The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume II

Back around the first of the year, I finished up the last of Sherlock Holmes Volume II. I have now read all 60 Sherlock stories and I would say, overall, Volume I has the better collection. Volume II did have some good ones though, The Valley of Fear being my favorite. The Valley of Fear felt to me more of a modern detective story. Anyone who loves stories like the Untouchables, would like The Valley of Fear I think.

It seems I enjoy the longer Sherlock stories, the novellas, the most. Not surprising because you just get so much more in the longer pieces. More character development, more suspense, and more immersion in the action. Most of the short stories are only 20 pages or so, which really doesn’t give enough time to build tension.

There are some shorts that shouldn’t be missed though!
From Volume I my favorites are:

A Scandal in Bohemia- There’s not a lot of “story” in this one but Sherlock meets his match in Irene Adler. It’s good fun to read someone getting one over on Holmes.

The Five Orange Pips- Classic Holmes, one of the more referenced stories.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle- Has a great example of Sherlock’s deduction skills, all based on a hat.

The Musgrave Ritual- Some more great details about Holmes, like how he keeps his letters transfixed by jack-knife into the center of the mantlepiece and shoots holes in wall when bored.

The Final Problem- Of course you have to read this one, although it’s a bit spoiled now since we know there are more stories to come.

The best thing about Volume I is that the longer and most renown stories- A Study in Scarlett, The Sign of Four, and The Hound of Baskerville- are all collected in it. The shorter stories are wonderful for following along with Dr Watson as he uncovers Sherlock’s character and idiosyncrasies.

Volume II has quite a different feeling than Volume I. In the second collection of stories, things become much darker, more violent, and Sherlock has become cynical of working with the Police. Very often in Volume II Sherlock acts as judge and jury, deciding on his own who should be held accountable for their crime and who acted as any one of us would act in the same situation.

Some of the best from Volume II

The Adventure of the Empty House- Sherlock and his nemeses, Moriarty and Moran

The Adventure of the Dancing Men- Fun cryptogram

The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton: Holmes and Watson become burglars.

The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans: If you watch Sherlock, the series, you’ve heard of this one.

The Adventure of the Dying Detective: Holmes near death…

As I go through the book, there was actually quite a few good stories in Volume II. They just feel a little less fresh when you’ve already read 30+ Holmes tales.
Do you have a favorite Sherlock Holmes story?

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Slightly off topic note- I just want to say I am extremely bitter that all you UK-ers are now watching the second Sherlock series! Dh and I are dying but I think we have to wait until Spring for the show to air in the US.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes, volume 1

Sherlock Holmes cut out by Rochelle Donald

While reading Sherlock Holmes Volume 1, I became increasingly bothered by what I thought was a colonialist attitude undermining the stories. I was torn about it because it wasn’t a blatant racism that would cause me to throw down the book in disgust. Often the stories swung in the complete opposite direction, with affection and understanding towards people outside of so called respectable society. The contradiction made more sense to me when I read that Sir Conan Doyle was a firm supporter of England’s colonialism yet also, known to be deeply committed to racial justice.

Knowing the contradictions in the man made it easier to accept the contradictions in the stories. Not that Doyle’s personality or opinions made racism or colonialism acceptable but I do think his writing reflects a mind set of the times. The Sherlock stories give the sense that people at the turn of the century where struggling to grow out of past ignorances but by no means completely free of them.

It wasn’t until I finished the last and my favorite story in the Volume 1 collection, The Hound of Baskervilles, that the thread running through all the stories really snapped into focus. The evil that Sherlock Holmes fights, and the middle classes that read his stories feared, is not of Indian or African descent. The foreign other at the heart of the fear is beyond all men and their cultures, it is Nature itself. The untamable, unknowable Nature that exist apart from and in spite of modern man.

Hidden amongst the post-industrial civilized world of Sherlock Holmes, are pockets were Nature still rules. In England’s barren moors, in India’s densest jungles, in the vast empty spaces of America, the land is still exotic, wild, and mysterious. Those who spend too much time in these places risk regressing into the wild, hairy man of the past. Who, ruled by baser selfish motives, could pull all of modern society into the past with him. Sherlock Holmes with his scientific, but not unknowable, logic and active initiative is the epitome of the English upper middle class. A middle class that only emerged after industrialization and was at a high point in the Edwardian era, when Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock stories.

Another writer, J. B. Priestley said of the Edwardian era…

the middle class lived in fear of sliding back into the jungles and bogs of the workers. It had achieved respectability and was terrified of losing it.

I now look at the Sherlock Holmes stories not just as fluff written for the masses. But as an insight into the fears, flaws, and potential of the people making up the new multitude, middle class men and women embarking on a new century.

From The Hound of Baskervilles, Dr. Watson’s letter:

My Dear Holmes:
My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of pre-historic people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are suppose to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must have always been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.