The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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Oh, you know what this is.

That said, I realised after reading this that I did not really know what Sherlock Holmes is. Specifically, I'd had the idea that it was "modern" detective fiction, and in many ways it wasn't. The mysteries were ultimately naturalistic, but I found them pretty weird and kinda "gothic" in vibe; they were maybe technically solvable from the information given the reader, but I never felt like "ah I could have got that"; that said, they tended to have so few characters that you could kinda guess Who Dunnit quite often just by bumbling down the list (after eliminating the "obvious" person, who I think it never is).

Finally, the stories were mostly conveyed in the same (slightly boring?) way, where a client shows up at Holmes' office and tells a long story about something that happened to them – yes, mostly Holmes then goes to the location and pokes around a bit more, but the bulk of the story is told-not-shown. Arthur Miller said that he would rather be operated on by the most mediocre modern surgeon than by Hippocrates [citation needed], meaning that the Pioneers of a craft may be more impressive but the absolute quality of their mediocre succesors is still just better, and I kinda felt that reading Holmes: that a middling modern detective story would probably impress me more, even if it's less impressive.

Two unrelated things:

  • Detective stories have the same impact on me that Twitter does, i.e. once I start I can't put them down, even if I'm not enjoying them. I've said it before but I think they're taking advantage of the delayed answer loop in our brains – by "they" I meant "detective novels", but who knows, maybe infinite scroll social media feeds as well. This is so bad! I should not be participating in either! I should definitely not be creating material for either! And yet....
  • My strong suspicion is that Sherlock Holmes is an icon mainly because of the insanity of copyright laws, and the narrow window in which there was a mass press + mass literacy but before Mickey Mouse. If you're reading this sentence I did not bother to go look up any evidence for this, so if someone could kindly do that instead I'd be much obliged.