This Old Book

A recent viewing of the excellent BBC series “Sherlock” sent me hunting my shelves for this softcover pocketbook. This one of the earliest books I owned, perhaps inherited from my father, so it could date to the middle of the 20th Century. It is undated on the copyright page and was published by Award Books Inc. (“Best Seller Classic Series - Specially selected immortal literature, handsomely designed with luxurious, leatherette finish covers. A distinguished addition to all home libraries.”) Unlike most editions bearing this title, it contains just seven stories, not 12: “The Red-Headed League,” “The Boxcomber Valley Mystery,” “The Five Orange Pips,” “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” and “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” For a boy of 10 in 1970s America, this England was an exotic and nearly indecipherable place. I eventually sought out the rest (many of them better than the ones in this anthology) as well as many pastiches and inspired knockoffs {“The 7 Percent Solution” was an early favorite, with Sigmund Freud treating Holmes). The BBC series transforms Watson into a blogger, a masterstroke. You could well imagine him typing this opener to “Five Orange Pips” into Tumblr…

When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ‘82 and ‘90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however, have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so high a degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some, too have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanation founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to him. There is, however, one of these last which was so remarkable in its details and so startling in its results that I am tempted to give some account of it…