After my tour of Verne, I decided I wanted to switch back to my project of reading detective fiction that I started last year. I had wanted to do this in historical order, the way you might do a college course. So in early 2020, I had started by reading the Auguste Dupin stories by Edgar Allen Poe, which are often cited as the origin of the detective genre. I remember reading them as a young man and not really understanding them, because of Poe's style, but in this case I found them quite entertaining and lucid. It was well worth it to see how Poe's Dupin truly is the prototype for the consulting detective who solves the case that no one can solve.
After that I had moved on to read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which is often cited as the the first detective novel, and introduced certain conventions that have become standard in the genre, such as the red herring. I had often seen this title among the classics in bookstores and had never considered giving it a read until now. In the course of reading it, it became, and remains, one of my favorite novels. I absolutely loved it. I had checked it out from Kindle Unlimited with audio narration, and in this case, I found the audio to be highly entertaining. It was one of the books that I was sad to finally finish.
From there I moved immediately onto the next phase of my syllabus, which was Sherlock Holmes. It was my intention to read all of the canonical Holmes in order of publication, and I nearly did so. I began with A Study in Scarlet, of course, and moved onto the short stories.
Right away I noticed something uncanny about Conan Doyle's stories featuring his famous detective. It had to do with similarities with The Moonstone, which was obviously a huge inspiration for Conan Doyle in creating his Holmes character. But that wasn't the uncanny part. Instead it was about the role that British colonial India plays in both Collins' novel and in the early Holmes, in particular in The Sign of the Four, but moreover in the very character of Watson as he is first introduced, as returning from the Northwest frontier of India (i.e. Afghanistan) after being injured.
There is something deep there, I think, in this realization. Somehow it is not an accident that the genre of gothic crime mysteries sprang out of the British contact with India and its culture---the mystery, allure, and inscrutability of that place. If I were a graduate student in literature, I think I could write a thesis about this topic.
As I said, I had intended to complete my tour of Holmes. I read (and listened to audio on Kindle) all the way through "The Final Problem", in which Holmes is apparently killed in his battle with Professor Moriarty. Of course I then read The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is published after that, but set in the time before Holmes' death. Next to The Moonstone, it was one of my favorite reads in this project, and clearly deserves its reputation as a classic, and moreover as the finest Holmes story that Conan Doyle wrote. As a novella, it is quite complete in almost every way. Of course the weird thing about this story is that Holmes is absent for most of the story. He disappears early on and only reappears near the climax. Most of the story involves Watson playing detective on his own.
Having come this far in the Holmes project, it became clear how much Conan Doyle found Watson to be the real central character of the series. Holmes is too much of a caricature, and too unreal at times, to be sustained. Watson is flesh and blood, and this is why The Hound of the Baskervilles is the best and most complete work by Conan Doyle.
After this I began to tackle the later short stories, in which Conan Doyle resurrects Holmes by asserting that his death was faked. One can imagine the excitement of readers. I felt it too. More Holmes! Yeah!
But this was quickly dashed. Even in the first post-resurrection story, one could feel that Conan Doyle's heart was not in it. Six or seven stories in it, I began to go bored. The stories felt recycled from earlier ones. The demands of the genre were too much to be sustained over such a number of plots. I could begin to see the solutions telegraphed to us half way through the story. This feels like reading Encyclopedia Brown, I thought to myself, remembering the boy detective story collections from grade school that I loved so much. When that realization hit me, I lost interest in reading any further in the later Holmes' works. Maybe I'll come back and finish them. By the time I get back to London and visit the Baker Street museum at last, I want to have read them all.
That lapse in my detective project was over a year ago now. I went on to read other things, including this recent spate of Jules Verne novels. But like I said, I needed a change from Verne's somewhat loose narratives of adventure stories, and the tension that creates in them.
So I thought it was time to move on from Conan Doyle to next famous fictional detective in my self-taught college course. There was only one obvious choice. I could relax from the worldly adventures of Verne, and in my cabin in the mountains, take myself away to an English country manor, where a matriarch is about to meet her doom by poison. It was time to start reading Agatha Christie.
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