A Sherlock Holmes Book
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Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
To Sherlock Holmes she is always THE woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer-excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained teasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
Sherlock Holmes
Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
language: en
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
Release Date: 1996-04-29
It is more than a century since the ascetic, gaunt and enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes, made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet. From 1891, beginning with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the now legendary and pioneering Strand Magazine began serialising Arthur Conan Doyle's matchless tales of detection, featuring the incomparable sleuth patiently assisted by his doggedly loyal and lovably pedantic friend and companion, Dr Watson. The stories are illustrated by the remarkable Sydney Paget from whom our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive and who first equipped Holmes with his famous deerstalker hat. The literary cult of Sherlock Holmes shows no sign of fading with time as each new generation comes to love and revere the penetrating mind and ruthless logic which were the undoing of so many Victorian master criminals.
The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes
The Sherlock Holmes books, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, are some of the greatest mystery novels ever written. Edgar Allen Poe may have invented the detective story, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle who perfected it when he created the character of Sherlock Holmes. The typical detective story begins with a protagonist who is faced with a mostly mundane incident or the report of an incident that he begins to investigate. If we were not so accustomed to mystery novels and what makes them tick this might seem like an unimaginative way to begin a story.What makes a good detective story work is the technique of the story within a story. As the protagonist begins to investigate the original mystery of a book he comes to reveal a second story contained inside the first one that expands the book and causes it to be transformed.Detective stories usually begin with a standard set of characters who fall into familiar categories, such as the hard-boiled private eye or the detached scientific investigator. As these characters that the reader is already accustomed to begin to encounter the original mystery of a book, however, they circle around something very different than themselves. Like characters traveling down a maze they reveal new patterns that allow the book to be transformed as they go deeper and deeper.Arthur Conan Doyle was a master at creating plots that fit inside one another in a logical way. What makes a Sherlock Holmes book so compelling is the way that Doyle masterfully puts one story neatly on top of another like the gears of a clock. The machinery of a Sherlock Holmes book moves slowly as a wider world is uncovered. The more of a Sherlock Holmes book that you read the more that it changes its shape. Arthur Conan Doyle created this way of telling a detective story and then showed how it could be mastered.Sherlock Holmes is a cipher himself. The reader knows from hints here and there that Holmes has much about him that must be complex and unusual underneath. Exactly what this is, however, is left up to the reader to guess. Is Holmes really as detached as he sometimes seems? What motivates him? What does he care about? Why does he do what he does?The narrator of a Sherlock Holmes story is always his good friend John Watson. Watson clearly worships Holmes and sees him as a genius. The reader is left to guess how reliable Watson is as a narrator, however, and how much they can always trust what he says. The relationship between Holmes and Watson is a question mark. Holmes often criticizes Watson and acts coldly towards him but then at other moments seems to betray his affection.The questions that the reader has about both Holmes and Watson are a good place to start a book but they are also questions that a reader can easily entertain without being distracted from the plots that follow. The stories and mysteries in a Sherlock Holmes book almost always end up being portraits of a larger Victorian society. The story may begin at 221 Baker Street, but in the course of unraveling a case Holmes and Watson are liable to take the reader to the farthest corners of the British empire.London at the time of the Sherlock Holmes books was still the center of the largest empire that the world had ever seen. The plots reflect this, with characters haunted by their pasts coming to see Holmes and Watson to tell them about what they saw and did in India and Africa and other far off places of the globe.The motivation for most of the crime committed in a Sherlock Holmes story is revealed to be the result of a conflict between the desire to maintain Victorian social respectability and attain worldly success. The new opportunities offered by industrialization and capitalism often clashed with the more conservative morality that Victorians clung to as a defense against social turmoil.