The Complete Sherlock Holmes

The Complete Sherlock Holmes - by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This was one of the first e-books I bought when I received a Kindle for Christmas in 2012.  Because of copyright laws, it’s incredibly easy to purchase “The Complete Works of….” your favorite author - provided your favorite author has been dead and buried for some time.  I’m not sure how far back the writings have to go to qualify, nor do I know the legal logistics, but there are plenty of old authors of centuries past that you can easily procure masses of volumes in one electronic book for a very cheap price - usually from about 99 cents to about $3.99.

So I snapped this one up.  Would I enjoy it?  Would I actually read this entire thing?  I honestly didn’t know.  But for a price of $1.99 or whatever it was, I simply couldn’t pass up such a bargain.   It was money well spent, and I did end up reading all ten volumes within this e-book.  Of course, I couldn’t do it sequentially.  No, my attention span simply couldn’t stay focused in one direction for that length of time, but I slowly made my way through all of these works.  It took me about two and one-half years, and I literally read more than 100 other books during this same timeframe to keep my mind fresh.

So what does the average person know about Sherlock Holmes?  Well, they probably know that he was a famous literary detective that practiced his trade in the 1800s in London, England.  They know he wore his trademark deerstalker hat, had a pipe and tobacco that he slowly puffed while deep in thought, and had a companion, Dr. Watson, that was always faithfully by his side.  I’m guessing most have never read any of the books since these works are more than a century old.  It isn’t even necessary to read any of these works to know about Sherlock Holmes since there have been several movies, movie spin-offs, made for television movies, and even a “modern day” television show that appeared just a few short years ago.

I found all of these books to be incredibly satisfying - 4 full length novels and 6 collections of short stories.  The biggest enjoyment for me, however, was not necessarily the mysteries in and of themselves, yet the fact that these stories are told in such a rich Victorian English style and vernacular.  Most of these stories are told through the eyes of flatmate Dr. Watson, as he retells these sleuthing tales that he has recorded from his extensive catalog of notes that he jots down every time the great detective solves yet another impossible crime.

These aren’t stories that you can “match wits” with the protagonist.  The author doesn’t give you every detail of every crime being solved so you can challenge Holmes to see if you can figure out the mystery before he does.  I’m reminded of the “Encyclopedia Brown” series that I read when I was younger.  It was always fun to read and reread those stories so you could try to solve the case on your own.  No, these stories don’t quite work the same way.  Example: when Sherlock receives a visitor to his apartment requesting help to solve some sort of conundrum,  Holmes can immediately deduce much about his visitor - his background, his occupation, his nationality, etc. just by observing his visitor’s skin tone, the color of mud on their boots or how they hold their walking cane.

To be fair, some of the observations, conclusions, and methods don’t stand the test of time that well.  Anytime a suspect is a non-white European, they are immediately branded as “intellectually inferior”.   Conversely, if the perpetrator leaves a hat behind at the crime scene and the hat happens to be larger than average, that means that the suspect obviously has “above average intelligence” because, well, if the hat is large, then so was the person’s head.  There were also too many stories where characters would wear disguises to remain anonymous amongst colleagues and even family members.  It seems silly, nowadays, to believe that a man could hide his true identity from his wife by wearing some sort of silly camouflage. 

Those sins are minor, however, as the real joy is in the tone of the storytelling and not how believable everything is.  It should also be pointed out that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not limited in his literary career to just writing about this famous detective.  He had masses of other publications and narratives, and we sometimes get a glimpse of what those diversions might have been like.  For example, one of my favorite of the full length novels here was “The Valley of Fear”.  That story was told in two parts.  Holmes and Watson solve the crime at the end of part one, and part two is a narrative from the criminal’s perspective of how and why the crime was committed.  We’re allowed to take a journey several years before the crime, and even on another continent.  You could easily forget you were reading a Sherlock Holmes story during this distraction, yet the tale was so well told, that you really didn’t care.  In fact, it was an enjoyable diversion from the all-too familiar at that point.

It should also be pointed out that the last collation in this volume, “Tales of Mystery and Terror” are not really Sherlock Holmes stories at all.  Part of me thinks that they don’t belong here amongst the other stories.  There were one or two stories where Holmes “sort of” made a cameo appearance (never in person, he was just referred to in the story, although not by name), but the stories are independent of the familiar.  Again, though, there was nothing upsetting about such a diversion.  If anything, it was a refreshing detour.

It’s not necessary for one to read everything here.  If you stumble on such a collection as I did, and want to spend a mere pennies for a huge collection, you can find just as much joy and satisfaction in reading only a few of these volumes and still feel satisfied.   

I’m glad that Holmes and Watson have lived on for so long after these books first saw the light of day.

