This is the first Sherlock Holmes novella. I’d never read it and decided to fill that hole. It was not entirely what I expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve read a bunch of the Holmes short stories and maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/em>, but by them the formula of a Holmes mystery had gelled into an efficient puzzle and Holmes delivery system. Scarlet<\/em> is still feeling things out in ways that surprised me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, there is the introduction of Watson and Holmes, which was quite fun. I know a bunch of the details but it was fun to see how Conan Doyle established all these. And then we get sucked into a Holmes mystery and watch Holmes do Holmes things. It’s great. Easy to see how this character hooked people and why there’s a whole canon around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then we take a turn to an entirely different setting to kind of show the reader the circumstances that Holmes has deduced. I was quite surprised. More than that, I can see why this style of mystery execution wasn’t for Holmes. Conan Doyle writes it well enough, but I spent the whole section – about half the novella – wanting to get back to Holmes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It makes for an interesting artifact more than a thrilling read. Still worth a look, probably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the first Sherlock Holmes novella. I’d never read it and decided to fill that hole. It was not entirely what I expected. I’ve read a bunch of the Holmes short stories and maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles, but by them the formula of a Holmes mystery had gelled into an efficient puzzle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-reviews","category-whats-new"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3340,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3339\/revisions\/3340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}