The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Rating: WORTHY!

Holmes suffers through some terrible winters and storms in this volume. Why Doyle wanted a good many of these stories to start out with bad weather is a mystery worth exploring, I feel! Maybe they just reflect the time of year he was writing them. The stories are listed below with brief comments.

• The Adventure of the Empty House
  Set in 1894, three years after the supposed death of Sherlock Holmes, the detective returns and contacts Watson. He faked his death - of course - and was scurrying around for thre previous three years trying to lay his hands on Moroarty's confederates. This sotry invovles the trappign of the last of them with a completely unbeleivable dummy of Sherlock Holmes which invites the confederate to murder him using an air gun (that fires real bullets, not BBs or pellets), and thereby get himself captured.
• The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
  This invovles holmes's exoneration of John Hector McFarlane who was set up as a murderer.
• The Adventure of the Dancing Men
  This features the alphabet code of dancing men - each of which has a flag if it's the end of the sentence. Otherwise the code is ocmpeltely simple and unremarkable and does ntothignt o hdie the prevalnece of certain letters of the alphabet, such as the eltter 'E' which is coomon in English writing. It retreads an old story used in other Holmes adventures, of a betrothed woiman who has a previous assignation.
• The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
  This sounds like the title of a Monty Python skit, and it's almost as amusing as one, but not quite. It's a story about ruffians deceiving a woman to get at her inheritance.
• The Adventure of the Priory School
  This was a story that was used in the British Sherlock TV series, and features the apparent kidnapping of a schoolboy.
• The Adventure of Black Peter
  Black Peter the pirate! LOL! Really he's a whaler and dishonest to boot!
• The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
  Thgis sotry was also used in the British Sherlock TV series, but it pans out differently in the book than it did in the show. There's no mind palace here, just a blacklmailer.
• The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
  Again, used in the TV series where it became the Six Thatchers and was about spyies. In the book it was about missing jewelery.
• The Adventure of the Three Students
  The three students were all suspects in the theft of exam answers. No murders at all in this one!
• The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
  The golden pince-nez were left a the scene of a murder and Holmes must track down the apparent female guilty party. The story starts out "It was a wild, tempestous night" which is almost as good as the trope 'dark and sotry evening"!
• The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
  The missing three-quarter was a rugby player who apparently let down his side!
• The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
  Sir Eustace Brackenstall has been killed! Holmes rousts poor Watson on minutes' notice to rush away on a train to solve the crime! Why Watson puts up with this treatment from Holmes is the real mystery. Holmes thinks nothing of sticking the doctor with the hotel bill.
• The Adventure of the Second Stain
  The Right Honourable Trelawney Hope, Secretary of State for European Affairs, is desperate for Holmes to find a misisng document before war breaks out! This is also the story in which we hear that Holmes has at last retired, forbidding watson to publish any more accounts of his doings. In an earlier story we'd learned that Holmes was dissatisfied with Watson's telling of these adventures, and was thinking fo writign his own treatise on the detective work he does.

I had never read these stories before, so they seemed fresh and it was an interesting experience to read them rather than go over something I'd read before. It's full of relatively mundane crimes rather than sensational ones, which for me made it more interesting, so I commend this as a worthy read.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A Conan Doyle

Rating: WARTY!

It's important to note that this is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by A Conan Doyle, not by the Conan Doyle. Just kidding. Seriously, I came back to this through the British TV series Sherlock penned by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and wondering whether they would ever get around to a fifth season. It's looking rather like they won't, and maybe that's not such a bad thing after season four. But I got to wondering if they did, what would it be like: would they continue into season arcs like they had, or simply get back to basic mystery solving like the show was when it first began. This led me to the original stories and to this volume which contains a dozen adventures:

