This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Julie Cohen has had 15 books published under her own name and pseudonyms, including Getting Away With It and The Summer of Living Dangerously. Her latest novel, Dear Thing, was released on the 11 of April. Julie tells us why looking for the biggest book in the book shop – and finding The Complete Sherlock Holmes – influenced the entire course of her life.
I was eleven years old and, let’s face it, a bit of a swot. I’d already started writing my first novel (about a girl wizard who doesn’t know about her magical powers until she goes to wizard school…hmm, missed the boat there) and I usually had my nose in a book. I’d recently finished Watership Down, which I absolutely adored. Mostly, I adored it because of the rabbits, but I also adored it because it was a big book. Really thick, with a lot of words, some of them in rabbit language. I was quite impressed with myself for reading it. So when my aunt and uncle gave me a book token for my birthday, I went into the bookshop with one main criterion in mind: whatever book I chose, it had to be a big one.
The biggest fiction book that happened to be in the shop at the time was The Complete Sherlock Holmes. It was even bigger than Watership Down, and therefore even cooler.
I had no idea that this decision would influence the entire course of my life.
I’d heard about Sherlock Holmes, of course, but I’d never read the original stories. They were…a revelation. I fell utterly in love with Sherlock Holmes and his world of Victorian London. I loved the gaslight, the hansom cabs, the tantalus on the sideboard. I loved the chase when the game was afoot, and the booming echo of a giant hound. I loved Holmes’s mastery, his logic, his odd older brother, his arch-enemy Moriarty and most of all, his friendship with Watson. I read all sixty of the stories and all four novels, in an enormous gulp, and then I started reading them again.
Imagine my delight when I realised that there were other crazy people in the world who loved Sherlock Holmes as much as I did. More than that — these people studied the stories, they interpreted them, they created theories to explain them. For the first time in my life, I was aware of the existence of literary criticism, of a sort. The idea that you could play games with a book to understand it better. I knew that this was what I wanted to do.
At 16, I went to England for the first time and I made a pilgrimage both to 221B Baker Street and to the Sherlock Holmes pub, where there was a reproduction of Holmes’s sitting room. I gave everyone an impromptu tour. While other teenagers had posters of pop stars, I had Basil Rathbone in a deerstalker. Instead of a band t-shirt, I had one that said ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.’
Perhaps a bit of a geek, there.
When I applied to university to study English Literature, I wrote my entrance essay about Sherlock Holmes. I spent a year at Cambridge and I decided to specialise in Victorian literature. Then I moved to England to research the Cottingley fairy photographs, an early twentieth-century scam that fooled Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I don’t think any of this would have happened if I hadn’t discovered Sherlock Holmes one day, age eleven, when I was looking for a doorstopper more than a novel.