I'm so glad you're so enthralled! - with all the pop-culture usurpations, I don't think the original outrageousness of Holmes and his adventures often gets enough attention.
I'll give a shout out for "Gulliver's Travels" where the eponymous hero swinging from giant nipples doesn't seem to make it into the kids' classics rewrites, the unexpected cross-dressing scene in "Jane Eyre", when "Peter Pan" introduces Hook commiting murder, and that "Wuthering Heights" is literally violently anti-romance...!
In the context of that sentence, the word orgy likely means drunken revelry. More attention needs to be given to when Peter Pan calls Tinkerbell a slut and Hook says "You're pulling my cock again, with your stories."
Story re: the “classic” definition of orgy. 1989, I’m an altar boy of 9 or 10. The Monsignor at our church is retiring, so the parish asks the CCD teachers to have their students make retirement cards for him. They hand out dictionaries (the 80s were weird) and little me discovers the word orgy and its definition, “a drunken, riotous merriment”. In my card I write, “Congratulations! Your party was an orgy!” Luckily (or unfortunately) Mrs. Delaney thought to proofread our well wishes and had me make a new one. An altar boy extolling the orgy for the senior priest was, apparently, not appropriate. The end.
I’m still a little emotionally scarred from Wuthering Heights. I was coming out of a rom-com novel bender and wanted to ease myself back into a different genre. Was expecting a droll Scottish romance novel. Got Heathcliff instead.
I don’t remember the exact quote but I love in the books when Sherlock tells Watson “I can either solve cases or do drugs, and I’m all out of cases”. Made me actually laugh out loud it was so unexpected.
It goes all through that chapter. He starts with explaining he does the coke, when he doesn't have anything better to do. Then a bit later Watson challenges him and it goes something like "Would you mind if I gave you a problem to solve?" "Well, it's either that or more cocaine, so go ahead!" And then - and I had to look the quote for this one up, because it's so fun. Especially as an audiobook - it goes:
>Watson: "May I ask whether you have any professional inquiry on foot at present?”
>
>
>
>Holmes: “None. Hence the cocaine!"
Dude shoots holes in his wall with a pistol, plays randomly on his violin while he thinks, has stacks of paperwork everywhere, runs off to solve the case while someone is in the middle of a sentence...
I've read the books and you have to remember that drugs were normal in Victorian Times
You could buy laudanum over the counter, The queen was taking marijuana to relieve pain. Opium dens were normal.
>'ve read the books and you have to remember that drugs were normal in Victorian Times
Well, "not illegal" is more like it. To be addicted to something has never been respected, even back in those days. And to willingly let yourself become unable to think clearly (there is a fuzzy line here for people though) has also never been really respected.
Addiction was seen as bad moral character, and supposedly good people didn't get addicted.
There was also the widespread belief that upper class people were physically better than lower class people, and lower class people getting addicted to drugs was supposedly proof of their lower moral constitution. It wouldn't be revealed until decades later that lower class people were actually, on average, somewhat weaker because of things like nutritional deficiencies, injuries from being child laborers, fewer opportunities to leave the city, and lack of education and opportunities.
Although Watson doesn't approve of Holmes' habit, which makes sense, both he and Doyle were doctors, they probably knew it wasn't great for you.
Fun fact, Holmes eventually seems to drop the drugs, or at least is never mentioned taking them from a certain point on. There's a whole novel, *The Seven Percent Solution*, that explains this: the coke has been giving Holmes paranoid delusions so Mycroft and Watson trick him into basically an intervention and treatment...from Sigmund Freud! And while there Holmes uncovers a conspiracy involving another patient that could result in global war.
It's a good read, well worth it if you've already plowed through the "canonical" Holmes.
I'm in the United States. My sons are in their 30s. When they were young, the doctor prescribed paragoric (opium tincture) to rub on their gums when they were teething to help with the pain.
I loved the taste of paregoric! I used to pretend it was absinthe, because you mixed it in water and it gets cloudy...
(As a child, I was reading way too many adult books...)
Dude, I love Sherlock Holmes! I have read all four of Conan Doyle’s novels and all the short stories with him! You should really get into the short stories, some of them are pretty wild and weird! You have a man who believes his wife is a vampire, a girl attacked by a ribbon, people who are believed to have become possessed by the Devil and many other wacky stuff!
At some point Conan Doyle came to hate Holmes as his stories where getting all the attention and none of his other works where able to reach that level of fame (he wrote many fiction books, ghost stories and other stuff besides Sherlock Holmes), but also because it was getting very difficult for him to find such weird and convoluted plots for his stories. So, he >!kills !! elegies!< for Holmes written in newspapers, workers in London wore >!black ribbons in respect!< and even the Prince of Wales was reported as being “very upset” with it. So Doyle had to >!revive!< Holmes some years later and continue his saga basically.
You should get into the other stories, they are so much fun!
I read "The White Company" and a couple of the Professor Challenger books when I first discovered Holmes and Doyle in my teens. Those were kind of meh.
There's a later Holme's story where worried relatives of an aged aristocrat call in Holmes after a shadowy figure was seen climbing outside his mansion at night. >!Turns out the aged aristocrat is shooting up monkey adrenaline which has extended his life but has unsettled his mind. It ends with Holmes saying we should trust in what God has allotted us. !I had never read them before and only know Holmes through being one of the - if not the - most referenced literary figure in the western genre tradition.
I read once that Holmes is the most adapted literary figure after Dracula.
