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Andrews UK - Sheldon Goldfarb

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139 pages

English

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Is Sherlock Holmes really as rational as he seems? He talks about the importance of reasoning and logic, but why then does he sometimes seem like a "strange Buddha"? On the other hand, why in The Sign of the Four does Watson smash a Buddha? What is going on in The Sign of the Four, that strange tale of Empire? What is going on in all the original sixty stories in "the canon"?In this study of the stories, Sheldon Goldfarb explores questions like these, from the significance of the eggs in "Thor Bridge" to the reason Watson keeps leaving Holmes for an insubstantial wife. What meanings lurk beneath the surface of these detective stories? Why is there an obsession with Napoleon in this story or an article on free trade in this other? Can we find answers to these questions?Perhaps. In any case, in this collection of essays (or "Musings") on each of the 60 stories, Dr. Goldfarb, an award-nominated mystery writer himself and the holder of a PhD in English literature, light-heartedly tries out a variety of perspectives, allowing readers to come to their own conclusions about such matters as the nature of the angel in "A Case of Identity" or the reason Holmes abandons his magnifying glass for binoculars in "Silver Blaze." Who brings binoculars to a horse race? Indeed.

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	02 avril 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781787054820
Langue	English

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Sherlockian Musings:
Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories
By
Sheldon Goldfarb

First edition published in 2019
Copyright © 2019 Sheldon Goldfarb
The right of Sheldon Goldfarb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
Any opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing or any other entity.
Published by MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
Cover design by Brian Belanger

In Memory of
Peter Wood,
my first Priory Schoolmaster

Foreword
In 2003 while researching a murder mystery I was writing set in the Victorian era, I happened to meet the late Peter Wood, “Priory Schoolmaster” of the Sherlockian group in Vancouver, the Stormy Petrels. I soon became a member of the group and especially enjoyed their monthly discussions of stories from the Sherlock Holmes canon, presided over by Peter.
After Peter died, the schoolmastering was at first taken over by another Petrel (Orilea Martell), but eventually fell to me. I brought a slightly different perspective to the job, something deriving more from Academe than Baker Street. Peter then and the other Petrels now tend to be more traditional Sherlockians, interested in the “real world” of Holmes and Watson, in explanations going beyond the text of the stories, and in evaluating the stories. I was trained at graduate school to ignore everything except the text and to analyse rather than judge. However, the Petrels were very generous in listening to this different approach, which I embodied in “Musings” on each story as we did them.
Peter and Orilea produced background notes and study questions, and when I took over I began to do likewise, but I soon developed my own musing style, leaving annotations aside and instead plunging into everything the stories made me think of, drawing on other literary critics and my own interest (a Holmesian-style interest?) in figuring things out.
My first musings (on “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” the story the Petrels were doing when I became Schoolmaster) in part followed my predecessors’ style by including background notes before I turned to my musings, but by the fourth set I had abandoned background and dwelt solely in the realm of the Muse (though I have learned that “musings” and “the Muse” have different derivations and are not connected).
In any case, I hope the Musings will both entertain and provide fodder for discussion of the stories. That is what Mark Alberstat of the Spence Munros (the Sherlockian group in Halifax, Nova Scotia) thought they might do when he commissioned a special set on “The Red-Headed League,” a story I had not yet Mused about, and I hope this collection can assist Sherlockians seeking ideas about the stories and academics looking for approaches to teaching them.
Mark suggested that I collect the Musings and offer them to MX Publishing for book publication, so here they are.
My thanks to Mark and to Steve Emecz of MX Publishing and of course to all the Stormy Petrels of Vancouver, who have listened to my musings over the years, including Gary Spence, my biggest fan; Brian Collins, who says the Musings make him too lazy to read the actual stories; and of course Fran Martin, the Petrels’ long-serving president and keeper of my predecessors’ notes.
Last but not least, thanks to my girl-friend, Roberta Haas, who was the first to say these Musings would make a good book. I hope she is right.

