I was — and still am — a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I first got into it around age 10, thanks to a Chinese edition I found during a summer holiday at my grandparents’ house. I barely remember the plots now, but the heat, the watermelon, and those long, lazy afternoons spent binging the stories without a single worry in the world were so memorable.
There’s something about Holmes that makes him perfect summer reading. Today I randomly flipped to The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle — easily one of my favorite short stories. I won’t spoil anything — but it has all the cleverness you’d expect from a Holmes case, plus a bit more fun and lighthearted with a cozy Christmas spirit baked in — like, it’s always a treat to watch Holmes playfully challenge Watson, like when he look at a hat and declares it a window into a man’s soul — while Watson just stares and baffled with the humor:
“I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I am unable to follow you for example, how do you deduce that this man was intellectual…”
Even though I’m not a die-hard fan of detective fiction in general, Sherlock Holmes keeps pulling me back — mostly because of John Watson. In Loren D. Estleman’s brilliant introduction On the Significance of Boswells, he puts it perfectly:
The stories without Watson or in which he plays a minor role, are arid and disappointing, lack humanity and embarrass one with Holme’s shameless narcissism.
…
If there is a Valhalla for superhuman sleuths and their all-too-human compatriots, it will allow them freedom at night to catch the racing hansom cab in the mustard fog and provide them a cozy cluttered place by day to feast upon cold pheasant and tales from the tin-box. If the detective should suffer over much from the artistic temperament, and his fellow larger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timber of a feminine voice, so much better for us and them.
And yep — so much better for us.