“He must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, in his preface to The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: "I fear that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences. This must cease and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary." The insistence: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson would go, as would their stories, and would remain gone. And now: I have read all of the canon. That is: There are no more Sherlock Holmes stories for me to read, for the first time. [Continue reading.]

Clean slate

Apologies in advance for whatever craziness you may find in the post that follows. I’m feeling a little strange—I’m running on a cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics and the threat of ache and sleeplessness and worry. (Nothing strange about all that, though, except for the antibiotics.) (I need to go visit my grandfather in the hospital [he was rushed there this morning, pneumonia, goodness, our hearts can't take this anymore], and I need to let the haze pass, and so now I’m sitting in a café with too much sunlight and too much people, and I’m hoping the relevant parts of my brain align at the soonest.) [Continue reading.]

Approximating normal

I’ve been—knock on wood—sailing calmer waters lately. Sure, my ever-lengthening list of gripes remains handy, but the clusterfucks are at a manageable, if not tolerable, level. I’m only able to articulate this now, actually—at the close of a day that’s oddly restful despite the terrible weather and the work that comes with it; at the close of a weekend that was fun and the happy kind of exhausting, give or take a few grumbles from my frail, mortal body. I’m in a good mood, if only because I’m not in a foul mood. Yeah, that’s cheery. Here’s another: The reading’s picking up, if only because the reading actually exists. [Continue reading.]

‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’

Fear is the tale’s lynchpin. Though preternatural hounds and a family curse form the foundations of Holmes’s new case, The Hound is a story of how fear kills—how the very idea of something monstrous in the shadows can be lethal, and how sly little villains can successfully seize on that facet of human nature. And, of course, it will take the straight-spined rationality of the Holmesian world—of Sherlock Holmes himself, and the as-vital-as-ever Watson—to reinstate order in the moors. [Continue reading.]

Stuff I’ve Been Reading While I Disappeared from the Glittery World of the Intarwebz

It’s definitely an improvement: I’m guilty about abandoning this blog for fewer hours in a day. The usual excuses: Work’s been crazier than ever, I like sleeping, I like reading, I am lazy, blah and blah. Still, though, I owe it to my O.C. tendencies to kick-start this blog with a moratorium of the books [...]

On The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — “the last court of appeal” — by Arthur Conan Doyle

Aherm. Previously, in Sasha’s Escapades with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, MD -- Baker Street, the canon, and all that sleuthing jazz: ♦ A Study in Scarlet. My first Sherlock Holmes, the first book, which “beat my preconceptions to a pulp.” Just so giddy to be part of ~Holmesiana. ♦ Sherlock Holmes Selected Stories. Which [...]

“It was indeed like old times when, at that hour, I found myself seated beside him in a hansom, my revolver in my pocket, and the thrill of adventure in my heart.”

In glancing over my notes of the seventy-odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the [...]

marginalia || A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle

My first Sherlock Holmes! I won a giveaway on Twitter a while back, for the complete Sherlock Holmes canon from Oxford World's Classics. They've been on my nightstand [well, what surface I could find] since I got them from the post office. So, I figured this would've been as good a time as any to [...]