I have no powerful opening sentence for this post, but to say that I have stumbled across a literary treasure. For some reason in the past, I had no desire to delve into the pages of this classic piece of English literature. I speak of Sherlock Holmes. I'm not sure why I was never interested in it. Perhaps I thought it cliché. The characters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are so ingrained in popular culture and media that I thought I already knew Sherlock; wrong!
The plot lines of the books are amazing, but that is not so much what drew me in. I started reading A Study in Scarlet earlier this summer. I didn't have much free time, but when I had five or ten minutes, I could be found pouring over the book, in an attempt to hear Sherlock's latest remark on the case at hand. I finished A Study in Scarlet, and found myself immediately flipping the page for the next novel. I have since finished reading The Sign of the Four.
The character of Sherlock has so much depth. As much as I hate to use the over-used phrase, he leaps off the page. He has a way of noticing the world around him that is beyond what an average mind can comprehend. Though he is literary, he is large as life. Just reading it makes me want to be more observant. Here is an example of how it has affected me: This is a excerpt from A Scandal in Bohemia:
"You see but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room?"
"Frequently."
"How often?"
"Well, some hundreds of times."
"Then how many are there?"
This passage drove me crazy. I went to count my own stairs (which number 14, by the way).
Sherlock can also create disguises very well. The character of Dr. Watson comments that when Sherlock puts on a disguise for a case, his personality, speech, and movement also change. He said that, "The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime." (A Scandal in Bohemia) He can also tell about the type of servant a person has from looking at their shoes, and can differentiate between Russians, French, and Germans writing letters in English; but, this is only after he tells Dr. Watson precisely where the paper the letter was written on was made.
Every time I read a Sherlock Holmes adventure, my mind is blown, something I do not say lightly.
This post ends here; I need to return to the stories of a certain consulting detective.
I do adore this character to death. He's warranted almost as much analysis as Hamlet and Richard III in my notebooks, and yet there is so much more to him. I think that's why Arthur Conan Doyle came to hate him; once you lose sight of a creation to the point where it begins to be autonomous, you wish nothing more than to destroy it.
ReplyDeleteWe should talk in depth about him sometime.
-E