Before we start talking about the sherlock holmes books, I’m intrigued by what happens in the baker street gang, which you were inducted into in 2002.
the baker street irregulars was founded in the 1930s by three brothers: christopher morley, who was a well-known literary journalist at the time, his brother felix morley, who was for a time the editor of my newspaper, the washington post , and his brother frank morley, who worked in publishing and once shared an office at faber & faber with that other big sherlock holmes fan, ts eliot.
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the morley kids had grown up reading the sherlock holmes books and used to tease each other with questions about the smallest details about them. they decided to hold a contest in the saturday literary magazine for people who had the same kind of passionate interest at 221b baker street, and out of this contest grew a kind of literary society and gastronomic club, which has been going strong for more than 75 years now. In it, people play what is called “The Game,” which is based on the premise that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are real historical figures and the stories historically record their exploits. there are discrepancies in “the canon”, there are gaps, there are issues with the chronology, but patchy scholarship will find a way to reconcile or make sense of all of them.
dorothy sayers [the crime writer] was a member of an equivalent group in england: the sherlock holmes society in london. she always insisted that “the game” should be played without cracking a smile. you needed to take it seriously. something like. the baker street irregulars continues to flourish, hosting an annual birthday banquet with lots of toasting and talking. Being a committed member of the group is a lot of fun, especially since my fellow irregulars range from Apple’s retired CTO to judges and lawyers to notable writers like Neil Gaiman.
Let’s look at some of the books you’re such a fan of. Your first choice is A Study in Scarlet, which describes how famous detective couple Holmes and Watson met.
If you’ve never read any sherlock holmes books, you really need to start with that one because it introduces this rather mysterious and romantic character. At first, Dr. Watson tries to decipher the profession of his strange roommate at 221b Baker Street. He lists what Holmes seems to know a lot about and what he seems to know nothing about, including the Copernican theory. In short, this is an introduction to a partnership and friendship that will be told through 56 short stories and four novels. I think everyone needs to know the basis of that relationship.
there have been so many different sherlock holmes movies, depicting watson and holmes differently. Based on your reading of the books, how would you describe them?
most of us grew up with basil rathbone and nigel bruce in those old b-movies from the 30s and 40s. nigel bruce deliberately portrayed watson as this bumbling jerk, who is very different from the watson in the books, who is a soldier, doctor, war veteran and an authority on “the fair sex”. Happily, the BBC’s 21st Century Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch as this very Aspergian Holmes and Martin Freeman as this vulnerable and handsome Watson, gives us a more accurate portrayal of their relationship.
Watson, we know from the books, marries at least a couple of times and is a much more admirable and humane figure than Holmes. Over time, the stories show how Watson gradually humanizes this thinking machine. Agatha Christie, through the mouth of her own detective Hercule Poirot, stated that Conan Doyle’s greatest creation was not Sherlock Holmes but Dr. Watson.
do you agree?
not really, but we get all our information on holmes through watson. is our representative in this strange house. Just as in vaudeville you need a serious man as well as a comedian, so in these wonderful stories, Watson has to be the serious man from Holmes. Think of all those little scenes at the beginning of every story when the couple are sitting around the fire and Holmes suddenly notices that a visitor has forgotten a hat or cane and asks Watson to make some deductions about the owner. . Watson is wrong about everything and Holmes is able to astonish his friend with amazing inferences. In one case, they are studying an old hat, Holmes goes over all these details and finally concludes with a flourish that it is obvious that the man’s wife has stopped loving him. that example comes from the story “the blue carbuncle”, by the way. you need the give and take between the two men for the stories to work. I once read that in vaudeville the straight guy was often paid more than the comedian because that’s the hardest job. you have to prepare the jokes in the right way. It’s really hard to find a good straight man, and Watson is one of the best.
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good point. Next on this list of the best Sherlock Holmes books is The Tale, The Adventure of the Speckled Band. You can buy it on its own or read it for free online, but if you commit, you can also buy it as part of the complete Sherlock Holmes. is described as a locked room mystery, what is that?
is essentially an impossible crime. a victim is found murdered in a locked room with no obvious entrances or exits. how was the crime committed? how did the killer escape? apparently only supernatural means can explain this impossible situation. But a detective like Sherlock Holmes will find out how it all really happened.
the speckled band is also a kind of gothic story. You have a wonderful villain in Dr Roylott, and you have the isolated home, the mysterious sounds and habits of home. most sherlockians, if they had to choose a single story to represent the canon, they would choose this one. for many years, she and the league of redheads were the two most repeated adventures in school textbooks.
why?
has a superbly creepy atmosphere and gives you all sorts of details about sherlock holmes and watson. as a story, everything in it fits perfectly.
we can’t talk about conan doyle without mentioning his most famous sherlock holmes book, the hound of the baskervilles.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was the first adult book I ever read. I remember buying the novel as part of a school book club and waiting until the right afternoon in November to read it, when my sisters and parents would be out. it was literally a dark and stormy night and i pulled all the covers off my bed and turned off all the lights in the house except one and read the pages with wide eyes.
when you get to the end of that second chapter, there’s a particularly brilliant exchange when doctor mortimer describes the death of the last baskerville and mentions that footprints were seen near the body. Holmes turns to Mortimer and says, “A man or a woman?” And Mortimer offers the best answer in 20th-century literature, “Mr. Holmes, they were the tracks of a gigantic hound!” I shivered with delight and realized that life didn’t get much better than that. after i finished the book i went to the library and found the complete sherlock holmes stories and devoured them.
