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 theSeven Per Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer where Watson has to trick Holmes into going to Vienna to be treated by Sigmund Freud).
In February my target is to read all (or at very least most) of the 12 stories in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Published: April 1893
Wikipedia here
Online here
Review: I would recommend this, with reservations. It’s Holmes reminiscing about his college days (so, at least ten years before he met Watson.) The plot is not all that much – variations on previous Colonial Baddie stories, but so what…
Best sentence(s):
“ ‘Do you know who it was that we let into the house that day?’ “
‘I have no idea.’ “
‘It was the devil, Holmes,’ he cried.
“I stared at him in astonishment.
“ ‘Yes, it was the devil himself. We have not had a peaceful hour since—not one. The governor has never held up his head from that evening, and now the life has been crushed out of him and his heart broken, all through this accursed Hudson.’
*********
“By God! I’ve got more pounds to my name than you’ve hairs on your head. And if you’ve money, my son, and know how to handle it and spread it, you can do anything.
[compare Benjamin Franklin The Levee – what money can buy you]
****
Predergast was like a raging devil, and he picked the soldiers up as if they had been children and threw them overboard alive or dead. There was one sergeant that was horribly wounded and yet kept on swimming for a surprising time, until some one in mercy blew out his brains. When the fighting was over there was no one left of our enemies except just the warders, the mates, and the doctor
*****
He had tracked us down somehow, and had set himself to live upon our fears.
See also:
“Then I re-read it very carefully”: Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The ‘ Gloria Scott ‘” and the Role of Generic Expectations in Reading, Interpreting, and Evaluating a “Holmes Story” Nils Clausson College Literature, Volume 52, Number 3, Summer 2025, pp. 419-442 https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2025.a965219
marchudson.net 
Leave a comment