Book Binge

I love weekends!  I finally get to do exactly what I want to do and I'm not too tired to do it.  This weekend, that thing I seem to want to do is read.  I finally finished "The Sherlockian."  It was fantastic but slightly disappointing.  After such an intriguing story, the ending was fairly anti-climatic.  I hate books that just end.  I like things to be tied up in a little bow, which I guess is why I like mysteries so much.  The killer is always caught by the genius detective and will always get what he/she deserves.  But I'd still recommend it to anyone who likes Sherlock and/or mysteries.  The story itself was a creative take and the mystery was worthy of Sherlock himself.

Then it was on to another of Doyle's original Sherlock mysteries. I'm slowly making my way through the short stories.  They've become my intermission between books.  The stories are good, but they don't really hold my interest for long periods of time, so it's difficult to read them all at once.  I actually think they work better spread out since that's how Doyle intended for them to be published.

Then I was in a funk because I wanted to get to a book store to pick up one of the dozens of books on my Pinterest shelf, but ran out of time.  Luckily, I usually have a backlog so I chose "And God Created the Au Pair." The bestie lent me this one months ago and has been on my case to read it the entire time I've had it.  Lucky for her, I'm in my London state of mind, and a book about an Au Pair living in London, sounds about perfect right now.  That is of course, until I can get to a Barnes and Noble : )

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!