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<blockquote data-quote="Alenda" data-source="post: 5774500" data-attributes="member: 15215">Something important to remember about the early Sherlock Holmes stories... they were written in the late 1800s when the mystery genre was just barely getting started. There were a handful of authors out there writing mysteries (Poe, Lecoq, Wilkie Collins), but the formula for mystery fiction had yet to be established.When we read Holmes nowadays, we come to it with modern-day expectations of what a mystery story should be. We expect a crime, the guilty party to be introduced as a character at some point, and we expect to be able to &quot;figure out&quot; the mystery either right along with the detective or even before the detective. Most of these conventions, though, weren't really popularized or standardized in detective fiction until Agatha Christie came along and created the &quot;whodunit.&quot;Hopefully that will help as you read the stories?I disagree, actually. There are quite a number of Sherlock Holmes stories where he comes to the incorrect conclusion, fails to figure something out, or fails to catch the bad guy. He has made quite a few mistakes along the way... after all, he's only human. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Couldn't agree more!! By a happy coincidence, I started re-reading the SH stories this past weekend. It will be my 7th reading of them, and I love them so! They led to my love of all things Conan Doyle which has lasted for over 15 years.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Alenda, post: 5774500, member: 15215"] Something important to remember about the early Sherlock Holmes stories... they were written in the late 1800s when the mystery genre was just barely getting started. There were a handful of authors out there writing mysteries (Poe, Lecoq, Wilkie Collins), but the formula for mystery fiction had yet to be established. When we read Holmes nowadays, we come to it with modern-day expectations of what a mystery story should be. We expect a crime, the guilty party to be introduced as a character at some point, and we expect to be able to "figure out" the mystery either right along with the detective or even before the detective. Most of these conventions, though, weren't really popularized or standardized in detective fiction until Agatha Christie came along and created the "whodunit." Hopefully that will help as you read the stories? I disagree, actually. There are quite a number of Sherlock Holmes stories where he comes to the incorrect conclusion, fails to figure something out, or fails to catch the bad guy. He has made quite a few mistakes along the way... after all, he's only human. :) Couldn't agree more!! By a happy coincidence, I started re-reading the SH stories this past weekend. It will be my 7th reading of them, and I love them so! They led to my love of all things Conan Doyle which has lasted for over 15 years. [/QUOTE]

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