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?