![]() He is indifferent to literature, knows little of history, and cosmology has no part in his intellectual framework. Nothing that is not germane to his work as a consulting detective is allowed to clutter up his mind. Holmes’s behavior, tut-tuts Watson, is bohemian: His papers are piled up higgledy-piggledy all over his rooms, he is entirely disorganized domestically, he is given to long bouts of brooding silence. Sometimes, Watson tells us, the chords were sonorous and melancholy, sometimes fantastic and cheery: obviously an avant-gardist at work. ![]() He has the soul of an artist, as demonstrated in his violin playing: He is prepared to please Watson by knocking off some Mendelssohn or Wagner, but when left to himself, he “scrapes carelessly” at the fiddle thrown across his knee. Conan Doyle’s coup de maître, as Watson might say, is to make his hero a flawed man, prone to deep melancholia, liable to escape into cocaine- or opium-induced oblivion. He is clever Daddy, who leaves us reassured, able to sleep at night. At least in the realm of crime - though not in the territory of the human heart - he sheds light where there has previously only been darkness. Auden remarked in his famous essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” “Holmes is the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace because he is a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion.” We come to him like frightened children, in search of explanations. The great detective, inhumanly brilliant, makes sense of things again. Initial chaos - the crime - appears to be without meaning. He restores logic to an unruly, disturbingly incomprehensible world. The reasons for Holmes’s enduring fascination are easy to understand. Ranevskaya’s son (it turned out that the governess, Carlotta Ivanovna, was in fact the son, who never did drown). ![]() He also sometimes pops up in other people’s plays: I fondly recall a version of “The Cherry Orchard” in which Holmes was called in to investigate the drowning of Mme. Almost from the beginning, too, other writers, eager to feed our insatiable appetite for his adventures, have written Sherlock Holmes stories set in the Victorian period, but engaging in unexpected encounters: In Nicholas Meyer’s spirited “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” Holmes, wrestling with the effects of his cocaine habit, seeks out Sigmund Freud in Billy Wilder’s underrated “Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” he runs up against Queen Victoria. Gregory House, in the eponymous series in which, for many seasons, Hugh Laurie played an irascible, drug-addicted surgeon of preternatural analytical penetration, solving apparently hopeless medical dilemmas. Surviving his own author’s attempts to kill him, he has caught the imagination of each new generation, which has either faithfully continued to read his exploits in the original (sales have never flagged since the first novel, “A Study in Scarlet ,” appeared in 1887) or updated him (the BBC’s “Sherlock” a notably successful version of this, but Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce did the same thing in 1942) or reinvented him, most entertainingly, perhaps, as Dr. If any fictional character can be said to be immortal, it is Sherlock Holmes. SHERLOCK HOLMES By Arthur Conan Doyle Read by Stephen Fry 63 hours.
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