Beyond Elementary

Took The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes off the bookshelves the other day, having decided it would be interesting to undertake a read-through. The novels and stories are sequenced in the order of publication and it struck me that whilst I knew the canon pretty well, having started reading the tales as a very young teenager, I had no real sense of the development of the body of work as a whole and it would be interesting to acquire a sense of that sequence.

I've been reading A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four over the lest three days and it's quite remarkable how fully formed the Holmes-Watson relationship is from the outset. Doyle established the template right away, from the opening pages of the first novel - or pamphlet, as the good doctor refers to it in A Study in Scarlet. But it's also odd how Doyle seems compelled to give us the rather tedious backstories of the perpetrators of the wicked deeds in both, with the requisite chapters occupying a good half of the first novel, completely derailing the Holmes-Watson heart of the story. Things aren't quite so bad in the second work, but the pages covering Jonathan Small and the Indian Mutiny are still pretty tedious stuff. I suppose Doyle thought his readers wanted plenty of foreign colour, when all they required was as much of No. 221B, Baker Street as possible.

By the by, the foreign colour in The Sign of Four is so racist as to be painful, but this is oddly fascinating in itself - and it puts the racism of Kipling and Conrad into massive perspective (as in, if you think these guys are bad get a load of what the average 'popular' writer of the period with few if any literary pretensions was capable of.) Mind you, Doyle manages to be reasonably even-handed in his treatment of Mormonism in A Study in Scarlet, being quite sympathetic to those undertaking the great migration to Utah, even though he's firm in his negative judgement upon their leaders in the years that followed.