Not a lot to add to my enthusiastic write-up of this book from first reading, except to say that the Doctor Who / Sherlock Holmes mash-up is even better reading in the Moffat Era.

It's actually only about five years since I last read this collection of Holmes stories. I was struck then by the several incidents of freaks of nature, and also the succession of fiery Latin American ladies, and by the way in which Holmes offers absolution rather than justice; this last point struck me even more forcibly on this reading, as Holmes has moved from being the problem-solver who mocks the establishment of the earliest stories to being a powerful moral force on his own merits. The other important difference is that while the early stories had him as a cutting-edge user of the latest technology, these last stories, set twenty years or more before they were written, now have him as a figure of Victorian nostalgia from a time when the world seemed a more certain place. It's a sad ending.

I finished this several days ago, but have been on the road all week. It struck me that a lot of the stories in this collection were a bit longer, allowing Doyle to work through his ideas in a slightly more thorough way without resorting to the padding which fills up space in three of the four novels. This collection includes "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans", which so memorably features an Underground train, and (in my edition) "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", in which the said box, containing two gruesome objects packed in salt, is sent by post to London from, of all places, Belfast (where I am at this very moment boarding a plane). Unfortunately the title story, in which Holmes penetrates a German spy-ring by going into deep cover as an Irish revolutionary, is a tad silly, but the rest are all good.

Having just read the best of the Holmes novels, I turn now to what is definitely the worst. There is one really good twist, as Holmes works out what really happened in the shooting incident (though I must say I'd have expected a bit more evidence of it at the scene of the crime). But we take quite a long time getting there, and several other bits of the story have been done better before; Homes and Watson are off-stage for quite a lot of the book; and we never quite sort out the Moriarty connection either.

It's clear that Doyle drew on two real-life crime stories for the back-story to The Valley of Fear - interesting that both of them are in fact stories of Irish political violence (and Moriarty is of course a Kerry name). Ireland is not very visible in the Sherlock Holmes canon, but this is an exception. (Both Doyle's parents were Irish Catholics though he grew up in Edinburgh.) The story of McMurdo/Edwards/Douglas and the Scowrers is almost identical to that of Armagh man James McParland penetrating the Molly Maguires in the 1870s; and the mysterious murder on a ship off the coast of Africa at the end of the story is drawn from the fate of James Carey, who informed on the Invincibles responsible for the Phoenix Park Murders of 1882. It is instructive that Doyle wasn't really able to make this rather factually based story work terribly well - he is much better when he sticks to the products of his own imagination.

"Sir Charles lay on his face, his arms out, his fingers dug into the ground, and his features convulsed with some strong emotion to such an extent that I could hardly have sworn to his identity. There was certainly no physical injury of any kind. But one false statement was made by Barrymore at the inquest. He said that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any. But I did--some little distance off, but fresh and clear."
"Footprints?"
"Footprints."
"A man's or a woman's?"
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered.
"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

And so we are off to Dartmoor, in a tale of ancient legends and tangled family histories of criminality and concealed relationships, in what I think is the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories -Doyle does very well at the atmospheric description, and is getting much better at characterization - Watson getting increasingly irritated by Holmes not letting him know what he is up to. I know the story so well that it is actually quite difficult to judge how well it works as a mystery, but it is very entertaining.

As I suspected, Holmes did not stay dead for long (apologies if anyone feels that is a spoiler, but the story of his return was published in 1903 which I think is a decent interval). None of these thirteen stories particularly stands out for me, though I noticed a general trend away from high politics towards domestic drama - for instance in "The Adventure of Abbey Grange", Holmes and Watson confront the murderer but decide that they like him more than his victim so let him go. I also sensed a stronger geographical specificity - one story is set in am unidentified Oxbridge college, another explicitly in Cambridge. There are some fairly blatant retreats as well - "The Six Napoleons" is the same story as "The Blue Carbuncle" but with busts instead of geese. Still, they are all engaging reading; one almost feels that Doyle has stopped trying too hard and found a gear that suits him.

There are eleven stories in the second of the Sherlock Holmes connections, where we see Doyle expanding the fictional universe: we have a couple of accounts of Holmes' adventures before he met Watson, we have Mycroft and the relationship with the French painter Vernet, we have the recovery of a treaty lost by the Foreign Secretary's nephew, and most of all we have Moriarty. The best of these is the first, "Silver Blaze", which is the one about the missing race-horse with the original curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Several of the others, unfortunately, have almost the same solution as "Silver Blaze"."The Final Problem" is a good bit of writing, as Holmes and Watson pursue each other to (apparently) mutual destruction in Switzerland, but has no real mystery element. There is also the peculiar story of the bloke whose wife turns out to have a black daughter by her previous marriage; some peculiar racist psychology going on there. Anyway, I don't think Holmes will stay dead, as I am only on page 480 out of 1122.