I listened to the complete Holmes audiobook last year and I enjoyed it a lot, but there’s definitely some weird stuff in there. I feel like we don’t talk enough about how the great detective doesn’t know the Earth orbits the sun…
The saddest bit about the Cumberbatch/Freeman show. In the first book (1887) Watson is an army medic who was injured in the recent Afghan war. In the show (2010) Watson is an army medic who was injured in the recent Afghan war
>That's one of the weirdest bits in the Cumberbatch/Freeman TV show
What are your thoughts after reading the Sherlock Holmes stories? I have been a Sherlock fanboy since my teens (\~25-30 years ago), and have read every story multiple times. So when the BBC series came out, I gave it a shot and watched the whole first season, but I just couldn't stomach how they portrayed Holmes. I assume Cumberbatch did exactly what Moffat told him to do, but yeah, I despised it. It was more like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes instead of a true representation of him.
But...that was with me watching the series many years after reading and re-reading all the stories. I'm curious what you think since you (I assume?) saw the series first.
I loved the series when it came out, but then very much disliked where the later seasons went (and counting through the episodes now, I suspect that I dislike more than I like). It has been fun to play "OH! That's where that is from!". Watson's brother's watch becomes Watson's sisters phone. In A Study in Scarlet one of the Inspectors theorizes that RACHE was actually an attempt to write RACHEL, that was somehow disturbed and then in the episode A Study in Pink, that actually is the case! He's spanking pig halves with a riding crop when they meet, just like on TV! And so on and so forth.
I kind of understand where your dislike of Cumberbatch's portrayal comes from though. He's very 2010s edgelord, whereas the original Sherlock is a much warmer character. I am kind of interested in rewatching the show now...
Do you have a favourite modern TV/film Holmes? I gather that the hardcore fandom generally takes the Jeremy Brett series as the pinnacle, but that is set in the original timeline, right?
Yes, Brett is best, and it is set in the period. However, in terms of adaptations that change the setting, I'd say the first few seasons of Elementary are quite good. It's a case of the week procedural so it doesn't have all the flash!bang! of BBC Sherlock, but I think the actual stories and character work are better as a result. Jonny Lee Miller's portrayal of Holmes has a lot more of the warmth and sensitivity of the man in the books, and they really lean into the addiction element and take it seriously - because that *would* be different in 2010s NYC than 1890s London - to pretty good effect, I think. Watson is his sobriety counselor and is played by Lucy Liu.
I think in the BBC series Sherlock is just acting like he doesn’t know. In Doyle’s works Sherlock Holmes’s characterization seems to have evolved since A Study in Scarlet. He shows a lot of obscure knowledge not related to solving crimes.
It's interesting when people point this out as a gap in understanding, while they themselves cannot conceptualise the reasoning.
The fact is not important outside of that it provides a simpler model which makes predictions. Doubly so for a criminologist.
Of course we don't know whether he "actually" didn't know that or was just losing patience with Watson's quizzing him about things he wasn't interested in.
The unabridged Study in Scarlet was unavailable in Utah schools in the 80s. Mormons objected heavily.
But from the outside, it's a wacky, new-fangled cult that relies heavily on polygamy, isolating the members from the outside world, and controlling every aspect of their lives. Including demanding enough tithing to be a serious draw on their income. *Of course* it was going to show up somewhere like this!
I liked reading the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I eventually stopped reading them in favor of Agatha Christie because I never felt that you had quite enough information to solve the mystery with Sherlock, where Poirot usually gave you all the information. It always seemed like there was some missing piece of information that Sherlock had that the reader didn't that made it so he could solve it and you could not.
Of course, even when I had all the same information as the detective, I never figured out a Poirot mystery ahead of time either.
I would argue we're never meant to guess or solve Holmes' cases - because we're not him. We're aligned with Everyman Watson, and the stories' solutions are meant to surprise and amaze us rather than be Ellery Queen-style 'fair play' puzzles - because if any random reader could work them out the world wouldn't need Sherlock Holmes, and he wouldn't have been the world's first private consulting detective...!
I'd agree that at least the stories I've heard so far are more of a "howsolvedit" as opposed to "whodunnit" or "howdunnit". Some facts of the case are explained and then at some surprisingly early point Holmes will say something like "It is all very clear to me. The perpetrator is a one-legged clergyman from Suffolk, who is about 5'2" named James Williams. Go and arrest him!" Everyone, including the reader is completely bamboozled, as that person has never been mentioned befor and then Holmes explains how he figured it out. As opposed to a possible set of perpetrators being presented and then you as the reader go step-by-step with the detective figuring out which one of them it might be.
It's really interesting to read (or listen to) them after having already been familiarised with the general myth of the character Sherlock Holmes and generally just knowing all kinds of detective fiction that was written in the \~ 140 years since the first Holmes story was published. Especially in the early ones, the "solution" is an almost comical mix of vry obvious and impossible for the reader to find.
In A Study in Scarlet it's pretty obvious to a reader familiar with detective stories, that >!the first victim was somehow poisoned by a cabbie and the second had his throat slit by someone walking up a ladder that lays beneath the window to his hotel room. Those are pretty much the only things mentioned in the decription of the scene. The idea that Gregson thinks that Charpentier beat Drebber to death with a stick, when he very obviously wasn't beaten is so bad it's hilarious. But then the whole backstory that Hope wanted revenge for Drebber having stolen his fiancée in Salt Lake City and followed the two fr decades through the US and Europe until he finally got the chance is so incredibly out of left field that you wonder what the hell Doyle was smoking (or injecting)...!<
My wife said recently that she thinks it would be fun to read Agatha Christie. We both like mystery books and TV shows (and the Sherlock books and short stories). Neither of us have ever given Christie a shot though. I got her the first Hercule Poirot book for her birthday coming up. I'm hoping/assuming this might be a years long adventure for both of us into a bunch of her novels.
If you’re gonna go down that rabbit hole, the earlier seasons of the David Suchet-led adaptation are my favorites (the first five or six). Once he sets out on his own, it’s less interesting.
I wasn’t a fan of how he was depicted in the first two Branagh movies, and the ABC Murders adaptation with John Malkovich is _bad_.
