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Exploits of Sherlock Holmes Editorial Review:
From the son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and one of America's greatest mystery writers, John Dickson Carr, comes twelve riveting tales based on incidents or elements of the unsolved cases of Sherlock Holmes. The plots are all new, with painstaking attention to the mood, tone, and detail of the original stories. Here is a fascinating volume of mysteries for new Sherlock fans, as well as for those who have read all the classics and crave more!
Customer Reviews:
A real pleasure!
For those of us who grew up reading Sherlock Holmes stories, and have read them all over and over, this book is a real find. Written by Arthur Conan Doyle's own son & John Dickson Carr (famed mystery writer in his own right, and award-winning biographer of ACD), of all the imitations and pastiches published in the last few decades, this stays the closest to the flavor and structure of the originals--a real pleasure to read and reread, just like the originals!
All the elements, only some of the charm
All 12 of these short stories have the key elements of original Holmes/Watson stories,
but the ones written by or with John Dickson Carr seem to me to have missed the savor and feeling of the originals. But the last 6, written by Adrian Conan Doyle, are terrific and well worth reading. The gimmick here, and it's not a new one, is to tell
the stories that Watson refers to in passing. Sometimes they seem rather far from what Watson might more likely have been referring to, but sometimes they're exactly what one fleetingly imagined from the original. Anyone who wants more Holmes stories,
especially ones quite close to the originals in feel and details, should be delighted by some of these stories.
"It's up to you, Watson"
"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.
Some of the best Sherlock Holmes stories Written by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr
I just got this book recently and I love it. It has the Conan Doyle flavor which I really like. I would highly recommend this book.
Exploits of Sherlock Holmes - a treat for Holmes' fans
The stories in the Exploits of Sherlock Holmes carries on the great tradition of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Conan Doyle. The stories are written by Adrain Conay Doyle and John Dickson Carr with great accuracy for the Victorian period of time. And the stories captures the relaionship between Holmes and Dr. Watson. The addition of great plot twists to the stories makes this book a must have addition to the Sherlock Holmes' fan library.
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