While my affection for audiobooks has taken me through several other literary tales this year (shoutout to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series), I keep returning to a behemoth listening project to fall asleep to.
On Audible, subscribers have access to more than 62 hours (!!) of the many adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, as narrated by Stephen Fry.
In his foreword to the massive collection, Fry explains that, like many people, he grew up with the tales of Holmes' detective work, but did not discover the origins and early tales of the Baker Street detective until much later.
The detective's first introduction to the world came in the story "A Study in Scarlet," as veteran and doctor John Watson is introduced through a friend because they both need a roommate. Watson almost immediately accompanies Holmes in his investigative work, kicking off their long friendship exploring the seemingly inexplicable crimes of London and other parts of the world.
"Where other literary characters had been discerned mistily through their creators, Holmes appeared in the highest resolution, so clearly and independently that the idea of there being a creator at all, a writer scribbling him to life, seemed all wrong," Fry says in the foreword. "But Arthur Conan Doyle was that creator, and he was very real indeed. Like Watson, he had received a medical training, ultimately specializing and practicing as an eye doctor."
Doyle's "all-consuming curiosity" as a Victorian helped shape the stories that introduced readers to such organizations as the KKK, the mafia and, in that very first story, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which many of his contemporaries would likely not have heard about before, Fry notes.
Like Fry, I've been amazed at how well-developed Holmes was as a character from the very beginning. The mania, drug use and insane powers of deduction are present in even the earliest stories. Seriously, who can tell by looking at the color of the dirt on someone's shoes where they likely came from? Who would take one look at the detective work on a murder and so easily see all the folly in their logic, when the facts on their face point to an obvious suspect?
Holmes is that kind of flawed hero we can all only ever aspire to be, with his clever insights and the type of know-how that only comes from hours of studying the strangest topics imaginable. Even if you've seen many film and television takes on some of the classic detective's adventures, you might just find some stories in the collection that you've never heard before. Here are a few I've enjoyed so far:
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle: One man is in for a big surprise when he ends up in possession of a Christmas goose after witnessing a strange street mugging, only to later discover a massive blue gem inside the bird. The search for the owner of a hat dropped with the goose ensues.
The Adventure of the Speckled Band: This is a dark tale of a family's inexplicably sudden death just as a daughter is set to marry and inherit the money her stepfather has been entrusted to hold on to until her wedding.
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb: An engineer who has lost his thumb comes to Dr. Watson for care, and to Holmes for help unwinding the frightening tale of a machine he was asked to work on that would leave anyone claustrophobic with nightmares. ♦
