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.