1. A Scandal in Bohemia
   This is the only story featuring the absurdly overrated Irene Adler, who is trumpeted today as Holmes's equal, when in reality, all she doe sis protect her property. The sad thing about this story is that Adler's "brilliance" is only visible because all other women in the Holmes canon are treated as cannon fodder, so be shot out as needed to display empty headedness, a predilection to fainting away, and other traditional feminine traits. The fact that Adler is none of these things makes her stand out, but it does not make her a mastermind. Holmes isn't even a mastermind in this story, so it's hardly an act of genius to bea thima t his own game. She just knew what she wanted and succeeded in protecting something that was valuable to her. It had nothing to do with smarts, only with determination if not outright desperation. That's it. The story isn't that good.
2. The Red-Headed League
   A story about a redhead who is tricked into leaving his place of work every day so the villains can dig through to the bank using a basement under his store.
3. A Case of Identity
   In which a money-grubbing stepdad hatches a bizarre scheme to keep his step-daughter;'s income in the family.
4. The Boscombe Valley Mystery
   Two Australians at war in rural England.
5. The Five Orange Pips
   Improbable tale of the KKK
6. The Man with the Twisted Lip
   A married man begging to keep a secret.
7. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
   A stolen blue diamond is added to the crop
8. The Adventure of the Speckled Band
   No one, and I do mean quite literally no one has ever called a snake a 'speckled band" except Doyle in this story! The whole story sucks. Snakes are effectively deaf to airborne sounds; they hear by resting their jawbone on the ground, so the idea of training a snake to respond to a relatively high-pitched whistle is for the birds. Holmes wasn't so smart after all, was he?!
9. The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
   Counterfeiting in the English countryside isn't something to thumb your nose at.
10. The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
    Twice toiled tail.
11. The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
    Doyle gave us the six Napoleons, Moffat gave us the six Thatchers, this story gives us the three beryls.
12. The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
    An Unwelcome fiancé is made to rue the castle.

Can't commend this based on the average stories inlcude din this collection. Perhaps retirement Holmes rather than Sherlock?

The Lost World by Arthur Doyle

Rating: WARTY!

Although it was read reasonably by Paul Hecht, this one ultimately disappointed. It was another audiobook experiment from my local library, but it's also available for free from LibriVox. This book was a DNF because it was taking so ponderously long to go anywhere that I lost patience with it! We were very nearly half way through the entire novel before these guys ever got to their 'lost world'. Everything prior to this was a slow set up.

The lost 'world' is really a high plateau in South America, and the idea is that this was so cut off from everything else that what killed off the dinosaurs elsewhere on Earth didn't affect those guys living up there. Of course, Doyle could not have known what we know now: that an asteroid destroyed them, and along with them very nearly the whole planet, so no dinosaurs, and none of what people popularly, but mistakenly lump in with them, such as the pterosaurs and the Sauropterygia, would have survived whether they were on plateaux or wherever.

There were things Doyle could have known, which I shall discuss shortly, but the problem here for me was that Doyle took an entire chapter with these guys parading round the plateau trying to find a way to get up there. The solution was obvious, but it took them a while to figure it out, and it was boring. This where I started skimming and skipping, and before very long decided to give up on it altogether.

The first problem is that the lost world as Doyle depicts it couldn't have stayed lost! There were pterosaurs living up there and while those animals which depended on legs to get them around would have been trapped up there, the flying animals would not have been so confined, and would have been discovered living in other areas long before the lost plateau was ever discovered, so this rang false.

The same thing applies to plant life. Why were none of the plants up there spreading to the areas around the plateau and becoming discovered? Doyle lived in an era where it was known how organisms get around. Darwin himself, a half century before, had made that clear, so Doyle cannot have been ignorant, yet still he wrote approached this story as though his little enclave atop the plateau would have remained entirely hidden. It wasn't credible.

Nor was it credible that this plateau could have risen so high so quickly that it preserved an antique set of species that never changed in over sixty million years! And held apemen! I'm sorry, but no. Anyone who thinks hominins and dinosaurs ever occupied the planet at the same time - anywhere - is an ignoramus, period. Doyle also knew of evolution, but failed to realize that it would have been going on up there on the plateau just as it was everywhere else.

Even if I were to overlook all of this for the sake of the story, the story itself was boring and entirely predictable. The encounters Doyle depicts, for example, between animal and human are all of the typically gory and violent kind that we find in every single story of this nature ever told, whether it be in book, in movie or on TV, about prehistoric animals - which are exclusively and savagely predatory. Predators do not behave like that in real life.

As I mentioned in a review yesterday, predators are not constantly hungry, constantly on the prowl, or constantly hunting. They do very little hunting (unless they're unlucky enough to be in a place where there's little prey or great competition). Neither do they obsessively track prey which they normally either do not encounter, or simply don't bother within real life. Yes, a really hungry predator will go after pretty much anything that might make a meal, but most of the time, predators - even warm-blooded ones - are doing quite literally nothing but sitting around until they get hungry!

