4 ms·
> I'm not even really convinced that Holmes could be as skilled as he's supposed to be with as broad ignorance as he's portrayed here as having. Agreed, assumi
by taneq 2y ago
> I'm not even really convinced that Holmes could be as skilled as he's supposed to be with as broad ignorance as he's portrayed here as having.
Agreed, assuming Holmes wasn’t (as a poster below suggests) essentially just trolling Watson here. That said, I found the first couple of Sherlock Holmes books to be infuriating, with the big reveal at the end coming across as a total deus ex machina that was in no way foreshadowed or set up by the preceding story. Apparently this improves in the later books though?
- lolinder 2y agoIt doesn't dramatically improve but it does get better than the first few books. This is early in the detective fiction genre, before anyone had really formalized that you ought to give the reader a fighting chance of getting the answer (or at least they should be kicking themselves for not getting it). Even in stories towards the end of the series Holmes will often just disappear for a whole day, come home and make a cryptic remark to Watson about having found the answer, and then later expose the whole story with the key bits of evidence having been collected off camera. I think that what makes some of the early stories like A Study in Scarlet particularly hard for people who started with later detective stories is that good portions of them are barely in the detective fiction genre at all, being more about Doyle's fantasies about foreign lands than they are about the detective. That can be pretty disorienting for someone who goes in with expectations that were created by later detective fiction.