Me reading through Sherlock Holmes library for the first time (with the exception of hound of the Baskerville’s which I’ve read before): Strange. The mystery has been resolved but there’s still a good chunk of the book left
The villain: As you’ve bested me, mister Holmes and these constables shall surely take me to the scaffold, please let me tell you my humble life story in great detail.
If you are willing to go audio, Audible had the entire series read by Stephen Fry and it is very well done.
There are a few anime as well such as Case File 221B Kabukicho and Moriarty the Patriot.
They are very loose adaptations in ways but have their own unique charms as well. I think there’s also one called Sherlock Bones.
But yeah the Mormon situation was a huge adjustment. Figured the story was done or I had a misprint.
I think the way the crimes are solved or explained is done better in Poirot stories, but Sherlock is enjoyable in his ways.
Also it’s wild how certain people are always given such huge presences in adaptations but show up in ONE story.
Gotta love it when people get their creative juices flowing.
You got me monologuing
"Classic villain monologue,” right? It’s a trope, but it adds to the drama. Plus, it gives Sherlock a chance to show off his brilliant deductions one last time. It’s all about the suspense, and I think it works brilliantly.
Yeah it’s fairly good. I think it works better in A study in Scarlet than in The Sign Of Four. But then A Study on Scarlet has more of a standard detective structure where you have to piece together the clues of the crime whereas The Sign Of Four seems less interested in having a puzzle to solve and more excited in having a chase.
These are adventures, most of the stories are a wild ride as Sherlock does his thing. You should read The Red-Headed League. That one has a silly puzzle that you could figure out
The Sign of Four was my least favorite out of all his novels for that reason. I do love the exposition dumps though.
Gotta pad out that word count for the serials, Doyle was no fool.
It is interesting, and not unique to Doyle by any means.
I am currently reading my way through a lot of detective books by Doyle’s contemporaries (Boothby, Morrison, Meade & Eustace, Le Quex, Austin Freeman, Bramah, Futrelle, Reeve, AK Greene etc) and it is quite common for the culprit to be identified and arrested but for the story to then carry on at some length with a kind of “post mortem” where the detective explains what actually happened and how he worked it out.
It wasn’t really until Christie came along and showed how to organise the denouement so that the explanation comes first and leads up to revealing the culprit right at the every end.
I see it as Sherlock wanting a ‘complete’ accounting of what happened, which includes the relevant backstory.
The Mormon sequence in A Study in Scarlet is absolutely wild. But after learning about the Mountain Meadows Massacre I can see why he made some of those choices.
I have come to move on from Holmes. Maybe I read his adventures one time too many. Still most current mystery writers are even now vastly inferior to Doyle.