fandomnumbergenerator | Entries tagged with sherlock holmes

"“Which is it to-day,” I asked, “morphine or cocaine?”
[Holmes] raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
“It is cocaine,” he said, “a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?”."

—

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

1) Was he reading German? (German Gothic type is now called black-letter, but I don’t know if that was true ca. 1890)

2) Languid? Was ACD just confused about stimulants, or is he saying that Holmes is calmed by cocaine (consistent with the mind as a “racing engine” metaphor, maybe analagous to a modern diagnosis of ADHD)

3) There is something pitch perfect about Holmes trying to shut Watson up with his, “Would you care to try it?” Either he tries it (extremely unlikely) and then doesn’t have a leg to stand on, or he gets splutteringly mad trying to figure out if Holmes is just messing with him.

I’ve decided that ACD Watson has prosapagnosia and that’s why he’s so consistently taken in by Holmes’s disguises.

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “His Last Bow“ (published in 1917 but set in 1914)

I pretty much understood this to mean WWI in the original story.

Also, Sherlock Holmes with a goatee! ("He was a tall, gaunt man of sixty, with clear-cut features and a goatee beard which gave him a general resemblance to the caricatures of Uncle Sam.”)

"I have found it wise to impress clients with a sense of power, and so I gave him some of my conclusions."

—

Sherlock Holmes narrating “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1926

Always a showman.

"He spoke perfect English, was pleasing in his manners, and as good-looking a man as ever I saw in my life. In some way we struck quite a friendship, this young fellow and I. He seemed to take a fancy to me from the first, and within two days of our meeting he came to see me at Lee. One thing led to another, and it ended in his inviting me out to spend a few days at his house,"

—

Scott Eccles in “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1908

Men’s friendships in Victorian/Edwardian writing seem so foreign. I cannot imagine a straight man describing his friend like this now. And maybe there was meant to be some queer subtext even at the time, but I don’t think so.

Or maybe what I mean to say is that men’s friendships now are so weird. Since I could see a woman describing another woman this way. Though, I’ve slept with a lot of my female friends, so I’m not sure I really have my pulse on how straight women relate to each other.

"But, you know, I have been trained as an actress myself. Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives."

—

Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia” Aurthur Conan Doyle, 1891

Is anyone else disappointed that we never got to see Irene dressed as a boy?

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Entries tagged with sherlock holmes

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