I feel a little retro in a much earlier sense. I’m finally reading some Sherlock Holmes stories, and yes, they are cracking!
No, you can’t guess really what is happening, because Holmes does get to comment on things that you only hear about in the next paragraph, rather than Conan Doyle giving people more clues as Agatha Christie does.
I should admit at this point that I am not a huge reader of crime fiction, so I’m not very well placed to work out what happens next.
But there again, I read a bit of newspaper on the bus yesterday where Ian Rankin had been commenting on JK Rowling being a classic crime writer in the way she sets up her stories. We did guess a bit of what was coming in Harry Potter (though not ‘the big revelation’ in book 7) so maybe my powers of observation are just not elementary enough for Holmes.
The books are fascinating – so much of it is familiar, but some of it clearly lost as far as our society is concerned. At one point, Holmes and Watson proceed to a scene where there is a scissors grinder, plying his trade on the street. I’m sure some people would like there to be scissor grinders still, but it’s not something that makes it into G2 as a complaint against the Government, for example.
We also saw a great couple of interviews last week, one about Stephen Fry, one with him. Reading Holmes, I feel that Stephen might approve…It’s not his ‘holy canon’ of Woodehouse, Waugh and Wilde, but it is of a society where indiscretion could ruin a reputation in a much more serious way than the supposed shock headlines re celebrities.
A society of bonnets, and smoking jackets; of people having probably more regularised habits than today, so that Holmes can tell how they type, where their bootscraper is placed in relation to their front door…I did wonder slightly whether our fragmentation might allow him to draw as good a set of conclusions as in his books.
Or perhaps Holmes would have a good career ahead of him as a social anthropologist, a reader of people’s food habits, a pundit of what their clutter really says about them. No doubt the joke ‘alimentary, my dear Watson’ has already been made, so I’ll stop right there…