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Rating: 
Summary: Get up and wander through the landscape of English crime
Review: Conan Doyle is a genius. When he invented his famous detective Sherlock Holmes he found a gold mine for publication in the press in England from 1891 to 1927, and of course for book publication later on.
The second element we have to put forward is the strange taste the English public has had for a long time for detective stories. After Conan Doyle Agatha Christie will come and many others. The English are attracted by the delinquent side of social life, by these shady characters who are taking advantage of their neighbors to make an illegal and immoral living, though at times we may wonder if it is really immoral, if those who have all the riches they have, by birth most of the time, are not even more immoral than the crooks who are taking advantage of them. In a way these stories, and the English interest for these fringes of social life, show that a sort of bad conscience goes along with it and they want to explore it.
These stories show that criminals are not crazy people but are very rational people who use their brains to find some loopholes in the system that they can exploit to their own benefit. Most of these stories are depicting very clever criminals who really transform crime into some profitable industry. And they also know about modern technology and use the knowledge they can find in science to improve their productivity and their profit. In the stories we can see modern inventions coming into the picture little by little, such as the telegraph, telegrams and the telephone.
These stories also show that the detective who will be able to stop these criminals will have to use a very sophisticated way of thinking, trying to get the knowledge that criminals need to commit their crimes even before them. It also shows, from beginning to end, that the society Conan Doyle is speaking of is the society of the train in which other means of transportation are secondary, except horse-drawn carriages of any type within the narrow limits of London downtown area. Beyond, Sherlock Holmes uses the train, be it the Metropolitan train or railways going outside.
These stories eventually enable us to draw the main trait of Sherlock Holmes's personality and way of thinking : to use any kind of knowledge he may have accumulated in his mind, to feed his mind with new knowledge all the time, and to always look at a case from an intuitive point of view that tries to build up various alternative hypotheses among which he will eventually choose when time comes and new facts appear. This is an essential mental stand : never reduce yourself to one solution and never close your mind to alternative explanations, no matter how farfetched, provided they fit with the facts you know. Then you just have to look for the missing elements that can fill the holes in your various hypotheses.
The final element I would like to put forward is that Conan Doyle is definitely of his time : the characters represent the ideas of his time and there is practically no romanticism about these criminals. Some may even reflect very dark sides of the ideology of the period. One example : the heavy antisemitism of the « criminal » in the very last story, published in 1927, The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place, shows how this man is warped by his financial interest, but also how the justice of the land will take a lenient attitude in front of his « crime » which is not killing anyone or stealing anything, but just cheating with circumstances to evade « the Jews » who are holding him in their hands because of his debts. Is this justice excusing the unpleasant things he does because by doing so he is able to evade, temporarily, these Jews ? One may think so.
Conan Doyle in other words is able to show the sad and sorry sides of his society, without ever leaning towards any ideology that may ask for this society to be changed : he even goes as far as condemning such attempts, or rather those who represent such attempts, like the Nihilists he deals with in one story at least (The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez).Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Rating: 
Summary: A complete waste of money, part 2
Review: Sherlock Holmes collections are a dime a dozen. I bought this edition solely for the promise of the Strand illustrations. However, this edition is very cheaply done both in the quality of the paper and the illustrations. The illustrations are fuzzy and sometimes so dark as to be mere blobs. They look like really poor photocopies. I returned my copy immediately. I also bought the collection of novels by the same publisher, and the quality was just as poor.
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