Done with Sherlock (Really, Done with Watson)

I finished reading the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes! Four novellas and fifty-four short stories. I had read some in the past, but took on the entire collection when I was able to buy it for $.99 at Amazon on the Kindle.

Some thoughts:

Watson, like so many other sidekicks, is a complete moron. Now, I know that's not true, and the truth is I liked Watson a lot and looked forward to passages where he was alone on a little side mission or in harm's way. It was the passages where he interacted with Holmes after a solitary escapade (where Holmes would point out the things Watson should have done, things I found myself yelling about while Watson was there, too) and the passages where he is just too far behind Holmes (and even the reader) for me to tolerate. This happens in all your TV shows with really smart main characters, though (Monk and House, to name a few). In the case of Monk, how many times has a seemingly stupid clue caught his attention and proven to be vital in the end? Why can't his cohorts just accept his eccentricity without constantly trying to undermine it? If he thinks the kind of bubblegum the killer was chewing is important, why do his sidekicks have to make fun of him with their "Monk, how could that possible be important?" Well, assholes, you know he's just that friggin' smart and you've seen him solve a case on less, so why can't you just learn to STFU? You KNOW it's an important clue if he notices. I wanted to strangle Watson everytime Holmes pointed something small out and Watson said, "How can that possibly important?" Because it just IS, man. It just IS.

But this is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's doing. Why couldn't he, in just one story, just ONE, make Watson competent? It is possible to have two main characters. He didn't have to ever solve a case, or be a step ahead of Holmes, or suddenly whip out his blackbelt or anything. He could have just...not run into the street shouting at a suspect, alarming the suspect that he was suspected and getting the life choked out of him in the process. As soon as he darted out of the house I was screaming, "No, bad Watson!" He had no common sense. As much as I think Holmes was not much of a grand companion in his own right (smoking, drugs, insensitivity to others, shooting firearms in an enclosed area), Doyle made me feel like he thought readers couldn't possibly keep up with his narrative and so used that age old chorus to represent what he thought readers must be thinking, and he named it Watson.

I suggest that any reader not read the collection en masse as I did. The cases became monotonous, and trust me, they aren't so in any way. It's just that when the same thing basically happens over and over (of course Holmes will solve it, for better or worse - of course Watson will come to no harm, he's recounting the story) it gets repetitive in it's own way. If the stories are broken up so that maybe another story is read in between each one, I think it would be much better.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much. I'm also glad I found it for incredibly cheap at Amazon. I had downloaded it for free from one of the "pre-1923" websites but there were obviously so many missing passages and strange typos I couldn't read it. Finding the entire collection for $.99 was fabulous. Toward the end I began to notice a few typos (more than there should have been) but I also began to wonder if it was Doyle's own typos - he would have had an old manual typewriter where mistakes were not as easily fixed, not to mention how they wouldn't be fixed very often if they slipped through to the printing.

All in all I give it a good solid B. Definitely it should be read by every serious reader but I just can't quite give it that perfect score because of the dumbing-down of our dear Dr. Watson. (By the way, I conjecture this anthology was between 1500-2000 pages. I couldn't tell because the Kindle doesn't give pages due to the way you can change the font or make notes. But there was about 20 lines per page and there were about 40,000 lines.)