Of all the English classes I ever had, my 7th grade one was the best. And part of it was that my teacher was great, and part of it was that I realized that grammar is equal parts fun and fascinating — although I realize I may be alone on that one — but probably the single biggest factor was that we had to write an essay on a short story each week. And I could talk a lot about how helpful it was to have to churn out essays and learn to construct an argument and stuff, but what I’m here to talk about today is how much I hated the short stories.
Middle School and High School English classes do a lot to instill in kids the idea that serious literature is super depressing, and short stories, which tend to be sort of single-minded in pursuit of an idea, make it worse — at least with novels, there’s usually time and space to put in a few scenes that will make you laugh, or, you know, offer sidelights on a character that give you hope that they have inner resources to draw on and won’t spend the rest of their lives completely miserable. If they live to the end of the story, that is.
I mean, there were bright spots: “The Speckled Band.” Dorothy Parker. Vocabulary lessons. But I came out of Middle School English with the conviction that all short stories were terrible and that I would hate them forever, with a grudging exception for detective stories.
Anyway, the point of this is that for a long time I really believed I hated short stories — until a couple of years ago when I realized that I was reading short stories all the time, and loving them. It was just that they were short story series, character-driven and funny instead of literary and depressing. These days I get really excited when an author I’ve been enjoying turns out to have a series of short stories or two. So this is the first in what I expect to be a extremely rambling series of posts about those, and how much fun they are — starting with the super obvious.
Sherlock Holmes
It doesn’t get a lot more obvious than Sherlock Holmes, right? To the point where I don’t need to describe the series at all, because if you don’t already know the premise, you’ve been living under a rock since 1887.I’m only including the Holmes stories here to point out that they’re exactly the same as everything else I’m about to talk about — focused on a character, based around a central conceit, and closely tied to a specific setting. And all about a person who’s better at stuff than everyone around him, which is preferred, if not essential. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is, I think, the most fun — first collections usually are — and I retain my 7th grade fondness for “The Speckled Band,” although I think the one that kind of bowled me over the most when I first read it was “The Red-Headed League.”
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the complete Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes or Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, but you get the idea. And the novels are sort of beside the point in this context, but I will freely admit that my favorite Sherlock Holmes Thing is Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love probably beyond reason.
Jeeves and Wooster
Then there’s P.G. Wodehouse. And if Sherlock Holmes is typical of the thing I’m trying to talk about, I don’t know what the Jeeves
I’ve read one Father Brown short story and it was really odd. It was about this guy who lived at the top of a sky scraper and tried to convince people he was a god (?). And then he threw his secretary down an elevator shaft, I think.
Have you listened to the BBC version of “The Man Who Was Thursday”? I haven’t compared it with the full written version, but it is just as incisive and dreamy as any GKC I’ve ever read.
Yeah, his secretary is wealthy, right? And he makes her eyesight worse by encouraging her to stare at the sun, and tricks her into falling down the elevator shaft after she’s made a will in his favor? Or he thinks she has? That’s a weird one, although it probably says something that I didn’t remember it when I was trying to think of weird ones.
I haven’t, but I have listened to the Mercury Theater one, which was pretty good. I have limited patience for audio books and radio plays, though.
I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never actually read any Sherlock Holmes or G.K. Chesterton but your post has inspired me. I love Bertie and Jeeves.
Well, Sherlock Holmes is kind of essential reading — even more than it is awesome, and it’s pretty great. I don’t even really know what to recommend for a first Holmes read, but I definitely stand by the first three stories in The Innocence of Father Brown as a good introduction to GKC.
I used to catch sooo much grief from my best friend over my unnatural love of Jeeves & Bertie. She would tease me by saying “Have you read the one where Bertie gets bullied by one of his aunts, and gets engaged against his will?”
I can’t help it. I KNOW they’re all the same and I DON’T CARE. The series is what cured her of the teasing, finally–she’s a devoted Fry & Laurie fan, and nothing they do could ever come in for criticism from her.
Do you like any of the other Wodehouse stories? I quite enjoy his stories about the Mulliners, and “The Oldest Member” (the golf stories), too.