Audiobook4 hours
Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles
Written by Pierre Bayard
Narrated by John Lee
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Eliminate the impossible, Sherlock Holmes said, and whatever is left must be the solution. But, as Pierre Bayard finds in this dazzling reinvestigation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, sometimes the master missed his mark. Using the last thoughts of the murder victim as his key, Bayard unravels the case, leading the reader to the astonishing conclusion that Holmes-and, in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle-got things all wrong: The killer is not at all who they said it was.
Part intellectual entertainment, part love letter to crime novels, and part crime novel in itself, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong turns one of our most beloved stories delightfully on its head. Examining the many facets of the case and illuminating the bizarre interstices between Doyle's fiction and the real world, Bayard demonstrates a whole new way of reading mysteries: a kind of "detective criticism" that allows readers to outsmart not only the criminals in the stories we love but also the heroes-and sometimes even the writers.
Part intellectual entertainment, part love letter to crime novels, and part crime novel in itself, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong turns one of our most beloved stories delightfully on its head. Examining the many facets of the case and illuminating the bizarre interstices between Doyle's fiction and the real world, Bayard demonstrates a whole new way of reading mysteries: a kind of "detective criticism" that allows readers to outsmart not only the criminals in the stories we love but also the heroes-and sometimes even the writers.
Author
Pierre Bayard
Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, and many other books.
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Reviews for Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong
Rating: 3.491379296551724 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
58 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book is playful, funny and amazing and adds so much to its subject. Having read THotB though is pretty much required preparation, and ideally some more Sherlock Holmes stories.
However, a caveat: This book requires you to like metafiction and be prepared to tolerate a charming arrogance/wankiness about literature though, but if you've read Sherlock Holmes then you should be up to the task. If you don't read it with too serious a face, it's really enjoyable. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Egad, I say. Whatever is this? Apparently 823.912 is the Dewey number for criticism and commentary on 19th and 20th century English authors, so as I ogled my way through a shelf of books looking for Tolkien commentary, I saw things like 'The James Joyce Companion', several Agatha Christie readers, a dozen books about Dickens, and this one that caught my eye. It presents an astoundingly sound re-examination of the case and also had some essaying about the reality of fictional characters. Really, it was more like two short books mixed together. The author discussed how we psychologically enter the realm of fictional characters (which is what makes the good stories so universally appealing), and, in their own way, the fictional personas enter into our reality. This is more obvious with Holmes, as his methods of observation and deduction are quite handy and impressive. I have amazed people by noticing the white line where a ring has been or asking someone where they got their pantlegs wet on a sunny day. I love the human intellect. It's such a fun buddy to have around. But I digress from my point. Apparently Conan Doyle really grew to hate Holmes because the clamor for more Holmes tales took time away from what he considered his more important writings, like the White Company and all that other stuff of his that almost nobody reads. That's why he killed of Holmes at Reichenbach Falls and had to invent an anti-Holmes to carry out the murder. The public uproar was such that his publishers demanded more Holmes stories and Conan Doyle did so reluctantly, and only with the doubling of his royalties. Bayard then goes on to show how Doyle's hatred for Holmes carried into that return story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. He builds up a surprisingly strong case around Holmes errors, of which there are actually several in the corpus of stories, shows how Doyle portrayed Holmes as a feral hound himself, points out that Holmes is actually absent in person from almost the entire story, then finishes with an alternative solution that actually makes more sense than the original. I was very surprised with this book, most notably with the psychological reality of fiction part. That alone made this a fairly valuable read and explains why fantasy lovers really, really love their favorites. Or why others hate it, I suppose. The bit about Doyle was fairly old news to me, but it may not be to others, and the parsing of a fictional story was the highlight of the book in theory, but was actually not that important. It's not like Monsieur Bayard found Jimmy Hoffa's body or solved some real crime. Still, I say if your library has this book, go ahead and check it out as it is a pretty fulfilling and yet short read. Oh, Bayard also wrote Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? along the same lines, and as a minor warning he throws in a total spoiler of Christie's Towards Zero as part of his theory about the Baskerville murders.