The Complete Sherlock Holmes

I was in love with Sherlock within the first 10 pages, and 1000+ later I'm so sad that there isn't any more. Holmes is charmingly insulting, Watson is adorably devoted, the mysteries are fabulously crafted. This isn't just plain wonderful, folks; it's wonderful with raisins.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes - Doyle
audio performance Simon Vance
5 stars

My father used to keep a single volume of the Complete Sherlock Holmes on the nightstand, bedtime reading. He said that each time he’d read all the stories, he’d forgotten the those at the beginning. So, he could just start the book all over again. Dad died in December, seven years ago. Thinking of him, I realized that I’d forgotten many of the Holmes stories. For a single audible credit, I bought 58 hours of my favorite audio performer reading the entire Holmes canon. Perfect. Bedtime stories.
‘Night, Dad.

This is a difficult book to review. Or, rather, it is difficult to cover so many full-length books in a single review. One constant in this series is the quality of the writing: the mysteries are fresh and interesting, and the characters feel very real and well-developed. The friendship between Holmes and Watson is genuine and solid, even if the Sherlock doesn’t like to show emotion or admit to any kindness. He insults Watson to his face, yet he praises him to others (and means it); Holmes trusts Watson, cares for him, and relies on his courage in many dangerous situations.

Throughout the series, Holmes seems to go out of his way to make himself seem worse than he is. He pretends not to care for the people close to him, but he does. He show more claims not to like women, yet he is chivalrous, tender, and sympathetic toward women. He worries, risks his life to help, and is compassionate. In one story, he refuses to tell the police about a woman who’d killed her husband (and he even saves her life) because he cares for her. He is egotistical, but he is honest and forthcoming about his failures, and he doesn’t seek credit for his work. He is empathetic. He becomes furious (and would even sink to murder) when someone harms the ones he loves. His personality is strong, and his kindness, when it appears, is equally strong—perhaps all the more so because it is so unexpected.

Some final thoughts: I like the atmosphere in the stories; they definitely have a British “feel,” and the details about the Victorian age in which it is set help evoke the scene. Quick shout-out to Simon Vance, who narrated the audio, and who adroitly handled voices for men, women, and children, and with a variety of accents. I enjoyed Watson’s romance in The Sign of Four. I enjoyed the variety of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; I liked that some of tales featured no murder, and some featured no crime at all. The tone is much sweeter and more lighthearted than most of the other mysteries I’ve read. By the time the later books came, the overall feel was much darker, and it felt like the author was getting tired. The series ends on a high note, however, with a burst of creativity in the last book, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes; it’s as though Doyle was willing to try new things here. It’s a great farewell to these two beloved characters. I can’t believe that it’s over, and that there isn’t any more to look forward to. It’s been a beautiful and deeply emotional journey, and I would very much like to pull out these books in the future and read them all over again. Slipping back into this world would be like visiting old, dear friends. show less

OVERALL THOUGHTS:
Now that I know for sure I've read them all, I do still like the Holmes stories overall. However, I've also determined that there are some of the stories I don't need to bother revisiting ever again, and I've figured out my favorites (which I won't hesitate to read again in future). There was a lot more racism and sexism than I had expected in these stories, since I didn't remember it being present from prior reads.

A Study in Scarlet: A Novel (reread)
I've read this one several times, and I enjoy it each time. However, the inclusion of the seemingly unrelated background story of the Morman settlers in the middle of the detective story STILL bugs me, and I wish that had been written differently.

A Sign of Four: A Novel show more (reread)
I enjoyed this Holmes novel as well, but this time around I noticed a lot more racism than I remember from prior reads. I should be surprised; it was more or less what I've seen in other books written around this era. But it was still annoying and unnecessary.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (reread)
I've read most, if not all, of the stories in this volume before, and overall enjoyed them both when I read them earlier, and also revisiting them now. "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is in this volume, and is one of my all-time favorite Holmes stories. (I still love it.)

Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (new)
I'm pretty sure that all of these were new to me. I had fun experiencing new Holmes stories for the first time in quite some time. I think "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" or "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" were my favorite stories here; though "The Adventure of the Final Problem" was included in this volume and was the only one of the new-to-me Holmes stories I knew anything about before reading this omnibus, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had anticipated.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: A Novel (reread)
This was my other favorite story going into this compilation, and it remains a favorite. It's just really well written, has great side characters, and it gives the reader a chance to put together at least some of the puzzle pieces before Holmes explains everything to Watson.

The Return of Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (mostly new, one reread)
This volume has another favorite short story in it, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men." My only regret at listening to the story this time around was that I had to listen to a description of the dancing men instead of being able to see the drawings themselves. (At least I've read a print version before, and could imagine them.) Other than that one, I enjoyed the stories and had fun trying to guess at the new-to-me mysteries, but none of the others really stood out as new favorites.