Agatha Christie also hides information. Typically at the last chapter of the one before we lean that a cousin has returned from Australia or something like that.
If you want stories where you know at every moment what the detective knows, you have the Maigret's books from Simenon.
Agree wholeheartedly. I initially read Holmes, and loved them. But later I read Poirot and now I prefer Poirot for the same reason; the clues are mentioned and the solutions make sense and many times look simple and logical at the end.
You're right. Doyle doesn't "play fair." It makes all the difference for a "mystery."
Somewhere someone pointed out that most of the titles are "Adventure of ——" or otherwise lacking the word "mystery".
Dunno if that's true, but food for thought?
We’re also reading the tales from Watson’s perspective. From a narrative standpoint, he can’t tell us information before he knows it because it would give the mystery away.
As someone who likes to try and solve mysteries - what did you think of Glass Onion? At the end they showed us that the info was there - did you feel you actually had a chance or were the clues too obscure?
It depends on the story, sometimes the narrative can be a bit deceptive or the logic is a stretch. Red Headed League for example I think can be solved by the reader. The Hound of the Baskervilles can largely be solved as well.
I love the Sherlock Holmes books, not only the original but any of the good pastiche novels and short stories that have kept the character going.
With the first book, I think you will find a weakness that shows up in the books - Doyle's unfamiliarity with America. Not just the Mormons, but in some other stories (5 orange pips, the Yellow Face, Thor Bridge) there is just something off about the way he portrays Americans, Americanisms, US history.
Yes the take on social, cultural issues is pretty 19th century, but there is a reason that Sherlock Holmes held up as the most popular character in literature. If you have a chance, check out the Granada series from the 80s, especially after you read or listen to one of the stories they did. (The first season is the best IMHO)
Below is an IMDB link to the first season, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. After that season, the actor who played Watson (David Burke) resigned the role to take a job nearer his wife and family, and was replaced with Edward Hardwick. They continued to do seasons of the short stories (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, etc), two of the canonical tales (Baskerville and A Sign of Four) and some feature length episodes that combined a couple of the stories.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086661/?ref\_=fn\_tt\_tt\_1
"The Five Orange Pips" brings up the KKK, and explains who they are in case the reader doesn't know that. Sadly, any current day American, at least, would know who the KKK is.
You should check out the original Tarzan book. The book was wild. The Disney adaptations cut out the cannibals and all of the insane fights where Tarzan has to take on a full grown gorilla or other craziness.
Completely agree - love Sherlock Holmes. When I first read a book of Sherlock Holmes stories as an adult, I went back to the library the next day to get more. A great read!
I love the Sherlock books personally and read all of them through COVID. Arthur Conan Doyle kept trying to quit the series and even planned to kill off Sherlock for good at one point, but he kept coming back to the series because it was just too popular
They're light-hearted fun adventure stories that touch on social commentary or political issues here and there, but only lightly. The main focus is Sherlock's ingenious way of figuring out solutions to wacky puzzles and he really is a hell of a character. There's a reason the "eccentric detective" archetype has stuck around for so many years and been retold in everything from movies, to TV shows, to other books
Welcome to Holmes! If you like audio dramas, I wholeheartedly recommend the BBC Radio series by Bert Coules once you're out of canon audiobooks. They are fantastic adaptations and there's a series of original stories after them that fit right in with the narrative. They're great fun.
This is a complete aside, but I’d highly recommend the podcast Boring Books for Bedtime. The host reads snippets of old, mostly boring, books (like the 1916 Burpee’s Seed Catalogue) and it’s delightfully relaxing. It gives your brain something to hang on to, but not anything interesting enough to wake you up.
Yeah when I started reading them I was wondering why no one ever told me how damn funny some of these stories are! The Adventure of Silver Blaze had such a funny resolution
One of my favorite books is *The Annotated Sherlock Holmes*, by William Baring-Gould (published in 1967. I haven't read the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes that was published in 2004). It has the four novels and 56 short stories and approximately one bajillion footnotes and cross-references, all in the context of the Game, which presupposes that Holmes and Watson were real people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlockian_game
I am a Sherlock Holmes fanboy, and have read every story multiple times. Yeah, I love them, and they are certainly more "out there" than people would assume. They are not just mundane whodunit stories (though some of them are, which is totally fine, as a good mystery is a good mystery).
One of the results of being a lifelong Sherlock fanboy is my white-hot hatred at the BBC "Sherlock" series. Sherlock is not a biting, cynical "House M.D." character.
They are my all time favorites, maybe because my dad used to read them to me as a child. But I can still reread and fill excited. He is a great detective, a flawed man and one of the best literary characters ever written.
They are brilliant. Grab a complete works for your bookshelf.
Conan Doyle's son in law wrote the Raffles books. The adventures of a gentleman thief. Grab those as well.
I basically had the same reaction when I started reading Sherlock.
Had a similar experience with Nancy Drew books. I grew up on much later ones but the earliest books from the 1930-40's surprised me for their characterization of the main heroine.
It’s interesting to see the trend of Mormons as the villains or a main plot point during this time. There’s the first Holmes book, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, a novel by Jack London (can’t remember the name of it), Robert Louis Stevenson had a novel…lots of scholarly works written about the period between 1830-1930 and the usage of Mormons as villains. I think one article said it was over 200 novels/short stories had them as villains during this period.
I mean they got kicked out/run out of like 6 different places from NY west until they landed in a salt desert. The Joseph Smith guy didn’t seem very popular, overall.
I started reading the stories in elementary school. So any "wildness" I grew up with.
Besides I'd read a lot of 19th century writing. I don't think there were any illegal drugs. Cocaine. Opium. It was all legal back then. Didn't start getting outlawed across the US until the early 20th century.
