Oh Dear dept.

I was excited, last year, to see that Oxford were bringing out a second edition of its famous 'Oxford Sherlock Holmes' series. The first 90s editions were for many including myself their first window into the wider world of Doylean scholarship, and justifiably they became standard reference points.

But the new second editions have started to come out. They are not a patch on the first.

Aesthetically, one must admit they look better. The asterisks that denote footnotes are less obtrusive, the paper is great quality, the covers are well designed. The actual text of the stories remains the same, as far as I can tell. The problem is with the scholarly apparatus.

For unlike the first editions, these have been edited not by fan-scholars (Owen Dudley Edwards, Christopher Roden, the late Richard Lancelyn Green) but by 'proper' academics. Do they bring to the table the latest in Doylean scholarship? Yes. But they also bring the latest in literary criticism and contemporary academic buzz-fields. Post-colonial theory. Gender studies. Queer theory. Crises in masculinity. All these and more are used not as research tools but blunt instruments to batter the readers' heads, besmirch the reputation of Conan Doyle (a veritable giant assailed by pygmies) and assassinate the character whose exploits are ostensibly here to be enjoyed.

One section of an introduction to SIGN 'examines' the alleged homosexual subtext in the Holmes and Watson relationship. Yes, that old chestnut has been given a modern spin. It begins by laying out Doyle's own attitude to homosexuality, then mentions that most of his fiction concerns male friendship, then bizarrely tries top shore up his 'queer' theory by saying that Holmes' drug use already emphasises that the 221b domestic scene is outside of social norms. He wraps up by saying it's up to the reader. So.... not only is no evidence presented to back any of this up, but a connection is made between drug use and homosexuality, as if the two are immediately analagous, then says 'make up your own mind' as if the whole subject is somehow ambiguous!

Worst is the guilt by association employed in the Introduction to The Memoirs, referencing CARD. Holmes has written an article on ears (that's ears!) for The Journal Of The Anthropological Society. But that Journal, it is proclaimed, was obsessed with racial science and was racist. Therefore Holmes is "an intellectual footsoldier in the toxic science of heredity." I'm sorry, what????

The footnotes themselves, on the rare occasions they delve more into the 'great game' side of things, are quite spectacularly joyless. Compare and contrast the note for Watson's "I keep a bull pup" in STUD with the dull new version.

I pity any reader coming to these editions as their first exposure to the Holmes stories or to Doyle.