The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1 (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

There are many things about these stories that I find to be brilliant but I will discuss only three in this review so as not to make it too long.

The first is that Holmes is actually as brilliant as his reputation would have everyone believe. Something that I find extremely annoying in fiction is when a character has a reputation for being a fantastic investigator or for being great at something else but they never do anything to prove themselves worthy of that reputation. The character just seems to have average intelligence and the writer makes the main character look smart by making everyone else stupid. Doyle actually went to the trouble of thinking up brilliant things for Holmes to do instead of just making everyone else in the stories stupid as a lot of writers do.

The second is the way Doyle handled Holmes and Watson's relationship. Something else that I have come to detest in fiction is the typical friendship in which the characters are too often making a huge sacrifice for one another and are too frequently having big emotional scenes together. Relationships such as that eventually get to the point where they seem too unrealistic and no longer make me feel anything. But Doyle manages to convince the reader that Holmes and Watson are close friends without any of the sacrifices or emotional scenes. He uses little things to show the depth of their friendship which prevents it from ever becoming sappy or too fictional. Also, the way he wrote the characters helps a great deal to establish them as being close friends. The main thing that convinced me that Holmes and Watson must care a lot for one another was the fact that Watson put up with Holmes' arrogance, rudeness, and strange behavior and the fact that Holmes, who was a very cold and unemotional person, actually allowed Watson to be his friend.

The third is the stories themselves. Even today they are so original and unpredictable. Another complaint that I have about modern fiction is that I can usually determine the whole plot of the story at the very beginning or at least have a general idea where the writer is going to go with the story and the charcters. With most of these stories I didn't have a clue as to what was going to happen next. There were a couple of the stories that I was able to predict but it was still cool to hear Holmes give a logical explanation as to how he had arrived at a conclusion that I had only arrived at by guessing.

If you've never read these stories then I would highly recommend doing so. They are absolutely wonderful.