Familiarity does breed indifference if not contempt and one wonders how this collection would have been received if it had been the first. When a critic by the name of John Gore proclaimed the tales to be ‘very poor’, Doyle wrote to him saying, ‘I wonder whether the small impression which they produce upon you may be due to the fact that we become blasé and stale ourselves as we grow older… I test the Holmes stories on fresh young minds and find that they stand the test well.’ The author had a point. Not surprising then, The Case-Book is generally regarded as the weakest of the Holmes short-story collections.
These late Holmes stories were penned purely as money-spinners, to provide cash for his Spiritualist crusade. It was a belief that he had finally embraced after a lifelong search for the meaning of life and the pain of death. His time, energy and enthusiasm were all directed to his work in the cause of Spiritualism. In fact in the final decade of his life – he died in 1930 – Doyle wrote hardly any fiction of any kind. This collection was first published in 1927 and at this time in Doyle’s life he had no real interest in Holmes at all. I thank you for your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.’ The author adds: ‘And so reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes. The almost apologetic tone of Conan Doyle’s Preface to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes – ‘I fear that Mr Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows.’ – indicates to some extent that the author was aware that these stories were the last gasp of the detective’s oeuvre.
This towers over the plots and adds an indefinable extra to these stories, imbuing them with a special quality that appeals to each succeeding generation. However, Doyle still remains bang on target in portraying the relationship between Holmes and Watson. However, it is fair to say that there is a certain shakiness in some of his plotting where issues are resolved perhaps a little too speedily or abruptly and sometimes without a completely satisfactory explanation. The Case-Book* is probably the most exotic of the Holmes collections which reveals that Conan Doyle’s vivid imagination was not flagging when he was writing these tales.
David Stuart Davies concludes his look at the complete Sherlock Holmes tales with this final collection of short stories
0 kommentar(er)
