The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Recommended Ages: 12+

Sherlock Holmes had already appeared in two novels, but his popularity did not really take off until the brief "adventures" collected in this book began to appear in monthly issues of The Strand Magazine, from 1891 to -92. And though there are two novels and three volumes of short stories still to come, these twelve mysteries include some of Holmes' most memorable and celebrated cases. Few of them are concerned with actual murder or even actionable crimes, and Holmes doesn't always get his man (or woman). But they are Holmes all over, the Sherlock you sure love, fascinating us (even when his cases don't) by his keen observation, quick deduction, and encyclopedic recall of the history of crime—so that he can often solve in moments a case that keeps Scotland Yard guessing for days.

In "A Scandal in Bohemia," the King of Bohemia (which Conan Doyle seems to confuse with Scandinavia) hires Holmes to help him neutralize a threat to his marriage plans. It seems His Majesty has been foolish enough to allow another woman to possess a photograph of the two of them. In the Holmes canon, this is actually the only appearance of "the woman," as Holmes describes her: Irene Adler, celebrated as the only woman who ever outwitted him.

"The Red-Headed League" is a comic tale about a stingy pawnbroker who suspects he has been had. It turns out that the harmless scam of which he is the victim is only part of a plot to play much dirtier trick. In "A Case of Identity," Holmes is hired by a near-sighted spinster to solve the disappearance of her fiancé. In "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," Holmes helps Inspector Lestrade prove the innocence of a young man who has been arrested for the murder of his father. "The Five Orange Pips" is the rare case in which Holmes fails to save the life of his client, who comes to him with a creepy story about three successive members of his family receiving a cryptic message before they died. Among the spooky secrets Holmes uncovers in this dark installment is a connection to that American institution, the Ku Klux Klan.

"The Man with the Twisted Lip" is a missing persons case in which a well-off businessman vanishes, almost before his wife's eyes, from a room in which a lame beggar is found, along with some blood and the victim's clothes. Is it murder? Or could there be something even stranger going on? "The Blue Carbuncle" is a case of a stolen jewel, which comes Sherlock's way in the gizzard of a Christmas goose found lying in the street. His powers of detection are never shown more vividly than in "The Speckled Band," in which a villain hatches a diabolical plot to murder his twin stepdaughters.

In "The Engineer's Thumb," Holmes helps a confused young man track down the gang of forgers who tried to use him as an unwitting accomplice, and then tried to kill him. "The Noble Bachelor" concerns a bride who, ten minutes after the start of her wedding breakfast, steps out of the room for a moment and is never seen again. In "The Beryl Coronet," a banker fears his son has plundered a national treasure, and hires Holmes in the hope of recovering the lost gems. And finally, "The Copper Beeches" has to do with a governess who suspects that her employers are involving her in something sinister and dangerous.

These mysteries are very straightforward, simple, easy to enjoy. They follow a clear formula that has worked for millions of readers these 120-odd years. Sometimes Holmes solves them by spotting a clue that no one else noticed. Sometimes it is his knowledge of human nature, and of similar cases in the past, that does the trick. Again and again, the truth is revealed when Holmes asks someone the right question, or puts the right advertisement in the newspapers, or sets a trap into which his quarry cannot resist falling. Of course, Holmes isn't always right. His deduction, for example, that the whole world would someday become one nation under the combined flag of the US and the UK, now rings somewhere between "spooky" and "unintentionally funny."

But hey, Conan Doyle was a spooky customer. He believed in Spiritualism, which is why this book was briefly banned in the USSR. Spookiness works sometimes. It doesn't hurt when you are an author of detective thrillers and science fiction novels. Eerieness and suspense were his friends. His best work, both generally and in the Holmes canon, was yet to come in the haunted pages of The Hound of the Baskervilles. But in this book, he already makes an excellent start. This is classic Sherlock. It's attention-grabbing fun. And it is followed immediately by a second year's worth of monthly Holmes tales, collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

The Idiot

The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Recommended Ages: 14+

Published in a series of magazine issues in 1868-69, this is one of the masterpieces by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. It made me laugh a great deal, but it is not a comedy. Its climax is mysterious and chilling, but it is not a thriller. Dickensian in its large cast of vividly colorful characters and in its satire on the society of its time, it is not quite a picaresque. Tragic to a truly disturbing degree, it is too subtle and complex to make grand opera, too often given to immensely long talky scenes, featuring too many characters, to translate well into film—though the attempt has often been made to adapt it for stage or screen. It's a great novel in which a sensitive reader can feel himself totally immersed, only to be shocked out of "willing suspension of disbelief" when its author breaks the fourth wall and begins commenting on his characters as fictional creations. Though it may come as a surprise to those of us who grew up watching a copy of the novel collecting dust in a reverential spot on our parents' bookshelf, looking so serious and sophisticated that we could hardly imagine trying to read it, it happens to be a vastly entertaining novel. Once you read it, you will not forget it.

