The Butler Did It with a Deactivated Rube-Goldberg Machine in the Living Room!
Hey all, it's been a while hasn't it? Haven't written anything the past month because I only really had one thing on my mind for a while: the war. Whether it be finding out which of my friends secretly thinks I'm a murderer, or how many of my co-workers would actually like to be murderers, it's been impossible to get my mind off of it. Even then, I'm someone relatively unaffected by the whole situation1; were I in Sderot or Gaza City I wouldn't have too much of a choice in whether or not I was spending every waking moment worrying over it.
Regardless, considering I do have the privilege to get it off my mind temporarily, let's talk about mystery stories.
A few weeks back I found out Sherlock Holmes is free to read on the Apple Books app. I've always wanted to dig into some classic literature2, so now that I had some extra free time off of work, I decided to give it a skim. They nothing like what I expected them to be. In a good way.
I've only really knew of Sherlock Holmes by proxy up until now; I've seen the BBC adaptation, that one movie with Robert Downey Junior, the numerous detective stories inspired by Holmes's stories. I've heard of the classics like The Hounds of Baskerville and A Scandal in Bohemia, but I only knew of their general shape and feel, not what actually transpired in them. From how everyone spoke of his stories, Holmes appeared to me like a post-human supergenius, who's intellect could only be rivaled by God himself. I knew Irene Adler is his love interest, and that Watson was the everyman dragged around on Holmes's misadventures.
I've read a lot of mystery when I was still a book-worm, and I assumed that other books' fascination with overly complex webs of conspiracy and betrayal were following in the footsteps of one of literature's greats, so when I propped open the short story collection, I was expecting something of that same caliber. Wow, I had no clue what was awaiting me.
Let's start with the man himself: Sherlock Holmes certainly is an amazing person in the way Arthur Conan Doyle presents him - he is incredibly perceptive, very well read, and has a talent for disguise that is legitimately superhuman - but his intelligence isn't... fantastical, so to speak. He knows only what people tell him, not more, and while he certainly knows how to investigate and look for clues, he avoids going on tangents of suspicion and baseless assumptions that nevertheless end up being right on the money. The primary thing he has going for him is merely being hyper-aware of his surroundings, not having some alien AI running around in his skull.
When he explains how he figured out the case at the end of the stories, I often go "duh, how didn't I think of that?" rather than "wow, that's so smart", which I honestly appreciate way more. It makes his genius feel grounded, I suppose, like his deductions came from the mind of a normal human I could meet on the street: He has his human flaws, he has his biases, and he sometimes loses! He's wrong, he's outsmarted, and often he can't really bring the villain to justice within the narrow confines of what the law allows him. He's not a god, he's just trying his best in the role he's given.
Irene Adler, aswell, I could not have been more wrong on. She doesn't love Holmes, nor does he love her; in her original story, A Scandal in Bohemia, she ends the mystery being married to another man and having interacted with Sherlock a grand total of once. If anything, he is the one who gains an interest in her. Not a romantic one, but a sort of begrudging respect at the sight of being outsmarted by someone who he perceived as predictable3. Retroactively, this kind of makes me groan at the way all modern Holmes adaptations turn her into a love interest - the entire point is that she doesn't care for him.
Watson... honestly I was pretty much on the nose here. He's an everyman that tells us the story with a flourish. Not much to add.
But the main thing that surprised me is how normal all the stories were. The crimes initially were confusing, it's a mystery novel after all, but they weren't some complex web of beguile - they were just a simple crime dressed in a non-intuitive outfit. For example, in The Red-Headed League we get a league of redheads funded by a mysterious benefactor, but in reality it's just a cover for a bank heist. In some of the stories that have aged worse (or better, depending on your viewpoint) you can actually figure out where the entire story is going from the very beginning, like in The Five Orange Pips, when a man gets a mysterious threatening letter from someone only referred to as "K. K. K.".
I gotta say, it's nice to just read a story where we don't get thrown into a rollercoaster of plot twists, and just get a story that gets from point A to B in a satisfying manner. It makes me wonder then why so many stories that came afterwards seemingly decided to do the opposite of what the greatest detective stories of all time did. Maybe it's harder to write a simple story like that? Maybe it's easier to set up 20 puzzle pieces that lead you in a journey from one to the next, but less straightforward to have only two pieces that require the same amount of thinking to combine as the previous 20.
I love stuff like Adam Douglass's Dirk Gently where the crime involves time travel, alien androids, and ghosts, with a protagonist who bends the laws of probability around him just for kicks, but for once it was nice to sit down and read a book where one guy just really fucking hated some other guy.
I only really get about one or two bomb alarms per day. For people outside of Israel that probably still sounds like a lot, but it's not something that shocks most people who've lived here.↩
I've been doing so already with stuff like 1984 and Catch-22, but most books I picked up were a bit of a slog, either due to weird writing habits or not having much of a story at all, other than a vehicle to ram a moral down my throat.↩
For modern standards this story isn't feminist in the slightest, but for the 19th century? It's not half bad. Sherlock loses because he assumes he knows what "women" are like.↩