To druga powieść, którą przerabiam w ramach chronologicznego przeglądu opowieści o Sherlocku Holmesie. I w odróżnieniu od "Studium w szkarłacie", które oceniam jako udane wprowadzenie w świat Holmesa i Watsona, ta odsłona nie wywarła już na mnie tak pozytywnego wrażenia.

Początek jest, owszem, obiecujący. Zagadka zniknięcia ojca panny Morstan, która szybko przeradza się w tajemnicę skarbu strzeżonego przez tytułowy znak czterech, jest niezwykle intrygująca. Przenikliwość genialnego detektywa daje się poznać już od początku opowieści.

Niestety, później jest już gorzej. Następujący potem ciąg akcji nie dość, że nie wydaje się szczególnie wciągający, to przede wszystkim niespecjalnie jest napędzany błyskotliwym intelektem Holmesa, a tego jednak przede wszystkim oczekuję po tych historiach.

No, ale przynajmniej Watson znalazł sobie towarzyszkę życia. Good for you, doctor!

An 19th Century man travels back to Arthurian England of the 6th Century where he tries to bring them from a monarchy to a republic. He brings his knowledge and starts building a modern world.

It took me a while to get into the cadence and rhythm of Arthurian English. Once I do this becomes a rollicking good time. Watching The Boss deal with the superstitions of the time and trying to teach, which he eventually does with Arthur, was interesting. I enjoyed how he set up his own alternate society which he keeps secret from King Arthur and Merlin. But just like Camelot ends in war so does this story and The Boss loses everything he built.

This shows how a person is born in a time and a mind set and it is very difficult to change them, no matter how much life improves with the changes.

Roughly 1800 years ago, a biographer and historian decided to compare the great men of Greece and Rome to one another to give his readers inspiration to follow their example or what to avoid.  Parallel Lives by Plutarch chronicles the lives of the greatest men of the ancient world and the times they lived in.

To show the influence of character—good or bad—of the great men of more remote past of Greece and the more recent past of Rome was Plutarch’s main aim in his biographies of these great men especially when he compared them to one another.  Yet throughout his writing he shows the times these great men lived to the benefit of readers today that might know the overall history, but not the remarkably interesting details or events that general history readers might never know about.  The usual important suspects like Alexander, Julius Caesar, and their like but it was those individuals that one never heard of today especially those Greeks between the end of the Peloponnesian War and its takeover by Rome save Alexander.  This revised edition of the John Dryden translation contains both volumes in one book resulting in almost 1300 pages of text thanks to the fact that they added four lives that Plutarch wrote independent of his parallel pairs which included a Persian monarch, yet this printing is of poor quality as there are missing letters throughout which does slow reading down for a moment.

Parallel Lives is a fascinating series of biographies of individuals that in the second century AD were the greatest men in history to those living at the time, a few of which have continued to our time.  Plutarch’s prose brings these men to life as well as the times they live in and influenced which history readers would appreciate a lot.

TITLE: The Reign of Arthur: From History to Legend

AUTHOR: Christopher Gidlow

PUBLICATION DATE: 2007

FORMAT: Paperback

ISBN-13: 9780750934190

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DESCRIPTION:

"This intriguing volume looks at the early sources describing Arthur's career and compares them to the reality of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. It presents the most up-to-date scholarship and a convincing case for the existence of a real 6th-century British general called Arthur."

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REVIEW:

Gidlow provides a comprehensive, scholarly analysis of ancient texts with a comparison of what is known of 5th and 6th century British life in an effort to determine if the fabled Arthur is a real person. Gidlow also examines how a 5th/6th century warrior became the "King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table". Interesting, but after a while all the picking apart of old texts and the "could have been", "might have been", "it is plausible" just got tedious. A bit more archaeological evidence would have been useful. Arthur fanatics will find the book interesting.

This week has been slumpish. I haven't felt like diving into any heavy reads or even full length novels or really anything that required a lot of focus. So, poetry and short stories and Paul Temple, and even this only a few minutes at a time, were the only reads I engaged in this week. Not that poetry doesn't require some focus etc. ... but poems are short and you don't generally need to remember a plot or characters from one poem to the next.

Anyway, I did manage to start Capital Crimes, which is a collection of short stories with London as a theme. 

The first story in the book was The Case of Lady Sannox by Arthur Conan Doyle. 

I have read this story before in a superb collection of ACD's (non-Holmes) short stories called Gothic Tales, and I found it stomach-turning then. On the re-read, it's still makes me wince, but then I am not a fan of horror ... and this falls into the horror genre for me.

However, I think I also appreciated the story a little more on the re-read for its pointing out issues regarding xenophobia and domestic violence. It's one of ACD's stories that I thought was quite modern, ahead if its time even, for story first published in 1893.

Btw, all of ACD's stories are available online for free.  

I am not sure I will write an update for all of the other stories in Capital Crimes, but for reference the stories included in the collection are:

The Case of Lady Sannox - Arthur Conan Doyle

A Mystery of the Underground - John Oxenham

The Finchley Puzzle - Richard Marsh

The Magic Casket - R. Austin Freeman

The Holloway Flat Tragedy - Ernest Bramah

The Magician Of Cannon Street - J. S. Fletcher

The Stealer of Marble - Edgar Wallace

The Tea Leaf - Robert Eustace and Edgar Jepson

The Hands of Mr Ottermole - Thomas Burke

The Little House - H. C. Bailey

The Silver Mask - Hugh Walpole

Wind in the East - Henry Wade

The  Avenging Chance - Anthony Berkley

They Don't Wear Labels - E. M. Delafield

The Unseen Door - Margery Allingham

Cheese - Ethel Lina White

You Can't Hang Twice - Anthony Gilbert