A Certain Slant of Light

After my joyous experiences with Dracula Daily and Dickens Daily (an Advent-calendar style read-through of A Christmas Carol, in 2023 I signed up for a smorgasbord of email reading adventures: Whale Weekly (Moby-Dick), Divine Comedy Weekly, and Letters from Watson (the Sherlock Holmes short stories).

Whale Weekly and Divine Comedy Weekly both quickly fell by the wayside. As it turns out, I still dislike Moby-Dick just as much as I did in high school, and although I do still hope to read Dante’s Inferno someday, Longfellow’s translation is not the one I would pick. (The substack editor had to choose one in the public domain, of course, but on my own I would not be hampered by this restriction.)

But I did keep on trucking with Letters from Watson! Indeed, I even supplemented the short stories by reading the novels, as well. And although the project didn’t convert me to a fully-blown Sherlock Holmes fan, as I rather hoped it might, I did enjoy the stories, and also enjoyed experiencing them serially, just as the original audience would have experienced them as they came out in magazines. (I don’t think the emails followed the exact same divisions as the original serialization, but nonetheless the spirit of serialization was there.)

It was also interesting, on a sort of meta level, to realize that all the famous Sherlock Holmes stories are early stories, both in terms of internal chronology and publication date. Maybe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a point when he killed Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls!

(Exeunt, pursued by enraged Sherlock Holmes fans bearing pitchforks.)

But no. Killing Sherlock Holmes in the 1890s would have done us out of the final bit of Sherlockiana with which Letters from Watson rounded out the year. Sherlock Holmes goes undercover (!) for two years (!!!) posing as an Irish-American spy, passing British secrets to a German spymaster (!!!!!!) only to blow the German’s entire spy operation on the eve of the Great War (!!!!!!!!! a thousand exclamation points!!!!!!). It’s just so… I don’t even know the word that I want… It’s like Jack Kirby inventing Captain America so that he can go punch Hitler in the face. Everything has gone terrible wrong, and isn’t it nice to pretend for a bit that Sherlock Holmes is on the case, and will help us sort everything out?

***

Even though the project didn’t convert me to a Holmes fan, I enjoyed reading the experience so much that I’ve signed up for two more such projects this year. Letters Regarding Jeeves includes the public domain Jeeves and Wooster stories, which shockingly I’ve never read! It starts officially on Valentine’s Day, although on New Year’s Day it sent out an early Reggie Pepper story, a forerunner of Bertie Wooster, so if you sign up do make sure to check that out.

The other is Letters from Bunny, a readalong of the Raffles short stories. I’ve read these, but years ago, so it’s a good time for a reread. This one starts on the Ides of March (“The Ides of March” being the title of the first Raffles story).

I am a little concerned that I may have bitten off more than I can chew in signing up for two of these, in the same year that I start a new job… but after all each email is quite short, and if one of them ends up falling by the wayside, what of it? I’ll keep going as long as it’s fun.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear turns out to have exactly the same structure as A Study in Scarlet: part one involves Holmes’s investigation into a mystery, which turns out to have an extensive backstory in the American West, so at the beginning of part two we jump across an ocean and about twenty years back to spend many chapters learning all the necessary backstory, before letting Holmes wrap it up in a chapter or two.

However, Doyle must have gotten some complaints about the abrupt shift between Parts One and Two in Scarlet, because in Fear Watson carefully informs us that he is now going to spend many chapters unfolding the events many years ago that led to the current investigation. This is quite helpful, actually! I did spend a few chapters in Scarlet going “...is this still the same book actually?”

I’ve also been reading along with Letters from Watson, which sends you all the Sherlock Holmes stories in reasonably sized emails). Originally I intended to post about these stories as they came in - in fact, I was hoping that a year devoted to Sherlock Holmes might at last make me a Sherlock Holmes fan - but in actual fact I haven’t had much to say about them. They’re well-paced and fun and they feel rather slight. Maybe I just don’t have the Sherlock Holmes port in my brain that makes other people go gaga over him and all his successors.

However, I simply must complain about “A Case of Identity,” in which ( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This holiday weekend was SO cold that I basically spent it ensconced in a chair under a blanket, reading. In no particular order, I read:

Elisabeth Kyle’s Girl with a Pen, a 1963 children’s biographical novel of Charlotte Bronte’s life, lightly fictionalized (nothing to the excesses of many modern“biographical” novels, however) and wholly absorbing. I picked it up on a whim and zoomed right through in a day. It begins with a visit from Bronte’s school friend Ellen Nussey, to whom Bronte shyly admits she would like to write, and ends just after Bronte arrives at the publisher’s office to announce she is the author of the blockbuster hit Jane Eyre. An unusually triumphal arc for Bronte’s life! The secret of a happy ending is simply where you stop.

I also greatly enjoyed Carol Ryrie Brink’s Louly, a companion piece to Two Are Better than One, about a pair of best friends in early 20th century Idaho. In Louly, Chrys and Cordy are a little older and have expanded their friendship to include lively neighbor girl Louly, who is always coming up with fun ideas for pretend plays - especially after her parents go east to visit relatives, leaving the children to look after themselves for six weeks… Just a really fun mid-twentieth century novel about children having good times (mostly) without adults.

And I finished Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, a lengthy historical novel set during the French Revolution, which I cribbed off a list of “slashy books on gutenberg.org” many years ago. I didn’t think it was actually that slashy (your mileage may vary; maybe “main character motivated by best friend’s brutal premeditated murder-by-duel” does it for you), and Andre-Louis is an omnicompetent trickster figure always ready with a quip, which is a character type that I’ve soured on in my old age… but darn it if I didn’t like him! The book details his adventures in early Revolutionary France, as he moves from revolutionary orator to actor in an improvisational theater group (playing, of course, Scaramouche) to assistant at a fencing school, all strung together on the thread of Andre-Louis’s thirst for vengeance against the villainous nobleman who killed his best friend AND ALSO wants to marry Andre-Louis’s beloved Aline.

Last but not least, I went into a brief period of mourning when the daily Christmas Carol email came to its end on December 26th. Simply the perfect read-along experience. Excerpts just the right size to enjoy of a morning. The perfect infusion of holiday cheer. Plus the continuing enjoyment of comparing the original to The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is quite a faithful adaptation considering that it is full of Muppets.

What I’m Reading Now

I have decided that life is too short to read Moby-Dick twice, so I’ve dropped Whale Weekly, but I’m still trucking with The Lightning Conductor (a couple of installments behind however! Sorry Molly…) and quite enjoying Letters from Watson, which kicked off with a couple of chapters from The Study in Scarlet.

What I Plan to Read Next

Letters from Watson is focused on the Holmes short stories, and only did the first couple of chapters of A Study in Scarlet because they detail Watson and Holmes’ first meeting, but I’ve decided to read the novels off my own bat as we come to them in the timeline. So I’ll be finishing up the rest of A Study in Scarlet.