Estudio en rojo/El signo de los cuatro (A Study in Scarlet/The Sign of the Four) Book

Read a couple of years ago. Listening to the Derek Jacobi audiobooks now. Added thoughts on narration and such over at my blog: here and here

Overall star rating: 3.5

A Study in Scarlet - 3 stars

There are some truly brilliant parts of this novel, the growing relationship between Holmes and Watson, the interactions between Holmes and the police, the deductive reasoning that sees Holmes pulling solutions almost from thin air, the mystery itself...Why then only three stars? Well... once the mystery is solved - at around the halfway point - all those good enjoyable things that one reads a Holmes story for disappear and the narrative shifts into a third person account of the murderer's backstory explaining his motives and relationship with his victims.

It's a jarring change and not really a very welcome one. After spending the first half of the book invested in the relationship between Holmes and Watson and being fascinated by the correct conclusions Holmes could leap to based on almost nothing, I didn't particularly care to get invested in this second set of characters. The most explanation of motive I needed was a quick monologue from the murderer summarising the key points - not a multi-chapter epic of lost love. But a multi-chapter story-within-a-story was what I got, and it simply didn't quite work. The third person narrative seemed awkward and ill-fitting with the rest of the book, which reads as a personal account told through the eyes of Dr Watson. If the Holmes canon is meant to be written by Dr Watson, then this section doesn't quite fit - the information is a bit too detailed for someone who wasn't there, even if they have received a second-hand account, and the tone is completely different from Watson's bluff, amiable style of writing. I kept asking myself where this omnipotent narrator had come from and wondering when we could get back to Holmes and Watson.

It didn't help that none of the characters in this story-within-the-story were very interesting. There was a typical older mentor figure, his adopted daughter Lucy, and a rough handsome young hunter, all felt rather sketched in and none of the other characters were fleshed out even enough to be worth mentioning. The father was fatherly; the daughter was one of those annoying perky orphan kids who say things like 'Oh! but why didn't you tell me we were going to die? We can join mother then' but eventually grows up into the most beautiful woman ever whilst still preserving her childish innocence and 'charm' (I use that term loosely); and the hunter was rough, young and handsome and well…you can totally see where that story is going, right? Insta-love! That's right! Don't you just love that trope? It's all very disappointing and predictable, especially as the reader already knows what has to happen and already knows that Doyle is a much, much, better writer than this who can actually write fully developed characters because we've just cut away from them to read this second-rate part.

I'll be fair on Doyle though. This was his first Sherlock Holmes book and it didn't actually receive any real attention until his short stories were already a hit and he had solidified his style and characters a bit more. When it's good it's very good, and he does learn from this mistake in future books. Dodgy flashbacks and inaccurate portrayals of Mormonism aside, it's worth reading for Sherlock Holmes alone - the mystery is just icing on the cake. He's a wonderfully real character, even as he manages almost inhuman feats of observation and deduction. He has his flaws - a rather superior attitude being the major one and very patchy knowledge on anything that doesn't pertain to his own narrow interests in solving crime for another. He's not 'perfect', he's as occasionally frustrating and annoying as someone with superior skills really is but he is amazingly charismatic. (Watch as these traits change until he becomes a caricature of himself in future stories though).

Now that many of his methods have been adopted both by the police and fictional detectives, you might think he would have lost some of his unique appeal - but I don't think he has. The style of detective fiction may have shifted to 'show the reader all the clues and see if they can work it out', but Sherlock's cold, calculated analysis of clues the reader (and Watson) weren't even aware of until he mentions them, are still a joy to wonderful to read.

So despite the low rating I really do think this is a worthwhile read. Just remember though; they do get better! (And then worse...)


The Sign of the Four - 3.5 stars

A much more satisfying read/listen than A Study in Scarlet and one that seems to have learnt from the truly dire mistake of that story. Whilst there is a flashback here to the antagonist's past and the motivations for his actions, it's a lot shorter told as a confession - with all the bias and slant to be expected in first person narration - and fits in almost seamlessly with the style of the rest of the story. Also in its favour is the fact that the backstory is a lot more interesting in its own right. But there's a whole mystery to solve before we get to that part so I'll backtrack towards the beginning.

The Sign of the Four opens with the introduction - and actually one of the few mentions - of Sherlock Holmes cocaine habit and exploration into his psychology. It's one of the things I love about Holmes that I don't get with my otherwise beloved Poirot - he's not just a thinking-machine but a complex person. He's a man of extremes and, if he was non-fictional and alive today would probably be diagnosed with a serious form of mood disorder; if there's an interesting crime he'll be in the middle of a rush of activity but as soon as it's solved he can flip, in an instant to lethargy and (then legal) drug abuse. At the start of the story he's been in this lethargic, melancholy state for several months. Holmes is too clinically detached a character for him to be very likable or relatable on a personal level - even as someone who suffers from depression myself - but it does make him a more interesting and human character to read about than the earlier version in A Study in Scarlet.

