The game may be afoot; the books, less so.
I was given a brief opportunity this afternoon to pitch a story idea for something Holmesian. It required familiarity with a particular piece of canon that, I can fairly say, I wasn't readily familiar with. Still, no problem, I thought; I'd head to the library and pick up one of the ubiquitous anthologies of ACD (hmmm, Holmes
does seem a cross between ADD and OCD, doesn't he?) and reread it at the gym.
Which I did, but only by the singlest stroke of Sherluck.
Before today, I would have deduced that finding such a work would be a piece of cake. The stories are classics, still widely read and adapted in modern media; they're all (well,
mostly all) public domain now and thus cheap for budget-conscious acquisitions departments, and Lord knows our libraries are chockablock full of mysteries, which almost all owe their lineage one way or another to the Deer Stalker. So there should be, like, plenty, right?
In the adult section, anyway: Not. A. ONE. Just two anthologies in YA, one of which is now safely in my grasp. Other branches, from the look of the catalog, didn't have much more of a selection, either, and almost all of them had the YA brand on them.
Am I missing something here? Have the great ones of our time been relegated to the dustbin of modern libraries in favor of whole wings of Dan Brown and that lot?
It's enough to make you want to go on a weekend-long opium binge and fake your own death for a decade or so.
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