My rating: 3 of 5 stars
That this collection of detective stories is classic fiction is beyond question. Nevertheless, never having read Sherlock Holmes before, at several points I was sorely disappointed. The literary trick of untranslated foreign language quotes almost always aggravates me, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sprinkled these quotes around using at least 3 languages that I don't comprehend. But I realize that this is a time-honored technique and so do not seriously criticize his famous work on that account.
Nor would I subtract from its rating because of some serious Mormon bashing in the very first story. I am not familiar enough with the true history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to determine whether Doyle's villainous portrayal of them is historically accurate or just an example of the trashing of a religion which one disbelieves. At any rate, let's let that pass as well.
Rather, I give only three stars to Sherlock Holmes, Volume I because of certain flaws of logic, flaws which I deem inexcusable in a work whose appeal rests almost entirely upon analytical reasoning.
For example, in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, Doyle has Holmes deducing a man's intellectual prowess from the size of his hat. Had Holmes never met a stupid man with a large head, or an intelligent one with a relatively small cranium?
Then, in The Adventure of the Priory School, Holmes deduces the direction that a bicycle had been ridden by observing that the rear wheel made a deeper impression in the mud and in places covered over the track of the front wheel. Brilliant. But such would be the case no matter which direction the bicycle was traveling. Duh!
The flaw that irritated me most was found in The Adventure of the Dancing Men. At the core of this story are a series of mysterious messages that I recognized immediately as simple substitution encryption, which assumption Doyle himself later confirms. As a long-time fan of encryption, I set out to decode the messages on my own without reading ahead, and would have succeeded within an hour or so had the messages been properly reproduced. But according to the text, one particular figure in the messages ended up representing two different letters: in one place a 'V' and in two other places a 'P'. Another figure represents both an 'O' and an 'M', while in another place a different figure represents an 'O'. All these are violations of the simple substitution encryption logic which Holmes asserts, and render the messages undecipherable as printed in the book. This flaw is not so much a matter of illogic as of sloppy composition and/or a failure to adequately proofread the encrypted messages.
On a positive note, Sherlock Holmes, Volume I contains plenty of other stories with plots that are both fun and logical. And with over 1000 pages, it provided me with many hours of enjoyable reading, a good buy for the price. Plus, the introduction by Loren D. Estleman is intelligent, informative and entertaining, qualities which one rarely finds in an introduction. All in all, I may very well end up shopping for Volume II as well.
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