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the "idiot" named in the title. We first meet this simple-hearted young man on a train to St. Petersburg, returning to Russia after several years under a doctor's care in Switzerland. In boyhood he had been disabled to the point of idiocy by epilepsy, but the support of a wealthy patron and (later) the generosity of his doctor have at least partially cured him, and provided for his education. Now he has decided to return from abroad, but he really knows nothing about how to get along in Russian society. Even before he sets foot on the motherland's soil, his ignorance of the confusing forces in play around him begin to create trouble for the Prince. By the end (mild spoiler, here), his fragile nerves will prove unequal to the strain that arises from the instantaneous love and hate that he excites in the men and women he meets.

I've been pondering how to boil Prince Myshkin's story down into a neat, pithy statement. I am loath to say that Myshkin is a Christ figure; that's probably been said before, and the weaknesses in that thesis have just as likely been pointed out. More tempting is a broader description of Myshkin as the one whole, wholesome, healing person in the world, surrounded by a crowd of sick, sickening people who spread their sickness to one another. But just when I feel ready to go with that thesis, Dosto(y)evsky explodes it by showering his messy, flawed characters with gentle, non-judgmental understanding. In this book, bad people come to some bad ends. But some good people come, arguably, to even worse ends. And you're not sure whether to laugh or cry; or, should you settle on doing both, in which order to do them.

Poor Lev Nikolayevich finds himself torn between the love of two women, two diametrically opposite women whom he loves for diametrically opposite reasons, and who alternately seem to love and hate him in perversely unpredictable alternation, yet in completely different ways. And so we see a good man—perhaps the good man—forced into a situation where he can only do one evil thing or another. And when, at last, the choice has been made, the evil that results is all that could be expected, and more.

Among the other cast members in this novel's hypnotically long and complicated scenes—any one of which could be staged by itself as a piece of experimental theater—are:

• General Yepanchin, a pompous, philandering, yet henpecked husband and gentleman
• Lizaveta Prokofyevna, his bossy, hot-tempered, but basically tender-hearted wife
• Their three unmarried daughters Alexandra, Adelaida, and the beautiful but flighty Aglaya
• Rogozhin, the dangerously unstable heir to a fortune, who is obsessed with a beautiful but troubled woman named Nastasya Filipovna
• Ganya Ivolgin, a young civil servant who is also torn between Aglaya and Nastasya Filipovna
• Ganya's socially climbing sister Varya, his old-for-his-years little brother Kolya, and his father General Ivolgin, who is both a drunk and a compulsive liar
• Lebedev, a sponging and scheming character whose many lines of work include government clerk, pawnbroker, landlord,  and interpreter of biblical prophecy
• Hippolyte, a consumptive scandal-monger and nihilist who (in one of the book's most fascinating scenes) publicly reads a manifesto concerning his planned suicide
• Yevgeny Pavlovich, another suitor for Aglaya's hand, who plays an ambiguously sympathetic role in the Prince's fate

These are only the foremost few of a much larger cast that includes an informer, a slanderer, a stammerer, a money-lender, an aspiring murderer (not to be confused with the actual murderer in the story, who has already been named), a child molester, and various representatives of every level of Russian society in all their glories and foibles. But at the center of it all is a fallen woman who fascinates many men, and who is drawn to destroy herself and those around her; a sheltered and virtuous girl whose happiness is threatened by her own willfulness; and our own dear Prince who, every time you think he's an idiot, says or does something that makes him seem amazingly wise and clear-headed; only to provoke someone to call him an idiot again in the next paragraph.

All this talk of Myshkin being an idiot will affect you as being cruelly unfair. Whatever he is—naive, pure, honest, lacking a sense of proportion, etc.—he is not, you will be sure, an idiot. Up to a certain point, you may think this book is about the injustice of such a man, of whom the world is not worthy, being called an idiot for his pains. At the end, however, it seems to be more about how the world can actually make an idiot of a good man. It is a novel of disgust with a world where the sanity of the upper, lower, and middle classes alike—of the very religious as well as those fired by political and rationalistic zeal—can destroy the sanity of people like Nastasya Filipovna, Rogozhin, and Myshkin, among others.