The Valley of Fear: A Novel (new)
I did NOT like this story... but that's because I didn't need to know (or care about) the background of Mr. Douglas that we're given after Holmes solves the mystery of his death. I appreciated that it was at least prefaced as "here's history about the characters in question" unlike the inserted story in A Study in Scarlet, so there was no confusion about why my Sherlock Holmes story got replaced with something completely unrelated. But really, I would have liked this story a lot more if it had stopped when we left Douglas' manor.

His Last Bow: Short Stories (new)
I enjoyed listening to most of the stories in this collection well enough, though other than "The Dying Detective" and "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax" I doubt any of them will stick with me for long. Those two were my favorites in this set, though I didn't care for the title story much. Perhaps because it switched to a third-person narrative instead of first-person, but also I'm not generally a big fan of war stories so that might have impacted my thoughts on it also.

The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (new)
This final set of short stories didn't interest me as much overall as the bulk of the stories. I do think that Doyle's early-to-mid Holmes stories were generally the better ones, with only a few exceptions. I don't think that I'll need to revisit any of these, and I was able to figure out some of the mysteries presented here long before the narrative explained them... and in some cases even before Holmes figured it out. "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" are two of the ones that I figured out before the denouement, though they were also two of the stories I enjoyed the most in this final collection. show less

After watching the BBC's brilliant modern-day take on Holmes, I went back to the source. Hadn't read the stories in ages and I'm quite surprised how many there are: I remembered only the usual suspects. The vast amount of detective fiction written (and read) since then somewhat diminishes the pleasure of the new discoveries: you can guess the solution far too early. But it also shows why he is still so widely read: the stories are well-written and the plots well-crafted.

There are a two reasons this took me 2.5 years to read. One is that it is nine books bundled - four novels and five collections, though I only get "credit" for one.

The other is that Doyle waned tedious so much! Oh My Flying Spaghetti Monster! The repetition was aggravating; the hat/rabbit pulling of unknown to the reader "clues" maddening; the plodding narratives numbing.

For me, Holmes is the rare case (accidental pun not intended) of interpretations being orders of magnitude better than the book(s). Even Guy Ritchie's pugilistic Homes in lieu of intellect is better than Doyle's.

This is my assessment. Fans can and will cry foul all they want.

I'll sum this complete collection in one word: soporific.

Sherlock Holmes started out as Doyle's steady-money potboilers, a series of stories ground out in exchange for a paycheck. But they caught the public imagination, and Holmes' fame grew until he became the best-known fictional detective out there. Countless remakes, pastiches, parodies, and retellings later, Holmes has finally made it into a rather unique position: he is currently featured as an action hero in several TV shows and quite a few movies, and yet on the polar opposite of the snobbery spectrum, he is Literature--I even took a college course where he was included on the syllabus. With all of the revamps and remakes and recharacterizations, it's easy to forget about the original character. With all of the analysis and study of show more symbolism and historiography, it's easy to forget what Sherlock Holmes is really all about: a set of rattling good yarns.

Whatever your literary polarity, Sherlock Holmes is a worthwhile read. The stories themselves are fun and the writing style is surprisingly contemporary for the time period: lots of snappy and often hilarious dialogue, a humorous first person narrator, and quite a lot of action. I haven't seen--and have no intention of seeing--the various remakes of Holmes, but I'm not convinced they captured the characters. Watson also always seems to lose out in the remakes--in the books, he is a bit stolid, but certainly not a buffoon. Holmes's complex and quirky personality is perhaps one of the reasons that his stories captured the public imagination. He is not a lovelorn superhero; rather, he is a somewhat sociopathic, drug-addicted, lonely misanthrope. At the same time, he is very different from the cold and uptight Brett from the old movies--he has a completely wacky sense of humour, an obsession with disguise, and a tendency to jump into action, his trusty revolver at the ready. His personality is rather static--possibly one reason why Doyle tried so hard to make that drop off Reichenbach Falls fatal. I believe that he is the prototype for a massive collection of later detectives from Alleyn to Poirot to Qwilleran in which the detective acts as the single fixed frame for an everchanging cast of characters.

Plotwise, the stories may not be brilliant, but they are a lot of fun. They also precede the times when detective stories necessarily required a murder--almost all of the stories function without dead-body-driven action. Holmes' adventures range from a mysteriously disappearing league apparently set up to benefit redheads to a treasure hunt for a hidden chamber to a run-in with the KKK to frolics with supernaturally glowing hounds.

If you're reading for fun, I suggest The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a set of some of the earlier short stories. Holmes' adventures technically begin with the novel, A Study in Scarlet, but I think Holmes functions better in his short stories--more wackiness and variety. Adventures also contains the famous run-in with Irene Adler. If you're searching for Moriarty--who, by the way, is only even mentioned in a handful of stories--then he's in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which also contains the story "Silver Blaze," where Holmes utters his famous line about the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. (But the dog did nothing in the night-time! Yes, that was the curious incident.) If you're reading for historical analysis, take a look at The Valley of Fear, which is nominally a Holmes story, but is really about violent secret societies in the US--interesting from a historiographical perspective.

So if you are interested in the history of mystery, or you're a fan of one of the various Sherlock enterprises, from the new show to House, take a look at the original. You'll enjoy it. show less