"A Study in Scarlet", by Arthur Conan Doyle

[rowyn]

I'm not sure if I've read any Holmes stories before now. I decided to read one now because Lut and I have been watching the new BBC "Sherlock" TV show. I was aware that there's a certain amount of arrogance and alienation that doesn't generally make it into the popular conception of Holmes, but I couldn't imagine that Doyle's Holmes had been a complete jerk in the mode of the BBC's latest incarnation. (Spoiler: he's not.) Also, reading Doyle seems like the sort of thing I ought to do at some point in my life.

I started the story on Thursday and didn't finish it until today, and it's only 103 pages, so not the most engaging story I've read. Part of this comes from the curious narrative structure:

Pages 1-17: Watson meets Holmes
Pages 18-52: Murder mystery
Pages 53-87: Western
pages 88-103: Resolution of original mystery

Yes, halfway through, the narrative takes a sharp right turn, ditching both London and the first person narrator in favor of a third person limited omniscient story set in Utah. For a good ten pages I was going "what the heck is this even still a Holmes story WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NARRATOR?" Then a couple of names come up that were mentioned in the "mystery" portion earlier, so I'm like "okay, I assume this will all connect EVENTUALLY." Which, in fairness, it does. But this may be the first time I've ever seriously considered that maybe the story I was reading had accidentally been concatenated with some completely unrelated tale.

The embedded Western is surprisingly engaging, although the hate-on for Mormons is frankly offensive. Holmes's methodology in solving the murder comes across as reasonable, and one can follow both how he comes to his conclusions and why the police investigators pursue the wrong ones without feeling like either (a) the police are complete idiots or (b) it's nothing more than authorial bias that makes Holmes right and the others wrong. I've read classics that I loved a lot more, but this was still a good read: I'll give it a 7 and will probably read some more. In fact, I'll go download some now, while I'm thinking about it. Because it was a lot harder than I expected to successfully download the first Holmes story, given that it's a popular series in the public domain.

Comments

[rowyn]

I've actually read both Exchange and Prisoner, and I did enjoy them at the time, in fact. :) Lut once described the protagonist as 'a man who lacks the courage of his convictions', which I thought was rather apt. I don't think I liked them enough to read the new ones, though, at least not at the present time. But I appreciate the recommendation!

I have read so many pastiches of other countries by American authors who've never been there that I was rather charmed by Doyle's pastiche of my own. Kind of a "wow, someone who isn't from here cared enough to write about us anyway!" moment. I could've done without the wholesale slander of Mormons, though. :/

[level-head.livejournal.com]

The Mormon prejudice bit was all too common. I recall an old saying: "We're so broad-minded, we've even got a Jack Mormon in town." These were tolerated, generally, only after blacks and Catholics had become acceptable.

Back then, they'd even have newspapers raising issues about a person simply because he was Mormon. Imagine that. People would make fun of their "Garmies" (sacred undergarments), based on writings like this from 1890:

“This garment protects from disease, and even death, for the bullet of an enemy will not penetrate it. The Prophet Joseph carelessly left off this garment on the day of his death, and had he not done so, he would have escaped unharmed.”

We are so civilized now, of course, that the idea of making fun of someone's religion-specific garments would not even occur to us.

===|==============/ Level Head