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 Case of the Left-handed Lady by Nancy Springer

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first of two negative reviews of novels by Nancy Springer. I guess I'm done with pursuing her as an author of interest! The two stories were very different, and whereas the other didn't grab me at all, I found this one rather engaging for the first half of the novel (which is quite short). It's an audio book which is read acceptably although not particularly inspired by Katherine Kellgren, and it's about Sherlock Holmes's younger sister, who of course didn't exist according to the Canon of Conan the Anti-Barbarian. Out of keeping with Doyle's style, this one is told in first person which is far from my favorite PoV and rather spoiled the story in the long run. Why the author chose to go this route is a mystery, but it was a capital mistake! For the most part, I managed to put that aside without becoming nauseated by it, but there were times when I was shaking my head and wishing the author had been smart enough to write in third person.

Enola Holmes is only fourteen, and having been given access to some money by her mother, she ran away from home and established herself as a private detective or a perditorian, as she calls it - a finder of the lost in London. She's rather surprised to be visited one day by Doctor John Watson, who has never met Enola, and who engages her to find herself - and her mother, who is also apparently missing. Enola is posing as Ivy Meshol (that last name being an anagram of Holmes - Enola isn't very inventive or very smart). Ivy is purportedly the secretary of the renowned perditorian Doctor Ragostan, who of course doesn't exist, thereby leaving "Ivy" free to take on any case under his name and investigate it herself.

Enola pursues her calling in much the elementary way as Sherlock does, employing disguises and making deductions, although she isn't anywhere near as sharp as Holmes when the game is afoot. Unfortunately she's given to ruminating idly and pointlessly on her rather slack investigation far too much. Completely unlike Holmes, she obsesses over her clothing to the point where it nauseated me, particularly in the latter half of the novel. Rather than go looking for her mother who (she has a good idea) is off pursuing art and staying with 'gypsies', Enola decides to look into the disappearance of a Duke's daughter which appears superficially to be an elopement, but which upon even modest examination, seems much more like she left of her own accord, but Enola has issues with that explanation even after she's already determined that the daughter evidently has a split personality.

I have to say that this is probably the very last novel I shall read that rips off Arthur Doyle, because that's all this is - cheap and cynical theft of property, even though copyright on this has long expired. I call it theft, because if you're going to have a cousin, or sister, or whatever, of Sherlock Holmes, I think it's beholden upon you to at least offer a respectful nod and a wink to Doyle's style and Holmes's expertise and methods. It's a tragedy of Adlerian proportions if all you're going to do is steal the name to sell your book and offer nothing else, and you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

This story had nothing whatsoever to do with Holmes or Doyle, or with the brilliance and insights of either of them. It was just a young adult story which shamelessly abused the name to sell more copies than it would have, had the character been made to stand on her own two feet - something at she would have singularly failed in my opinion. I actively disrecommend this novel.

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!

The Revenant of Thraxton Hall by Vaughn Entwistle

Title: The Revenant of Thraxton Hall
Author: Vaughn Entwistle
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a big fan of novels which take real historical characters and have their way with them. It seems disrespectful, if not misleading or downright insulting, so I must confess up front that I had a problem with that, and it was only because it was Doyle and Wilde that I found myself drawn to this one. Who wouldn't be intrigued by a pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde?! But given that Holmes is fictional and Wilde is not, then I would certainly consider the next best thing: Holmes's creator, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, and Wilde. Curiously, Wilde's birth year, 1854, is the same as Holmes's fictional birth year. So this is what was offered, but it did fall a bit flat for me. Doyle seemed altogether too adolescent, and Wilde was nowhere near as entertaining as he ought to have been. It's difficult to see where this can go as a series.

I should confess also that I do not believe in any of the psychic and supernatural nonsense purveyed in this novel. There is no respectable evidence whatsoever that there is any such things as ghosts, life after death, mind-reading, levitation, teleportation, clairvoyance, or any of that flim-flam, and there is much evidence that the people claiming these abilities or experiences are at best misguided and lacking a solid scientific education, and at worst, delusional, lying, or knowingly fraudulent.

Having made that clear, I do like a good supernatural story, but have a hard time finding one. I did like this novel and enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go in terms of becoming a series, especially since there were so many "trifling annoyances" in the text, which I shall delve into shortly. This is a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it takes place immediately after he's killed off Holmes (in tandem with with his arch enemy Professor James Moriarty) at Reichenbach Falls at the end of his story: The Final Problem published in December of 1893. In this fictional account by Entwistle, Doyle wants to move on from these trifling (I love that word!) stories and create something new (in actual fact he wanted to devote more time to his historical fiction), but the reading public hates him for destroying their beloved hero to the point where they're pelting him with rotten fruit and vegetables at one point (which seemed rather excessive and exaggerated to me).