A Study in Scarlet
So here’s how it all begins: Or maybe not. And I don’t mean in the Baring-Gould sense that since there are earlier cases, the Holmes canon actually began earlier. No, I’m talking about publication and how A Study in Scarlet was the first Holmes story to be written and published, to be followed of course by 59 others. And how tempting to refer to those other 59 when discussing the first. The origin story which led to all the others, which you perhaps can only understand by referring to all the others. But …
There’s a problem here: When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this story (novel or novella, really), it does not seem that he was planning a series, still less to write 59 sequels. He had to be dragged, kicking and screaming (or bribed by huge payments), to write some of them. And after finishing Scarlet in 1886, he didn’t immediately write another detective story; instead he wrote a historical adventure called Micah Clarke and then embarked on another, The White Company . His great aim, when not trying to be a doctor, was to write serious historical novels; he would later complain that Sherlock Holmes distracted him from that more serious work. It was not for a few years after Study in Scarlet that he decided to write some more Sherlock Holmes stories, so let’s try and look at the Study as a work in itself.
And how does it begin? Not with Sherlock Holmes at all (except as the title of Chapter One), but with that other character, without whom there would really have been no series, and who may even have been thought of first: Dr. John H. Watson. The sources are unclear, but perhaps Ormond Sacker (Doyle’s original name for Watson, and thank God he abandoned it) was going to be a sort of combined doctor-detective and the hero of the whole thing. And why would Dr. Doyle have thought of making his hero a doctor? The question perhaps answers itself, though one should also remember Dr. Joseph Bell, Doyle’s deducing professor in Edinburgh. In any case, we begin with …
Watson: And what a Watson. A wornout, wounded, aimless Watson. An idler drawn to that great “cesspool,” London, where he is squandering his government pension and feeling sorry for himself. The ideal situation for a life transformation, a typical beginning for an adventure story in which someone will be swept up into exciting situations and made to become a hero. Will Watson be the hero? Perhaps like a Marlow going to discover Mr. Kurtz? And his Kurtz will be Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a mystery man he is warned about by young Stamford – and by the way, all the characters are young here, are they not? Holmes is some sort of student, Watson only graduated a few years before: these are very young men, not the middle-aged codgers we may think of from later in the canon. But let’s not think about the canon. Let’s just think about Scarlet .
Thinking about Scarlet: And thinking about it from the point of view of the character who is positioned as the hero, not Holmes, but Watson. Reminiscent a bit of the situation of Violet Hunter (oh, there I go, thinking about the canon again), who ends up in a strange establishment and has to figure out what is going on. Here Watson tries to figure out what is going on with his new companion, who seems quite mysterious. What is his profession, first of all? And why does he swing between moods of enthusiasm and periods of languor? Drugs, I hear you say – but no, no, no, you’re thinking of later stories. We are reading Study as if there are no other stories, and our hero, Watson, is sure there can be no drugs involved. Perhaps he is wrong; perhaps he is naive; and don’t we know from the very next story … But we don’t know that, not yet; let us stick to our text.
Let’s forget about the drugs and think about the profession: Watson is strangely “delicate” (his word) about asking directly. Is this Victorian reticence or a sign of how passive he is at the start? I note that the very text of the novel begins in a passive way: he is “removed” from his brigade and later, after being struck by the famous Jezail bullet, is removed again (to hospital), then is struck again (by enteric fever): the very grammar is passive. Later his adventures begin when someone else taps him on the shoulder (not the one he got the bullet in, I hope), so he is not at first very assertive. Instead, he makes his famous list of Sherlock Holmes’s attributes and tries to deduce something from them: but he is not the master of deduction and gives up in despair. Poor Watson.
Humorous Watson: He does have a sense of humour, though, and when confessing his bad habits (laziness and an aversion to rows) adds, “I have another set of vices when I’m well, but those are the principal ones at present.” What are those other vices? Well, later in the canon we might note his eye for the ladies, but we must stick to this story, and we don’t really see Watson when he’s well here, so we don’t know.
Does Watson get better? Yes, I think he does, and it begins perhaps when he is roused to action by reading Holmes’s article, “The Book of Life”: a rather high-falutin title with perhaps Biblical overtones that suggests grand things when it’s really only about detective work, and is detective work all there is to life? Not a question Watson raises, but he does question whether this science of detection is valid, and he does so by wielding as his weapon an eggspoon. Another humorous moment, but effective because in calling the article “ineffable twaddle,” he provokes Sherlock Holmes into defending it, owning it as his, and explaining his profession as the world’s only consulting detective.
Does Watson find a profession? Yes again, he does. Not as a detective; he only accidentally provo