Abcde BLOG

by Arthur Conan Doyle

I have to admit that I was pretty disappointed with A Study in Scarlet, mostly on a content account, but also on one formal account.  I'm certain that most of my dislike comes from the fact that I do NOT enjoy reading about the American Old West.  In fact, I was trying to think of a time period (as represented in fiction) in which I was LESS interested, and I haven't come up with anything.  Possibly the suffering in Calcutta slums, but those books tend to be nonfiction.  Possibly the era of The Mahabharata, but I haven't read that in AGES and I might have changed my opinion.

At any rate, I had settled down to A Study in Scarlet knowing it was the first meeting of Holmes and Watson and expecting a lovely British Victorian mystery.  And I got one for the first couple of chapters.  I thoroughly enjoyed my first view of Holmes through Watson's eyes, and giggled to myself at the image of the great detective beating corpses with a cane to discover how long after death bruising could occur.  I was carried along by the mystery, though I didn't think it was one of the most enthralling Holmes mysteries.  Then there was a strange break.  Honestly I feared I'd ended up in another story somehow.  It was a very "through the looking glass" moment.  That abrupt change in narrative content and style is my formal issue with the text.  I understand why an author would want to do that, but it just seems a bit TOO jarring in this context.

So, this change landed me squarely in the American Old West--worse yet, in a particularly religious discussion of the American Old West.  I have nothing at all against religion, but I don't particularly want anything that's not CoE or RC in my Victorian British Novels--unless it's the exoticism of "Hindoos."  I kept reading though, thanks to this challenge.  If I'd not signed up for it, I probably would have stopped when I figured out what was going on.  The backstory was a decent one, and it certainly lent emotion and romance to the larger plot, but I just wasn't quite convinced by it.  I don't know whether this is my resistance to the Old West setting, or because it didn't tabulate with what I expect from a Sherlock Holmes case, or because it really *was* jarring, but I know I just didn't quite "buy" it.

This is not at all a bad book, but it didn't live up to the expectations I'd had of it, and I won't be reading it again, even when I go back through the Holmes corpus.