Sunday, March 20, 2011

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Okay, he must have said that in one of the other books, because he didn't say it in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  I read this book the week of  February 27-March 5. Obviously I'm behind in my blog posts, but I'm keeping up with my reading. Forgive the likely choppiness of this entry, as I'm trying to catch up.

This book is the third of nine in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series.  (There are four novels and five collections of short stories.) Unlike some series', however, these books can be read out of order without undue confusion on the part of the reader.  Holmes and Watson are, of course, classic and familiar characters.  Conan Doyle's series isn't written in a very literary style, nor do we see a lot of character development, but Sherlock Holmes (based on Conan Doyle's professor, Joshua Bell) was such a singular and unprecedented character that the series immediately attracted attention. Holmes'  hyper-rational, observant, logical, scientific approach to reasoning was (and still is) a great inspiration for the discipline of forensics.

I leave you with an observation from Holmes himself: "Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay!"

1 comment:

Debbie said...

He never said it. The quote is a Hollywood invention.