The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Haining
May 22nd 2007 07:22
Before Harry Potter and Star Wars there was another franchise which had acquired maniacal fandom. I am talking, of course, about Sherlock Holmes. It is said Conan Doyle himself did not enjoy his creation and killed him in a fit of irritation. It is well-known that fan pressure made him write a comeback for his detective. For some fans, even that was not enough.
Sherlock Holmes collections usually have 4 novels and 56 short stories. According to Peter Haining, the guy who edited this book there are many more Sherlock Holmes stories and his mission is to collect them in one volume. Sherlock stories nobody ever heard of? Sounds promising doesn't it?
But the promise is horribly undone as soon as you read the introduction. It contains two preliminary sketches that the author made before he could conceptualise Homes and Watson pair completely, two essays which the author wrote to explain his hero, two parodies of his own creation, two short stories in which Holmes plays an incidental role and a poem where the author tries to disassociate himself from the Sherlockian view of life. The two full-fledged cases are of disputed authorship and there are two plays which Doyle co-wrote with somebody else.
It's a collection for die-hard fans who want to grab every scrap of paper on which Holmes name is written and there are legions of such fans, I am sure. I am not one of them. I did enjoy some stories of Holmes but for some reason have never been an ardent fan. I appreciate the romanticism and the atmospheric prose of Doyle but not all of his plots are of equal quality. Some of them are just pure bragging and the whole professor Moriarty episode was a joke (at least Agatha Christie would do The Big Four kind of novels, her tongue firmly in cheek). Still, I wouldn't mind reading new set of detective stories but to read parodies of Sherlock Holmes even when written by Conan Doyle himself? Not for me.
The editor gushes in with schoolboy enthusiasm about how all these pieces are necessary to understand the genius of Sherlock Holmes and they form the canon too. Yeah? Any such collections should be given as a bonus, clearly stating that they are not canon and are offered for the elucidation of fans. Ayn Rand fans or J.K. Rowling fans are more careful regarding such things. The whole matter of rushing to canonise every bit of Sherlock Holmes Doyle ever managed to scribble is what is so irritating about this book. Sherlock fans should take a leaf out of Harry Potter fans and start writing fanfiction.
Sherlock Holmes collections usually have 4 novels and 56 short stories. According to Peter Haining, the guy who edited this book there are many more Sherlock Holmes stories and his mission is to collect them in one volume. Sherlock stories nobody ever heard of? Sounds promising doesn't it?
But the promise is horribly undone as soon as you read the introduction. It contains two preliminary sketches that the author made before he could conceptualise Homes and Watson pair completely, two essays which the author wrote to explain his hero, two parodies of his own creation, two short stories in which Holmes plays an incidental role and a poem where the author tries to disassociate himself from the Sherlockian view of life. The two full-fledged cases are of disputed authorship and there are two plays which Doyle co-wrote with somebody else.
It's a collection for die-hard fans who want to grab every scrap of paper on which Holmes name is written and there are legions of such fans, I am sure. I am not one of them. I did enjoy some stories of Holmes but for some reason have never been an ardent fan. I appreciate the romanticism and the atmospheric prose of Doyle but not all of his plots are of equal quality. Some of them are just pure bragging and the whole professor Moriarty episode was a joke (at least Agatha Christie would do The Big Four kind of novels, her tongue firmly in cheek). Still, I wouldn't mind reading new set of detective stories but to read parodies of Sherlock Holmes even when written by Conan Doyle himself? Not for me.
The editor gushes in with schoolboy enthusiasm about how all these pieces are necessary to understand the genius of Sherlock Holmes and they form the canon too. Yeah? Any such collections should be given as a bonus, clearly stating that they are not canon and are offered for the elucidation of fans. Ayn Rand fans or J.K. Rowling fans are more careful regarding such things. The whole matter of rushing to canonise every bit of Sherlock Holmes Doyle ever managed to scribble is what is so irritating about this book. Sherlock fans should take a leaf out of Harry Potter fans and start writing fanfiction.
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