It is a novel of messed-up people in collision, and of one supremely messed-up individual who almost, for a little while, seems to have a chance to heal them all. It's a well-known enough book that it's not really a spoiler when I say things don't work out that way. I give you fair warning. Why they don't work out, and how they don't, will be on your mind for a while.

Morbid Doggerel

This truly horrible specimen will be filed under "The Jaundiced Eye" in my collected poems...

Death, devourer of all flesh,
Chooses oft the choice and fresh;
Those preserved till elder years
Brine themselves with salty tears.

Christ, who died to pay our debt,
Now death's stomach has upset.
Holy draft of ipecac,
He will cause all graves to yak.

Froi of the Exiles

Froi of the Exiles
by Melina Marchetta
Recommended Ages: 14+

An "Adult Content Advisory" remains in effect for the second book of the Lumatere Chronicles, in which the fate of kingdoms depend on the actions of highly sexed Young Adults. Even more so than in Finnikin of the Rock, in which the figurative and literal rape of a kingdom is involved in the tale of a nation divided 50/50 between captives and refugees. But now the people of Lumatere have been reunited; the curse has been broken that separated those within the boundaries from those without; their queen has returned to her people; and a new set of problems has arisen.

I was going to tell you about all these problems, but after four paragraphs of explanation I still hadn't mentioned the name of the title character. So maybe you're better off finding out about it honestly. Let's just say there is more trouble with curses, sacrileges and mysterious prophecies, more danger involving would-be assassins of a royal family, more intrigue between neighboring kingdoms that (naturally) have their own interests at heart, more more issues relating to plagues and famines and refugees, more victims of sexual abuse, more lovers who wonder if their broken relationships will ever heal, more nightmarish images of people being cruel to people, and as always, beautiful young things right in the thick of it all.

One of the beautiful young things is Froi, the urchin found by Lumatere's Queen Isaboe when she and half her kingdom were still in exile. Now bound in allegiance to her, Froi has learned the arts of war and done a bit of farming, but he still hasn't found out where he really belongs. When Isaboe sends him to the neighboring land of Charyn to assassinate its King—partly as revenge for the role he played in Lumatere's tragedy, and partly as justice for his brutality against his own people—she inadvertently helps him find out where he really came from. Now Froi finds himself torn between his orders to kill an insane princess and his growing realization that he is the one destined to break the curse that hangs over Charyn—a country where no child has been born, not one, in almost eighteen years. The princess may be the last-born; she may be the one prophesied to break the curse; she may also be a complete wacko. But she doesn't deserve the horror and just plain nastiness that has been her life until now. And nor, Froi senses, does she deserve the death that menaces her if she doesn't get pregnant by her eighteenth birthday. We will draw a veil over the steps that have been taken to fulfill this prophecy. Let's just leave it at "nasty."

Froi comes to Charyn on a mission to kill, and stays on a desperate quest to save life. Meanwhile, back in Lumatere, some of the Charynites have moved into a valley that technically belongs to the Monts, led by Isaboe's cousin Lucian. His wife Phaedra, the other half of an arranged and estranged marriage with a Charynite provincaro's daughter, becomes the lever that will move Lucian to become the man, and the leader, that he wasn't ready to be when his father died. But as the pages of this book run out and the tension and danger of the situation do the opposite, it becomes clear that this story will remain unfinished until the third book, Quintana of Charyn.

It isn't all teen and tween romance. This book also includes a more mature love story, as well as some very unlovely goings on. Potentially tragic misunderstandings, selfishness, pride, betrayal, lust for power, the terror of anarchy, violence (sexual and otherwise), and a swarm of other vices and atrocities teem in a tale that will definitely leave you a little less complacent about human nature. At its heart are a husband and wife who do not realize that they love each other until it is perhaps too late, a family whose feelings for each other have been twisted out of recognition by the perils and intrigues at the center of a nation's politics, and a unique culture whose only hope of survival depends on the fate of a mysterious, mad princess and her unborn child. It's a hard book to take, at times. But there is something very moving about it, too.