I finally found out that conan doyle was not only the creator of sherlock holmes, he was actually a multi-talented writer. he also wrote wonderfully evocative ghost stories and historical fiction. he has these rather blustering fantastical tales told by a napoleonic cavalryman, brigadier gerard. I recommend them.
still, the hound of the baskervilles was the book that persuaded conan doyle to bring holmes back in a serious way. you know he killed the detective at the end of sherlock holmes memoirs and people thought for several years that their beloved sherlock had died after the fall with professor moriarty at reichenbach falls. But eventually Conan Doyle gave in to audience pressure and dated The Hound of the Baskervilles, though he insisted it was a pre-Reichenbach affair. But the book was so fabulously popular – it was the Da Vinci or Harry Potter code of the time – that eventually Conan Doyle was offered so much money that he couldn’t refuse to produce more Sherlock Holmes stories.
Despite his popularity, is there anything you don’t like about him?
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i would say the only real flaw is in the middle of the novel where there is a long period where holmes is not present and we are just following the adventures of doctor watson in baskerville hall. but the idea of this hellhound really gives the story an air of mystery that readers love. The Baskerville Curse, developed over generations and still in modern times, is especially brilliant, as is Holmes’ discovery of the truth.
as you mentioned, conan doyle wrote other novels that don’t include sherlock holmes. one of them is the lost world.
one of the goals of my little book on conan doyle is to encourage people to explore the wonderful non-sherlockian works of conan doyle. certainly the one most people should start with is the lost world. Features Professor George Edward Challenger, a cocky but wonderfully funny and committed scientist who discovers a plateau in a South American jungle where dinosaurs still roam the earth. this is based on some real historical explorations that were going on at the time. the novel obviously inspired jurassic park. is one of the great classic versions of a lost civilization.
challenger is a larger than life humorous character, and I repeatedly emphasize that conan doyle is often very funny. himself, unlike many writers, was something of a man of action: a great sportsman who skied, climbed, and walked, and a man who served on a whaling ship as a ship’s doctor and tended to the wounded during the war of the Boers.
so why do you think the sherlock holmes books are so much better known?
sherlock holmes represents an intellectual ideal. he is a man who lives purely by his wits, bowing to no one and disdaining the conventions of society that most of us have to observe. When you read these books at age 11 or 12, it’s clear that Holmes lives the life of an ideal child. his best friend is his roommate. he has a mother figure who serves him hot meals when he is hungry. he can shoot his gun inside his house, he can be as messy as he wants, he can wear many disguises and he can go out and have great adventures fighting bad guys. beyond that, as I said before, he is open to all sorts of interpretations. he is the village of the police novel.
you have finally chosen arthur conan doyle: a life in letters, edited by jon lellenberg, daniel stashower and charles foley.
particularly after becoming famous, conan doyle considered himself a public intellectual and wrote many letters at the time protesting the atrocities in the belgian congo, advocating divorce law reform and trying to right the wrongs of people unjustly imprisoned. . Arthur and George, Julian Barnes’ pre-Booker Prize novel, dealt with Arthur Conan Doyle in one of these cases.
some of that public intellectual side of conan doyle is reflected in these letters, but they are also very personal and reveal a captivating personality. conan doyle is funny, witty, cares about his family life and writes in a very entertaining way on all kinds of subjects. Above all, with copious annotations from him, the book provides a good summary of Conan Doyle’s career and some of his many interests.
how did it help you with your research for your book?
to write my own book, i read almost all of arthur conan doyle’s book. there were some of his books that I didn’t get to, some of the spiritualist treatises, for example, that he wrote in his later years. I drew on the letters, of course, but also on his essays and memoirs, the Sherlockian lore of the Baker Street irregulars, various biographies. Naturally, I am referring to the many movies, plays, and hobbies that employ the great detective.
In short, my goal was to collect a lot of information about Conan Doyle’s writings and the whole range of Sherlockian activities in a very personal and simple short book. If I have any talent as a writer, it lies in transmitting true enthusiasm for the authors I love. I certainly hope that people will enjoy my book for its own sake, but also use it as a means to better appreciate the Sherlock Holmes stories and as a gateway to other works by Conan Doyle.
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