The Return of Sherlock Holmes

"I’ve probably read the stories of Sherlock Holmes 200 or 300 times in my life, starting from when I was 11. I still read them now. They’re brilliantly written. What I love about this story is that Conan Doyle had written a character who was so good that when he decided to kill him off, he couldn’t because there was too much of a clamor. So in “The Final Problem” Conan Doyle throws Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls. Then, in this book, in a relatively unconvincing fashion, he has to explain why Holmes didn’t die. So in the first story, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” he has Watson semi-bereft, living in London and thinking, ‘I can’t believe Sherlock is dead’ only to find out he didn’t die. Holmes had survived the fall, climbed back up the cliff, and had then gone off around the world chasing down the gang that nearly killed him. Holmes then bumps into Watson and they solve another crime. “The Adventure of the Empty House” is a really good puzzle. It’s a locked-room murder, quite a famous one, where a man is sitting, counting his winnings in cards. The door is locked, the window is very high up: how did he die? “We’ve all been scrabbling around for 130 years, but Sherlock Holmes is still the best” But my favourite bit, the reason why I’ve chosen this story, is because at its heart is the friendship between Watson and Holmes. I’m a gross sentimentalist and I think in the end all these books live and die by the warmth of the characters. Sherlock Holmes spends all his time talking about himself as this cerebral creature, this brain. Does he actually have human, heartfelt relations? In the story, Watson bumps into a hunchback selling books. They go into a room, Watson turns around, and then Holmes stands up and reveals himself. And Watson passes out with the joy of it all. Holmes then leans over him and says, ‘Oh, my God, I’m so pleased you’re okay.’ And you realize that even though Holmes is a very curmudgeonly, annoying, acerbic, coke- and tobacco-raddled figure, there is a beating heart within him. In the end, that beating heart is the thing I love about detective fiction. It’s true in all these books I’ve recommended. That story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes has a beating heart very visible in it. Yes, Conan Doyle then goes off and writes lots more Sherlock Holmes stories. The Return of Sherlock Holmes has 13 stories and it’s got some of the classics. Some of the absolute best Sherlock Holmes stories are in this collection. I could have picked the first Sherlock Holmes collection as well. I could have picked The Hound of the Baskervilles , which is brilliant. I could’ve picked anything Sherlock Holmes. But if someone said to me, ‘You can only reread one Sherlock Holmes story’ that first story in The Return would be the one for me. It’s both a brilliant locked-room mystery and you have Holmes returning. It’s great. Also, in my book, there’s a bit where Jake discovers a secret compartment in the library he has inherited. He sees a book whose title is “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” which is a Sherlock Holmes story from this volume. In it, a man pretends to be killed and hides in a little room and Sherlock Holmes discovers that room. My little tribute to that is, if you pull back the book in the library, a secret compartment is revealed which advances the plot a little bit. I was born in 1980 and there were a very finite number of books in my house. There was no Amazon. I read and reread what was there, which included lots of genre novels, but it wasn’t thousands and thousands. I remember Penguin reissued some classic detective books, one of which was a Sherlock Holmes, in these very cheap, green paperbacks. I remember reading them a lot. But I had a finite number of genre novels. So no, the idea that you could have a thriller library in the middle of this beautiful country farmhouse is unadulterated fantasy."