The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Getting through the last half of this book was a little like trying to finish that second helping of dessert that you really shouldn’t have had. At first it tastes good and you think “Sure, I could eat this every night, that’d be fine”. But soon it stops tasting so good and you have to start sipping water to help it go down. You’ve eaten too much to stop now, though. There’s no point putting what’s left away, there’s not enough left for a decent snack even. So you plough on through, even though you can’t really fit anymore in and it doesn’t taste as good as it did at the start.

It’s a shame, but I kind of ruined it for myself by continuing to eat the Holmes-cake instead of stopping when I got full. 

I enjoyed the 4 novels the most. I felt that there was a bit more to sink your teeth into. The Hound of the Baskervilles was probably my most favourite. The short stories were good but started to feel a bit formulaic after a while. Introduction by Watson, here’s the initial facts of the case, Holmes and Watson go investigate, Holmes finds the solution, confession from the bad dude, Holmes lets us in on how he did it. The novels were able to deviate from this and I liked when we got a little side story, like in The Valley of Fear. Or perhaps I was just glad for the respite.

Maybe in a couple of years I’ll be able to go back and re-read some of the stories again and enjoy them properly.  I was just too Holmes’d out to fairly judge the last couple of collections of short stories. One highlight from those latter stories was when we got to read a couple of cases from Holmes’ perspective.  I felt that it brought a bit of believability and warmth to the character. I got a little tired of hearing from Watson how amazingly fantastic Holmes was.

Go ahead and read some Sherlock Holmes, just take it easy. Don’t OD like I did. They are some very clever stories and they will make you start to take notice of people’s hands and shoes and you will try to make deductions. Whether they are right or not…well, that depends on how good a sleuth you are. Watson spent years with Holmes learning his methods and Holmes still laughed at his attempts to make deductions about what he saw. If I had been Watson I would have had a whole lot of fun intentionally splashing mud up one side of my trouser legs or sprinkling some crumbs down the front of my jacket just to see what Holmes would make of it, or if he would know that I was laying false trail. 

Three out of five partially smudged fingerprints for The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Only because there’s so much of it and I did it all in one go. Maybe in a couple of years when I’ve done a full Holmes detox I can up the rating.