By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor is an unusually snarky title for one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Stories – but more on that later. The tenth of twelve stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the story is one of those that the great detective solves from…
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb is perhaps the least Holmesian of Conan Doyle’s earlier stories, barely featuring any deduction from the great detective. Still set firmly within the Holmes canon it is, as the title hints, more adventure than mystery. It’s also more the engineer’s tale than either Holmes’ or Watson’s. We’re no worse…
The Red Badge of Courage, serialised in 1894 and first published as a single edition in 1895, is a novel about the American Civil War. Though it’s taken me two attempts to finish, it’s soon read in a week or so and truly engaging as a war story as much as it is a…
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Sherlock Holmes story I have read and enjoyed most of all, The Adventure of the Speckled Band is the finest of Conan Doyle’s mysteries. Taking a classic locked-room set up, the adventure adds a sense of urgency and horror only matched by perhaps by then novel-length The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Holmes…
A rare re-read on my mission to read some of the greatest books ever written, I’ve been a fan of Slaughterhouse-Five since first finding it many years ago. Appropriately, one thing about the book has lodged timelessly in my head. On mentioning the title to an old friend of mine, they replied with such an odd…
In which Holmes can’t disguise his astounding abilities. The Man With The Twisted Lip is an unusual Holmes story. Rather than investigating a murder or robbery, this time there may not even have been a crime committed. The story begins when a Mrs St Clair engages Sherlock Holmes to find her husband, a wealthy city…
In which we meander along the Thames with Montmorency and his three companions. Three Men in a Boat is one of the few novels I own with the dubious honour of having been attempted twice and completed once. That’s not to say the tale isn’t an enjoyable and light read, more that it requires…
In which murder is perhaps less fruitful than imagined. The Five Orange Pips stands out in my mind for two reasons. Firstly, the title evokes such mystery and intrigue – though perhaps just by differing from the more common The Adventure of the Something Something format that we’ll see take hold in later stories. Secondly, the pips within…
In which we see that two become one. First published in 1891, A Case of Identity is the third story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes collection from the following year. It’s notable for featuring seven of Sidney Paget’s wonderful illustrations, which seem to fill almost half the paper of this succinct narrative. A young lady arrives at…
In which we find Extreme Makeover: Post-War Britain Edition. Whether it’s the title of Cold Comfort Farm that lingers on the edges of our consciousness or a clever ploy by author Stella Gibbons, the term cold comfort seems (like “cellar door”) to evoke a sense of both its literal meaning and something far more intangible. Cold…