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Silver2195 posted:I'm surprised to see Musgrave Ritual listed as a top story. It's a classic idiot plot; it was extremely obvious that the "ritual" was a set of fairly straightforward instructions to finding a buried treasure, but apparently several generations of Musgraves couldn't figure it out. I read a lot of Holmes when I was in school and re-read the first two books last year for a book group. I was amazed at how many of them sucked; I'd be surprised if I'd stick my neck out for half a dozen of them. On another note: has anyone read Gladys Mitchell? Wikipedia makes her sound interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Mitchell posted:Mitchell was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and throughout the 1930s was considered to be one of the "Big Three women detective writers", but she often challenged and mocked the conventions of the genre – notably in her earliest books, such as the first novel Speedy Death, where there is a particularly surprising twist to the plot, or her parodies of Christie in The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929) and The Saltmarsh Murders (1932). Her plots and settings were unconventional with Freudian psychology, witchcraft (notably in The Devil at Saxon Wall [1935] and The Worsted Viper [1943]) and the supernatural (naiads and Nessie, ghosts and Greek gods) as recurrent themes.
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Oct 15, 2019 06:14
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Silver2195 posted:I would say the weakest stories in Adventures are A Case of Identity, The Man With the Twisted Lip, and The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb. Also, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches isn't bad on its own, but it stands out as an example of Doyle reusing ideas; the too-good-to-be-true job offer setup is from The Red-Headed League and will be used again in The Adventure of the Stockbroker's Clerk, while the domestic abuse subplot and the dog subplot will arguably be reused in The Hound of the Baskervilles. I didn't dislike the stories because they were implausible, just that I found them disappointing, either as detective stories or stories in general. "The Red-Headed League" has some crazy images in it, but it leads up to a pretty standard denouement. "The Five Orange Pips" has a deus ex machina. In "The Engineer's Thumb" essentially nothing happens. anilEhilated posted:You could also argue that the vast majority fails the whole show-don't-tell principle because Holmes pulls out solutions the reader was never given a clue about all the goddamn time, based on a painting never described, a peculiar type of cigarette ash, whatever. And there's too many of these, or ones where someone shows up to tell Holmes what the answer is (e.g. "The Crooked Man".) Mind you, the stories that work are really good: "Silver Blaze", "The Blue Carbuncle", even "The Speckled Band" is mostly good. Maybe Holmes should have investigated more animal-related crimes. Rand Brittain posted:Gladys Mitchell is mostly unique to me in making her sleuth an unashamedly awful person. It's probably worth giving a few of her books a try. Thanks!
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Oct 16, 2019 03:02
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Silver2195 posted:To be clear, my issues with the Holmes stories I dislike now generally aren't their implausibility. Oh yeah, we're on the same page there for sure. Regarding "The Speckled Band": If it was just the snake escaping and killing people accidentally it'd work in a Freudian, gothic way. That way the mystery could have made sense and still had the detection aspect. Could even have had a red herring involving Holmes mistaking the bites for Indian poison.
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Oct 16, 2019 16:18
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Silver2195 posted:Eh. Speckled Band is an important forerunner of the Dickson Carr-style “impossible crime” story, isn’t it? If Roylott was innocent in the way you say would make a better story, then it would just be a Murders in the Rue Morgue knockoff instead. I don't know about your first point - although "Rue Morgue" is a locked room - but I don't think it would be just a knockoff. The relationship between the sailor and the killer in "Rue Morgue" is essentially accidental; there's none of the subtext that Roylott deliberately endangered his stepdaughters, and the colonialism aspect is amplified. So I think it'd be a development, not a knockoff. Speaking of knockoffs, though, I just read "Rue Morgue", and Dupin practically says Holmes' "When you have eliminated the impossible..." line: "Now, brought to this conclusion in so unequivocal a manner as we are, it is not our part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities."
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Oct 18, 2019 05:07
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Rand Brittain posted:So, Gideon spawned a conversation about the "rules" of a detective story. We talk about Knox a lot, but nobody actually followed Knox's rules to the letter, not even the Detection Club. Mystery stories focus on someone investigating a human-scale mystery and the reader is able to read the story as a puzzle as well as a narrative: fantastic elements* are forbidden, sudden realisations and strong emotions must be very plausible if they affect the puzzle, the reader must work if she wants to solve the mystery herself, and she must be able to propose and later disprove viable alternate solutions, and so on. Mind you, this is negotiable if you've got a good reason, like HA mentioning noirs. Murder on the Orient Express, for instance, comes close to breaking that second rule by playing with that "single solution" point... the other hypothesis is never disproved, after all... *unless carefully defined; in The Dragon Waiting, an alternate history fantasy novel, one character uses the differences between the setting's real vampires and superstitions about them to solve a murder.
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Sep 29, 2020 13:00
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