When they do get hungry, they get on with it. They give up in short order if they can't catch their prey, and they try again later. When the hunt is done, they go back to their sedentary life until they're hungry again. That's it! When they're in that mode, their usual prey can saunter past them all the time and the predator really doesn't care. So for Doyle to depict the dinosaurs as constantly chasing down food, especially when they've clearly just eaten, as evidence by fresh blood on the beast's maw, is not only wrong, it's stupid and boring. I can't recommend this book at all.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Rating: WARTY!

This was an awful dramatization by the BBC, which was so melodramatic and pretentious, with screeching skin-crawling violin randomly inserted, and they were, for the most part so absurdly overblown that it was really a parody. There were twelve episodes which are listed in order below with my comments appended:

• A Scandal in Bohemia

Reviews to follow.

• The Red-headed League
• A Case of Identity
• The Boscombe Valley Mystery
• The Five Orange Pips
• The Man with the Twisted Lip
• The Blue Carbuncle
• The Speckled Band
• The Engineer's Thumb
• The Noble Bachelor
• The Beryl Coronet
• The Copper Beeches

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Doyle

Rating: WARTY!

The Valley of Fear was the last Sherlock Holmes novel to be written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and was published as a serial in Strand Magazine running from September 1914 through May 1915. I have to say I was disappointed in it and quit it half-way through. I'm not sure what Doyle thought he was doing here, but he told the entire story in the first half, and Holmes of course solved the mystery, which wasn't much of a mystery. The second half of the book explains why the main character did what he did, and this wasn't at all interesting to me.

Holmes has been receiving messages from a man who is known by the pseudonym "Fred Porlock" who evidently works for Moriarty. The most recent message is a book code which doesn't so much reveal as gives an extremely vague hint, that something bad will happen at Birlstone manor. Unfortunately, the hint is too late - or Holmes is far too laggardly in solving it, because the next thing Holmes learns is from inspector MacDonald, and it's that John Douglas of that same address was found murdered the previous night. Holmes and Watson accompany MacDonald to investigate.

Douglas was shot when making his nightly security rounds of his home. His face is blown away and in this era of no DNA testing, it's assumed that the body is Douglas by everyone except Holmes. Meanwhile, Baker, a friend of Douglas's and Douglas's wife both appear to be intimate and sharing secrets which they do not reveal to the police or to Holmes.

The clues seem to indicate that the murderer arrived on a bike, but abandoned it in his escape, leaving a bloody shoe print on the window ledge, fording the shallow moat which surrounds the property and making good his escape on foot. There appears to have been a card left at the scene with the initials VV and a number, and the body has a tattoo branded on his arm - just as Douglass did, which looks like two-thirds of the Deathly Hallows symbol! All that's missing is the wand.

I have to say that this story dragged on and on, with Holmes being completely insufferable, not revealing a single thing to the police, which in this day and age would have had him charged with obstructing an investigation at best, and as an accessory after the fact to murder at worst. It was this, and the poor mystery and stupid clues, together with the unnecessary length of this novel which made me dislike it. I cannot recommend it.

The Yellow Face by Arthur Conan Doyle

Title: The Yellow Face
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher: Bompa Crazy
Rating: WORTHY!

This Sherlock Holmes novelette was published in 1894. Most who know of Sherlock Holmes tend to picture him as solving every case, but real fans of the great detective know that he did not solve them all. Typically the ones at which he failed were, by John Watson's own admission, suppressed, evidently because without a conclusion, they were unsatisfactory cases: "...where he failed it happened too often that no one else succeeded, and that the tale was left forever without a conclusion." He did report one or two, however, such as The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, and this particular case, The Yellow Face, although in this particular case, it's not so much that it went unsolved as that it required no work on the part of Holmes for its resolution.

How it ever came to be titled The Yellow Face (and also known as The Adventure of the Yellow Face) is the only big mystery here! There is no yellow face in it (unless you count the reference to yellow fever)! The only other face that's remarked upon is first described as white.

