A Scandal In Bohemia: Sherlock Holmes and Women
I was Sherlocked before it was cool. Before Benedict Cumberbatch stole hearts, before Robert Downey Jr took an Iron Man lunchbox to the set of Game of Shadows, I was in my tween years when I found a love of Sherlock Holmes proper (I had watched and re-watched The Great Mouse Detective many times as a child) through the two volumes of his adventures that my parents owned at the time. I recently tried listening to Stephen Fry read them all, but that meant having to listen to A Study in Scarlet, and that is so anti-Mormon that I noped out of that pretty darn quickly (I'd like to think that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was merely taking what others were saying about my religion at the time and filling in the blanks with his imagination).
So when I got a new library card and found a volume containing thirty-seven adventures plus The Hound of the Baskervilles with no ignorant religious persecution in sight, I snatched it up immediately. I'll be giving each adventure it's own post in the coming month or two (this many adventures, you bet I'm renewing).
A Scandal In Bohemia is set in March of 1888, some time after Watson gets hitched and decides to pay the man a visit, who has been tasked by the Hereditary King of Bohemia with finding a photograph of him and his old flame, Irene Adler, who plans to use it to sabotage his upcoming marriage to the daughter of the King of Scandinavia.
So Holmes gathers intel on Miss Adler, when he is suddenly drawn in as a witness to her wedding to an English lawyer. After that, Holmes devises a cunning plan to get her to reveal the whereabouts of the incriminating photograph. But Irene is a clever lady. When Holmes, Watson, and the king look in her house, not only is the photograph gone, but so is Irene and her new husband. All she left was a note complimenting Holmes's cleverness and promising that she will not use the photograph against her old beau, as her new husband is a far better man than he was. I guess she took the breakup personally. Watson says that whenever Holmes talks about her from then on, it is always as The Woman.
As Watson states at the beginning of the story, Sherlock Holmes isn't in love with The Woman, and it doesn't seem Irene is in love with Holmes either. They only meet three times (once while he was in disguise, once where she figured out his true identity, and once where she was in disguise). Their only communication without any kind of act is through the note, and the general vibe I get is one of mutual respect for one another's cleverness, however grudgingly on Holmes's part. No love interest hints here, and certainly not a master villain in disguise either (stupid Elementary).
It's not going to only be Sherlock Holmes for two months. Next post, I will be talking the first section of the other work of fiction I found at my local library: Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings.