A re-post from my Live Journal archive: [In 2008,] as part of my annual Irish readings, I went through the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Roddy Doyle.  I finally finished The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes given me on my 10th birthday.  I also read much of AC Doyle’s other works:  his non-Holmes short stories, his Brigadier Gerard stories, and his historical adventures from the 100 Years War (The White Company and the prequel, Sir Nigel).  Two of the Professor Challenger stories (The Lost World in book and silent film version, and The Poison Belt), and Maracot Deep.  I read Arthur and George — a fictionalized biography with a focus on the George Edalji case, and Teller of Tales, a literary biography.  I also read some of an unreadable play Holmes play co-written by AC Doyle, and Baker Street, the Broadway musical.

Until this year, I knew nothing about AC Doyle, except that he wasn’t really “Irish,” and that he was goofy about spiritualism.  I had seen an episode or two of Murder Rooms, which transposed Joseph Bell and AC Doyle as Holmes and Watson.  I had previously read a critique of the silly fairy photographs.

There’s a reason that Holmes is still with us, while the rest of Doyle’s creations have faded into obscurity, at least here in America.  Holmes’s concerns are still ours.  For instance, identity in a mass urban and global society (e.g., can a respectable man also be a beggar?).

Motivation is another, perhaps the major, subtext to the Holmes stories.  The surface stunt is how Holmes’s powers of observation and “deduction” allow him to see the significance of small details.  But the little secret is that Holmes often already knows what he’s looking for, because he’s already deduced the probable motivation of the criminal.  When I read some of these stories as a kid, I couldn’t see the adult Victorian motivations.  As an adult, the cases are nearly as transparent to me as to Holmes.  Did contemporary readers see them so clearly?

AC Doyle plays with other Victorian and early 20th century  blind spots, particular the effect of race on perception.  This counterbalances his own pervasive racialism, which at his time may have seemed scientific and even progressive, but seems hopelessly racist to the modern.

Another feature of Holmes stories that sustains them in our time is the great friendship at its core.  Watson gets dumbed-down for the classic movies, but his role in the stories is essential, and the relationship is right up there with Kirk and Spock.  He’s one of Holmes’s few links to the normal human world.  The movie treatment in Murder by Decree captures this, as much as it fails in other respects, particularly the resort to the supernatural.  (Murder by Decree also anticipates From Hell by a couple decades.)

For Roddy Doyle, I finished reading the Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van).  I had already read Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and its sequel Paula Spencer, the early play Brownbread (rhyming slang for “dead”), his most recent collection of short stories The Deportees, and the first two books of his “The Last Roundup” trilogy, A Star Called Henry and Oh Play That Thing.

I enjoy most everything Roddy Doyle writes.  He has a delightful transparent style:  easy, understated, humorous, human.  It’s sprezzatura at its finest.  Those who fail to respect R Doyle’s craft haven’t tried to duplicate it.