Following a pattern that becomes relatively common in the short stories Watson does his best to get Holmes out of this funk by prompting several small examples of Holmes' deductive genius - that Watson had gone to a specific place earlier in the day, the family history of Watson's pocket watch etc. etc. These mainly serve to either show or remind the reader of Holmes' skill and competence before we get to the real mystery, and it works - though I have to say I do get a bit tired of the 'this type of mud is only found in one place!' solutions as they do seem a bit of a cheat and I don't always agree with Holmes that his explanation is the only one, even if it is the most likely. However, it is only with the arrival of Mary Morstan and her strange story of her father, who disappeared several years ago, and the anonymous pearls she started receiving several years later, that Holmes snaps out of his lethargy and starts getting interested.

Here again, you can see Doyle developing a framework used in later stories - the odd but seemingly but non-criminal story, that leads to something much darker and nastier than it first appears once untangled. Not that a mysteriously disappearing dad isn't pretty dang dark, but that it isn't a straight up simple crime such as being called to a murder scene - detective work needs to be done to even discover the crime in the first place. It's a more complex, and arguably more interesting, device than the relatively straight forward plot to A Study in Scarlet and has the benefit of a more emotional core in trying to find the truth for a living character than A Study in Scarlet's quest to identify the murderer of a character only introduced as a corpse. Of course Holmes gets the basics in about five minutes flat but it takes a while longer for the full story to be revealed, by which time the character's have themselves a real crime to deal with and we get to the meat of the story.

And the meat of the story…well it sounds almost Robert Louis Stevenson/'boys own adventure' in places; wooden legs, stolen treasure, hidden murders, and exotic weapons. It's got action and adventure tropes in spades - there's even a chase sequence! But the mystery itself well… Holmes sums it up best himself when he says that normal everyday crimes that offer no distinctive clues are harder to solve than the big ones with lots of unusual elements are. And here there are so many clues; footprints, exotic weapons, poisoned darts, the motif of a man with a wooden leg. Holmes is hardly drawing his conclusions from small inconsequential elements - the basic story (ignoring specific backstory elements only the villain would know) is practically written over the crime scene for anyone with eyes and ears to draw conclusions from. But, of course, the police and Watson are both baffled,

The backstory, when we get to it, though, is fascinating - perhaps more so to me because it focusses on a period of colonial history that I've studied; the India Mutiny of 1857. Even if you know nothing about it though it's a more wonderful and exciting backdrop than Mormon Utah, and there's a lot more going on than a few blokes all fancying the same girl. There are some, unpleasant, elements of exoticism and Victorian racial theory however - one apparently universally bloodthirsty and violent tribe is described as 'naturally hideous' by an anthropology textbook and 'monstrous' in appearance by the narrator. You've just got to grit your teeth and remember the time period if you find yourself being too annoyed. But there's also an, admittedly not entirely sympathetic, depiction of Sikhs as being worth a white man's loyalty that redeems it slightly (many Sikhs fought alongside the British in putting down the mutiny and they were favoured by the Victorian colonial regime set up afterwards). It's a dark and brutal chapter of colonial/Indian history though that works as a perfect backdrop to the crime and sets a much better and more atmospheric tone for the whole book than is ever achieved in A Study in Scarlet.

This book, as a whole, is simply more grown up in every way than its predecessor; the narrative issues have been ironed out, more humanity has been given to the characters, the tone is much more consistent, and there's an emotional heart to the story. Now I don't actually rate this emotional heart particularly highly or find it remotely necessary for this type of book - it consists of Watson rather fancying the female client and if there's one thing Doyle isn't good at, it's romance - but it succeeds far better than the romantic insta-love storyline in A Study in Scarlet. This is a lot to do with the fact that we're privy to Watson's thoughts and understand his bias but mainly because Mary is a fundamentally more interesting, complex, and less annoying character than Lucy ever was. It may not be my favourite thread of the storyline but it doesn't detract at all from my enjoyment of the rest of the book.

It's not a 'perfect' Holmes story - but the elements of the character and storytelling technique are still being introduced and developed. However you can see here, far more than in the first Sherlock Holmes book, why the Holmes stories took off the way they did.



Random almost unrelated recommendation! The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman - a victorian-set mystery novel that also features the India Mutiny as a key element of the backstory. Aimed at children/teenagers but an enjoyable read that features both a pretty awesome female protagonist and a female villain who isn't a femme fatale.