Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 2 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

(Book Review)

It's taken me far too long to get around to reading this book.

I actually bought this book 10 years ago now.

...wow.  10 years ago already.  It's scary how quickly time starts to pass as you get older.  It seems like it was just the other day.

I was in Fukuoka city with my friends John and Mary, on the same  trip I described in this May 2006 blog post.

English books are in short supply in Japan, so whenever we made it into a big city, we always hit the bookstores. The three of us were browsing through one such bookstore, when I saw the two volumes of the complete Sherlock Holmes.

Up until that time, my image of the Sherlock Holmes canon had been an image of a sprawling infinite array of stories.  No mortal could possibly dream of reading all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, anymore than it was possible to read, say, all of the Batman stories.

But now here before me, in two thick but portable volumes, were all the collected stories.  I could buy these books.  I could actually read through the entire collected canon.
It would be a huge step in my continuing quest to someday achieve the status of being "well-read".

"Imagine," I said to Mary, "I could actually buy these books and read through the whole Sherlock Holmes canon.  And then, the next time I'm at a bar, I could say to the person next to me, 'Did you know I've read all the Sherlock Holmes stories?' "
"What a sadly misunderstood man you are," Mary responded.

Well, buying the books was easy enough.  Reading through them proved to be another matter.

Not that these were bad books--not at all, they were very enjoyable actually.  But in this day and age of constant media distractions, finding the time and concentration to read even an enjoyable book can be difficult for some of us.

I finished the first volume of this collection, and reviewed it on this blog, way back in January 2007.  At that time I fully planned to just continue on to volume 2.  But I didn't.  I got distracted by several other books, and just never got around to coming back to this one.

Again, it's not that these books were bad.  (In fact, I even put the Sherlock Holmes stories from Volume 1 up on my list of "Classic Books Which Are Actually Fun to Read"). But I suppose that after working through the first volume, my curiosity was satiated, and I knew what to expect from a Sherlock Holmes book.  Whereas other unknown books now excited my curiosity more.

Eventually, however, I finally decided it was time to either come back and finish the job, or just admit to myself I was never going to get around to reading all the Sherlock Holmes books.  And so I picked up volume 2, and completed it over the last couple months.

Now, I can at last say to those guys at the bar, "Hey, did you know I've read all the Sherlock Holmes books?"
(Although now that I've actually read them all, I find I can remember very few of the stories from the first volume.  They've more or less all faded from my memory over the past 10 years.  Which perfectly illustrates the futility of reading just for the sake of becoming well-read.  You forget most of what you read over the years anyway, so what's the point?)

The Contents
The second volume contains the remaining four books in the Sherlock Holmes Canon.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)

The Valley of Fear (1915)

His Last Bow (1917)

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

The Difficulties of Writing This Review
I am beginning to think it was a mistake to structure these reviews by the two volumes that the publishers (Bantam Classics) arbitrarily divided the canon into.
Either I should have reviewed each individual book separately, or I should have reviewed the entire collected edition as one whole.
While each individual story does have some unique aspects that could be commented on, simply lumping all of these books together into Volume 2 is going to produce the exact same sorts of generic comments about Sherlock Holmes that I already wrote about in my review of Volume 1.

...Well, too late now.  I already make the decision to separate these reviews by volume way back in January 2007.  Nothing for it now but to press on ahead.

The Review
Much of what I said in my review of Volume 1 holds true for Volume 2 as well.

I wrote in my review of Volume 1 that I was disappointed to discover that the reader did not get to solve the mystery alongside Sherlock Holmes.
Before I actually read these books for myself, I had previously thought that the appeal of these stories was a sort of intellectual puzzle in which the reader got to match wits against the detective. But this is not the case.  The reader does not have access to all the clues that Sherlock Holmes does, because the narrator of almost all of these stories is Doctor Watson.  Watson never notices any of the details that are crucial to solving the case, and Holmes keeps most of his observations to himself until the final scene, when he finally lets Watson (and the reader) know all of the clues they had missed out on.

But despite this annoyance, the stories are real-page turners nonetheless.
There's the simple appeal of having the mystery resolved.  The human mind can not stand an unsolved mystery.  Once an unresolved case is introduced to the reader, the reader's curiosity kicks into overdrive, and you find yourself staying up late continually turning pages until you find out what the answer is.  (Most of these stories are murder mysteries, but not all.  A number of cases are the "find out why my friend has been acting so strange lately" variety.)
This is true even if the author "cheats" by not giving the reader all the clues upfront (of which Arthur Conan Doyle is guilty).  There's still, nonetheless, a great satisfaction in seeing the mystery resolved.

