Last summer, my book club, the Modern Readers, decided to go on a magical mystery tour, reading one contemporary, one Agatha Christie and one Sherlock Holmes mystery. We had a heck of a lot of fun and we will definitely do it again at some point!
Synopsis
Though endlessly reinterpreted, reinvented, and imitated, the Sherlock Holmes stories have never been surpassed. Sporting his signature billowing coat and pipe in hand, the genius investigator Holmes captivates readers with his alluring melancholy and superhuman intuition, while his partner, Dr. Watson, remains ever the perfect foil, a classic Victorian gentleman with brilliant intellect. Set in the seductive world of Victorian London, the stories of Holmes and Watson live on, as immediate and original in our time as in their own.
Review
When the Modern Readers decided to embark on a Magical Mystery Tour of a summer, we thought that we’d be ending the summer with what would be our favorite of the lot. We all loved the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. movies, we were a 50/50 split on the Cumberbatch mini series, but we figured that the source material would have to be great to inspire so many revisits and retellings.
But it wasn’t. And we all agreed that it wasn’t what we anticipated, it didn’t live up to our lofty expectations for it. We concluded that a good mystery lets you hypothesize, come to your own conclusion before the “big reveal!” Mystery writing, for all its nuances, really is formulaic – and it needs to be for a reader to fully engage in what they’re reading. Sir Arthur’s Sherlock doesn’t even attempt to let you try to solve the mystery with him. You’re given all the facts, not potential suspects, and then an extremely complicated backstory that even the great and wonderful Sherlock should never have been able to deduce as a means of explaining why the perpetrator did what they did.
There was no following along, no reasonable ability to follow Sherlock’s thought pattern. While this is understandably Sherlock’s MO, which we all knew going in as somewhat respectable Sherlockian aficionados, but in film and television, it’s easier to suspend believability and reality.
Rating: 5 out of 10 stars
Edition: Paperback • $9.00 • 9780140439083 • 192 pages • originally published in 1886, this edition published October 2001 by Penguin Books • average Goodreads rating 4.15 out of 5 • read in August 2016
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