Will you please for the love of fiction stop trying to crowbar serialized American western chapbooks into your Sherlock Holmes novels? It's embarrassing for you and annoying for us.
I suppose the only thing to be said in his defence is that Westerns were still something *exotic* at the time he was writing, rather than a hackneyed cliche.
To give him his due, the one I'm currently slogging through (in The Valley of Fear) isn't quite as embarrassing as the one in Study in Scarlet...the more outrageous Yosemite Sam dialogue has been trimmed back a bit. Sadly, though, the cipher-ish pretty-but-empty-headed Victorian maiden remains a fixture. ("Oh, so you're a cold-blooded murderer who's part of a gang that's terrorizing our settlement and part of everything I despise? Come and take me now!")
I was reading an intro to The Hound of the Baskervilles last month, which either stated or raised the question why it was the most popular of all the novels. The answer seems pretty screamingly obvious to me: it's the only full Holmes novel without a fucking western dumped in the middle of it!
it's the only full Holmes novel without a fucking western dumped in the middle of it!
Indeed! It's probably dated the least because Doyle managed to *anticipate* the popularity of a Mystery on the Moor. It's generally more tautly-plotted because the American Subplot is only alluded to at the denouement, rather than shoehorned in in the middle chapters.
Amendment: The Sign of the Four doesn't have a western in it, but it does have a nearly equally interminable denoument backstory about some jewelry heist in India that takes us away from the main plot for a good stretch of forever.
No wonder I like the short stories so much better: with them, Doyle never gives the impression of having eaten a romance novel-slash-penny dreadful and thrown up in the middle of his Victorian murder mystery.
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I suppose the only thing to be said in his defence is that Westerns were still something *exotic* at the time he was writing, rather than a hackneyed cliche.
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I was reading an intro to The Hound of the Baskervilles last month, which either stated or raised the question why it was the most popular of all the novels. The answer seems pretty screamingly obvious to me: it's the only full Holmes novel without a fucking western dumped in the middle of it!
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Indeed! It's probably dated the least because Doyle managed to *anticipate* the popularity of a Mystery on the Moor. It's generally more tautly-plotted because the American Subplot is only alluded to at the denouement, rather than shoehorned in in the middle chapters.
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No wonder I like the short stories so much better: with them, Doyle never gives the impression of having eaten a romance novel-slash-penny dreadful and thrown up in the middle of his Victorian murder mystery.
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It's the Council of the Ring of the Victorian era. (In all srsness, you can just skip that stuff altogether.)
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