Stories for the Long Haul by Brad Keefauver

Tell me . . . what are your favorite Sherlock Holmes stories?

Were they always your favorites, from the moment you first read them? When considering your favorites do you remember that initial burst of joy?

After something like forty-five years of Sherlock-fancy, I have to admit that I don’t remember my early favorites any more. And lately, my reasons for liking a given story have changed with time. Take “Silver Blaze” for example. During a recent story discussion, I realized that I didn’t much care for “Silver Blaze” any more. And that thought disturbed me a bit.

I mean, I still admire the technical mastery of the parts and pieces of the tale, the plot, the train ride, those limping sheep. But it’s like looking at the fifth proposition of Euclid for me. I mean, horses are nice, I like visiting horses in their stables. But Silver Blaze’s personality isn’t great, and there isn’t anyone in the tale who is an interesting hang.

Forty five years of revisiting “Silver Blaze” has left me rather numb to its charms.

Yet I remain a Sherlockian, and I love the Canon, so I must not have become numb to all of the stories. Having been shocked at my feelings about “Silver Blaze,” I decided to ponder the question deeper.

I mean, I love “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.” Always have, and probably always will. What makes it so different? 

My first thought is the characters: Kitty Winter, Adelbert Gruner, Violet DeMerville, Porky Shinwell . . . heck, even Watson is going the extra mile in this one. Sure, Sherlock Holmes solves the issue at hand -- this being a tale where the mystery is merely the melodramatic “How will Holmes keep Violet from marrying the evil Baron?” No real mystery for Holmes to solve. But for us?

What was Kitty’s past life and what led to her ruination? How did Gruner get away with murdering his wife? What’s Porky do in “Hell, London?” What do Watson and his pal Lomax the sub-librarian talk about when they get together? This story is full of mysteries, full of prompts for analytical articles and fanfic. There’s life in it, and reading it ten years in, twenty years in, thirty years in, you’re always liable to see something different.

“Illustrious Client” is, in its way, a sloppier story than “Silver Blaze,” and in that mess are tidbits for us to find. 

When I think of my perennial favorites in the Canon, they’re always the stories that are rich veins of imaginative gold to be mined. While we might occasionally complain of Moriarty having to be in so many Holmes movies and TV shows, like Mycroft, he’s a mystery that we have to know more of. Silver Blaze . . . well, I’m sorry, but he was a horse. Maybe he won another race or two, got put out to stud if he didn’t break a leg. I don’t often wonder about Silver Blaze unless my imagination gives him sentience and a secret agenda. For it is the triggering of our imaginations which gives these stories their immortal fan-love.

The dweller on the threshold in “Devil’s Foot.” Wicked Susan Stockdale, first lady of the Stockdale gang. How a Dartmoor prison escape works. The folks in Sussex who think vampires are real. Parker, the harmless garroter and musician. The unused air-gun of “The Mazarin Stone.” All of these whisper of stories we have yet to hear, even if someone has told us their version of a might-have-been.

Sherlockians spend entire lives returning to these sixty stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped Watson bring to us. Sometimes we try to force that same faith on other writer’s works and so often we fail as years pass. But these stories . . . maybe not all of which can support such faith by themselves, but these stories as a whole body of work . . . they offer a never-ending banquet.

I may turn back around on “Silver Blaze” one day. But for now, another course of Holmes is always at the ready.