The Sign of (the) Four

The Sign of the Four
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Recommended Ages: 12+

The second book of the Sherlock Holmes canon was first published in 1890 under the five-word title The Sign of the Four. Since then, it has often been republished under the four-word title The Sign of Four. The confusion actually originates in the book itself, in which both phrases are used interchangeably. Although Holmes did not really become a hit until Conan Doyle followed up with a series of short stories (later collected in such books as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), this book is an important step in the development of a great cultural icon. This is the one in which Dr. Watson meets his beloved wife Mary. It marks the first time Holmes enunciates his famous dictum, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." In this novel, the sleuth's craving for a seven-percent solution of cocaine is first mentioned, as is the name of the Baker Street Irregulars, those dirty-faced junior detectives of his. Viewers of TV's Elementary will thrill to find Holmes here saying, for the first time: "You can... never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to." And fans of the late Holmes film featuring a bare-knuckled boxing Holmes may be delighted to spot the first mention of his pugilistic talents, already in his second recorded case.

Holmes is indeed a wonderful creation, either as a literary figure to visualize as you read, or as a role for an actor to bring to life. Too many heroes of modern folklore are upstaged by the villains they strive against. Name, for example, a single actor playing Batman who has not paled alongside the flamboyant Joker. Name one incarnation of Superman who was more interesting than his Lex Luthor. (I do not mean more pretty to look at. I mean more fun to watch.) Dracula is always more magnetic than Van Helsing. But for all his edginess and troubling traits, Holmes is one of the rare heroes who holds more fascination than the monsters he hunts. Dark, complex, and ambiguous as his character may be, he is an essentially good guy who triumphs over evil through keen observation, deductive reasoning, and discipline of mind, and yet our attention is riveted to him, and eagerly comes back to him even after the intriguing facts of the case are laid bare. Alongside this charismatic hero, the banality of evil is powerfully seen and felt. Holmes himself quotes a French proverb that makes this very point: "Le mauvais goût mène au crime." Bad taste leads to crime.

While that quote is fresh in mind, I should suggest that when you read this, you keep a computer handy for looking up quotations in Latin, French, and German that Holmes is wont to toss off by way of urbane conversation. Not only does he go in for references to great authors, but for recommendations of books one should read if one wants to become, like Watson, a sidekick worthy of a great Victorian detective. Be sure to start your bibliography of books recommended by Sherlock Holmes, if not in A Study in Scarlet, at least in this book. Conan Doyle allows Holmes to develop a believable life of the intellect, including references to actual philosophers such as Jean Paul and Winwood Reade.

In the first case Holmes and Watson worked together, the tale of detection was enlivened by a subplot involving a nightmare version of Brigham Young's Mormon utopia. The historical melodrama playing out in the background of this mystery is the 1875 Sepoy Mutiny, in which British forces in India were attacked by their native allies. Mixed up with this tale are a prison break, a stolen treasure, the disappearance of a retired army officer, and an early masterpiece of the Locked Room Murder Mystery. Brilliant deductions based on easy-to-miss clues only bring Holmes so far in his hunt for the killers. Where deductive genius gives out, exhaustive footwork begins. Here we see Holmes and Watson trailing behind a hound, and street urchins combing the riverbanks for a missing steam launch, and a high-speed chase down the Thames, and even a shootout between two Englishmen armed with revolvers and an islander armed with a poisoned-dart blowpipe. You don't see that every day.

Nearly five quarters of a century later, we now have the luxury of taking Sherlock Holmes for granted. It gets easier to do every year, what with two different Holmes-based TV series available on demand, and a list of films so extensive that you would need a big, round magnifying glass to study it. My advice: don't. Don't take Holmes for granted. Follow my example and discover him anew, starting at the beginning and appreciating, maybe for the first time in your life, how deeply your world has been impacted by the main character in four pulp novels and 56 short stories. There's a reason Holmes made the big time, and has stayed there ever since. These stories are well-written, compelling, smart, high-quality pieces of entertainment. They not only titillate with images of fiendishness and horror; they also stimulate the intellect, the heart, and one's sense of justice. They not only depict the curious state of the cutting-edge criminology of a century ago; they also bring out themes of modern life in surprisingly sharp relief. They are not only historical costume dramas, but human dramas that still ring true in urban life today. And though the adventures of Holmes have scarcely begun in this book, the man we all know—even though he never existed—already, fully, convincingly lives.

50. Reminiscere Hymn

Text: based on Matthew 15:21-28, the traditional Gospel for the second Sunday in Lent.
Tune: DER MANGE SKAL KOMME (Stockholm, 1695).

Remember Your goodness and mercy, O Lord,
For they are from ages of ages.
Let us not succumb to the enemy horde;
Save us from the trouble that rages.
Remember your mercies, O Jesus!

The saints of all ages pray on our behalf,
And likewise the just in all places:
We lift up our souls! Lest our enemies laugh,
Deliver us, Hope of all races.
Remember your mercies, O Jesus!

