In this story, Holmes is asked by a distraught man to determine why his wife is sneaking to the house next door in the middle of the night. ![]() One of my favorites was “The Yellow Face”, which Watson explains is an illustration of how Sherlock Holmes sometimes doesn’t get it right. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is made up of eleven short stories: “Silver Blaze”, “The Yellow Face”, “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”, “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, “The Musgrave Ritual”, “The Reigate Puzzle”, “The Crooked Man”,” The Resident Patient”, “The Greek Interpreter”, “The Naval Treaty”, and “The Final Problem.”Įach story is a short but fun read, and what makes the book so inventive is that each is completely different. But I couldn’t see reading a single short story when I could read the whole book. I read The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen challenge, which includes the final short story in the collection, “The Final Problem”, which is all about arch-villain James Moriarty. ![]() Whatever Sir Conan Doyle intended, Holmes is a fascinating character. ![]() Of course no one knew of Asperger’s in the late 1800’s, and other experts have “diagnosed” Holmes with manic depression or bipolar disorder from his wild mood swings, from depression to near-euphoria when solving a crime. Was Arthur Conan Doyle presenting some sort of genetically transmitted personality disorder or mental illness he’d observed, or was Sherlock Holmes merely an interesting character created from scratch? He has no friends other than the extremely tolerant Watson a brother, even stranger and more isolated than he, is his only family. He is strangely “coldblooded,” and perhaps as a consequence, he is also alone in the world. His interests and knowledge are deep but narrow. He appears oblivious to the rhythms and courtesies of normal social intercourse - he doesn’t converse so much as lecture. In a 2009 article in the New York Times, Dr. He has almost no interpersonal skills and his attention to detail rises to an entirely different level from everyone else’s. It was interesting, having just read a book about Asperger’s Syndrome, to see so many of the traits of Asperger’s in Sherlock Holmes. He seems to be only happy when he’s working on a case it’s like his mind needs a challenge at all times. ![]() Sometimes he lets you follow along with what he’s doing, and other times he leaves you behind completely and you only find out what’s happened at the end. Holmes is brilliant and not terribly likeable, but always intriguing. I expected a stuffy pipe smoker with a funny hat and that’s not what you get at all (although he does wear the hat with the ear flaps at times). I also watched some of the vastly better British series with Benedict Cumberbatch (who has one of the coolest British names I think I’ve ever heard).īut nothing beats reading the original, and Holmes is the archetype that so many of today’s mystery-solvers are based on. Maybe I was inspired by the movie with Robert Downey Jr, which I thought was pretty weak – I wanted to see what Sherlock Holmes was really about. I love Victorian literature and classic mysteries, so Sherlock Holmes is a perfect fit. I only discovered Sherlock Holmes last year, although I always wanted to read the stories.
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