A Detective Story The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes By Arthur Conan Doyle

Author : Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781976784620
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (846 download)

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Download or read book The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sherlock Holmes books, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, are some of the greatest mystery novels ever written. Edgar Allen Poe may have invented the detective story, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle who perfected it when he created the character of Sherlock Holmes. The typical detective story begins with a protagonist who is faced with a mostly mundane incident or the report of an incident that he begins to investigate. If we were not so accustomed to mystery novels and what makes them tick this might seem like an unimaginative way to begin a story.What makes a good detective story work is the technique of the story within a story. As the protagonist begins to investigate the original mystery of a book he comes to reveal a second story contained inside the first one that expands the book and causes it to be transformed.Detective stories usually begin with a standard set of characters who fall into familiar categories, such as the hard-boiled private eye or the detached scientific investigator. As these characters that the reader is already accustomed to begin to encounter the original mystery of a book, however, they circle around something very different than themselves. Like characters traveling down a maze they reveal new patterns that allow the book to be transformed as they go deeper and deeper.Arthur Conan Doyle was a master at creating plots that fit inside one another in a logical way. What makes a Sherlock Holmes book so compelling is the way that Doyle masterfully puts one story neatly on top of another like the gears of a clock. The machinery of a Sherlock Holmes book moves slowly as a wider world is uncovered. The more of a Sherlock Holmes book that you read the more that it changes its shape. Arthur Conan Doyle created this way of telling a detective story and then showed how it could be mastered.Sherlock Holmes is a cipher himself. The reader knows from hints here and there that Holmes has much about him that must be complex and unusual underneath. Exactly what this is, however, is left up to the reader to guess. Is Holmes really as detached as he sometimes seems? What motivates him? What does he care about? Why does he do what he does?The narrator of a Sherlock Holmes story is always his good friend John Watson. Watson clearly worships Holmes and sees him as a genius. The reader is left to guess how reliable Watson is as a narrator, however, and how much they can always trust what he says. The relationship between Holmes and Watson is a question mark. Holmes often criticizes Watson and acts coldly towards him but then at other moments seems to betray his affection.The questions that the reader has about both Holmes and Watson are a good place to start a book but they are also questions that a reader can easily entertain without being distracted from the plots that follow. The stories and mysteries in a Sherlock Holmes book almost always end up being portraits of a larger Victorian society. The story may begin at 221 Baker Street, but in the course of unraveling a case Holmes and Watson are liable to take the reader to the farthest corners of the British empire.London at the time of the Sherlock Holmes books was still the center of the largest empire that the world had ever seen. The plots reflect this, with characters haunted by their pasts coming to see Holmes and Watson to tell them about what they saw and did in India and Africa and other far off places of the globe.The motivation for most of the crime committed in a Sherlock Holmes story is revealed to be the result of a conflict between the desire to maintain Victorian social respectability and attain worldly success. The new opportunities offered by industrialization and capitalism often clashed with the more conservative morality that Victorians clung to as a defense against social turmoil.