Since the removal of my humble reading list from the space, I’ve decided to record what little tract of literature I can garner in a book by book style afterthought posted on the blog. Partially for my own benefits, to record any meaningful pondering I might have had; and partially for other respectable book lovers interested in a paragraph or two of facetious opinions from an amateur.
I read a selection from the casebook in Chinese as a child. After a display of incredible fascinations with the great detective Holmes as a boy, my family indulged me in a splurge of Holmes collections which, as I recall included stories such as the Lion’s Mane and the Veiled Lodger from the twilight years of Baker Street. As I am largely familiar with the canon, the casebook held no surprises from the outset. Nonetheless, for an ardent admirer of Holmes, it is satisfying enough just to retrace the adventures.
And trace I did, with much brevity. The book was completed in a weekend. By day I exhausted my fingertips on the Northern grit of the Peaks; by night I mystified myself with the strange happenings of Southern England. However, to my disappointment, the book held up as a series of short fictions, but was rather downcast in comparison to the rest of the canon.
To begin with, the casebook lacked much of what I adored in the previous instalments of Holmesian adventures – the precision of deduction, as displayed throughout the story from the famed introductions to the fantastical denouements; the oxymoronic glamour and simplicity of the stories, vis-a-vis, the star quality of Victorian nobility and scandal mingled with the base human intents ingrained in the criminals, often with none but one motive straightforward enough to be understood without analysis, prescribed in plain English, dramatic and forceful; and finally the detective himself, always the centre of a seemingly complex but essentially congruous plot, casting a great shadow over awed readers, a shape of the best qualities of an analytical, courageous, ingenious, Victorian gentleman. In a nutshell, always perplexing, but always gratifying.
The casebook on the other hand flirts with unknown territories as Sherlock Holmes steps into a new century. To begin with, many of the stories are of a psychological or incidental nature making the detective almost redundant such as the Lion’s Mane (where a simple biologist would have sufficed) or the Veiled Lodger (Holmes felt more like a therapist than a crime fighter). This effect is amplified when one realises that most of the stories aren’t even revolved around an intriguing plot dedicated to the back and forth of puzzle solving. Rather, as in the story of the Blanched Soldier, it is essentially a matter of storytelling with the deduction device tacked on – there were even moments where I found Holmes’ explanations retarding the development of the story.
While this may be forgiveable, the appearance of recycled materials and tacky gimmicks is not. Consider the Three Garridebs, one cannot but feel this is an alternate version of the Red-Headed League; or the Mazarin Stone, where the entire solution is based on the invention of gramophone, a weak story where the credentials of the great detective is hyped, “I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider.” but never realised.
While other critics have pointed out the dark uncomfortable world of suicide, homosexual incest and psychological tragedies painted by the casebook as distracting and disturbing. For a modern reader such as myself this was not an issue as compared to the cruel reality of what can only be described as a role more appropriate for a show host than Holmes.
To be fair there were moments of brightness, but most of the casebook displays a Holmes out of place with the evolving world. Perhaps an apt metaphor for the decline of the British Empire at the turn of the century, but nonetheless a regretful exit performance I would rather discard than recommend.
The 26th Dimension 