settling in Utah, not something one normally wants to read about in good classic Victorian fiction.
Still I did enjoy the books more than I thought. I don't feel in a huge hurry to read any of the other Holmes mysteries any time soon, too many other books on the reading list queue at the moment. However, I did hear of a history of spirituality that Arthur Conan Doyle had written later in life that I would like to get my hands on.
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