One Summer

One Summer - David Baldacci

I only read this one because, once I discover an author that I like, my anal tendencies force me to read everything by the author that has ever been published.  Although Baldacci’s main genre deals with political/government thrillers, every once in awhile he’ll take a detour and write about the sweet and sentimental.  That, itself is o.k., but unfortunately, he doesn’t really fare too well in this area.  Maybe he does fare well in this area, and it’s just that I don’t particularly like books of this nature.  I really wanted to like this one.  I really wanted him to pull it off.  I actually started out reading this book and thinking it might turn out o.k.  Even half-way through it I thought I might be able to give it at least a passing grade.  Unfortunately, the last 25 pages or so takes what is a very mediocre effort and brings the whole experience down to a category of “just plain bad and stupid.”

Baldacci has been guilty of “lazy writing” before in many of his other books.  Even some of the good ones.  This book has “lazy writing” all over the place.  By “lazy writing”, I mean that when he’s trying to advance the plot, he gets lazy and pulls things out of thin air that make absolutely no sense, nor really are believable, just to ensure that the story can keep going and moving in a forward direction.  I’ll get to that in a bit.

This story is about Jack Armstrong.  A 30 something year old man with a wife and three kids.  Unfortunately, Jack is dying.  He only has a few weeks to live when our story starts in November, and Jack is hoping to hold out long enough to celebrate one more Christmas with his family.  What is he dying of?  Baldacci never tells us.  The only thing we know is that the disease is so horrible, that Jack can’t even pronounce it.  This is the first example of “lazy writing”.  I guess Baldacci figures that if he gives us a real disease, he’ll have to do some research and explain why things might happen the way they eventually do.

One night during the hectic holiday season, Jack’s wife forgets that they’ve run out of his medication, so she heads out to the drugstore on a cold wintery night where they live in Ohio.  She’s killed in a car crash.  So now the three kids have no mom and a dad that will be dead in a few days.  Well, Jack’s in-laws are in town, fortunately, and arrangements are quickly made to permanently disperse the three kids to different relatives while Jack goes to die in hospice.  There’s a toddler, an elementary aged child, and a teenage daughter.  The teenage daughter seems perpetually ticked off at the world early on in the book because….well…she’s a teenager, and teenagers are supposed to be in a constant rebellious stage.  I guess.  The only thing she really clings to is her guitar because she’s a budding songwriter/guitar player or something.

So Jack goes to hospice to die, but (GASP!) he doesn’t die!  Somehow during the next several weeks he miraculously recovers!  So much so, that he’s able to walk out of hospice, retrieve his children (against his mother-in-law’s wishes.  Why? I honestly don’t know) and start life over again in a South Carolina beach house owned by one of his late wife’s relatives.  It seems Jack’s wife grew up in this town, and she sadly had some skeletons growing up there.  I believe she had a twin sister that died there when they were very young due to meningitis or something.  So Jack wants to start anew there, and maybe reconnect with his wife’s past.

Anyway, this is where the story really gets sappy and stupid.  I held out hope at this point  because I felt like things could have turned out o.k. story wise, but Baldacci, again, succumbs to more lazy writing.  Early on in the summer, Jack is trying to mend his distant relationship with his rebellious teen-age guitar playing daughter.  They stop to eat at a local restaurant called “Little Bit of Love” because the name of the restaurant is, according to Jack’s daughter, a “Def Leppard song” (It’s not.  Why couldn’t Baldacci pick a real Def Leppard song?  “Pour Some Sugar On Me” for instance?)  They go to the restaurant, and they meet the owner, who just happens to be a  divorced woman who, golly-gosh-darn-it, just so happens to be “good looking” and “about Jack’s age”.  This woman, golly-gosh-darn-it, also happens to have a son who is the same age as Jack’s daughter!  Her son, golly-gosh-darn-it, just happens to be a musician as well!  And the woman also has, golly-gosh-darn-it, some work at her house that Jack can do for her because, well, golly-gosh-darn-it, since Jack just moved here out of the blue, he needs to find some kind of work to pay the bills.  Oh, and also, this good looking divorced restaurant owner also, golly-gosh-darn-it, happens to be (ta-da) a lawyer!   A lawyer?  Jack doesn’t need a lawyer.  Well, because of Baldacci’s lazy writing, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out he’ll probably need one sooner or later.

It would be pointless (and painful) for me to go on any further with this lousy excuse of a story.  Everything is simply too stupid and contrived.   I do remember another golly-gosh-darn-it instance early in the story:  For no apparent reason, completely out of the blue, Jack decides to show his daughter a “self-defense move”.  This comes out of nowhere, has no connection to what is currently happening, and is so ridiculously out of place, that it’s incredibly obvious that his dear daughter will somehow need  this “self-defense move” sometime before the summer is over.  I’ve seen middle school students tell a more convincing tie-in within a story.

Again, I had hopes for this one.  It really could have been so much better.  Really, the only good thing I can say about this book is that it’s somewhat short, and I think I read the whole thing in about two days.  The last 30 pages, I read in about 5 minutes, just skimming the highlights (now THERE’S a misnomer!)  Had I read it carefully, I would have become nauseous.  I really hope that all “sappy” books aren’t this bad.  Of course, if they are, I could easily become a millionaire.  And so could just about anyone else that puts a pen to paper.