Sherlock Holmes stories

[dask]

I read the Penguin complete SH aged about 18, living up a mountain in India, during a year out between school and university.

Wow.

When I read this earlier at work during break I thought pretty much the same thing. Alien to my biosphere, that's for sure. Cool, though.

 

[hitmouse]

Wow.

It was an old hill station. Very comfortable really. Lots of interesting elderly British who had never gone home after the sun set on the Raj. They still had their (dusty) clubs and libraries, afternoon tea, and liked to read Wodehouse out loud. That was the late 80s. They must all be gone by now.

 

[dask]

Sounds very Ray Bradburyish. Should write a novel about it.

 

[Extollager]

Sounds very Ray Bradburyish. Should write a novel about it.

Or a memoir.

 

[hitmouse]

I have thought about it. One day, when I get the time...

But enough of this palaver. Back to the subject at hand.

 

[Extollager]

What's your favourite story from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes?

 

[Extollager]

This cheap A. L. Burt reprint had two stories from The Adventures, following A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four.

 

[dask]

Put a few things on hold to start this:

Neat little intro by Ellery Queen reminiscing about his first encounter with the "tall, excessively lean man with his razorlike face and hawk's bill of a nose" and his "mysterious Victorian household gadget called a gasogene." In addition to that I've also had to look up "vizard." Anyway, Adventure 1, A Scandal In Bohemia coming along quite nicely.

 

[Extollager]

"Scandal" does move along well. But it shouldn't be placed where it is, first story! Agreed?

 

[dask]

Not sure. Haven't finished it yet. I'm getting the feeling, though, I may have read this a long time ago.

 

[hitmouse]

Is this the one with The Woman?

 

[Extollager]

Put a few things on hold to start this:
View attachment 46620
Neat little intro by Ellery Queen reminiscing about his first encounter with the "tall, excessively lean man with his razorlike face and hawk's bill of a nose" and his "mysterious Victorian household gadget called a gasogene." In addition to that I've also had to look up "vizard." Anyway, Adventure 1, A Scandal In Bohemia coming along quite nicely.

I thought I remembered those Ballantine releases, -- but, here, too bad that the lamp seems to be dangling from Irene's hat, though. And the artist has, understandably, shown Irene not-disguised as a youth, and Holmes in his dressing gown, and the scene indoors.

 

[dask]

Is this the one with The Woman?

Yeah, always causing mischief.

 

[dask]

I thought I remembered those Ballantine releases, -- but, here, too bad that the lamp seems to be dangling from Irene's hat, though. And the artist has, understandably, shown Irene not-disguised as a youth, and Holmes in his dressing gown, and the scene indoors.

I thought they were pretty cool when they came out so picked up as many as I could find.

 

[Extollager]

I thought they were pretty cool when they came out so picked up as many as I could find.

i like 'em too, but now I'm not sure which I or my sister had back then. Is the artist identified, perhaps on the other side of the title page?

 

[dask]

There is no artist listed either on the back cover or the copyright page but the name Anderson appears on the cover. I think I know who he is. If I'm correct he did a cover for Analog back in 1979 and his name is Richard Anderson (II). When the Ballentine books started coming out I was fairly it was the same guy and for whatever reason I was really taken with his work so picked up the paperbacks as they came out. Here's the Analog:

 

[dask]

And now a few words about the fragility of memory and the screwloose nature of thought. I did not buy the Sherlock Holmes books because I was smitten with Richard Anderson's artwork on Analog as stated above because looking for cover artist credit on the copyright page I noticed the Ballentine paperbacks, being first printings, came out in 1975 and the Analog cover didn't appear until 1979. How I got this twisted around Is beyond me. It has been a rock hard fixture in my mind for nearly 40 years. I can still hardly believe it. But there it is. The brain is such a silly thing.

 

[Extollager]

"Scandal" does move along well. But it shouldn't be placed where it is, first story! Agreed?

Well, what I was getting at is this. In this story, Holmes fails. From his point of view, disaster is averted only by factors over which he had no control. Watson realizes that Holmes has had a powerful learning experience.

(I trust I haven't spoiled the story for anyone who somehow has not yet read it.)

This story comes first in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which, I believe, simply follows the order in which the stories were published.

My thought is that it should come later in the book. Let's have a few cases in which Holmes exhibits his real brilliance -- and then the impact of his failure in this one will be all the more entertaining.

For a similar reason, "The Engineer's Thumb" needs to come as late in the collection as it does, but shouldn't have been (and wasn't) the very last story.

 

[Randy M.]

Hi, Extollager.

Seeing the thread title I was reminded I wanted to ask why you felt so strongly about "Scandal" and here I see you've already explained.

I was also prepared to question your assertion but ... well, you raise a pretty good point which raises the question, did earlier generations of writers/editors/publishers have a different perspective on story collections than more recent generations have had? If so, when did the change happen?

Or was this a Doyle decision? Since he saw the Holmes stories as merely a commercial exercise, his best writing elsewhere, did he just put them together in publishing order and have done with it?

There probably isn't a definitive answer, but it's and interesting question to gnaw on.


Randy M.

 

[Extollager]

Randy, what I suspect happened was this: all of these early Sherlock Holmes stories (and the later ones too, I imagine) were, I think, issued in magazine form first.

Thus, Doyle would have thought of readers of "A Scandal in Bohemia" as magazine readers who likely would already have read (in installments) A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. They would be ready for the surprise of a story in which the great detective was outsmarted by a woman. But for readers who pick up the stories collected as The Adventures as their first Holmes book, the collection starts off with "Scandal." The story's impact is lessened when you haven't been set up to see Holmes as super-clever by previous reading. Of course, he's now so well established in the popular imagination as the brilliant sleuth that perhaps it doesn't matter a whole lot if "Scandal" turns out to be the first Holmes story you actually read.

Before I retired, I included the little Dover collection of six great Sherlock Holmes stories as a required text in a freshman comp course that included an introduction to literature component. "Scandal" was the first story, but we would start with the eerie "Speckled Band" and they'd read "Scandal" as the third story (after "Red-Headed League").

These stories were really nice for getting students to consider basic things such as protagonist, antagonist, dilemma, points of view, irony (verbal, dramatic, situation), and so on. I used also to have them buy the Dover books of Kipling and Hawthorne stories. But those were perhaps too hard as the years passed, even with my annotations. I blame technology habits for a lot of that.