Everything is in order [CHAS]
05th July, 3 Comments
By The Good Doctor
When I heard recently that someone had set themselves a summer reading project to read the entire Canon of sixty stories including all the short stories and the four novels, I suggested an unusual approach to this would be to read the stories in the chronological order according to when the cases occurred rather than the more usual order of publication.
Using Vincent Delay‘s as the the most recent attempt to order the stories, despite my legendary problem with dates, this would be the order in which they should be read.
Before Holmes and I met:
- The Gloria Scott
- The Musgrave Ritual
Our meeting and the first case together, up to the Great Hiatus:
- A Study In Scarlet
- Shoscombe Old Place
- The Resident Patient
- The Beryl Coronet
- The Speckled Band
- Thor Bridge
- The Cardboard Box
- The Yellow Face
- The Greek Interpreter
- Charles Augustus Milverton
- The Valley of Fear
- The Reigate Squires
- Silver Blaze
- The Sign of the Four
- The Five Orange Pips
- The Noble Bachelor
- A Scandal In Bohemia
- The Stockbroker’s Clerk
- The Crooked Man
- The Second Stain
- The Naval Treaty
- The Dying Detective
- The Blue Carbuncle
- The Boscome Valley Mystery
- The Man with the Twisted Lip
- The Engineer’s Thumb
- The Hound of the Baskervilles
- A Case of Identity
- The Copper Beeches
- The Red-Headed League
- The Final Problem
After the Great Hiatus:
- The Empty House
- The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
- The Norwood Builder
- The Sussex Vampire
- The Golden Pince-Nez
- The Red Circle
- Wisteria Lodge
- The Three Students
- The Solitary Cyclist
- Black Peter
- The Bruce-Partington Plans
- The Veiled Lodger
- The Missing Three-Quarter
- The Devil’s Foot
- The Abbey Grange
- The Dancing Men
- The Retired Colourman
- The Six Napoleons
- The Priory School
- The Three Garridebs
- The Three Gables
- The Illustrious Client
- The Creeping Man
- The Blanched Soldier
- The Mazarin Stone
- The Lion’s Mane
- His Last Bow
Posted in Canon, Chronology
Have you tried the Baring-Gould annotated Sherlock Holmes? Ever seen the chronological SH’s stories order according to him?? Most scholars believe he was the most accurate at the time of ordering the stories, and I totally agree. You should give it a look.
I have, in my library, a range of reference books including both the W S Baring-Gould Annotated (both a one-volume edition and the original two-volume edition) and the more recent Leslie Klinger Annotated. The problem with Baring-Gould is that if some parts of a story do not suit his view of the chronology he tends to ignore them. I doubt that anyone will ever completely unravel the mysteries surrounding the Sherlock Holmes timeline. My poor record-keeping, failing memory, a desire to obfsucate to protect the people behind some of the stories and my literary agent’s own problems of reading my notes and somewhat hurried checking of the publication proofs have created enough work to keep Sherlockian’s busy analysing and arguing, probably for ever!
I agree that we’ll never have a “perfect” chronology, and with 15 published (each different), I thought that the best one could do was examine them all and note where there is consensus. That’s what I’ve done in “The New Annotated SH”–go with the “consensus” dates. For a more detailed tabulation of ALL of the chronologies (except for Vincent’s, which is too recent), may I suggest consultation of my Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, containing a chronological table of the results for each case? Or alternatively, and certainly less costly, may I recommend the book “‘The Date Being?’” by Andrew Jay Peck and myself, tabulating 14 chronologies?