Letters from Watson
Jan. 6th, 2023 11:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerLetters 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!
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!
no subject
Date: 2023-01-06 10:21 pm (UTC)I want to read that hypothetical paper.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-07 01:07 am (UTC)