P. D. James & Sherlock Holmes

 

Never having read any of P.D. James's detective stories, I did happen to pick up this book years ago. In Talking About Detective Fiction (2009), James traces the detective genre from Dickens and Wilkie Collins to the present day.  

Of Sherlock Holmes, she writes: 

...he remains unique, the unchallenged Great Detective, whose brilliant deductive intelligence could outwit any adversary, however cunning, and solve any puzzle, however bizarre. 

This we know is not exactly true since Holmes admitted to being beaten four times, and was known to draw the wrong conclusion occasionally. 

James writes: Despite the amount of detailed information about Holmes and his habits provided by Watson in the short stories, the core of the man remains elusive.

James lists Holmes's qualities thus: ...clever with a practical, rational, non-threatening intelligence, patriotic, compassionate, resourceful and brave...

He was an expert boxer and swordsman and had a good practical knowledge of the law and of poisons.

She quotes Arthur Conan Doyle commenting on his famous character: ...a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really life-like unless he had some possibilities of that character within him. 

 Still, on Doyle, James writes: But his most attractive characteristic was undoubtedly his passion for justice... He imbued Sherlock Holmes with the same passion, the same courage.

James goes on to state that not all of Holmes's qualities were so admirable. ... he spent days on the sofa without uttering a word, regularly injecting himself with cocaine, and with his erratic lifestyle and habit of firing off his revolver in the sitting room...

James lists The Speckled Band as the most popular, best-known, and most terrifying of the stories. She considers Dr. Grimesby Roylott as Holmes's most evil adversary. 

P. D. James writes: ...the Sherlock Holmes canon is still in print and the stories are being read by new generations nearly eighty years after Conan Doyle's death.

 

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