描述
开 本: 16开纸 张: 纯质纸包 装: 平装-胶订是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9787544764933
牛津英文经典（Oxford
World’s Classics）为牛津大学出版社百年积淀的精品书系，译林出版社原版引进。除牛津品牌保证的权威原著版本之外，每册书附含名家导读、作家简介及年表、词汇解析、文本注释、背景知识拓展、同步阅读导引、版本信息等，特别适合作为大学生和学有余力的中学生英语学习的材料。导读者包括牛津和剑桥大学的资深教授和知名学者。整套书选目精良，便携易读，实为亲近*名著的经典读本。
《福尔摩斯探案精选》包含12篇广受欢迎的经典探案故事，贯穿福尔摩斯全部推理生涯，多次被搬上荧幕和舞台。美国圣母大学教授巴里·麦克里为本书撰写导读，从大英帝国阶级、城市化、推理演绎学、同性恋学者研究等方面，多角度地介绍了柯南·道尔和福尔摩斯的故事。
一个世纪以来，福尔摩斯的故事一直在读者的想象世界里有一种特殊的魔力。
这本新的选集收入了12个经典故事，全方位呈现出他们那个想象世界的元素：伦敦阴郁的浓雾、住在破烂宅邸里那些没用的贵族后裔，以及在大英帝国遥远角落里隐藏的凶案。这些故事从福尔摩斯推理生涯的早期跨越到终点，另外还收录了可单独成书的《四个签名》。巴里·麦克里教授的导读则向我们揭示了故事表面之下的复杂暗流。
For
more than a century the Holmes stories have held a strange grip on the popular
imagination.
This
new selection of twelve of the best stories is designed to give readers a full
sense of their world: the brooding fog of London, ruined heirs in creaking
mansions, and hidden crimes in the farthest-flung corners of the British Empire.
They take Holmes’s career from its early days to its close, and include the
book-length The Sign of the Four. Barry McCrea’s introduction investigates the
complex currents that lie beneath their surface.
Introduction
Note
on the Text
Select
Bibliography
A
Chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle
The
Sign of the Four
A
Scandal in Bohemia
A
Case of Identity
The
Red-Headed League
The
Man with the Twisted Lip
The
Blue Carbuncle
The
Speckled Band
The
Musgrave Ritual
The
Greek Interpreter
The
Dancing Men
The
Six Napoleons
His
Last Bow
Explanatory Notes
普通读者可以用这些书建构出一座图书馆。它们已经融入了我们的生活理念之中，我们还想要把它们请入我们的家里。
——牛津大学出版社
Oxford World’s Classics
For over 100 years Oxford World’s
Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with
over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth
century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as
celebrated writing.
The pocket-sized hardbacks of the
early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham
Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.
Today the series is recognized for
its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama
and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes
perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing
needs of readers.
INTRODUCTION
(Barry
McCrea)
Among
the members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the most famous society of
dedicated Holmes fans, a convention known as ‘the game’ requires one to treat
Holmes as a real historical personage, Watson as his biographer, and Arthur
Conan Doyle as the unimportant, even unreliable publisher of Watson’s writings.
The Irregulars’ practice, playful as it is, points to a real truth about the
Holmes stories: the huge gulf that separates Holmes and his creator. The
stories are proof, if it was ever needed, that the writer and the work are
wholly distinct entities. Doyle thought of the stories as a trivial and
frivolous distraction from his real literary ambitions, and his several
attempts to kill off his creation were all foiled. Holmes is a bohemian
bachelor
who
abhors family life, whereas Doyle was a middle-class professional and devoted
family man. The Holmes adventures are, along with the novels of Charles
Dickens, the quintessential London stories, even though Doyle was a Scot who
did not even know London that well (he had to use a Post Office map while
writing them to help with street names and directions). Most of all, Holmes’s
unrelenting devotion to reason and hard facts, and his disdain for superstition,
are at odds with the character of a man who devoted his greatest efforts to
spiritualism and the paranormal; Doyle was a peculiar mixture of scientific
rigour and a naïveté that at times bordered on philistinism (his conviction as
to the authenticity of the infamous Cottingley fairy photos, for example—in
which children had added paper cut-outs of dancing fairies to photographs of
themselves in the garden—made him an object of some ridicule).
Doyle’s
first stories, written while he was studying medicine at the University of
Edinburgh, were more in keeping with his idiosyncratic mix of the scientific
and the supernatural. He had some modest success with them, but his breakthrough
came with a short novel, A Study in Scarlet, stripped of his usual paranormal
or Gothic flights of fancy, a highly rational crime-story narrated by one John Watson,
a doctor just back from military duty in Afghanistan, who is wandering
London in search of a flatmate. He ends up sharing with an eccentric private
detective called Sherlock Holmes, a character partly modelled on Joseph Bell,
who had been one of Doyle’s teachers at Edinburgh. Holmes asks Watson to
accompany him in his investigation (the device of having the story narrated by
the detective’s live-in companion was borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s creation
C. Auguste Dupin). Doyle had no luck in getting his novella published until it
was finally fished from the slush pile of a downmarket publishing house, Ward,
Lock and Company, who specialized in cheap, sensationalist fiction. It was
published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Doyle received a modest fee for
the text and was forced to relinquish all copyright to the publishers.
