Watson,” entertains so successfully is because she gets the critical component - Watson’s voice - right. One of the reason’s first-time novelist Lyndsay Faye’s energetic, charming and nicely atmospheric new Holmes pastiche, “Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. He is one of the greatest storytellers the world has ever listened to.” All the cliches fit him, but he is not a cliche. He is a first-class chap, loyal to a fault, brave as a lion, and the salt of the earth. It is clear, energetic and decent, the voice of a tweedy, no-nonsense colonial Britisher at ease with himself. His voice has no barriers or affectations. Watson doesn’t write to you, he talks to you, with Edwardian courtesy, across a glowing fire. Klinger’s two-volume annotated collection of Holmes’ stories: “Dr. As no less a novelist and creator of memorable characters than John le Carre writes in his concise (but splendid) introduction to Leslie S. To make a real character one must sacrifice everything to consistency and remember Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson that, ‘he could make the little fishes talk like whales.’ ”Ĭonan Doyle may have Holmes’ measure in that appraisal, but he’s a mile wide of the mark when it comes to Watson. I would say a word for Watson also, who in the course of seven volumes never shows one gleam of humor or makes one single joke.

He is a calculating machine and anything you add to that simply weakens the effect. If I have sometimes been inclined to weary of him it is because his character admits of no light or shade. Holmes’ adventures total four novels and 56 short stories.Īs he explained in the single chapter of his 1924 autobiography devoted to the most famous character in detective fiction, “I do not wish to be ungrateful to Holmes, who has been a good friend to me in many ways. Arthur Conan Doyle famously tired of Sherlock Holmes and repeatedly tried to end the series of stories featuring the detective he dismissively called “my most notorious character.” On each occasion, though, an intense popular clamor - and the opportunity it afforded to shore up the author’s shaky finances - coaxed Conan Doyle into an additional sequence of stories.

Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye