Sherlock Holmes: The Books
Dec. 20th, 2010 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebThe latest BBC "Sherlock Holmes" series was the last straw: I've gone to the library and checked out The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I was worried that although the plots might be interesting, the writing would be boring. In fact, I read Hound of the Baskervilles as a kid and was unimpressed.
Fortunately, the writing is great. Here's an excerpt I read just this morning on the bus:
I don't suppose I actually want to start transfixing my unanswered correspondence to something with a jackknife (it doesn't seem very practical), but that's quite an image. And this is just part of the explanation about how Watson came to learn about the case we are to read about, a task you might think a writer would be tempted to skimp on.
Reading this book is also showing me that one of my favorite movies, “The Zero Effect,” is practically another interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. Daryl Zero is what Sherlock Holmes might have been if he had just a few more negatives to go with his positives.
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In other news, I no longer know how to link to pictures in Picasa for this journal. They've changed things, the scum, as if they're Flicker or something. I don't use Picasa as a public photo gallery, I want it so I can have an illustrated blog. I suppose I'll figure something out and you'll eventually get to learn a little about my trip to Amsterdam. Meanwhile, technical difficulties await me.
Fortunately, the writing is great. Here's an excerpt I read just this morning on the bus:
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jackknife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs.
I don't suppose I actually want to start transfixing my unanswered correspondence to something with a jackknife (it doesn't seem very practical), but that's quite an image. And this is just part of the explanation about how Watson came to learn about the case we are to read about, a task you might think a writer would be tempted to skimp on.
Reading this book is also showing me that one of my favorite movies, “The Zero Effect,” is practically another interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. Daryl Zero is what Sherlock Holmes might have been if he had just a few more negatives to go with his positives.
**
In other news, I no longer know how to link to pictures in Picasa for this journal. They've changed things, the scum, as if they're Flicker or something. I don't use Picasa as a public photo gallery, I want it so I can have an illustrated blog. I suppose I'll figure something out and you'll eventually get to learn a little about my trip to Amsterdam. Meanwhile, technical difficulties await me.