FREE TO AMERICAN DIGEST READERS: The Quotable Sherlock Holmes

BECAUSE IT IS CONAN-DOYLE'S BIRTHDAY, IT'S BACK: A free copy of my homage to his great detective, Sherlock Holmes:

THE QUOTABLE SHERLOCK HOLMES
Originally Published by The Mysterious Press (Time-Warner) in 2000.
Now sadly out-of-print -- except here.
Click Right Here to Download Free PDF [ 530K ]

Every so often, and more often in the future, I either write or make a book. And every so often, as is the way of the world, those books go out of print. But not, I dare say, on the Internet. While it is not as compact or as slick as the original, it still has all the text and should give no little pleasure to those that love the "World's Greatest Consulting Detective."

Please feel free to link here, to download, to email and otherwise and pass it along.

The Quotable Holmes as reviewed by Otto Penzler in Penzler's Picks at Amazon Amazon.com:

His roommate and amanuensis, John H. Watson, once described Sherlock Holmes as "the best and wisest man whom I have ever known." With the possible exception of Marv Epstein and Stanley Ellin, two dear old friends now deceased, I have to go along with that assessment. I discovered Holmes when I was pretty young, and nothing was more influential in my choosing this life of crime. The 56 stories and four novels that comprise the true canon are filled with more wisdom and quotable lines than any other single book aside from the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

Gerard Van der Leun has extracted scores of wonderful lines from the text, and they are a joy to sample. On jealousy, for example, Holmes says, "They are as jealous as a pair of professional beauties." On lost love: "A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, no matter how badly he may have treated her." Watson was a ladies' man, but Holmes, though unfailingly polite and protective of women, had his moments of misogyny: "Women are never to be entirely trusted--not the best of them." And: "I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money...."

As wonderful as this little volume is, it would be only fair to those who have gone before to note that there have been, over the years, many books devoted wholly or partially to Holmesian quotations, most notably Bruce R. Beamon's Sherlockian Quotations (1977); The Thoughts of Sherlock Holmes by S.H. Moss and R.L. Kuis (1976), My Life with Sherlock Holmes: Conversations in Baker Street by J.R. Hamilton (1944), and The Whole Art of Detection by Sherlock Holmes (compiled by John Bennett Shaw), 1968. Does the world need another compendium of Sherlockian quotations? Sure it does. How many editions of the Bible are there, and how many different versions of Shakespeare's plays? After all, Holmes is the best and the wisest man you will ever know. --Otto Penzler

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Posted by Vanderleun at May 22, 2006 11:04 AM | TrackBack
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