“Draw your chair up, and hand me my violin, for the only problem which we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.” This was a fun book to dip in and out of all month. I’m glad I did it the way I did. I think otherwise it might have been easy to grow tired of Holmes and his Watson. The stories are short and a bit slight, so they make excellent little auditory treats every couple of days […]
Would have liked a lot more Holmes in this one.
Honestly, a teensy bit disappointed in this one. It was more fun in bits and pieces than it was as a whole. This is the novel that famously originated at a dinner between an American publisher, Conan Doyle, and Oscar Wilde. Out of that meeting came The Sign of the Four (which is often shortened to just ‘The Sign of Four‘) and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I think most people would agree is the superior output (ACD thought it might be good fun […]
A fixed point in a changing age.
This was fun! I think I expected a bit more from it, but overall it was an entertaining, informative look at the phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes. First, what didn’t work for me. Dundas bases this entire book on trying to find out the answers to a central question, why has Sherlock Holmes endured, reviving and reviving over 130 years? Well, the problem here is that there isn’t really an answer to that question! There are 5,000 possible answers. It’s not something anyone will ever *know*. […]
“There’s a scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life.”
The first novel down in my quest to read The Complete Sherlock Holmes by the end of 2018. Though I have seen numerous adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories over the years, I only managed to read a handful of the actual source material as a child (and The Hound of the Baskervilles is the only one I remember with any clarity). I never managed to read this one, which gives us the introduction between Mr. Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, and Dr. John Watson, his friend […]