I see it, I deduce it - in which I am more complimentary to Doyle and Holmes

With "The Scandal in Bohemia" (1891), the first Sherlock Holmes short story, Arthur Conan Doyle instantly eliminates the worst parts of the two early Holmes novels, while retaining the best parts.

The version I have with me, in the 3rd edition of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, is eighteen pages long.  Watson visits Holmes, and they do their little Holmes-Watson minuet (W: "Then, how do you know?"  H: "I see it, I deduce it.").  A client appears, and the mystery is established.  This is all fine, the usual stuff, but fine.  It fills about eight pages.

That's the solution, right there.  An eight page setup, nine pages of action, a one page denouement, with a juicy reward for the Holmesians, and we're done.  Doyle's not enough of a polisher for me to call the story elegant, exactly, but it is pretty efficient.  No, even better - it is efficient in the right places (the action, the minimal, trivial, mystery), but also lingers in the right places (the Watson-Holmes interactions).  This problem is not solved at all, but we can't have everything, except in all of the great books where we can.

All of this is well-known and obvious to anyone who has read any of these stories.  It was not well-known to me, in part because the diehard Holmesians are more interested in the various tics and props associated with Holmes than in the literary quality of Doyle's writing.  Many of them play an odd game in which Doyle does no writing at all. 

After finishing, barely, The Sign of Four, I was completely sick of Doyle and Holmes.  There was just too much bad writing.  I have been reading a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps too much, and worrying that I have been wasting too much time with second-rate books.  And this is with a real craftsman!  To turn from Stevenson to those early Doyle novels was no help.  From the point of view of the Scottish Reading Challenge, if I'm all done with Holmes for now, I won't complain, although a fellow reader would be just the thing to jumpstart my enthusiasm.

I knew, though, that I was not being fair to Doyle or Holmes.  The stories, the better ones, had to be superior, and I assume that the much later Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) is good, too.  Thus, a rereading, after many years, of "A Scandal in Bohemia," and this more complimentary post.

Advice to new readers of Doyle:  Go for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes first, or a short story best-of (not a Complete collection).  Then Hound.  The more stories.  If you discover that you really like the Whole Holmes Thing, that you are or may be a Holmesian, go back to the beginning, see how Holmes and Watson met, witness the introduction of the Holmes props (the violin, the cocaine).  Skip the Utah chapters of A Study in Scarlet.  Don't do what I did.

Reading "A Scandal in Bohemia" in a big anthology created new problems.  The story immediately following is Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game."  Now that, I tell ya what, is a piece of writing.  And look, there's "The Dead."  There's Alice Munro, and Eudora Welty, and Chekhov.  More advice: do not read any of these writers immediately before or after Arthur Conan Doyle.  Ramp down, then ramp back up.