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Penguin Tote Bags. Isokon Penguin Donkey. Where to start with Sherlock Holmes. Matt Blake 20 September Image: Penguin. The Sign of Four Even geniuses have their vices especially geniuses, perhaps , and Sherlock Holmes was no exception.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Time to take a break from the novels and dive into Conan Doyle's first set of short stories for a deeper understanding of Holmes' complex personality, intriguing methodologies and his sideline as a master of disguise.
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes If you only read one story in this collection, it has to be the last one, The Final Problem , because introduces us, finally, to Professor Moriarty, Holmes' arch-nemesis. The Hound of the Baskervilles There's a pretty strong argument for this as Holmes' finest escapade — the most famous story in the canon and maybe the one to start with.
The Valley of Fear This is probably the least well-known of all the Holmes books, but it's still a doozy that takes us back to a time before Moriarty's death plunge. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes By the time Conan Doyle got round to his final collection, he had clearly had it up to his moustache with Sherlock.
He is our representative in this strange household. Think of all those little scenes at the beginning of each story when the pair are sitting around the fire and Holmes will suddenly notice that a visitor has left a hat or a cane and will ask Watson to make some deductions about the owner. Watson gets everything wrong and Holmes is then able to wow his friend with astonishing inferences. You need the give and take between the two men to make the stories work.
He has to set up the jokes in just the right way. It is really hard to find a good straight man, and Watson is one of the best. Good point. It is essentially an impossible crime. A victim is found murdered in a locked room and there are no obvious entrances or exits from it. How was the crime committed? How did the murderer escape? Seemingly only supernatural means can explain this impossible situation.
But a detective like Sherlock Holmes will figure out how it all really happened. The Speckled Band is also a kind of gothic story. You have a wonderful villain in Dr Roylott, and you have the isolated home, the mysterious sounds and habits of the household. Most Sherlockians, if they had to pick just one story to represent the canon, would choose this one.
For many years, it and The Red-Headed League were the two adventures most often reprinted in school textbooks. It has a superbly eerie atmosphere and it gives you all kinds of details about Sherlock Holmes and Watson.
As a story, everything in it comes together perfectly. The Hound of the Baskervilles was the first grown-up book I ever read. I can remember buying the novel as part of a school book club and waiting until just the right November evening to read it, one when my sisters and parents would be away.
It was literally a dark and stormy night and I pulled all the covers down from my bed and turned off all the lights in the house except one and read the pages absolutely wide-eyed. When you come to the end of that second chapter, there is this particularly brilliant exchange when Doctor Mortimer describes the death of the latest Baskerville and mentions that there were footprints seen near the body.
After I finished the book, I went to the library and found the complete Sherlock Holmes stories and devoured those. He also wrote wonderfully evocative ghost stories and historical fiction. He has these rather swashbuckling tall tales told by a Napoleonic cavalryman, Brigadier Gerard. I recommend them. You know that he killed off the detective at the end of the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and people thought for several years that their beloved Sherlock was dead after the tumble with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.
But eventually Conan Doyle bowed to audience pressure and came out with The Hound of the Baskervilles, though he insisted that this was a pre-Reichenbach adventure. But the idea of this hound from hell really gives the story an air of the uncanny that readers love.
One of them is The Lost World.
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