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Originally Posted by crich70
It has been disliked by some over the years, in part due to the portrait of the Mormon's that it paints....
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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
It's so long since I read it that I had completely forgotten the plot, which was good. I found the sudden change to the US a bit clunky, but otherwise enjoyed it....
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Although it takes up half of the book, I had completely forgotten the Mormon connection as well. But it's been about 35-40 years since I've read the book.
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Originally Posted by crich70
What I've never been able to understand is why Watson misses the clues relating to Jefferson Hope's health. He is a Dr. after all...
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But he's also the narrator. A good narrator of a mystery yarn has to be at least a bit slower than the reader.
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Originally Posted by Asawi
...I do remember reading quite few of them back in my teens, and also that I was pretty fascinated by them back then. I think the "scientific" side of them appealed much to me, and maybe today's abundance of forensic science TV series has made me "jaded". Back when they were published they must have bee ground breaking though!
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I'm currently reading Maria Konnikova's
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. It offers some surprising insights into Holmes' methods and the basic assumptions underlying them.
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Originally Posted by fantasyfan
Asawi, do you have any opinion of the updated Holmes in the Sherlock series? I thought A Study in Pink was excellent.
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Originally Posted by crich70
Here, here. I'd also add that this is the 1st Sherlock Holmes story ever written and that the genre was still in its infancy at the time when it was written. So it's more than possible that A.C. Doyle was still finding his proper voice in regard to his most famous creation. Hound of the Baskervilles was written yrs later (I believe after 'The Final Problem' and before 'The Empty House') by which time A.C. Doyle's writing style had no doubt matured quite a bit. Judging by how many people world wide know of the great detective through story, OTR, TV and movies there has to be something to his stories that has held up well over time. Holmes appeared in Dec. 1887 in Beaton's Christmas Annual and he's still going strong 126 yrs later in 2013.
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Very few literary templates were available at the time. One was was Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, who could hardly be called a detective proper as the term had yet to be coined, but even so, in the book we just read, Holmes appeared to have only a small respect for him.
Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."
As for Gaboriau's creation Monsieur Lecoq, Holmes had this to say:
"Have you read Gaboriau's works?" I asked. "Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?"
Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. "Lecoq was a miserable bungler," he said, in an angry voice; "he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid."
I have to confess here that I've never read any of the writings of Émile Gaboriau, but he was very popular in the day in which Doyle began writing.