Smoking and Sherlock Holmes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (2005)

In Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), Kathy H describes how she and her fellow Hailsham students were warned about smoking: "There was even a rumour that some classic books— like the Sherlock Holmes ones— weren’t in our library because the main characters smoked too much [...]." Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet" (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel, may have been missing from Hailsham's library, but Kathy H and her friends Tommy and Ruth do act like the stereotype of Holmes as an "armchair detective": in order to understand the mysteries of their lives as clones, they mostly sit around and discuss all the clues they have noticed. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 March 2025)