Volume 52, Number 3 · February 24, 2005
The Game's Afoot
By Michael Chabon
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volumes 1 and 2
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, and with an introduction by John le Carré
Norton, 1,875 pp., $75.00
Though today they are often published without the standard prefix, I think it's important that so many of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories bear the word 'Adventure' in their title: 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band,' 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist.' It has become commonplace to view the Holmes tales, and the detective story tradition that they engendered, as fundamentally conservative.[1] In this reading the detective, while technically independent of the law, is in truth the dedicated agent of the prevailing social order—a static, hierarchical structure, in which murder is an aberration. This was the view Raymond Chandler took of 'murder in the Venetian vase,' against which he famously posited his 'mean streets' theory, in which the autonomous if not anarchist detective operates in a disordered and fluctuating world that can never hope to be restored, in which social position is transient, the law a hopeless fiction, and morality flexible at best.
Review, 5120 words
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