reading report
Mr. Holmes received a case from one of Watson’s old time friends who was deeply worried about the strange deeds of his beloved wife. Mr Ferguson reported to have seen her sucking the blood of both the dog and their baby. Moreover, the wife, as a stepmother, beat Jacky, the son of his exwife, in a hysteric manner. After all this had been found out, she confined herself to her bedroom and refused to see him. It turned out that the wife was neither a murderer-to-be nor a maniac— she sucked the blood to eliminate poison from the dog and the baby that was discharged by the stepson who got insanely jealous about his father’s love for the mother and baby. She defied explanation in order not to hurt Mr Ferguson with the cruel truth.
Maybe detective stories of Sir Conan Doyle are just not my thing. I felt irritated when the answer to this puzzled case was revealed in mere hundreds of words while the foreshadowing of the story accounted for thousands. The pacing of the story seemed rather strange to me as I was expecting more puzzles and horrors to come when everything ended all of a sudden. This is a piece designed to be appreciated from the plot and intellectual reasoning aspect more than from its style and delicacy of illustration, though the description on the old and Gothically haunting house suddenly switched me into the mood of reading Allan Poe. What helped me distinguish this as a Conan Doyle story was the British humor that pops up naturally once in a while. For example, “A smart maid, the only modern thing which we had seen in the house, had brought in some tea.” was employed for the foregrounding of the old house.
As I am really not a fan of detective stories, I wouldn’t be able to tell what makes it a famous detective classics. Instead I would like to analyze the moral warnings implied in this work. The primary motive of every chain involved in this case was purely love. Jacky, who turned out the mastermind of evil deeds, conducted them because of his love for his father, which soon transformed into crazy jealousy. Mrs Ferguson acted like a vampire and a lunatics to save the baby and to let out her hatred for a intended murdered of it. It was still love that kept her from telling the truth to her husband for fear of breaking his heart. As for the husband, he turned to Holmes instead of the police for help in love for his wife. Even the secondary character, the maid, protected the baby with no spared effort as a result of the love she had developed for it.
We see at the end of the story that love usually turns out a good thing but it also blinds us to many things that used to be susceptible to our sensibility. We may well have made better choices in face of mishaps but when emotionality triggered by deep love gets involved, rationality simply does not work. We are admonished by this piece to take good care of the emotions of our intimidate ones, for their love we are most familiar with, the inversion of it the most unbearable.
And this is what makes a detective story readable and attractive in its primitive stage—the antithesis between the rationality of Sherlock as an outsider and the emotionality of characters involved in the case. Hume claimed "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Everything we do is driven by passions, worded another way, emotionality rather than facts, or reasoning. Interestingly, detectives are often irrelevant to the case and thus get to treat the participants’ emotions that push forward a case as mere facts. They run mental activities to solve the puzzles but they don’t act to actually push forward a plot—the latter is already there for them to unravel. And passions are indispensable only when you have to take actions. In this way, the readers, who naturally cast themselves in the role of the detective while reading, find amusement at an intellectual level without the need to devote emotional energy. This I identify as a major distinction between reading a detective story and other genres of literature.
The last point I want to mention about this piece is its Victorian style wordings. The dialogue read genteel to me with patterns like “Will you have the goodness to” instead of a simple “would you” or “please”. Another common strangeness is that every character said “hullo” instead of “hello”. This reminds me of the beginning of Episode 3 of Cambridge Spies. An American woman recognized a newly acquainted man as English for “You said hello with a U where the letter E ought to be.” I guess it can be a useful tip to identify Englishmen. This unique style is not infrequently employed beyond historical episodes, in any popular film or novel that intend to sound elevated and create a sense of royalty or nostalgia.
To sum up, this work is a fossil to look into and analyze rather than a piece of amusement for me, for it is far less interesting than the diverse, exciting and complicated plots accessible in modern times. The pacing and structure seem to me very unreasonable and the admonition is a cliché while the style is what interests me the most and what I will keep studying into.
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