Sidelights on Holmes

Review: John Hall is probably best known as one of the most scrupulous and perceptive Holmesian scholars currently active. His third new book should please even those who dislike new Sherlock Holmes stories.

I’d assumed that Sidelights on Holmes would be a biography of the detective, following up the author’s lives of Dr Watson and Professor Moriarty. Instead, it’s a story-by-story commentary, evidently inspired by, and complementing, Martin Dakin’s 1972 classic. Whereas Dakin treats the Canon in published order (and refuses to recognise The Case Book as authentic) John Hall adheres to his own chronology, established in his still-available I Remember the Date Very Well (Ian Henry; 1993; £6.25). He has a way of spotting obvious facts which most of us miss; for example, that cryptic message in The Gloria Scott: "The game is up. Hudson has told all. Fly for your life." Read the story again, and you’ll find that Hudson had done no such thing!

The author’s statements can be unnecessarily sweeping (is it really true that the 19th century working class ‘seldom bothered with the formalities of . . . marriage?’), but he has a nice way with words, and he does pick up on a great many oddities and inconsistencies that seem to have escaped his predecessors.

Just one thing troubles me: I like the idea that Moriarty was behind the business of the Red-Headed League, but it should be pointed out that John Hawkesworth came up with that notion first, in his script for the Granada TV series!

Hall’s Sidelights on Holmes will certainly establish itself as a standard work, to which future scholars will regularly refer. This 190-page paperback is as sturdy and handsome as we’ve come to expect from Calabash Press.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 178, 1998]