By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
ISBN: 9-780143-570325
First published 1887
162 pages
Publisher: popularpenguins.com
5/5 Stars
A fantastic book, the first adventure of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. This tells the brief tale of how they met, how they lived together and how they cracked their first case together. It is written is an easy flowing form – not at all like a 19th Century novel, more like a popular 20th Century piece of fiction, even though it was written in 1887.
What is amazing though, is on Page 85, the story turns into a Western!
Before Zane Grey and the Riders of the Purple Sage, Conan Doyle has created the first Western story, interspersed with a London based crime-narrative.
The close and confining, dirty and muggy London cityscape are as different as possible from the open ‘alkali’ plains of the Utah and the American mid-west.
These two narratives are resolved before the end of the story – but it is an interesting thought experiment – what if Conan Doyle had written Westerns instead of Detective novels!
Recommended reading.
The Eclectic Book Review 