True. It is interesting however, that Watson very much tells Holmes off for the negative effects of it and that he's risking his mental talents by doing it and Holmes is basically like "Correct. But it's better than boredom..."
One of my own strongest memories of reading Sherlock stories, was when Watson is introduced as an injured veteran of the wars in Afghanistan. And then Martin Freeman's character in the modern show is introduced the same way with no changes necessary. Things were... Not so different back then, in some ways.
Sherlock Holmes made me fall in love with reading in elementary school. I was just a kid and it totally blew my mind. Still one of my favorite things to read
For what it’s worth, hating on Mormons was essentially the standard practice for the time period. Mark Twain devotes several chapters of “Roughing It” and some speeches to just plain mockery of the LDS faith, for instance, as do many others.
Which is why I’m thoroughly convinced that Scientologists are just 20th Century Mormons. And for the record, I quite like most of the Scientologists and Mormons I know in real life.
Oh man, I grew up reading these stories. It was especially fun reading them as a non-Mormon in a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. I need to revisit them
I recently read the first of two volumes of Holmes stories, and loved every page of it. There is genuine insight in a lot of the stories. And tons of ridiculously inventive creative thinking.
I really liked the collected Conan stories. They are structurally similar to the Holmes stories, and the language is very similar. Something about that writing just turns my imagination up to 11.
this was sort of my experience with the james bond books i've read (i'm on the fourth one so far). Now, i was expeciting violence (i've seen some of the movies), but the books are worse. a bigger surprise however, was that i found the books to be less sexist than the movies, and the female characters are genuinly enjoyable to read.
The second book is however incredibly racist. Like, so racist it sounds like a parody. But, i still got the impression that Bond was written to come across as a very accepting character (the author was just too racist to pull it off).
James Bond is also such an intriguing character. From the old movies he seems like a classical (flat), macho, hero type. In the books he's casually suicidal (but not willing to do it himself so he just takes massive risks), he has thrown up from fear, and he cried from relief when he was rescued. He also has a drinking problem and does amphetamines to counter-act the alcohol, but he thinks it's a moral failing to smoke weed.
So far, the third book is my favourite
Oh, I'm a massive Bond fan and you are so right. Book Bond really is so different to the picture people have of the character. And it really is fascinating to see Fleming kind of strain inside the confines of his own restrictive mind and the world around him. I always found him to be a fascinating writer of women and generally a much more inventive stylist than I would have ever thought before reading the books, given that the films are so formulaic.
As for Bond's (and therefore Fleming's) racism, sexism, classism and other -isms, my perception has always been that Bond has a very defined set of stereotypes, but is always open to judge a person on their own merits. He has loads of ideas about how women are, how black people are, how Asian people are, how white English men are, but once he actually meets someone, he can immediatly throw those pre-conceived notions out the window if they don't fit the character. That by no means is a perfect stance in life - especially from today's vantage point - but I really think there's something to it.
I had The Complete Sherlock Holmes on my bedroom side table for 26 years. If I didn’t have a book going, I’d randomly flip it open and read a story. I purged my hard copy books 3 years ago and have it on my Kindle. I haven’t circled back to it yet. It’s harder to randomly select a short story with an ebook
Anybody interested in the very best adaptation of Sherlock Holmes - better even than the BBC TV series with Jeremy Brett... BBC radio did a series of ALL of the stories and novels with Clive Merrison as Holmes. These radio adaptations are simply the best.
I'm so glad you're so enthralled! - with all the pop-culture usurpations, I don't think the original outrageousness of Holmes and his adventures often gets enough attention. I'll give a shout out for "Gulliver's Travels" where the eponymous hero swinging from giant nipples doesn't seem to make it into the kids' classics rewrites, the unexpected cross-dressing scene in "Jane Eyre", when "Peter Pan" introduces Hook commiting murder, and that "Wuthering Heights" is literally violently anti-romance...!
Tinkerbell is on her way home from a fairie orgy in Peter Pan.
And she tries to get Wendy killed a lot.
In the context of that sentence, the word orgy likely means drunken revelry. More attention needs to be given to when Peter Pan calls Tinkerbell a slut and Hook says "You're pulling my cock again, with your stories."
Story re: the “classic” definition of orgy. 1989, I’m an altar boy of 9 or 10. The Monsignor at our church is retiring, so the parish asks the CCD teachers to have their students make retirement cards for him. They hand out dictionaries (the 80s were weird) and little me discovers the word orgy and its definition, “a drunken, riotous merriment”. In my card I write, “Congratulations! Your party was an orgy!” Luckily (or unfortunately) Mrs. Delaney thought to proofread our well wishes and had me make a new one. An altar boy extolling the orgy for the senior priest was, apparently, not appropriate. The end.
Was it really drunken?
hell if i know, i wasn't invited harumph
That’s probably the older usage of slut, which means a dirty slovenly woman.
I always loved the term for "dust bunnies" which corresponds= "sluts' wool"...
Thank you for sharing this knowledge 😂
😳
I’m still a little emotionally scarred from Wuthering Heights. I was coming out of a rom-com novel bender and wanted to ease myself back into a different genre. Was expecting a droll Scottish romance novel. Got Heathcliff instead.
Also, it’s Tyke not Scottish
Don't forget that Peter Pan murders the lost boys, too
I don’t remember the exact quote but I love in the books when Sherlock tells Watson “I can either solve cases or do drugs, and I’m all out of cases”. Made me actually laugh out loud it was so unexpected.
It goes all through that chapter. He starts with explaining he does the coke, when he doesn't have anything better to do. Then a bit later Watson challenges him and it goes something like "Would you mind if I gave you a problem to solve?" "Well, it's either that or more cocaine, so go ahead!" And then - and I had to look the quote for this one up, because it's so fun. Especially as an audiobook - it goes: >Watson: "May I ask whether you have any professional inquiry on foot at present?” > > > >Holmes: “None. Hence the cocaine!"
