The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

As my first point I would like to comment on the use of Watson as a

narrator. I think that the writer does this to show how clever

Sherlock Holmes is compared to an ordinary person. We see this as

Watson often gets confused and doesn't know what's going on, where as

Holmes always seems to be in control. An example of this is in the

story 'The Blue Carbuncle', before the mystery has even come to light,

Sherlock Holmes deduces certain things from a battered hat. "He does

not have gas laid on in his house". This amazes Watson, because he

could not deduce anything from the hat. This serves to illustrate

Watson's stupidity in comparison with Sherlock Holmes. Other good

examples of this are at the ends of the stories, when Holmes explains

to Watson how he drew his conclusions to solve the case. Watson is

always surprised and his own conclusions are always wrong. Another

reason Holmes is shown to be so clever could have been to combat some

of the dissatisfaction felt with the police force at the time of

writing. If people believed that there really were detectives like

Sherlock Holmes in the police force then they would probably feel a

bit safer.

Another reason for using Watson as a narrator is that it gives an

outsiders perspective of Sherlock Holmes. It shows us how brilliant

Holmes must have seemed to the common public. It also adds realism to

the stories, as it seems that they were not written by Conan Doyle,

but just chronicled by one of his best friends. Also Watson is someone

that the reader can relate to, for example if Holmes was the narrator

then the audience would not understand how he draws...

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...sing is that he

keeps throwing plot twists to confuse them and take them right back to

square one. An example of this is in the story of "The Speckled Band"

when Holmes thinks that it was gypsies who killed the girl, but we

later see that it could not have been them. A series of clues then

leads Holmes to the real killer, the girl's father. This makes the

reader want to read on and find out what happens. Another example of

this is in the story of "The Man With The Twisted Lip", when no one

would guess that the beggar is really the apparently murdered man's

alter ego. Also readers who had read previous books would know about

these things, and look for them.

In conclusion, I would say that there is no single reason for the

continued popularity of the stories, but it is a culmination of all

the ones mentioned above.