The Canaanite woman commended her care
To You who could free her bound daughter;
Unworthy yet trusting, we too lift our prayer,
Entreating the blessing You brought her:
Remember Your mercies, O Jesus!

When to our petition no answer we hear,
Grant us to obey her example,
Persistent in plying Your all-knowing ear,
Believing Your stores to be ample.
Remember Your mercies, O Jesus!

For we, too, are beggars and heathens indeed,
Deserving no seat at Your table.
The crumbs You let fall are enough for our need;
To save even us You are able.
Remember Your mercies, O Jesus!

Release us from bondage of body and soul,
O Shepherd of Israel, most holy!
By Your gift of faith, make us righteous and whole;
For we are but poor, weak, and lowly.
Remember Your mercies, O Jesus!

The Throne of Fire

The Throne of Fire
by Rick Riordan
Recommended Ages: 12+

In Book 2 of the "Kane Chronicles," the Texas-based author of the "Tres Navarre" mysteries cleverly uses hilarious, romantic, magical, and thrill-packed entertainment to educate young adults about ancient Egyptian mythology. He's very sneaky that way. But we're not surprised, since he did the same thing with Greek mythology in the "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" series. Ditto Roman mythology in the "Heroes of Olympus" series. Face it, you're going to need a roadmap to keep track of all the different ways Rick Riordan has brought the legends of ancient gods and heroes into the present day. But in spite of the globe-trotting complexity of the action in this book, and the relative unfamiliarity of the gods, monsters, and mythological concepts it introduces, this is a deceptively easy book to enjoy.

The charm of the brother and sister narrators, taking turns dictating their story into a voice recorder, is one reason for this. Another is Riordan's knack for skewering bits of weird, ancient Egyptian trivia with brightly colored, memory-grabbing gimmicks, such as dubbing one antlered god "Bullwinkle," or describing a psychedelic griffin as a seven-thousand-pound hummingbird. You may giggle, perhaps blasphemously, at a hairy dwarf god who puts on his "ugly suit" (i.e., a speedo), pulls a demon-scaring face, and yells "BOO!" But you won't forget him soon.

Teenage magicians Sadie and Carter Kane extend the same genius as far as dubbing a villain "the ice cream man," speculating about Ptah being the god of spit, and describing the god of the underworld as having skin the color of a blueberry. But all their wise-cracking and sibling raillery is needed to lighten what would otherwise be a very dark adventure. For, don't you know, the world is going to end in four days unless they do something about it. Something big. Something "awaken-Ra-the-pharaoh-of-the-gods-from-a-three-thousand-year-slumber" big. Only Ra was ever strong enough to balance the powers of chaos, represented by the serpent-god Apophis, with ma'at, or good order. But even if they find him, and the three pieces of the scroll that contains the spell to wake him up, it may not be enough. Ra, after all, is old—old even by the standards of the gods—and for all anyone knows, completely senile. So it's not enough that the Kanes face an all but impossible task; they must do it while also resisting the temptation to seize power for themselves, to become at one with the lesser gods Horus and Isis, and to try their own divinely amplified strength against Apophis.

Of course, that would be spectacularly bad. But their task doesn't become any easier when winning puts people they care about in danger, when many of their fellow magicians are out to kill them, when their home base in Brooklyn is under attack by demons, and when their journey through the twelve houses of the underworld is plagued with misfortune, sabotage, and a deadly game with one of Egypt's least attractive gods. (And I don't mean the one who says "Boo!") A tomb full of mummies and ghosts, a wrestling match with river demons, a train-station-wrecking battle with a vulture goddess and an over-shampooed baboon, and several out-of-body experiences are only a few of the side trips that make their quest more interesting. From chilly St. Petersburg to sweltering Cairo, with stops in New York, London, and a nursing home for retired gods, the Kanes get the full tour of the classic quest myth while time runs out for life as we know it.

Whatever happens, the world will be different when Carter and Sadie are through with it. But their adventures are far from over. The "Kane Chronicles" continue with a third book, 2012's The Serpent's Shadow. Plus, both this book and its predecessor The Red Pyramid have been published as graphic novels; and a crossover series combining the Kanes with Percy Jackson is now up to two books: The Son of Sobek and The Staff of Serapis. There is even a Kane Chronicles Survival Guide, for what it's worth. As for me, I would stick to the stories. This one is lots of fun. By now, I would expect no less of any novel by Rick Riordan.