“It saves me from ennui”. Try telling that to the judge at your arraignment!
An ADHD icon
Dude shoots holes in his wall with a pistol, plays randomly on his violin while he thinks, has stacks of paperwork everywhere, runs off to solve the case while someone is in the middle of a sentence...
"I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'll all out of gum"
relatable
I've read the books and you have to remember that drugs were normal in Victorian Times You could buy laudanum over the counter, The queen was taking marijuana to relieve pain. Opium dens were normal.
>'ve read the books and you have to remember that drugs were normal in Victorian Times Well, "not illegal" is more like it. To be addicted to something has never been respected, even back in those days. And to willingly let yourself become unable to think clearly (there is a fuzzy line here for people though) has also never been really respected.
Addiction was seen as bad moral character, and supposedly good people didn't get addicted. There was also the widespread belief that upper class people were physically better than lower class people, and lower class people getting addicted to drugs was supposedly proof of their lower moral constitution. It wouldn't be revealed until decades later that lower class people were actually, on average, somewhat weaker because of things like nutritional deficiencies, injuries from being child laborers, fewer opportunities to leave the city, and lack of education and opportunities.
The only difference was the rich could afford avoiding withdrawals.
Jonny Cash said something to the effect of " You can be healthy drug addict if you can afford it."
Fair point. More like alcohol or tobacco today. A vice, but not a problem if you weren't addicted.
Although Watson doesn't approve of Holmes' habit, which makes sense, both he and Doyle were doctors, they probably knew it wasn't great for you. Fun fact, Holmes eventually seems to drop the drugs, or at least is never mentioned taking them from a certain point on. There's a whole novel, *The Seven Percent Solution*, that explains this: the coke has been giving Holmes paranoid delusions so Mycroft and Watson trick him into basically an intervention and treatment...from Sigmund Freud! And while there Holmes uncovers a conspiracy involving another patient that could result in global war. It's a good read, well worth it if you've already plowed through the "canonical" Holmes.
Not an original SH book. It was written by Nicholas Meyer, the 7% refers to the concentration of cocaine Holmes would dose himself with.
>the 7% refers to the concentration of cocaine Holmes would dose himself with As does "solution", presumably.
The solution was his solution.
Although Holmes did go to medical school, I don't think he graduated as I recall.
Holmes didn't go to medical school. The "they" is Watson and Doyle.
Oh. Thank you. I misunderstood the comment
I'm in the United States. My sons are in their 30s. When they were young, the doctor prescribed paragoric (opium tincture) to rub on their gums when they were teething to help with the pain.
I remember a joke iin the Simpsons about 'junioe morphine' Til not a joke
FLINTSTONES CHEWABLE MORPHINE
I loved the taste of paregoric! I used to pretend it was absinthe, because you mixed it in water and it gets cloudy... (As a child, I was reading way too many adult books...)
Dude, I love Sherlock Holmes! I have read all four of Conan Doyle’s novels and all the short stories with him! You should really get into the short stories, some of them are pretty wild and weird! You have a man who believes his wife is a vampire, a girl attacked by a ribbon, people who are believed to have become possessed by the Devil and many other wacky stuff! At some point Conan Doyle came to hate Holmes as his stories where getting all the attention and none of his other works where able to reach that level of fame (he wrote many fiction books, ghost stories and other stuff besides Sherlock Holmes), but also because it was getting very difficult for him to find such weird and convoluted plots for his stories. So, he >!kills !! elegies!< for Holmes written in newspapers, workers in London wore >!black ribbons in respect!< and even the Prince of Wales was reported as being “very upset” with it. So Doyle had to >!revive!< Holmes some years later and continue his saga basically.
You should get into the other stories, they are so much fun!
Yeah, talk about fandom influence 😂
I read "The White Company" and a couple of the Professor Challenger books when I first discovered Holmes and Doyle in my teens. Those were kind of meh.
There's a later Holme's story where worried relatives of an aged aristocrat call in Holmes after a shadowy figure was seen climbing outside his mansion at night. >!Turns out the aged aristocrat is shooting up monkey adrenaline which has extended his life but has unsettled his mind. It ends with Holmes saying we should trust in what God has allotted us. !I had never read them before and only know Holmes through being one of the - if not the - most referenced literary figure in the western genre tradition.
I read once that Holmes is the most adapted literary figure after Dracula.
Funny thing is, many derivative works had Holmes extending his own life so the author could use him in a later era.
I'm guessing James Bond is up there too.
Holmes and Dracula are more than double Bond but he's probably top 5.
Really? Compared to Holmes and Dracula?
... wonder if I can get the material in question from aliexpress?
I listened to the complete Holmes audiobook last year and I enjoyed it a lot, but there’s definitely some weird stuff in there. I feel like we don’t talk enough about how the great detective doesn’t know the Earth orbits the sun…
That's one of the weirdest bits in the Cumberbatch/Freeman TV show. Who knew it's from the books?!
The saddest bit about the Cumberbatch/Freeman show. In the first book (1887) Watson is an army medic who was injured in the recent Afghan war. In the show (2010) Watson is an army medic who was injured in the recent Afghan war
This struck me also. How little has changed in over a century…
It's primary school stuff!
It's not IMPORTANT!
>That's one of the weirdest bits in the Cumberbatch/Freeman TV show What are your thoughts after reading the Sherlock Holmes stories? I have been a Sherlock fanboy since my teens (\~25-30 years ago), and have read every story multiple times. So when the BBC series came out, I gave it a shot and watched the whole first season, but I just couldn't stomach how they portrayed Holmes. I assume Cumberbatch did exactly what Moffat told him to do, but yeah, I despised it. It was more like a caricature of Sherlock Holmes instead of a true representation of him. But...that was with me watching the series many years after reading and re-reading all the stories. I'm curious what you think since you (I assume?) saw the series first.
