Exploits of Sherlock Holmes
by Adrian Conan Doyle, John Dickson Carr
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Book Summary Information
Author: Adrian Conan Doyle, John Dickson CarrEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-05-11
ISBN: 0517203383
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Gramercy
Book Reviews of Exploits of Sherlock Holmes
Book Review: "It's up to you, Watson"
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes" is one of the best volumes of Holmes pastiches by writers other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is primarily due to its highly accurate recapturing of the characterizations of Holmes and Watson and of Watson's narrative voice. Perhaps not unexpectedly, many pastiche writers are less successful than Conan Doyle's son Adrian in recreating these elements, and even the younger Conan Doyle slips up once or twice.
A couple of the stories co-written by John Dickson Carr feel slightly inauthentic. "The Wax Gamblers" is a dull, weak story which concludes with a sequence that attempts, not entirely successfully, to give a new dimension to Watson's character. "The Highgate Miracle", while enjoyable, is far more comedic than any of the elder Conan Doyle's sixty Holmes tales, resorting to the Dickensian technique of using humorous names such as "Cabpleasure".
Halfway through the writing and serialization of the "Exploits", Carr was briefly taken ill, causing Adrian Conan Doyle to write the final six stories by himself. These tales are more uniformly faithful to his father's style than the first six. Unfortunately, the plot of every one of them, to a greater or lesser extent, is painfully similar to that of one or more of the original Holmes stories by the author's father. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself sometimes recycled plots -- compare "The Red-Headed League", "The Stockbroker's Clerk", and "The Three Garridebs", for example -- but never in six consecutive stories.
The most spectacular example of this borrowing is "The Deptford Horror", which is a patently obvious reworking of what may well be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's single most famous and highly-regarded Sherlock Holmes short story. And yet "The Deptford Horror" is also one of my two favorite Holmes stories by writers other than the elder Conan Doyle. Why? Perhaps I find "The Deptford Horror" even more viscerally frightening than its source text. Or perhaps I'm swayed by the fleeting and yet powerful moment at the story's climax that acknowledges the strength and profundity of Holmes and Watson's friendship.
Skip the final two-and-a-half pages of the final story, "The Red Widow". Here Adrian Conan Doyle indulges in sentimentality utterly foreign to the style of his father's Holmes narratives. This book's best tribute to its two main characters comes, not in the twee excesses of its final paragraphs, but as they face an unimaginable horror together in an upstairs bedroom of a rundown house in Deptford.
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