This human desire to seek resolution is no doubt why mystery stories continue to be popular today even if they are more about shocking reveals then they are about intellectual puzzles--like the awful, but very popular CSI  franchise (W).

Once you're hooked into an individual mystery, it's easy to keep turning the pages until find resolution.  When working through a volume like this, however, the difficulty is getting yourself into a new story each time.  (2 of the 4 books contained in this volume are themselves collections of short stories, so in total there are 22 separate mysteries contained in this book.)  After you've just got done obsessing about one mystery, it's very difficult to convince yourself to care about a new mystery all over again.
My personal strategy was, after I finished one mystery, to force myself to get about 2 pages into the new mystery before bed.  Then the next morning, I had forgotten about the previous story, and would wake up curious to find out what was going to happen in the new story.

In this way I found the stories to be very pleasant reading.

Other Observations
As I said above, I'm not going to attempt a thorough review of each story.  But I will just jot down some random thoughts about thing that struck me.

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I have always thought of Sherlock Holmes as part of Victorian Literature, but actually his career spanned several decades.  The first book (way back in volume one) was published in 1887, but volume 2 ends with a collection published in 1927.
The original 1927 author's introduction to The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes indicated that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was becoming somewhat testy about the age of his character.  "decrepit gentleman who approach me and declare that his [Sherlock Holme's] adventures formed the reading of their boyhood do not meet the response from me which they seem to expect.  One is not anxious to have one's personal dates handled so unkindly."
Nevertheless, Arthur Conan Doyle showed a great reluctance to update his character for modern times.  Despite the publication dates of the later stories, almost all of them continue to be set during the 1890s.
It's this consistency that makes the few exceptions all the more interesting--such as His Last Bow (W), published in 1917, which features an aging Sherlock Holmes coming out of retirement one more time to defeat a German spy in a story set shortly before the outbreak of World War I.

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Despite the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle cheats by not laying all the clues out before the reader, there's no denying these stories are pure brilliance and that Sherlock Holmes fully deserve his place in the literary canon.   The logic by which Holmes solves these cases is usually astoundingly clever.
It must take a very special kind of brilliant logical mind to come up with all these solutions.  That, combined with an ability to write good prose, and it's hard not to respect Arthur Conan Doyle as a special kind of genius.
(There are, however, one or two stories near the end of the canon which don't quite hold up to the usual level .  The Adventures of the Creeping Man, for example, was just absolutely ridiculous.  I don't want to spoil the ending here, but, just trust me, it's completely ridiculous.)

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Much as I admire the literary genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there's a rather disturbing strain of xenophobia and classism that runs through these stories.  Anything that's not part of the British middle-class is usually portrayed as something to be distrusted and feared.
The unflattering portrayal of Germans in His Last Bow is probably understandable, since it was written during 1917.  Still, it is a bit much.  The story is set in 1914, before the war, and is all about the Germans' secret plans to attack Britain.  (In actuality, it was Britain that declared war on Germany in 1914).
No other nationality gets treated quite as harsh as the Germans, but none of them come off looking that good either.  South Americans come off as hot-headed and impetuous, Italians as corrupt.  America and Australia are both portrayed as a lands of violence and lawlessness.
Basically, anyone who's not British is pretty suspect.
And, most regrettable to report, dark skinned peoples are always described as ugly or hideous or monstrous.
(I don't remember this so much from Volume 1.  Possibly Arthur Conan Doyle got more xenophobic as he got older.  Or possibly I just don't remember it.  It has been 10 years after all.)
There's also a disturbing anti-union theme that runs all throughout The Valley of Fear.  But I'll get to that in the next section.

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You've got to feel a little bit sorry for Arthur Conan Doyle.  He kept wanting to write other things besides Sherlock Holmes, and the public kept demanding more Sherlock Holmes.
The Final Problem (W), the infamous story in which Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill off Sherlock Holmes (only to eventually cave into public pressure to bring him back again) was way back in 1893 (way back in the Volume 1 edition I read 10 years ago).

Every time Arthur Conan Doyle thought he was done with Sherlock Holmes, the public just kept asking for more.
The 1917 book was even entitled The Last Bow.  And yet Arthur Conan Doyle would be persuaded to write 12 more stories for 1927's The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes.
The author's introduction to The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes is essentially two pages of Arthur Conan Doyle saying, "Okay, seriously you guys, it's 1927.  I've been writing these stories for 40 years now.  This is really the last book.  Seriously."

The idea that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to branch out into other genres, but felt constrained by the demand for more and more Sherlock Holmes stories, is the only way I can think of to explain the bizarre second half of The Valley of Fear.  The second half of The Valley of Fear is an 80 page backstory (pretty much a whole separate novella in its own right) which is about labor unions and violence in a mining town in America.  It has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, is only very loosely connected to the main story, but it must have been a topic Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to explore.
Arthur Conan Doyle, unfortunately, portrays the mine owners and the Pinkertons as the forces of good, and the labor unions as the forces of pure evil.
The real story on which this was based was a lot more complex.