It so happens that Doyle is contacted in a rather mysterious way by someone who is a medium, and who has foreseen her own destruction at a seance to take place in the near future. Doyle is angered by, and dismissive of this encounter. Later, he starts to feel that he was wrong, yet when he revisits the address where he met this woman (very mysteriously in the dark), he discovers no one is there. His friend Oscar Wilde becomes so intrigued by the story that he volunteers to accompany Doyle when he goes to the inaugural meeting of the Society for Psychical Research where this deadly seance is due to take place.

The novel is well written, if a little too modern in general style for what Entwistle seemed like he was trying to do, which is to evoke Doyle's style. Indeed, it reads more like an Agatha Christie or a Charles Dickens novel than a Holmes mystery. The Victorian influence in some areas of the novel seemed at odds with the modern influence in others. For example, with the "disguising" of names and addresses. Yes, it was done back then, but given the rather modern tone of the novel, I saw no point in doing it here. Nor did it really disguise the address: 42 _______ Crescent! Victorian London was large, but I'll warrant that there were few "crescents" in it even then, so I found that weak attempt at anonymity to be rather fatuous, and especially given that the blank line was repeated annoyingly often!

There were many other minor issues, such as the curious case of the repetitive repeating! Yes, we know that Wilde has full lips and large hands, and that he smokes Turkish cigarettes! There honestly is no need to lard the text with repeated references to these attributes.

Entwistle purposefully misspells the name of Daniel Home (a well-known "psychic" fraud) - using 'Hume' throughout this novel. The name was pronounced 'Hume', but it was spelled 'Home', and Home himself added the 'Dunglas' in the middle of his name - it was not his name from birth. Contrary to descriptions used in the novel, Home wasn't American (not by birth). He merely resided there, but he was, in fact just as Scots as Doyle. Entwistle owns up to this misspelling in the Author's end note, but I found it rather insulting that this author evidently thinks that his readers are not smart enough to grasp that Home should be pronounced 'Hume' once it's explained. Why not embrace it and have one of the characters mention this at the start? I have to say I disagree with his approach here. And contrary to Entwistle's assertion that Home was never caught faking, he was indeed caught faking on several occasions, and damning evidence of his fraud was discovered in his belongings after his death.

On the topic of names, I don’t get why Entwistle consistently refers to the main male protagonist as Conan Doyle. It’s not an hyphenated name and is the equivalent of referring to Wilde as Wills Wilde, which he does not do. It seems oddly irrational and inconsistent to me. Whilst on the topic of Doyle, I might mention that he was primarily an ophthalmologist, not a family physician as such. Although he obviously did have the training, it's a bit misleading to represent him as a general practitioner, especially since he really never practiced!

Note that contrary to Entwistle's misleading description, moths do not eat clothes or other fabrics. It is the larvae of the moths which do the eating, most specifically the larvae of Tineola bisselliella, and then they eat only natural fibers preferably containing keratin, not synthetic - which of course were in any case scarce in Doyle's era. On this same lack of understanding, Entwistle appears not to grasp that the plural of candelabrum is candelabra - as any writer of that era would have known. While candelabrums is acceptable (odd as it may appear to some of us), I doubt a writer of that era, which Entwistle is evidently trying to emulate, would employ it. He gets further into trouble with this when he employs the singular candelabrum to indicate what is clearly more than one candlestick on p131.

There are also inconsistencies in the novel. The most glaring one, to me, was that Lord Web arrived after we’d been informed that Thraxton Hall had been cut off from outside society by the flooded river, and yet not one person remarks upon this. If the Hall was cut off, then how did Webb get there?

It may seem inappropriate to involve Doyle in the supernatural, given his dedication to resolving mysteries in perfectly mundane and scientific manner through his Holmes character, but the truth is that Doyle was sadly gullible when it came to the psychic charlatans of his era. Indeed it was why Houdini, the scourge of frauds, broke off his friendship with Doyle.

Entwistle is misleading in claiming a big age difference between Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor. They were close to the same age, and both in their early to mid-fifties in 1893, so she was not the young flirt as she's rather shamefully represented here. Indeed, she was dedicated to women's issues, so I found Entwistle's depiction of her to be insulting.

But enough nit-picking. What of the story in general? I found it enjoyable and engrossing, notwithstanding the problems I had with it. I wanted to read it and was interested in what happened, so the author did his job. I was intrigued by the idea that the medium, Lady Thraxton, might have been a ghost. In order to find out, you will have to read the novel! She was definitely a charming and interesting character who was under-used in my opinion, but as appealing as she was, I found myself far more intrigued by another character who played far too small a role in the story, most of it undercover. No spoilers for you there!

So, in short, I found this novel to be a worthy read. It was very easy to get through it, but it seems to me that it will appeal more to they who enjoy Victorian supernatural tales than for they who are fans of Sherlock Holmes or of Oscar Wilde.