In 2026 I plan to read all the Conan Doyle “Sherlock Holmes” works – 56 short stories and 4 novels (here’s why and how). If you haven’t already read it, Michael Green’s “undiscovered letter” from John Watson is fricking hilarious.
I may also read various Holmes homages/pastiches etc. Who knows? (btw I’d recommend the Seven Per Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer where Watson has to trick Holmes into going to Vienna to be treated by Sigmund Freud)
Published: 1891
Wikipedia here
Review: I would not recommend this – it’s mundane, obvious. By no means Doyle’s best effort
Best sentence(s):
“I found Sherlock Holmes alone, however, half asleep, with his long, thin form curled up in the recesses of his armchair. A formidable array of bottles and test-tubes, with the pungent cleanly smell of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his day in the chemical work which was so dear to him.”
Words I didn’t know:
| quinsy | In quinsy, the abscess (a collection of pus) forms between one of your tonsils and the wall of your throat. This can happen when a bacterial infection spreads from an infected tonsil to the surrounding area. Quinsy can occur at any age, but most commonly affects teenagers and young adults. |
| baryta | paper that is coated with a preparation of barium sulfate in gelatin and used after calendering as a support for the light-sensitive emulsion used in photography |
Allusions I had to look up:
“If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”
From here
I tried tracing the exact citation for this line but could find nothing online. The footnote in the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes surrenders as well:
“Hafiz” is also spelled “Hafez.” His more complete name is Mohammed Shams Od-Dīān Haāfez (b. 1325/26, Shīāraāz, Iran–d. 1389/90, Shīāraāz), and he was one of the finest lyric poets of Persia. The Diwan (Collected Poems) of the poet was not translated in its entirety into English prose until 1891. However, scholars have been unable to trace the proverb to any published works of Hafiz.
“Horace” is Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 B.C.), the greatest of the Latin lyric poets.
This was still unsatisfying so I went digging further and found what at first appeared a real suggestion in a book by John Yohannan called Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200 Year History
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put into the mouth of his famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes the observation that “there is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace and as much knowledge of the world,” he was probably chiefly inspired by the advantage of alliteration in the poets’ names. the sentiment he attributed to Hafiz in “A Case of Identity” … was more likely an adaptation of the fifty-third Maxim in Sadi’s Gulistan in Eastwick’s translation.
That passage in the translation referenced reads:
Maxim LIII
To consult with women is ruin, and to be liberal to the mischievous is a crime.
Couplet
To sharp-toothed tigers kind to be
To harmless flocks is tyranny.Aside from the convenient collocation of women and tigers, I don’t find the proposed source at all convincing.
Overall I’m rather inclined to lean on this being an invented source, inspired only by Conan Doyle’s taste for giving Holmes occasional outbursts hinting at deep knowledge in out-of-the-way fields – something like the intellectual equivalent of his eccentricity in keeping ‘his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper’ (per The Musgrave Ritual).
See also: There’s a Peter Corris short story with Cliff Hardy hired by a mother to track down a runaway daughter. He figures out that the step-father has groomed the kid and set her up in a flat. He decides not to “solve” the case (this is a standard trope, I guess – the investigator deciding that the client can’t handle the truth, that it’s better for sleeping dogs to lie, to take the hit to his rep (Simenon has a similar story – Maigret figures out that what seems to have been murder was an elaborate suicide made to look like murder for the insurance pay out).
marchudson.net 
Leave a comment