According to Wikipedia (W), The Valley of Fear was based on the real-life story of James McParland, a Pinkerton detective who infiltrated the Molly Maguires (an Irish American labor group which resorted to terrorism).
The real James McParland threatened to resign from the his job once he realized that thugs hired by the mine owners were much more vicious and violent than anything the Molly Maguires ever did, and that the information he provided had been used by these hired capitalist thugs to kill three men and two women in their house.

Now I wake up this morning to find that I am the murderer of Mrs. McAlister. What had a woman to do with the case – did the [Molly Maguires] in their worst time shoot down women. If I was not here the Vigilante Committee would not know who was guilty and when I find them shooting women in their thirst for blood I hereby tender my resignation to take effect as soon as this message is received. It is not cowardice that makes me resign but just let them have it now I will no longer interfere as I see that one is the same as the other and I am not going to be an accessory to the murder of women and children. I am sure the [Molly Maguires] will not spare the women so long as the Vigilante has shown an example.[9]  (Also from Wikipedia)

Now, there's the interesting story.   Which Arthur Conan Doyle completely missed in his effort to show the union as pure evil, and the mine owners as pure good.
But imagine what an interesting story the real story could have made.  In fact, I think this would be a great Hollywood movie--a story filled with moral ambiguity, as the Pinkerton detective starts out convinced of the righteousness of his cause, but suddenly realizes that he's not so sure he's on the right side after all.
Add James McParland to the list of Hollywood Biopics I want to see.

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Much as I enjoyed these stories, I did roll my eyes slightly as the way the narrator (usually Doctor Watson) introduces each story using the superlative.  Something along the lines of  "Of all the cases Sherlock Holmes ever solved, this one was by far the strangest of them all."
Holmes, for his part, will often say that the villain for that story is the cleverest man they have ever matched wits against.

Arthur Conan Doyle probably was able to get away with it, because these stories were all originally published separately in newspapers, and only later compiled into book form.
But when you're reading them all in one volume, you can't help but roll your eyes at it.  "Come on.  They can't all be the strangest story.  The villains can't all be the most diabolical."

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The Hound of the Baskervilles is considered by many to be the best Sherlock Holmes story.  Or at least, the spookiest mystery.  So I probably shouldn't close out this review without saying at least a couple words about it.

...Actually I don't really have anything to add to the praise that's already been given to that book.  Except to say I also enjoyed the spooky atmosphere of the lonely English moors covered with fog.  A masterfully spooky tale masterfully told.

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In my review of The Count of Monte Cristo, I observed that a lot of the "Classic Books" in the Western Literary Canon aren't so much great works of art as they are popular fiction that managed to stay popular through the years.

If that was true of Dumas, it's even more true of  Sherlock Holmes.  These were originally just detective stories that were serialized in pulp newspapers.  How did they come to be regarded as classics?

So, all the same questions I had about the literary value of Dumas still stands for Sherlock Holmes.  Are these books a waste of time, or are they worth reading simply because they are considered classics?  And what would Jonathon Jones make of these stories?

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The early Sherlock Holmes stories (those contained in Volume 1 of this collection) featured a very flawed hero.  He was brilliant, certainly, but he also had an overactive mind that he didn't know how to shut off, and if there was not a case to keep him occupied, he went a bit crazy.  He was also a substance abuser, who would use cocaine to stimulate his mind, and opium to help himself calm down.

That angle has been completely dropped by these later stories.  Aside from his tobacco habit, all of Sherlock Holmes's drug problems have disappeared.

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Connections With Other Books I've Read
I mentioned Pinkerton and his detective agency in my discussion of The Valley of Fear.  But the Pinkerton detectives also show up in The Adventures of the Red Circle.

The historical Allan Pinkerton and his detective agency were also featured in A World that Never Was, and Flashman and the Angel of the Lord.

The background to The Adventures of the Blanched Soldier is the Boer War, which I read about in The Scramble for Africa.

Other Related Posts

For my thoughts on some of the Sherlock Holmes movies, see: Young Sherlock Holmes,  Sherlock Holmes (the 2009 movie), and  Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows.

Also Sherlock Holmes featured as a minor character in the Anno Dracula series (of which I read the first - two books.)

It was perhaps unfair of me to say that Arthur Conan Doyle felt constrained by the popularity of Sherlock Holmes, because he did actually manage to write several other books during his lifetime.  Including one which I've reviewed on this blog: The Lost World.

Link of the Day
On the Economic War in Latin America