Tag: Sherlock Holmes

  • Trigger Warning

    Neil Gaiman

    “We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting. These are stories about those masks, and the people we are underneath them.” Thus reads the blurb on the back cover. It’s quite meta, because the book does have a dark theme – “Many of these stories end badly for at least one of the people in them. Consider yourself warned”- and I am reading this after Covid struck! The setting couldn’t have been worse, or better!

    The book has 24 stories (including the poems) and they are of different hues. Made richer because of the long introduction, which provides the context to a lot of these stories. There’s magic, science fiction, twisty fairy tales whose characters you almost know, and yes, ghost stories too! Gaiman also gives in to self-confessed trips of silliness – “And weep, like Alexander” is one such. His own fandom can be seen in a fantastic Sherlock Holmes story, a neat tribute to Ray Bradbury, a Doctor Who tale, and a surreal and profound one for David Bowie as well. There might be more that I might have missed because of a lack of context. Gaiman ends with a story with characters from American Gods. I probably wouldn’t have gotten that if I hadn’t watched the show, I need to buy that book! In addition, there are some clever formats too – A Calendar of Tales has a story for every month, each almost a different genre. Orange is another, a subject’s responses (no questions) to an investigator’s questionnaire.

    What’s common in all of these is the power of imagination, and Gaiman’s way with words. The class of a storyteller is his/her ability to transport the reader to a place and time far away, and Gaiman did that for me more than a dozen times in this book. Pick it up, I am sure you will find your own treasures.

  • Holmes Of The Raj

    Vithal Rajan 

    Similar to the other Holmes fan fiction I read earlier, (The Curious case of 221B –http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/…) this book is also set up on the premise of the author receiving hitherto forgotten papers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

    The setting is late 19th century India, a crucial arena where ‘The Great Game’ was being played out. Holmes and Watson get involved in 5 cases set in various parts of India – Madras, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bombay, Nainital to name a few, and then return 25 years later for a swansong adventure. What is interesting about the book is the way the author weaves in historical characters and events, and shows a different perspective to discoveries and personalities associated with them – Ronald Ross, Ramanujan, to name a couple. And it’s not just science, but literature (Kipling, his character Kim and another that would serve an inspiration for Mowgli; Rabindranath Tagore) and sports (Dhyan Chand). The same trend continues for political events too, with Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, Lord Ripon all featuring in various storylines.

    What didn’t work for me was the narration and mystery moving away from the original Holmes adventures. Very often, the focus is on how Holmes and Watson had played crucial parts in actual historical events, and many a time, these seem a laboured fit. The book concentrates more on the cultural and political aspects of the colonial rule (with the Notes section providing enough evidence that the author has done a lot of homework) and tries to draw our attention to the kind of thinking and behaviour that laid the framework for everything that has happened since. Unfortunately, that means that Holmes and Watson are relegated to being props in a larger canvas. So, it would be good to set your expectations clearly before you start out. This is a commentary, and a very interesting one, on the socio-cultural ethos of the Raj. Regard Holmes and Watson as just another couple of characters, and you’ll do just fine.

  • Shift + Alt + Holmes

    I’m quite a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes. If you remember, schools had this process in which one student was asked to read from the textbook, and another had to start from where he left off. Though most teachers went along a row, some smart ones picked random students. In Class 8 when ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ was part of the syllabus,  I was once so engrossed in reading ahead that i got a ‘Get out of the class’. No, the teacher wasn’t really evil, I think i might have irritated her by pronouncing it as ‘hoond’ and then, when corrected, asking whether i could say “Howston, we have a problem.”  So yes, though M in ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ happens to be Moriarty, Holmes’ arch enemy, and it might be played by Brad Pitt soon, I am a huge fan.

    And so i was quite disappointed not to be able to catch ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in the cinema hall in the first week because we were shifting homes. But fate had a mystery in store for me. The curious incident of the dogmatic nozzle in the night time. I can explain, and will. 😀

    We managed to bring a semblance of order to the place quite late. The toilet attached to the main bedroom had not been explored much, until then. And when we did, we discovered this strange arrangement.

    leftistWhat do you mean what’s wrong. Its leftist. Doesn’t it strike you that the damn nozzle is on the wrong side? Not a good thing to discover when one is erm, pooped. Since the nearest tap was relatively far, we didn’t have lota options.  I have to add – the limited length of the nozzle pipe meant that  if you did try using it, i guess the twists and turns required would  make you feel a bit like the sari donned Draupadi in the Mahabharata!! Actually in the end, you’d feel like Dushasana – edge of the seat stuff, but you have a headache and still cut a sorry figure. After several minutes of discussions with D, that’s the wife not Dushasana, we realised that we had our backs against the wall, figuratively and otherwise, since the engineer wouldn’t help us out that late in the night. And that’s when I remembered Holmes’ famous admonition – “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”

    And that’s how I told D that if she wanted to use this loo now, she would need a paradigm shift. I suggested an option that looks like the one on the top in the image below, facing the wall.

    toilet

    She said “What crap. Sometimes you really go potty ” 😐

    Ha. Toilet humour, the last resort. I wonder if I should say that for the post too? And that would once again make me the butt of the joke. 😐

    until next time, alimentary tracks, my dear Watson? 🙂