Why Mystery Stories Appeal

Harold...realized that he'd never before had to put into words his reasons for loving the Holmes stories.

"I think I love the idea that problems have solutions. I think that's the appeal of mystery stories, whether their Holmes of someone else. In those storiezs we live in a understandable world. We live in a place where every problem has a solution, and if we were only smart enough, we could figure them out..."
\
"As opposed to...?"

"As opposed to a world that's random. Where violence and death are happenstance--unpreventable and unstoppable. Of all the conventions of mystery stories, the one that impossible to break is the solution at the end. Conan Doyle has writings in his journals about it. And plenty of novelists since have tried.

"Can you write a mystery story that ends with uncertainty? Where you never know who really did it? You can, but it's unsatisfying. It's unpleasant for the reader.
There needs to be something at the end. It's not that the killer even needs to be caught or locked up. It's that the reader needs to know.

"Not knowing is the worst outcome for any mystery story, because we need to believe
that everything in the world is knowable. Justice is optional, but answers, at least, are mandatory. And that's what I love about Holmes. That the answers are so elegant and the world he lives in is so ordered and rational. It's beautiful."

From Chapter 34, pages 255-6, in The Sherlockian by Graham Moore (2010)

221B

Vincent Starrett, B.S.I.

Famous early tribute poem to Holmes and Watson

Here dwell together still two men of note

Who never lived and so can never die:

How very near they seem, yet how remote

That age before the world went all awry.

But still the game's afoot for those with ears

Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:

England is England yet, for all our fears—

Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane

As night descends upon this fabled street:

A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,

The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.

Here, though the world explode, these two survive,

And it is always eighteen ninety-five

Words & Phrases Shakespeare Coined

In all of his work - the plays, the sonnets and the narrative poems - Shakespeare uses 17,677 words. Of those 1,700 were first used by Shakespeare. Writers often invent words, either by creating new forms of existing words or coining new words outright, because they are unable to find the exact word they require in the existing language. Shakespeare is the foremost of those. He was by far the most important individual influence on the development of the modern English that we speak today.


A Few of the Words Shakespeare Coined

accommodation
aerial
amazement
apostrophe
assassination
auspicious
baseless
bloody
bump
castigate
changeful
clangor
control (noun)
countless
courtship
critic
critical
dexterously
dishearten
dislocate
dwindle
eventful
exposure
fitful
frugal
generous
gloomy
gnarled
hurry
impartial
inauspicious
indistinguishable
invulnerable
lapse
laughable
lonely
majestic
misplaced
monumental
multitudinous
obscene
palmy
perusal
pious
premeditated
radiance
reliance
road
sanctimonious
seamy
sportive
submerge
suspicious


A Few Phrases Shakespeare Coined

barefaced
fancy-free
catch a cold
disgraceful conduct
elbowroom
fair play
green eyed monster
heartsick
hot-blooded
housekeeping
lackluster
leapfrog
long-haired
pitched battle
clothes make the man
method in his madness
to thine own self be true
towering passion
ministering angel
dog will have his day
frailty, thy name is woman
brevity is the soul of wit
mind's eye
primrose path
it smells to heaven
the lady doth protest too much
witching time of the night
it's Greek to me
live long day
breathe one's last
heart of gold
give the devil his due
too much of a good thing
naked truth
foregone conclusion
break the ice
strange bedfellows
wear one's heart on one's sleeve
eat out of house and home
be all and end all
more sinned against than sinning
one fell swoop
the milk of human kindness
the course of true love never did run smooth

Adapted from NoSweatShakespeare.com

Our Mascot: Fardels Bear

Most Famous Stage Direction in English Drama

Exit, pursued by a bear

Winter's Tale 3.3.57

Welcome...

To say you’re welcome were superfluous....

Prepare for mirth, for mirth becomes a feast!

Pericles, II, iii

Ere we depart, we’ll share a bounteous time
In different pleasures.

Timon of Athens, I, i