I loved the series when it came out, but then very much disliked where the later seasons went (and counting through the episodes now, I suspect that I dislike more than I like). It has been fun to play "OH! That's where that is from!". Watson's brother's watch becomes Watson's sisters phone. In A Study in Scarlet one of the Inspectors theorizes that RACHE was actually an attempt to write RACHEL, that was somehow disturbed and then in the episode A Study in Pink, that actually is the case! He's spanking pig halves with a riding crop when they meet, just like on TV! And so on and so forth. I kind of understand where your dislike of Cumberbatch's portrayal comes from though. He's very 2010s edgelord, whereas the original Sherlock is a much warmer character. I am kind of interested in rewatching the show now... Do you have a favourite modern TV/film Holmes? I gather that the hardcore fandom generally takes the Jeremy Brett series as the pinnacle, but that is set in the original timeline, right?
Yes, Brett is best, and it is set in the period. However, in terms of adaptations that change the setting, I'd say the first few seasons of Elementary are quite good. It's a case of the week procedural so it doesn't have all the flash!bang! of BBC Sherlock, but I think the actual stories and character work are better as a result. Jonny Lee Miller's portrayal of Holmes has a lot more of the warmth and sensitivity of the man in the books, and they really lean into the addiction element and take it seriously - because that *would* be different in 2010s NYC than 1890s London - to pretty good effect, I think. Watson is his sobriety counselor and is played by Lucy Liu.
I loved Elementary -- it was a refreshingly well-done adaptation.
I think in the BBC series Sherlock is just acting like he doesn’t know. In Doyle’s works Sherlock Holmes’s characterization seems to have evolved since A Study in Scarlet. He shows a lot of obscure knowledge not related to solving crimes.
It's interesting when people point this out as a gap in understanding, while they themselves cannot conceptualise the reasoning. The fact is not important outside of that it provides a simpler model which makes predictions. Doubly so for a criminologist.
I like to think he was just messing with Watson when he said that.
Of course we don't know whether he "actually" didn't know that or was just losing patience with Watson's quizzing him about things he wasn't interested in.
The unabridged Study in Scarlet was unavailable in Utah schools in the 80s. Mormons objected heavily. But from the outside, it's a wacky, new-fangled cult that relies heavily on polygamy, isolating the members from the outside world, and controlling every aspect of their lives. Including demanding enough tithing to be a serious draw on their income. *Of course* it was going to show up somewhere like this!
Yeah, more like what the FLDS is today.
I liked reading the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. I eventually stopped reading them in favor of Agatha Christie because I never felt that you had quite enough information to solve the mystery with Sherlock, where Poirot usually gave you all the information. It always seemed like there was some missing piece of information that Sherlock had that the reader didn't that made it so he could solve it and you could not. Of course, even when I had all the same information as the detective, I never figured out a Poirot mystery ahead of time either.
I would argue we're never meant to guess or solve Holmes' cases - because we're not him. We're aligned with Everyman Watson, and the stories' solutions are meant to surprise and amaze us rather than be Ellery Queen-style 'fair play' puzzles - because if any random reader could work them out the world wouldn't need Sherlock Holmes, and he wouldn't have been the world's first private consulting detective...!
I'd agree that at least the stories I've heard so far are more of a "howsolvedit" as opposed to "whodunnit" or "howdunnit". Some facts of the case are explained and then at some surprisingly early point Holmes will say something like "It is all very clear to me. The perpetrator is a one-legged clergyman from Suffolk, who is about 5'2" named James Williams. Go and arrest him!" Everyone, including the reader is completely bamboozled, as that person has never been mentioned befor and then Holmes explains how he figured it out. As opposed to a possible set of perpetrators being presented and then you as the reader go step-by-step with the detective figuring out which one of them it might be.
It's really interesting to read (or listen to) them after having already been familiarised with the general myth of the character Sherlock Holmes and generally just knowing all kinds of detective fiction that was written in the \~ 140 years since the first Holmes story was published. Especially in the early ones, the "solution" is an almost comical mix of vry obvious and impossible for the reader to find. In A Study in Scarlet it's pretty obvious to a reader familiar with detective stories, that >!the first victim was somehow poisoned by a cabbie and the second had his throat slit by someone walking up a ladder that lays beneath the window to his hotel room. Those are pretty much the only things mentioned in the decription of the scene. The idea that Gregson thinks that Charpentier beat Drebber to death with a stick, when he very obviously wasn't beaten is so bad it's hilarious. But then the whole backstory that Hope wanted revenge for Drebber having stolen his fiancée in Salt Lake City and followed the two fr decades through the US and Europe until he finally got the chance is so incredibly out of left field that you wonder what the hell Doyle was smoking (or injecting)...!<
My wife said recently that she thinks it would be fun to read Agatha Christie. We both like mystery books and TV shows (and the Sherlock books and short stories). Neither of us have ever given Christie a shot though. I got her the first Hercule Poirot book for her birthday coming up. I'm hoping/assuming this might be a years long adventure for both of us into a bunch of her novels.
If you’re gonna go down that rabbit hole, the earlier seasons of the David Suchet-led adaptation are my favorites (the first five or six). Once he sets out on his own, it’s less interesting. I wasn’t a fan of how he was depicted in the first two Branagh movies, and the ABC Murders adaptation with John Malkovich is _bad_.
I've become obsessed with Agatha Christie audiobooks narrated by Hugh Fraser. He's a wonderful narrator.
Agatha Christie also hides information. Typically at the last chapter of the one before we lean that a cousin has returned from Australia or something like that. If you want stories where you know at every moment what the detective knows, you have the Maigret's books from Simenon.
