Done with Memoirs.

I'm always in a complicated spot where Memoirs is concerned. To me, while I realize it counts among it's stories Holmes first case, his decision to start his career, his last, and even the introduction of his brother, making it a "must" for the construction and rounding up of the character (and something I feel ACD definitely was aiming at so as to divest himself of Holmes, Macondo style), I always find that Adventures was more enjoyable.

Now, the fact that, after making sure Mrs Watson was traveling, he took Watson with him in The Final Problem, but sent him off at the last moment will always ring inside me on sheer evidence of protectiveness.

Listening to The Hound of the Baskervilles foreword now. As always, it brings all this delicious nuggets to the fore. In this instance, my Harry Potter crazed self keeps picturing a Houdini desperately trying to convince the muggle that no, it was not real magic, and shit, he was about to get in trouble with the ministry if he kept it up.

At the opening of the Musgrave ritual, we were told

An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs.

Five stories later

"I will be at your service in an instant, Watson. You will find tobacco in the Persian slipper."

But for celebrating continuity and call-backs

"The alarm had reached Scotland Yard by this time, and Mr. Forbes, the detective, came round at once and took up the case with a great deal of energy."

I'll take the rebounding brick of tagging the police as energetic by in-world characters, like some kind of praise, that keeps on coming back and get's all the more insulting and hilarious on each repeat.

Done with Adventures. As much as I liked it before, it was so much better this time around.

Now I'm listening at the Memoirs Foreword, and I can't stop laughing!! (as in, serious, LOUD laughter) This was NOT what I expected when he said Holmes had changed his life!!

I'm so in love with this audiobook collection

I'm listening a lot this Sunday. It's good company while I clean. I'm up to the last tale now.

The Blue Carbuncle made me laugh so hard. I don't remember being so amused by this collection as a child. The sense of ridicule is really something that develops as you get older I guess.

As for the last story, Copper Beeches start:

It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.”
“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.”
“You have erred, perhaps,” he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood—“you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”
“It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,” I remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend’s singular character.
“No, it is not selfishness or conceit,” said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. “If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.”

Cute of ACD to tell us Holmes' opinion of Watsn's tales on the last story, and it be this.

“you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.”
“The end may have been so,” I answered, “but the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest.”
“Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!

Doubly cute. Bang the wall a little more, won't you, to get us to protest louder.

Do you not deduce something from that?”
“We have got to the deductions and the inferences,” said Lestrade, winking at me. “I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.”
“You are right,” said Holmes demurely; “you do find it very hard to tackle the facts.”

Somehow, Fry manages to make the exchange even more savage from both parties