Sherlock Holmes for #Noirvember

For my first book to read this year for #Noirvember, I decided to go classical with an early adventure of Sherlock Holmes that I have been wanting to rediscover for a while. I have thus decided to read The Sign of Four (or The Sign of the Four, which is its original title, but I think it sounds lame). I had first read it when I was something like 14 and I had wanted to read it again in the original language. It may sound a bit too old for Noirvember, but rediscovering the work of Arthur Conan Doyle as an adult is one of my ongoing projects, for one, and there is plenty of violence and brutality in it. I also find the character of Jonathan Small to be a very modern and dark character: ruthless and villainous, but with at least some sense of justice and fairness, and some excuse for his actions. He ends up a rather tragic character, come to think of it, and the ancestor of many villainous protagonists in crime fiction. And I cannot forget that this is where Holmes is first depicted as a cocain user. So in many ways, it is very Noir indeed, certainly Noir enough for this month.

Sherlock Holmes and speedball?

Which is it to-day," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
"It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"

Remember my post a bit more than a year ago, about King George V dying of speedball overdose? Well, it struck me that there may have been another famous user of the infamous cocaine and heroin (or morphine) cocktail: Sherlock Holmes himself. He was of course a drug user when he did not have a case, which shocked me discovering it. We discover this in The Sign of Four that he is a user of both cocaine and morphine, as you can see from the quote above. It is not much of a stretch to think he may have used both at the same time. I was shocked as a child, but it is now one of the aspects of the characters I find most fascinating. He was not only the ancestor of the super sleuths of whodunits, but also of the anti-hero private eye with his cliché drinking addiction. There is something far more elegant, almost glamorized, in Holmes' drug consumption. Something far more fictitious too. Still, what a fascinating trait.