Special #4: Lyndsay’s Intro to Canon—Part 1

Welcome to a very special series of BSB podcast specials with our very own Lyndsay Faye!

Lyndsay teaches a class about the Sherlock Holmes stories at the Center for Fiction in Manhattan and has kindly agreed to record it for posterity. So now you can listen to her introduction to the Sherlock Holmes canon wherever you are. Here’s Lyndsay’s class description for the week—and don’t forget to do your homework for next month’s

SESSION 1: The Adventures

–A Scandal in Bohemia
–The Red-Headed League
–The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
–The Adventure of the Speckled Band

The Sherlock Holmes mysteries are timeless adventure stories, still more popular today than upon their initial appearance in the Strand Magazine. While the two novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four were published first, Holmes as a cultural phenomenon exploded when Doyle adapted the character into a short form hero.

Three of these tales are included in Conan Doyle’s “Top Five” List of his own favorite stories, while “The Blue Carbuncle” offers a deliciously atmospheric account of Holmes’s deductive abilities.

We’ll discuss the style and efficiency of Doyle’s prose, the real life inspiration for the character of Holmes, the effect these works wrought on the mystery genre, Victorian London as a major character, and the inherent vigilantism of Holmes’s moral compass.