The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Kyle Freeman Page 0,451

the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

Comments

RONALD A. KNOX

Any studies in Sherlock Holmes must be, first and foremost, studies in Dr. Watson....

If the sophists have been borrowed from the Platonic dialogue, one element at least has been borrowed from Greek drama. Gaboriau has no Watson. The confident Lacoq is an old soldier, preternaturally stupid, inconceivable inefficient. Watson provides what the Holmes drama needs—a Chorus. He represents the solid, orthodox, respectable view of the world in general; his drabness is accentuated by contrast with the limelight which beats upon the central figure. He remains stable amid the eddy and flux of circumstance.—from Blue Book (1912)

—from Blue Book (1912)

A. A. MILNE

There used to be a song which affirmed (how truly, I do not know) that every nice girl loved a sailor. I am prepared to state, though I do not propose to make a song about it, that every nice man loves a detective story.

This week I have been reading the last adventures of Sherlock Holmes—I mean really the last adventures, ending with his triumph over the German spy in 1914. Having saved the Empire, Holmes returned to his farm on the Sussex downs, and there, for all I mind, he may stay. I have no great affection for the twentieth-century Holmes. But I will give the warmest welcome to as many adventures of the Baker Street Holmes as Watson likes to reconstruct for us. There is no reason why the supply of these should ever give out....

The best of writing a detective story [must be] that you can always make the lucky shots come off. In no other form of fiction, I imagine, does the author feel so certainly that he is the captain of the ship. If he wants it so, he has it so. Is the solution going to be too easy? Then he puts in an unexpected footprint in the geranium bed, or a strange face at the window, and makes it more difficult. Is the reader being kept too much in the dark? Then a conversation overheard in the library will make it easier for him. The author’s only trouble is that he can never be certain whether his plot is too obscure or too obvious. He knows himself that the governess is guilty, and, in consequence, she can hardly raise her eyebrows without seeming to him to give the whole thing away.

—from If I May (1920)

T. S. ELIOT

Sherlock Holmes reminds us always of the pleasant externals of nineteenth-century London.

—from Criterion (April 1929)

RAYMOND CHANDLER

The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be promoted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and hence a frustration of the race, may, and in fact has, a good deal of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it.

—from The Art of the Mystery Story, edited by Howard Haycraft (1946)

Questions

1. Do you agree with Kyle Freeman’s argument in the Introduction that the Holmes stories in which Watson is not the narrator suffer for his absence?

2. Is there a sign in Holmes or Watson of what we would now call an “unconscious” at work?

3. Holmes’s fits of melancholy or boredom, his resort to opium and strong tobacco, his lack of a need for female companionship, his skill as a boxer and fencer—are these just so many disparate traits, or do they add up to parts of a coherent personality? Is the absence of love or sex or romance in Holmes’s life the flip side of his skill as a detective, as, for example, exceptional skill with computers is alleged to go along with a nerdy personality?

4. “From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagra without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great