Sunday, November 30, 2008

Socrates Gone Mad

Yesterday a chap at the office wrote, "I have a 1905 leather spine edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, printed in Leipzig, but in English. It belonged to my grandfather. That was the edition I read when I was 15. Back then I used to watch the Rathbone movies on UHF at midnight on Friday nights in Boston. Life before cable!" Lovely family heirloom.

I have the entire collection of Holmes stories -- it was something I received from my parents before I left for college. The set is two hard-back books with annotations, editor's notes, and commentary on likely dates and locations. For my part I wouldn't have minded a bit of
Knox-type scholarship in the mix, but that's a minor complaint.

"Hound of the Baskervilles" is arguably the most famous case; with its mysteriousness, hints of the supernatural, and long absence of the famous sleuth, it is also clearly the least typical of all the stories. I assigned "Hound of the Baskervilles" to a young fellow I was tutoring in Literature, and he ate it up: he took my books and read the entire Holmes canon. Score one mark in the Spreading Culture column.

Doyle said that "The Speckled Band" was his personal favorite Holmes short story. I don't know if anyone ever pointed out to him that snakes are deaf, so a snake that comes at the call of a whistle would be tough to manage. There's also the problem of the adder hailing from India -- but maybe it was just passing through?

I'm partial to the novels myself -- "The Sign of the Four" takes top billing in my view, followed by "A Study in Scarlet" (Holmes "the mere calculating machine," as Doyle later wrote). Maybe I'm a sucker for flashbacks?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for a great essay, Sean. I love Sherlock Holmes and have the entire collection of stories in one huge leatherbound book. My favorite is "Study in Scarlet" followed closely by "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Have you read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's other works? Some of them are very creepy and smack of the occult, such as "Parasite." I have many of his works.

Patti