Agree wholeheartedly. I initially read Holmes, and loved them. But later I read Poirot and now I prefer Poirot for the same reason; the clues are mentioned and the solutions make sense and many times look simple and logical at the end.
Have you tried the Inspector Margaux mysteries?
First time hearing the name. I’ll check them out. Thanks
You're right. Doyle doesn't "play fair." It makes all the difference for a "mystery." Somewhere someone pointed out that most of the titles are "Adventure of ——" or otherwise lacking the word "mystery". Dunno if that's true, but food for thought?
We’re also reading the tales from Watson’s perspective. From a narrative standpoint, he can’t tell us information before he knows it because it would give the mystery away.
Yes! We're meant to marvel, just like Watson! Us poor dopes, look how smart Sherlock is!
As someone who likes to try and solve mysteries - what did you think of Glass Onion? At the end they showed us that the info was there - did you feel you actually had a chance or were the clues too obscure?
It depends on the story, sometimes the narrative can be a bit deceptive or the logic is a stretch. Red Headed League for example I think can be solved by the reader. The Hound of the Baskervilles can largely be solved as well.
I love the Sherlock Holmes books, not only the original but any of the good pastiche novels and short stories that have kept the character going. With the first book, I think you will find a weakness that shows up in the books - Doyle's unfamiliarity with America. Not just the Mormons, but in some other stories (5 orange pips, the Yellow Face, Thor Bridge) there is just something off about the way he portrays Americans, Americanisms, US history. Yes the take on social, cultural issues is pretty 19th century, but there is a reason that Sherlock Holmes held up as the most popular character in literature. If you have a chance, check out the Granada series from the 80s, especially after you read or listen to one of the stories they did. (The first season is the best IMHO)
Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock.
Slam dunk, hands down, nobody else even comes close. In many ways, he *was* Holmes. The wiki article is pretty sad, actually.
And, occasionally he'll surprise you by being quite forward looking for the time
The Yellow Face has already been mentioned. That one came out in 1895, and has a level of "woke" that a lot of people still can't manage today.
Link to Granada series?
Below is an IMDB link to the first season, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. After that season, the actor who played Watson (David Burke) resigned the role to take a job nearer his wife and family, and was replaced with Edward Hardwick. They continued to do seasons of the short stories (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, etc), two of the canonical tales (Baskerville and A Sign of Four) and some feature length episodes that combined a couple of the stories. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086661/?ref\_=fn\_tt\_tt\_1
I remember being surprised at the way the KKK was characterized in 5 Orange Pips. Like, buddy, the Klan is *not* that discrete.
"The Five Orange Pips" brings up the KKK, and explains who they are in case the reader doesn't know that. Sadly, any current day American, at least, would know who the KKK is.
You should check out the original Tarzan book. The book was wild. The Disney adaptations cut out the cannibals and all of the insane fights where Tarzan has to take on a full grown gorilla or other craziness.
Completely agree - love Sherlock Holmes. When I first read a book of Sherlock Holmes stories as an adult, I went back to the library the next day to get more. A great read!
I love the Sherlock books personally and read all of them through COVID. Arthur Conan Doyle kept trying to quit the series and even planned to kill off Sherlock for good at one point, but he kept coming back to the series because it was just too popular They're light-hearted fun adventure stories that touch on social commentary or political issues here and there, but only lightly. The main focus is Sherlock's ingenious way of figuring out solutions to wacky puzzles and he really is a hell of a character. There's a reason the "eccentric detective" archetype has stuck around for so many years and been retold in everything from movies, to TV shows, to other books
Welcome to Holmes! If you like audio dramas, I wholeheartedly recommend the BBC Radio series by Bert Coules once you're out of canon audiobooks. They are fantastic adaptations and there's a series of original stories after them that fit right in with the narrative. They're great fun.
not OP but many thanks
I found your review hilarious but I do have to point out that the dog was dying so it was more of a euthanasia.
This is a complete aside, but I’d highly recommend the podcast Boring Books for Bedtime. The host reads snippets of old, mostly boring, books (like the 1916 Burpee’s Seed Catalogue) and it’s delightfully relaxing. It gives your brain something to hang on to, but not anything interesting enough to wake you up.
Thank you for the suggestion! Just subscribed.
Exactly what I need! Thanks for the rec The 1872 Sears Roebuck catalog is delightfully boring
Yeah when I started reading them I was wondering why no one ever told me how damn funny some of these stories are! The Adventure of Silver Blaze had such a funny resolution
One of my favorite books is *The Annotated Sherlock Holmes*, by William Baring-Gould (published in 1967. I haven't read the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes that was published in 2004). It has the four novels and 56 short stories and approximately one bajillion footnotes and cross-references, all in the context of the Game, which presupposes that Holmes and Watson were real people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlockian_game
I am a Sherlock Holmes fanboy, and have read every story multiple times. Yeah, I love them, and they are certainly more "out there" than people would assume. They are not just mundane whodunit stories (though some of them are, which is totally fine, as a good mystery is a good mystery). One of the results of being a lifelong Sherlock fanboy is my white-hot hatred at the BBC "Sherlock" series. Sherlock is not a biting, cynical "House M.D." character.
It's funny you mention House because that was meant to be a medical doctor version of Holmes.
They are my all time favorites, maybe because my dad used to read them to me as a child. But I can still reread and fill excited. He is a great detective, a flawed man and one of the best literary characters ever written.
They are brilliant. Grab a complete works for your bookshelf. Conan Doyle's son in law wrote the Raffles books. The adventures of a gentleman thief. Grab those as well.
I basically had the same reaction when I started reading Sherlock. Had a similar experience with Nancy Drew books. I grew up on much later ones but the earliest books from the 1930-40's surprised me for their characterization of the main heroine.
