A Scandal in Bohemia discussion

[Ahmad]

Discussion thread for the first book in our reading challenge.

[June]

Hey, does anyone have a link from where I can read the book please :) ?

[Ahmad]

you can read it on project Gutenberghere

whenever you're looking for books, project Gutenberg is a good place to start..

[Rachel]

It's the first story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is free in the Kindle store.

[Aileth]

This is the general link I use for Gutenberg and all public libraries in the network:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
It has all public works and then some.

[Nisma]

Okay, I read it. I liked it. I have a question.

What is it about Sherlock Holmes that many people so adore?

This isn't me being a hater or anything (for any dedicated fans) - I'm just curious. What's the big deal is all I want to know. Convince me. I'm open :)

Side note: I have read a minimum of two Sherlock Holmes novels, maybe more, I remember reading them as a kid, and I liked them. I just don't understand why it's so massively huge.

That is all.

[Ahmad]

I read it, and I didn't like it. like I knew I wouldn't. I don't get detective stories in the first place, and this was a port choice in this regard ... what happened was so little and trivial that afterwards it just melted away.. I've got nothing to take away from the story. I'm sorry if it sounds too judgemental, but I could never like Sherlock Holmes, and not for the lack of trying. I've read the hounds of Baskerville too and it is just as .. pointless x.x

[Nisma]

It's like 'light reading' for me, something I wouldn't mind reading once if I someone handed it to me. So the Big Deal is lost on you too? ^_^

[Melina]

Well, mystery stories with a bit of action and adventure fit into the mix. I'm not really into the literary aspect myself since I've never actually read into it or anything as old as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stuff, but the media based on it is pretty cool :)

The stories have influenced movies (I haven't seen the older movies but there's the newer ones with Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. ... and Disney's The Great Mouse Detective), certain concepts on television series (like House M.D. whose main character - Dr. House - is losely based on the concepts of Sherlock Holmes; BBC Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson; Elementary, which is new and American, is also based on crime investigation and has a Sherlock... but Watson is Asian and female, I think?), and some overused quotes which have been misused/misconstrued ("Elementary, my dear Watson!").

It's something that's always been there much like A Game of Thrones was... up until a T.V. show or a movie based on it comes out. It's because of the media putting it out that more people get to hear about it and thus want to read whatever inspired it to be there in the first place (or watch other stuff related to it, whether something that influenced it or anything that's been influenced by it).

Though... I also find the prose confusing... it's not picturesque as what I'm used to, anyway. *not giving up just yet, though!*

[Nisma]

Okay, that's true. Most of my friends who claim to adore Sherlock tend to use it synonymously with Robert Downey Jnr ^_^ I'm not entirely sure if they're referring to a TV series/movie/book anymore... hm. Interesting.

[Ahmad]

the big deal is totally lost on me xD
and as for Meli's insight into its popularity, I do believe RDJ and BBC have contributed a lot to it. but Sherlock has been popular in England right from the start, and I don't know why. even the prose of many English Writers is more entertaining than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ... anyway, I'm not saying its not good, but as you've put it, 'what's the big deal?'
I remember reading that when sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock in his last novel, the public response was so overwhelming that he had to come up with an impossible escape for him and write more x.x... so Sherlock fandom predates even RDJ era :P

[Melina]

Well, there will always be people who insist that they were fans before the movie release is out, but it's alright so long as everyone's got something in common, right?

[Aileth]

The first person to conjure up a detective story was Edgar Allan Poe in his tale The Crimes on the Rue Morgue. He only wrote 2 stories. They became so hugely popular at the time all over that others took up the premise, most notoriously Arthur Conan Doyle. He was successful because his stories were imbued with scientific breakthroughs of the time and a more ascetic prose, like a scientific work. Apparently, that appealed to the man of the time and thus Sherlock became an instant success.

Doyle did it for money but he never really cared about his detective. When Sherlock Holmes became so prominent that papers wouldn't receive his works unless it was a Holmes story, he decided he needed to end the detective's life in order to get back his own. It didn't work, as we well know; the response was a massive outcry. His own mother wrote to him to bring the detective back! So he continued writing the detective into the eager readership's hands and eventually, after 10 years, had to bring him back. I'm guessing his mother had to do with that again. He was a big family man who had the worst luck in family survival rate: he lost his wife and son, 2 nephews, 3 brothers and his mother all in a span of 5 years.

I've been reading the Sherlock Holmes stories since I was little, and some on the life of Doyle. They were serialized in The Strand, which is why most are short stories. Doyle was good at creating a scenario and solving its puzzle. Although like you, I've often wondered about his deductive abilities being more of a parlor trick. Moffat himself has said Doyle's method was to work from the ending backwards in order to create the situation that lead to that conclusion, including the deductions themselves. But it's true that he used the latest scientific knowledge of the time to make the clues.

In this time of constant improvements and massive information onslaughter we don't realise how much impact having a character who used scientific facts to solve a crime created in the society of the time. We're so used to getting at least 20 shows a week that talk science gibberish that for us is a daily routine. In Victorian time it was a huge novelty. And thus Sherlock Holmes became the legend who paved the way for us to have at least 20 crime shows a week that talk science gibberish. That's why it's so popular and so important. And it's the character that became more prominent than the author.

I'm forgetting that the first person to use fingerprints for criminology in a story was Mark Twain's story Pudd'nhead Wilson.

[David W.]

Sherlock Holmes holds a special spot in my heart for being the first literary series I've read from beginning to end (in my native language Chinese), after which I read all the short stories and A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four in English; in retrospect I realized how good the translation had been, and it was 35 years old. Word of advice: if anyone wishes to learn Chinese by reading relatively "familiar" books translated into it, do NOT read the Chinese edition of Harry Potter, nearly every chapter is riddled with mistranslations, inconsistencies or conceptual errors, and to this day they haven't fixed all of them. And the really weird thing is that they were printed by the same publishing house that provided (and still provides) good translations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Kafka and the like.