A
Study in Scarlet was well received, and although Doyle was more interested in
promoting his long historical novel Micah Clarke, he accepted a commission from
an American publisher to write another Holmes narrative, the short novel that
became The Sign of the Four.
Following
this novel’s success, Doyle hit upon a new genre for his detective: a series of
short stories, each complete in itself, but involving the same principal
characters of Holmes and his companion Watson. The first of these was ‘A
Scandal in Bohemia’, and the stories were published serially in the Strand
Magazine to immediate and enormous success. The first twelve stories were
collected in 1892 in the volume The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Despite
several efforts to give Holmes up—including asking for an extortionate fee,
which he claimed he was sure no publisher would agree to, for the second dozen
tales—Doyle continued to publish Holmes stories in theStrand, which were
syndicated in American newspapers. Altogether the Holmes corpus consists of
fifty-six short stories and four novels.
In
addition to The Adventures, four other collections of the stories were
published: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), The Return of Sherlock Holmes
(1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).
The
success of the Holmes stories allowed or forced Doyle to discontinue his
ophthalmic practice and devote himself entirely to writing; they also made him,
it goes without saying, a very wealthy man.
But
Holmes was a constant source of irritation and self- recrimination for Doyle,
who longed to spend his energies on and garner his fame from historical novels,
scientific and spiritualist research, and political writings. In ‘The Final
Problem’, published in 1893, he sent Holmes tumbling over a ravine in Switzerland.
He recorded the writing of it in his diary with the two words ‘Killed Holmes’,
but left just enough ambiguity in the ending of the story to keep the door open
a sliver. In response to popular demand—and pressure from his mother—he wrote a
further novel, set retrospectively, before Holmes meets Watson (The Hound of
the Baskervilles, 1901). In 1903 he finally reversed Holmes’s death, concocting
a complicated story of Holmes’s survival and intervening travels through Italy,
Persia, Sudan, and France, a period known among Sherlockians as ‘the great
hiatus’ and the subject of much conjecture. This allowed a final run of new
stories.
However
much his passions may have lain elsewhere, and however much his own
sensibilities and world view were at odds with those of the detective,
posterity, of course, remembers Doyle for Holmes.
There
is no need to rehearse the unrivalled mass appeal of Sherlock Holmes which has
now spanned three different centuries and which, far from showing signs of
diminishing, seems, if anything, to be blossoming. At the time of writing, three
major filmed adaptations are running in parallel on television and in cinemas.
Holmes’s influence is palpable in all detective and crime fiction whether
written or on screen. There is simply no other fictional character who comes
close to having the cultural influence of Holmes. How can we account for the
bewildering success of Doyle’s creation? What is it about the stories that has
caused them to exercise such an unparalleled and enduring hold on the popular
imagination?
Part
of it has to do with the distinctive socio-historical backdrop to the stories.
Holmes is not an obvious product of Arthur Conan Doyle, but he is clearly a
product of his times. The Holmes stories are in part the result of a confluence
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents: faith in progress but also scepticism
and fears of regression; the age of empire but also of the crime and disorder
of huge industrial cities; neo-Gothic flights of romantic fantasy alongside new
literary commitments to unsparing social realism; sensational crime fiction and
decadent aestheticism. Many of the concerns that run through the stories are
peculiarly relevant to our own age. Among them we might include rapid and
widespread social change; perplexity about
the
economic system, how it works and how it affects the individual; newly emergent
networks of information and power; the consequences of European colonial
adventures coming home to roost; and, the defining word of our own times but a
concept absolutely central to the Holmes stories, globalization. None of these
concerns is ever addressed directly, and we are given no lectures, facts, or
analysis.
There
are many long digressions in the stories but none of them is political in
nature (although Doyle himself was a passionately political man who stood for
election to Parliament). The mechanism of the stories is to focus our attention
entirely on the mystery while imperceptibly exposing us to social, economic,
psychological, and historical realities.
At
the same time, the fascination of the past is only part of the stories’ draw.
Many filmed adaptations recognize no limitations of historical period. The BBC
television adaptation Sherlock, whose first
series was broadcast in 2010, moves Holmes, Watson, and the plots themselves
seamlessly to a world of mobile phones, iPads, and
Google.
There is something in the stories’ form, as opposed to content, that has
nothing to do with historical context but which draws us in wholly and
inexplicably. The stories deal with the most primordial dynamics of
storytelling: how information is withheld and revealed.
Watson,
supposedly the mere biographer and assistant of the great detective, is quietly
central to the stories’ appeal and to their underlying meaning. He is our way
into the stories because we learn the facts more or less as he does (or at
least as he chooses to reveal them to us; we cannot know something that Watson
does not know), and because his blindness and puzzlement in the face of these
facts mirror our own experience of reading the story. The sense that Watson
incarnates of missing the big picture, of not ‘getting’ how everything really fits
together, is part of our experience of life itself.
What
everyone seems to be agreed upon—casual readers, diehard fans, and literary
scholars alike—is that the whole of the stories adds up somehow to more than
the sum of their parts. Even as they grab and hold our attention with the solving
of crimes and enigmas, they expose us to other things entirely, and leave us
with other, unsolved mysteries.
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