The story begins with the visit of a man, Grant Munro, who has very recently had cause to doubt his wife, Effie. For three years they have had the perfect marriage, but now she is behaving oddly, first asking for a large sum of her own money, which she had put into his charge upon their marriage, and later leaving the house at odd times visiting the newly arrived neighbor, across the field from their cottage. When Munro confronts her about it, she begs her husband not to pursue it. Effie reassures him, but offers nothing concrete, instead asserting that she cannot tell him what’s going on and asks only that he trust her. This he cannot do, which is why he consults Holmes.

The story which is delivered to Holmes and Watson of Effie's history suggests some possibilities. She was, for a while, resident in the USA, in Alabama (no word on whether she sported a banjo on her knee), married to a fine man named John Hebron. Together they had a daughter, but subsequently, husband and daughter became ill and died of the illness, whereupon she returned to England. About six months after that was when she met and fell in love with Holmes's visitor.

The solution to this simple and pleasant story is itself quite simple, but out of several possibilities, the ones I had in mind were wrong. I felt slightly annoyed with Doyle that he didn’t give me quite sufficient clues to determine the answer more accurately! But I rate this positively, because I did enjoy the story and thought it a remarkably forward-thinking tale.

Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles by John Green and Arthur Conan Doyle

Title: Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Author: John Green (and Arthur Doyle!)
Publisher: Dover Publications
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

Set on the moors of Devon in 1887, this is one of the most famous and loved Sherlock Holmes adventures. I read and enjoyed a previous graphic novel by this author (note that this isn't the John Green of The Fault in Our Stars whom I find obnoxious. This is a different, talented John Green), titled Dracula, and found it to be quite wonderful, unlike the original, so I was really glad to get a chance to review another by the same writer in the same classics series, and I wasn't disappointed. Note that he's also written a graphic version of Frankenstein.

This graphic novel cuts to the chase pretty quickly, with Holmes and Watson meeting with Sir Henry Baskerville, newly arrived to take over Baskerville Hall. He is the last surviving heir to this fortune and is concerned about a note he received warning him away from Devon moors. He's also, curiously, missing a shoe, stolen from his hotel room.

Having discovered that Sir Henry is being followed, Holmes claims to have prior business which he needs to take care of, and dispatches Watson to travel with Sir Henry and his close friend Doctor Mortimer, to Baskerville hall, to see what he can stir up in Holmes's absence. Watson's first discovery is that there's a wanted criminal, name of Selden, loose on the moor. His next is that Barrymore, the male servant in the house, is signaling to someone out on the more by means of a candle in the window. Selden is evidently his wife's brother.

Despite having been requested by Holmes to keep an eye on Sir Henry, Watson takes to strolling the moor alone each day for exercise. It’s on one of these trips that he meets with Stapleton, a local. Though they hear a loud moaning noise, Stapleton dismisses it as swamp gas! Watson is invited to the Stapleton home, and is warned off staying on the moor by Stapleton's sister, who initially mistakes Watson for Sir Henry.

When Sir Henry meets Miss Stapleton later, he decides that she's charming and attractive, but her brother seems to disapprove of this attraction between them. Selden is found dead on the moor, wearing clothes which Sir Henry had donated to him. Before he died, Selden passed on a tidbit of information regarding a burned letter, only a fragment of which remained, signed "L. L.". This is took to be Laura Lyons (Lana Lang and Lois Lane anyone?!), the daughter of a mean man named Frankland. Laura lives in Coombe Tracey and becomes the next person on Watson's list for a visit.

Watson soon meets up with Holmes, who has been living in the wilds on Devon moor conducting his own investigation in secret. based on the likeness of the portrait of Hugo Baskerville, in Baskerville Hall, Holmes deduces that Stapleton is actually in line for inheritance of the Baskerville wealth, but Sir Henry must die before it becomes his.

When Lestrade of the yard shows up, he, Holmes, and Watson lie in wait outside Merripit House, which is Stapleton's residence. They have arranged for Sir Henry to stroll across the moor, and when Stapleton unleashes his trained hound, it is shot before it can harm its target, who is now pretty much Sir Henry Basketcase.

I really liked this graphic novel and I recommend it. And while this has nothing to do with this novel or with this author, I have to mention that it reminded me of a Peter Cook - Dudley Moor comedy take on the story The Hound of the Baskervilles", which was hilarious!