The Book That Changed My Life
Was it Christmas 1970? Or was it my 16th birthday? It matters not - they're the same day.
I receive a present, a book, given to me by my father. Why he chose this book I don't know. It wasn't a bestseller at the time. There's nothing flashy about it, nothing spectacular. In fact, most people would likely find this book daunting: a standard-sized hardcover with 1,122 pages of close-set type, no pictures. My father never read it himself, of that I'm certain. Maybe he was passing through a store, saw its cover, and thought I'd like it. Maybe my mother told him to go out and buy me something - anything - so I would have something special from him on my 16th birthday. I'm sure he never once thought that this book, without doubt, would have a greater, more lasting influence on my life than any other single volume.
Everyone has a book that changes their life. I suppose for some that book is the Bible. But I find the Bible - full of great lessons and metaphor - too dry, too broad, too jumbled to effect a life change. For some that book is the seminal publication of some great societal watershed: Common Sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Silent Spring. For most, it's a work of fiction read as a youth: Lord of the Flies, Alice in Wonderland, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For nearly everyone, it's a book that fires the imagination.
And so it is with me. I have read The Complete Sherlock Holmes cover to cover at least 4 times. My original copy of the Doubleday tome I keep at work, its bookplate - with my crabbed, childlike scrawl of a signature - adorning the inside front cover. I have three annotated versions of the Sherlockian Canon: Baring-Gould's, Les Klinger's, and the Oxford. I own commentary on these Sacred Writings, histories, chronologies, compendiums, reference works, periodicals, Sherlockian pastiches, Sherlockian crossword puzzles, pictures, statues and crockery, pins and stickers, one large bookcase in all. I subscribe to a Sherlockian quarterly, The Baker Street Journal; belong to two Sherlockian scion societies: Watson's Tin Box and The Six Napoleons of Baltimore; and correspond with the Hounds of the Internet, a Sherlockian discussion group. My nom-de-net namesake, Cyril Morton, was the one electrical engineer specifically mentioned in the Sacred Writings. Even this blog's name and masthead were inspired by a passage from The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb.
The Sherlockian Canon wasn't published in chronological order. His Last Bow, depicting my man Holmes as an energetic 60-year-old catching a German spy on the eve of the Great War, was published nearly 10 years before Doyle's final canonical entry, The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place. His stories were of uneven literary quality. The drama and excitement of The Sign of Four, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and The Hound of the Baskervilles are utterly lacking from Doyle's later stories. And Doyle wasn't above introducing inconsistencies to the stories. Was Dr. Watson's wound from the "Jezail bullet" in his shoulder or his leg? Sir Arthur was never quite sure.
But Doyle imbued the 56 short stories and 4 novellas composing The Complete Sherlock Holmes with a sense of place and character and detail rarely exceeded in English literature. To this day, Victorian England fixates itself in my imagination with a clarity and presence unlike any other.
"Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot." cries Holmes to a sleeping Watson on a bitterly cold early morning in 1897. "Not a word! Into your clothes and come!" I read those words and am transported back, back to a place I've never been, yet a place real, familiar, and fully-formed in my mind. My breath steams as I nestle ever further into my heavy coat. I sit in a hansom cab with my companions, silent, as we rattle through the still and quiet streets of London on our way to Charing Cross Station. We have work to do, my friends and me, as our hearts quicken at the thrill of the chase. Stanley Hopkins and Scotland Yard await, just as always.
Just as it ever will be.
K-
