Though this quote may have been used to comedic effect in the recent Guy Ritchie film it actually appears in a classic Holmes adventure entitled "The Man with the Twisted Lip." This will undoubtedly play a part in next week's blog about the film but here I find it particularly humorous when the conversation is directed at our nearly omnipresent narrator in the best loved tales by Conan Doyle. Watson, of course, was not entirely silent since he, despite his usual lack of deductive skill, provides the brilliant Holmes with both someone to talk to as well as a means through which the exploits of such an icon of the detective genre can be believably recorded.
Though Holmes had been preceded by Poe's Auguste Dupin ("The Purloined Letter") by nearly thirty years whether as a result of Doyle's more expansive works within the genre or through the multitude of idiosyncrasies that marked his character Sherlock Holmes has come to exemplify the perfect detective. It could be argued that Doyle's stories have a tendency to become formulaic or at least somewhat contrilved but their entertainment value cannot be lost and has in fact captivated its audience without slackenign since the late 1800's.
I'm not sure where I had even had the opportunity to experience any thing Holmsian in my early youth, no doubt through a cartoon of some sort, but I distinctly remember putting two baseball caps on my head, one foreward and one reverse, in an attempt to emulate Holmes' classic deerslayer. Nearly fifteen years later I actually had the opportunity to visit 221B Baker Street and peruse the museum and gift shop that has been established in that location. There I managed to pick up the real article; a genuine Holmes deerslayer cap, a souvinir which subsequently became my calling card.
The nice part was that I felt particularly qualified to wear it since a few years earlier at Christmas my grandfather had bestowed upon me the grand volume pictured above. As you might imagine it is quite a brick, containing all four Holmes novels (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, and The Hound of the Baskervilles) as well as every other collection of Holmes adventures (Adventures of..., Memoirs of..., The Return of..., His Last Bow, and The Case Book of...). It must have been the following Summer break, while working as a cashier at a gas station with very little to do during the slow Saturday shift, that I managed to devour all 1122 pages, leaving me feeling particularly intelligent. For some reason reading Holmes makes one feel particularly qualified to develop grand deductions about the world around him that one realizes weren't all that grand once the book-buzz has worn off. I can't say that Doyle presents an immensely artistic series of tales but then again I don't think that is what he was going for. Ultimately Holmes is amusingly cerebral and entirely entertaining; this particular mindset also made the recent film quite fun, but I will leave this for next week.
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Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. New York: Doubleday, 1930.
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