Scandalous

Having completed the first two Sherlock Holmes novels, I've now reached the point where Arthur Conan Doyle transitioned into a short story format for the adventures of his famous sleuth -- the literal adventures, in fact, as the first several of them are collected in the volume "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes."

The first of these stories is "A Scandal in Bohemia." It's one of the more well-known tales, even to some degree among people who don't actually know its contents. That's because it's the story in which Doyle created the character of Irene Adler. Adler is much utilized in Holmes adaptations, appearing in the recent films starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law (as played by Rachel McAdams), and also in one of the six episodes thus far of the BBC's Sherlock. She's a cunning woman who manages to get the best of Holmes, and in so doing, secures a reputation in the canon far larger than her single appearance here would otherwise demand.

After the long form novels, transitioning into this short story format definitely requires an adjustment. The tale feels incomplete, concluded practically before it begins -- and that sensation isn't helped by the fact that Holmes doesn't get his man (woman) in this instance. The story feels like another chapter, or perhaps a sequel, should follow to continue the adventure.

What's there is fairly entertaining, though. The particulars of the case, which involve foreign royalty, are overly simple (though it's a welcome departure from the convoluted context of the crimes in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four), but it's all really just a pretext for a two "chapter" confrontation between Holmes and Adler.

In the first round of the match, Holmes concocts a plan to force Adler to reveal where she's hiding sensitive information within her house. He again displays the disguise mastery we learned of in the prior novel. He requires Watson's help in his clever ruse, and it all appears to go off without a hitch. It's a real triumph for Holmes, who is not merely tracking his target, but is actually orchestrating a trap in which to snare them.

But then in the second round -- the third segment of the story, and its final pages -- we learn that Adler realized the ruse after the fact, and cleverly fought back. It's unsatisfying on some level to have Adler just slip away and leave the adventure without any real resolution, and yet it's only by outfoxing Holmes so that she earns her honored spot in the stories as a worthy nemesis of the great consulting detective.

Ultimately, my only real complaint about this story is that it's too short. After two novels based around plots that I felt had insufficient material to sustain them, it's a shame that this tantalizing setup wasn't the basis of one of those novels instead. I'd give A Scandal in Bohemia a B.