Saturday, December 31, 2011
Too Convenient?
In my reading I sometimes find that Holmes' circumstances can be a bit too perfect. In the Adventure of the Beryl Coronat, for instance, Holmesused the footprints in the snow to solve the case. What if it had been summer. Do you think these stories are realistic? Have you noticed simmilar instances?
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I think they are all defiantly too convenient. Every time Holmes' is about to solve a case every thing lines up perfectly. Like in The Man With The Twisted Lip, when Homes always finds the perfect evidence, (the coat that was thrown into the water, and the makeup.) I think Doyle some-what pioneered mystery books. There were not many similar ones to compare. Therefore, what seems too convenient for us, probably got many reading in the day.
ReplyDeleteI keep wondering if he could find other evidence if the situation was different. Detectives today can only use what they're given. I wonder if they were given the same evidence as Holmes, how they would handle it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Lilly in that Doyle pioneered many what we might think today as mystery cliches. Since Sherlock Holmes' original release, countless stories, movies, or other media have probably taken ideas and structures from Holmes. Therefore, people have evolved their expectations of mysteries to be more clever so to us, it seems like Holmes sometimes has it way too easy.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I think the evolution of our mystery stories has also been mirrored in the evolution of crime. In answering Emmy's question, I think that criminals have gotten better at leaving less clues, so detectives have gotten better at using less clues. If you could look at police cases from Doyle's time period, you might find that the criminals were a lot less creative than criminals of today. So, our modern detectives quiet possibly could solve some of Holmes' cases, but some of them might still probably require genius deductions. It really depends on the case.