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The fog swirls along shuttered streets. Voices make their disembodied way in the mist, now near, now fading off. An ominous howl warns mariners from these ancient rocks, lest they join their drowned brothers in the octopus quadrille. There's a sudden gasp as tendrils of fog part to reveal a giant hound, slavering, straining at the leash. Two men immediately cross the street to escape its wolfish jaws.Could this beast be the fearful curse of the Baskervilles? No, merely me walking Kai, our malamute mix along the beach in Seattle. Atmophere does funny things to perspective.Which is sort of the point of Bayard's piece of literary criticism. I found the concept more interesting than the execution. While his rendering of a possible alternate killer, and the reasons behind it, were intriguing and plausible, his manner of getting there was a yawn. First off, relying on Freudian psychology for a portion of his explanation of the relationship between Doyle and his creation struck me as a bit of an eye brow raiser. I think it's fine to pschoanalyze this relationship, if one is still into that sort of thing. But Freud? Really? As great a man as he was, I can't take his theories seriously at this point. Too much time, science, experience, knowledge has gone by.Also, I found his exposition of the reality of the shared space between the creation/creator/reader just a little too Ffordian for me. Sure, as a writer my characters become real for me, and I hope they become real for my readers. I do not expect them to start having a "real" life of their own. And if literary characters are going to start doing that, may I make a request as to which ones could come visit?Overall, I didn't feel it added anything new to the canon, or to my perspective on literature.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Disappointing. The author should have left the case closed. There are quite a few problems with the book. Two have to do with the author who is a psychoanalyst and French. The problem with him being a psychoanalyst is that he writes like one. Much of the middle part of the book is a lot of back and forth about fictional characters and their relationships with the authors and readers and their ability to move in and out of the text and reality, etc. My eyes tended to glaze over during this discussion. The problem with him being French is that he used a French translation of the Hound and (as the translator brings out in some notes), the author bases some of his arguments on language that just doesn’t match the English text. Additionally in his summary of the Hound at the beginning of the book he gets at least two of the plot points wrong. They aren’t really major but when you are basing your book on a close reading and reinterpretation of the text you should at least get the plot right. He did make some good points about some unlikely events in the original novel and his suggestion for an alternate villain is interesting but it just was not that convincing. He doesn’t really make a better case for his suspect that Doyle does for Stapleton. The idea for the book was very good I just did not feel that the execution lived up to the promise.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I wish this 188 page book had been about 133 pages long but, otherwise, enjoyed it.Peter Bayard’s notion is that the characters of a novel live and operate independently of their author and that the latter is often unaware of the true events taking place in a story (the quote from Jasper Fforde at the beginning of the book gives the reader his first inkling). In previous stories, he has apparently shown that Claudius was not the villain of Hamlet and that Hercule Poirot misidentified the murderer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In this volume he tackles Sherlock Holmes, showing that the detective got it entirely wrong in The Hound of the Baskervilles.The book comprises six actual sections, but is divided into roughly four parts that don’t quite correspond to the author’s divisions. The first is a recapitulation of the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is done quickly and is useful if you haven’t read the latter recently. The second is an explanation and critique of Holmes’ methods. If you are a fan of the detective, this section is nothing new, for you are certainly familiar with those methods. Quite probably, you have also reached the independent conclusion that Holmes often treats statistical probabilities as facts and often leaps to ill-supported conclusions that seem brilliant only because the comparison is Watson, who is such a dunderhead. Yet, Bayard expresses his ideas quickly and with many examples and it is enjoyable to read.The third section came close to ruining the book for me. It is a psycho-philosophical discourse on the “realness” of fictional works, along with a recounting of Doyle’s actual dissatisfaction with Holmes. And it is long. And it is tedious. Essentially, Bayard sets up the premise that Doyle was so upset with his inability to kill Holmes that he could not be trusted to provide an unbiased reporting of events. It felt like five pages of text ballooned into over 60.The fourth section is the payoff, in which Bayard exposes the real murderer in the book. No spoilers but, quite simply, his solution is much better than Doyle’s. The resolution is a much better fit of the facts of the story; the crime more intricate and interesting to the reader; the oddities and coincidences which fill this story are explained.A recommended read but, if you skim the third section, I shan’t blame you.