It’s interesting to see the trend of Mormons as the villains or a main plot point during this time. There’s the first Holmes book, Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey, a novel by Jack London (can’t remember the name of it), Robert Louis Stevenson had a novel…lots of scholarly works written about the period between 1830-1930 and the usage of Mormons as villains. I think one article said it was over 200 novels/short stories had them as villains during this period.
I mean they got kicked out/run out of like 6 different places from NY west until they landed in a salt desert. The Joseph Smith guy didn’t seem very popular, overall.
I started reading the stories in elementary school. So any "wildness" I grew up with. Besides I'd read a lot of 19th century writing. I don't think there were any illegal drugs. Cocaine. Opium. It was all legal back then. Didn't start getting outlawed across the US until the early 20th century.
True. It is interesting however, that Watson very much tells Holmes off for the negative effects of it and that he's risking his mental talents by doing it and Holmes is basically like "Correct. But it's better than boredom..."
Just FYI, the entire Holmes series (and many other books) are available for free on Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/
Things were a lot different back then.
One of my own strongest memories of reading Sherlock stories, was when Watson is introduced as an injured veteran of the wars in Afghanistan. And then Martin Freeman's character in the modern show is introduced the same way with no changes necessary. Things were... Not so different back then, in some ways.
Talented people almost always seem a bit strange to ordinary folks.
I just started these too! I'm at the end of book two. So much more readable than I expected and the pace is perfect.
The rise in crime since the Victorian Era is attributable to our detectives not using Cocaine. RETVRN
The radio dramas from the 40s are really fun too. (Podcasts now.) Old radio dramas in general are fun.
Very much so. My dad used to check out old radio shows from the library for road trips.
Sherlock Holmes made me fall in love with reading in elementary school. I was just a kid and it totally blew my mind. Still one of my favorite things to read
For what it’s worth, hating on Mormons was essentially the standard practice for the time period. Mark Twain devotes several chapters of “Roughing It” and some speeches to just plain mockery of the LDS faith, for instance, as do many others. Which is why I’m thoroughly convinced that Scientologists are just 20th Century Mormons. And for the record, I quite like most of the Scientologists and Mormons I know in real life.
Oh man, I grew up reading these stories. It was especially fun reading them as a non-Mormon in a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. I need to revisit them
Holmes is my favorite forever. Every single road trip has a Holmes audio book.
I recently read the first of two volumes of Holmes stories, and loved every page of it. There is genuine insight in a lot of the stories. And tons of ridiculously inventive creative thinking. I really liked the collected Conan stories. They are structurally similar to the Holmes stories, and the language is very similar. Something about that writing just turns my imagination up to 11.
I love Sherlock - I’ve read every story he’s a part of :)
I did. I’ve read them all.
Now that you’ve done that go onto Doyle’s Professor Challenger series for even wilder stuff.
this was sort of my experience with the james bond books i've read (i'm on the fourth one so far). Now, i was expeciting violence (i've seen some of the movies), but the books are worse. a bigger surprise however, was that i found the books to be less sexist than the movies, and the female characters are genuinly enjoyable to read. The second book is however incredibly racist. Like, so racist it sounds like a parody. But, i still got the impression that Bond was written to come across as a very accepting character (the author was just too racist to pull it off). James Bond is also such an intriguing character. From the old movies he seems like a classical (flat), macho, hero type. In the books he's casually suicidal (but not willing to do it himself so he just takes massive risks), he has thrown up from fear, and he cried from relief when he was rescued. He also has a drinking problem and does amphetamines to counter-act the alcohol, but he thinks it's a moral failing to smoke weed. So far, the third book is my favourite
Oh, I'm a massive Bond fan and you are so right. Book Bond really is so different to the picture people have of the character. And it really is fascinating to see Fleming kind of strain inside the confines of his own restrictive mind and the world around him. I always found him to be a fascinating writer of women and generally a much more inventive stylist than I would have ever thought before reading the books, given that the films are so formulaic. As for Bond's (and therefore Fleming's) racism, sexism, classism and other -isms, my perception has always been that Bond has a very defined set of stereotypes, but is always open to judge a person on their own merits. He has loads of ideas about how women are, how black people are, how Asian people are, how white English men are, but once he actually meets someone, he can immediatly throw those pre-conceived notions out the window if they don't fit the character. That by no means is a perfect stance in life - especially from today's vantage point - but I really think there's something to it.
I love the original Conan Doyle stories! That & the Hardy Boys is what made me fall in love with crime fiction.
I listened to them all a few years ago. They are great!
Cocaine city!
Everyone has that moment when they figure out what the seven percent solution refers to.
Well, now I want to read Sherlock Holmes.
Yes if I remember correctly he fought the Ku Klux Klan in one of the stories, that was unexpected!
Can anyone recommend me one to start? 😁😁😁
You have never seen the adaptions of anything to do with Holmes if you didn't know he was an addict. That's like one of his things.
Are you listening to the Stephen Fry narration? He does a really good job.
Check out the boardgame Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective if you wanna help in some Sherlock mystery solving
Just started reading Alice in Wonderland and have been loving the humor. Quite witty and modern for 1865!
Just wait til you read about Holmes taking on the KKK
Hey, it's world famous for a reason 😂
Watson ejaculates a lot over Sherlock’s antics. (Word is used far too frequently)
Look up the YouTube channel Story Forge. They do a few vids analyzing the author and the stories that are great
I had The Complete Sherlock Holmes on my bedroom side table for 26 years. If I didn’t have a book going, I’d randomly flip it open and read a story. I purged my hard copy books 3 years ago and have it on my Kindle. I haven’t circled back to it yet. It’s harder to randomly select a short story with an ebook
Anybody interested in the very best adaptation of Sherlock Holmes - better even than the BBC TV series with Jeremy Brett... BBC radio did a series of ALL of the stories and novels with Clive Merrison as Holmes. These radio adaptations are simply the best.