After a string of Scandinavian crime novels (Jar City, The Pyramid, Nemesis) I’m reading Arthur Conan Doyle, and what a relief it is from the futility and gloom of those other books. Every chapter in Jar City opens with a description of pounding rains. Kurt Wallander, the misanthropic detective-hero of Pyramid, selects dinner by standing over a menu, closing his eyes, and ordering whatever his finger lands on first. Even if the detectives in these novels solve something, they resolve nothing. The conclusion just clears the floor for fresh tragedy.
Sherlock Holmes doesn’t always solve his cases, but each of his case histories offers the conventional narrative pleasures of beginning, middle and end. While grouped together now as novels, the stories were first published individually and can be read randomly, one at a time. The narrative structure in each is clear but complex. We hear the detective’s sidekick Watson as he recounts the story a client told them, then the story Holmes offered in explanation, and, finally, the story that revealed itself afterwards. Holmes’ explanations, while often masterful, are just as often incorrect or incomplete. While the mythology of Sherlock Homes is one of observation, examination and deduction, the mystery in question is typically fuelled by raw emotion. My favorite is a simple one, The Yellow Face, about an unsettling figure hovering in the window of a neighbor's house. Holmes shows little interest in the evidence (a death certificate, a house, a portrait) and arrives at the wrong conclusion. It matters little, however, when we find out that what’s at the heart of the matter is a deception one person carried out in order to protect another. In the end it’s not a mystery; it’s a love story.
