reading the canon - some thoughts

I recently finished re-reading the Sherlock Holmes canon, in un-annotated editions. My main reason for doing so was that I realised for some years I was only ever reading the stories in annotated editions - either in the Oxford editions, the Baring-Gould 'Annotated' or Klinger's 'New Annotated' - to say nothing of various scholarly books. So in a sense I wasn't really reading the stories 'as intended', and I found that my thoughts and impressions about them were being 'guided', in a sense, by those of others.

(I admit I cheated once or twice and looked up certain details, mainly the ones mentioned earlier in this blog, i.e Watson's medical treatments in ENGI and the geography of LADY)

My first impressions are once again a boundless admiration for Conan Doyle and his achievement, the sense of a really 'real' world, characters and settings. Yes, there are inconsistencies (isn't the whole world of fan-scholarship built on those?) which in no way affect enjoyment. I found myself enjoying some of the slip-ups, including dialogue slip-ups, humour (intentional and otherwise) and obvious mistakes (the watchman who locks up Woolwich Arsenal but who apparently has no key in BRUC, the dates in SIGN). 

They also allowed me to look up details of the historical background - a strength of the annotated books of course is that all this information is in one place, but it does a reader good sometimes to seek out all these facts on his or her own! I look forward to diving back in again to the canon after a break. I wonder which of the facts I looked up I will actually remember...!

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