Letters from Watson

[osprey_archer]

Letters from Watson is off to a cracking good start! Like the Christmas Carol readalong, it sends out fairly short excerpts at regular intervals (Letters from Watson seems to be every two days), which works really well for me, especially as Doyle like Dickens knows how to keep a story moving at a cracking good pace.

I’ve decided to read the Holmes novels alongside the short stories, so as well as “The Gloria Scott” (in which Holmes tells Watson about his first case; the victim of a blackmail scheme died of apoplexy, but helpfully left a lengthy letter explaining exactly what happened), I read A Study in Scarlet, which involves evil Mormons.

In fact, in part two, the book jumps without so much as a by-your-leave into the tale of the evil Mormons. I paused to check to make sure that I’d opened the right ebook, because suddenly we were in a desert where an unknown man was perishing of thirst? And then he got rescued by a train of Mormons… “Ah!” I cried. “This is the evil Mormon book!”

(Despite having read very little Sherlock Holmes, over the years I have picked up quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes trivia, one piece of which was “there’s a story with evil Mormons.”)

And so it proved to be! The evil Mormons kidnapped Jefferson Hope’s bride-to-be and forced her to marry a Mormon, thus setting Hope on a decades’-long pursuit of Vengeance that finally culminated in London, where he killed her kidnappers and then conveniently died of an aortic aneurysm before there was any need to put him on trial for administering what we surely agree is well-deserved if rough justice.

(Someone surely has written a fascinating paper, “Guilty But Not Very,” about which murderers detective novels decide to let off the hook in one way or another, and what this says about shifting attitudes toward justice.)

I don’t always have a full post in me about a short story, so I probably won’t post about all the stories as it goes along, but I suspect that this readalong will greatly cheer my year… especially if I take a shot every time a character dies of convenient heart failure. We’re two for two!

Comments

[rmc28]

Letters from Watson is fun, and the accompanying Discord is busy and interesting.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I'm glad I signed up for this one!

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

That would definitely make an interesting study-- I wonder how ACD would compare to the Golden Age (and later) novelists...And I'd forgotten about the evil Mormons, heh!

[osprey_archer]

My gut feeling is that there would be a lot of continuity between ACD and Golden Age mysteries in this respect, and the big shift would occur later one (I really haven't read enough post-Golden Age mysteries to say when), but this is totally unscientific and based on purely scattershot reading.

[sanguinity]

Heh, the first time I read A Study in Scarlet, I wondered if my ebook file had gotten corrupted, the switch to the Mormon section was so abrupt!

There's a lot about the evil-Mormon section that's just... incorrect, historically speaking. F'rinstance, the US Army had an outpost about an day's ride from the evil Mormons -- the biggest US Army outpost of the era, and there solely to keep the Mormons in line. Which would have made it a much better destination than Carson City.

(Link goes to a sixty-word fic based on STUD -- during my last read-through of canon, I was attempting to write 60-word stories for all of the original 60 canon stories. I may pick the effort up again with Letters from Watson, we'll see.)

[osprey_archer]

Right? We're toodling along with a nice Sherlock Holmes story, then SUDDENLY MORMONS (well, not even Mormons at first; SUDDENLY DESERT), completely out of nowhere! You imagine Holmes leaning over Watson's shoulder and reading this and being like "Sir, you are making half of this up."

One can only assume that this story takes place in an AU without Camp Floyd, OR Jefferson Hope mysteriously forgot Camp Floyd, only to realize later that it would have solved all of his problems, and now whenever he hears the name Floyd he starts screaming.

[lucymonster]

Haha, I thought you’d enjoy the abrupt left turn into evil Mormons! It’s definitely not what I was expecting from part one. (In the next chronological entry, Holmes tells Watson off for sensationalising the story so much.)

I want to read that hypothetical paper.

[osprey_archer]

I do like it when authors pick a completely crazycakes direction, it's true. Sure, we COULD try to keep this story calm and plausible and grounded in fact.... OR we could go off on a tangent about this theory that Audubon the bird painter was actually the missing dauphin of France!

[sholio]

(Someone surely has written a fascinating paper, “Guilty But Not Very,” about which murderers detective novels decide to let off the hook in one way or another, and what this says about shifting attitudes toward justice.)

Oh man, that's fascinating. If you ever do turn up some meta on that, I'd love to read it. I bet it does change over time in some really interesting ways.

One thing I notice in a lot of Golden Age murder mysteries that doesn't really seem to be as much of a thing anymore is how often the killer is punished via suicide, especially in morally gray situations or cases where arresting them and putting them in jail wouldn't really work. That one's certainly gone out of style - at least anywhere other than the really dark murder mysteries. I can still see it happening in procedurals and noir, but definitely not in anything cozy-adjacent.

[osprey_archer]

I'm not sure I've read any modern mysteries where the murderer commits suicide (let alone gets nudged toward suicide by the detective). Maybe it's hard for a modern audience to believe that a murderer would actually go through with it? In the Wimsey book where this happens, IIRC Peter believes that the murderer will do for "on his honor as a gentleman" reasons, which just wouldn't work in a modern book set in modern times. Couldn't do it in a cozy because it's too dark; couldn't do it in a noir because trusting the murderer to keep his word and kill himself is too trusting for noir. Procedural... maybe?

[thisbluespirit]

THe Golden Age suicide thing is actually pretty explicable and simple - an awful lot of the most famous Golden Age authors are British, and in that era murder was still a capital crime (by hanging) here, so it's understandable that authors were squeamish about having their detectives routinely inflict that on people, whereas from 1968 the death penalty was abolished, and the murderers can be sent to prison without making the detectives look bad!

[osprey_archer]

Yes, that makes sense! You don't want the detective directly responsible for the death of Sympathetic Murderer, but Sympathetic Murderer is not quite so sympathetic that the audience wants him to get off scot free...

[landofnowhere]

I think I gave up on reading *A Study in Scarlet* when I got to the Evil Mormons -- this was not what I signed up for!

[osprey_archer]

Suddenly chapter upon chapter with NO HOLMES AT ALL. And no explanation what this has to do with anything!

[genarti]

I'm loving Letters from Watson! I've read a lot (maybe most?) of the short stories and a couple of the novels, but some of them quite some time ago, so I'm looking forward to the rereads and the new reads both. There definitely are a certain number of convenient deaths by aneurysm-from-emotional-strain scattered through, though!

[osprey_archer]

Doyle knew a convenient plot device when he saw it and he wasn't going to shy away from using it merely because he had used it before!

[taelle]

Lol, I read that one aged about ten and it was from here that I learned about the existence of mormons...

[osprey_archer]

Well THAT'S certainly an introduction to the Mormons.

[taelle]

Indeed.

[brigid]

Is this the one where part of the plot hinges on the spelling of a farm implement as either "plow" or "plough" indicating whether one was American or English? That one tripped me up because I, an American, was used to seeing it both ways. (Also: Doyle's mysteries suck because he got a lot of stuff factually wrong HOWEVER they're great because they're fun.)

[osprey_archer]

No, there are no plows (or ploughs) in this story, so that must have been another one! Will be curious to see when that crops up.

I DO spend a lot of time thinking about that Terry Pratchett quote about how all of these supposed tell-tale signs actually have lots of different possible explanations, but I am trying to turn off that portion of my brain for the duration of the story and just enjoy the ride.