Sherlock Holmes

My "other book" (I usually read a small fiction novel which I put in my bag and read in bed, and have a second novel or non-fiction book that is too big to read in bed but which I keep in the living room for spare moments) for the last few weeks has been Sherlock Holmes, or more precisely the beautiful The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, which has all the stories in chronological order.
Now I had never read any Sherlock Holmes before this, so my only references were The Great Mouse Detective (which was, to be honest, my least favourite Disney movie) and the new Sherlock Holmes films with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law (the second of which is so much better than the first), which an avid Sherlock-reader told me were no good. As I liked the movies, I expected not to like the book, also because I generally don't read detective stories. Most of them are too show-offy, with the author trying to let us know how very clever and ingenious they are, generally with bad writing, flat characters, and cliffhangers at the end of each chapter to keep you reading. If you need cliffhangers to keep people reading (I'm looking at you, Dan Brown) then your story is probably not very good. I have to say I do like the writing in 19th century novels, because in general there is a lot of attention paid to good language and good descriptions, but I usually don't like the stories (really, generally nothing happens, until everything happens, the story ends, and you're left confused and annoyed).
So I really wasn't expecting that much.
But I was pleasantly surprised. The writing is really very good, some of the descriptions are almost poetical ("Even the rafters above our heads were lined by solemn fowls, who lazily shifted their weight from one leg to the other as our voices disturbed their slumbers"), the chase scenes are very lively and pull you into the story (who knew that you can still be drawn in by two steamboats chasing each other on the Thames, after seeing Die Hard, the Bourne films, etc), the characters have depth and motivations and realism, Holmes is a little conceited but seems truly surprised that not everyone can reason their way through a murder case with the ease he can, and the whole "out smarting the official police force" is a nice anarchistic touch. Usually you can figure out what is going on just before Watson does, although in some cases the circumstances or words are just too archaic to make sense of (as when they follow a trail of creosote through the streets... I looked up what creosote is, but it still didn't help me very much), but there always is an elegant solution and reason. There are some continuity errors between works (Watson keeps shifting from having a pistol or a revolver, and he marries twice, seemingly having forgotten about his first wife), but there were several years between the publication of the works, and at some point Arthur Conan Doyle was quite annoyed that his main character was more popular than he was, because he did not think his Holmes-stories were true literary works and wanted to devote his time to his "proper" historical novels, so it may well be that he did not pay that much attention to the details (of continuity, he clearly did pay a lot of attention to the details of his muder mysteries).
Anyway, they're great reads, the short stories you can finish in about 20 minutes and feel smug about yourself over because they are "easier" than the longer stories, but the longer stories usually involve exoctic locations in for example India or America, so they are rewarding in their own way. And of course, it's a great way to get a glimpse of the world-views, attitudes, behaviours, and everyday life of people at the eind of the 19th century. So if you have any time to spare and would like to start on detective novels, Sherlock Holmes is your man!