No Sheet, Sherlock?

I've been reading a great deal of Sherlock Holmes lately; going back and forth between some of Doyle's short stories and "The Sherlockian" by Graham Moore (which is a fabulous book!).  I've always been a fan of mysteries and thought it was high time for me to jump on the master's band wagon.  Doyle's stories still hold up, which is no surprise since there seems to be an onslaught of pop-culture specials in the last year or so.  Between the BBC's "Sherlock" with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman and "Elementary" with Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu, we're getting more and more Holmes from both sides of the pond.

I, of course, knew pretty much everything everyone else knows about Sherlock already, even though I had never read any of the stories.  But I never realized, just how much authors rely on the structure and plotting of Doyle when writing new mysteries.  One of my favorite series is the Nero Wolfe Mysteries written by Rex Stout.  If you've never heard of this mystery series (which were written between 1934-1975), see if this sounds familiar. A cantankerous and brilliant detective, whose obsessions include orchids and beer solves crimes using his right-hand man Archie's legwork and sheer deduction in a brownstone in New York City, but is baffled and annoyed by those of the opposite sex.  Change some of the names and move his brown-stone to London, and you've got 40 odd new Sherlock stories.  There's something comforting by that.  We all know what we're getting into when we pick up a mystery, thanks to Doyle.  It's assumed that we'll spend pages upon pages wondering who the culprit is, only to be fooled again by some twist at the end.  That's what makes Sherlock and about a dozen other detectives like him, so endlessly entertaining: the thrill of the chase.

Now that I'm here, I, unlike Sherlock who always knows his next move, have no idea where I was going with this post.  I guess I've written all of this just to say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite the genius and anyone who has ever spent days wrapped up in a Whodunit? should thank him for creating this maddening and fascinating detective.

PS: The title of this post was stolen from the BBC's "Sherlock" and I find it endlessly amusing!