This is the first volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, and includes several rather brilliant tales of detection - my favourite is "The Red-Headed League", but it also includes "The Speckled Band" and "The Blue Carbuncle". "The Engineer's Thumb" is another good one - even though Holmes' only deduction is the location of the crime, and even that turns out to be too late, it is an effective piece of horror.

However, the collection also includes several stories which are already getting a bit formulaic - the country house with the Awful Family Secret ("The Speckled Band" being the best), the disrupted wedding (the best of these is "A Case of Identity", not the over-rated "Scandal in Bohemia"). I can already sense why Doyle wanted to kill Holmes off.

Following my remarks about drugs in The Sign of Four, I note that Watson does indeed find Holmes in an opium den looking for "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (which is actually a rather weak story - the alert reader will work out where the man is long before Holmes does). But both Holmes and Watson agree that opium is worse than cocaine. Certainly opium use had a strong social and racial stigma, which Doyle does not challenge; indeed, in general these twelve stories are much less subversive than the two first novels, and were correspondingly more successful, though this reader is a bit disappointed.

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One thing that surprised me about The Sign of Four is its brevity - only 76 pages in my Complete Sherlock Holmes. But I think this shows a somewhat more disciplined approach by Doyle, and also perhaps a growing awareness that "less is more" which leads to the success of the short stories. It's still not as tight as it could be - once again the actual mystery, which is literally a locked-room murder, gets rather sidelined in the tale of dangerous foreigners coming to disrupt London to gain an ancient revenge, though this time they are thieves from the East (and in fact, of the two only one is actually foreign, it is the other who is actually the thief, and it is really the conveniently dead English fathers, Sholto and Morstan, who are the villains) rather than religious fanatics from the West.

There's a lot of family in this short book. We start with Watson and his brother, then we encounter the Morstans, the Sholtos, and Jonathan Small and his adopted family of fellow conspirators with the child-like Tonga (very small; can't talk properly; er, also kills people with a blowpipe - I admit the analogy is not perfect). The book ends with the establishment of a new family as Watson gets engaged to Mary Morstan, who he has known for, what, two days? Of course, the point is to increase the dramatic effect as the reader imagines his or her normal family life being disrupted by the mistakes of previous generations, but I found it striking.

Sherlock Holmes has no family. (Mycroft and Vernet are in the future.) For him, as he says at the end, "there still remains the cocaine-bottle." I can't think of another novel which portrays the use of cocaine in such a positive light - "so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind". In fact, I can't think of many novels about drug use at all, other than Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson, and even their more enthusiastic moments have a conscious sense of self-destruction about them. Again, Doyle is more subversive than I had realised. (And he has another, if briefer, go at the cosy relationship between the media and the police.)

I'm finding more in these than I had expected to. On to the classic short stories next.

Edited to add: new userpic is from a letter written by Arthur Conan Doyle to my distant cousin Frederic.)

I've started to work my way through the complete Sherlock Holmes, inspired by last year's rather glorious TV adaptation, and of course this is the place to start. I read most (possibly all) of Holmes as a teenager so it's a return to former pastures.

Inevitably I started by comparing with the Moffat "A Study in Pink". Common elements obviously include Watson's time in Afghanistan and the cab driver, and I had forgotten about the bit with the pills being also in the original. The TV version is less satisfying as a mystery; in the original, Holmes works out who the murderer must be pretty early on by powers of observation and deduction, and then uses unorthodox methods (the Baker Street Irregular) to track the killer down. Much of this happens off-screen, in Holmes' head, but it works in the voice of the baffled Watson. The Mormon back-story is merely chrome - any old grudge would do for plot purposes, though the TV version skipped even that - but gives Doyle a chance for imaginative and descriptive writing.

One point that struck me more forcefully this time round is Doyle's merciless portrayal of police manipulation of the media to show themselves in the best possible light. In a story which is full of trendy commentary - Holmes is at the cutting edge of biochemical technology, he goes to see the current star female musician - this reads to me like a tremendously subversive and very direct attack on the integrity of the state institutions of coercive force, and their successful formation and constraint of public opinion. Perhaps this seemed normal enough to me as a teenager growing up in Belfast, but it feels rather shocking to me now for a writer of the 1880s to say this. It furnishes Holmes with the sardonic Latin epigram which ends the story. Of course it's partly to reinforce the image of Holmes as background genius, but I think there is a sincere political commentary there too.

(And finally, I am always amused by my brother's appearance in Chapter 5.)