Some Thoughts on Character: Reginald Musgrave

“In appearance [Reginald Musgrave] was a man of an exceedingly aristocratic type, thin, high-nosed, and large-eyed, with languid and yet courtly manners. He was indeed a scion of one of the very oldest families in the kingdom… Something of his birth-place seemed to cling to the man, and I never looked at his pale, keen face or the poise of his head without associating him with gray archways and mullioned windows and all the venerable wreckage of a feudal keep.”

In the 1986 Granada Television adaptation of “The Musgrave Ritual,” Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson arrive at Hurlstone Manor for a holiday – much needed (on Holmes’s part) and much encouraged (on Watson’s part). They are greeted by Reginald Musgrave, and the conservation is polite, if a little stilted. Finally, Holmes and Musgrave walk off alone – leaving Watson in friendly conversation with Brunton, the butler. Musgrave compliments Holmes on making a successful living off of his wits, to which Holmes replies, while looking about absently: “And how is the dear wife?” A brief silence follows before Musgrave replies: “I’m not married, Holmes.” There is another, longer, more awkward silence before Holmes claps Musgrave on the shoulder: “How wise!”

Photo Credit: bookishadventures.tumblr.com

And that is the disconnect with Reginald Musgrave; that is what separates Musgrave from other figures from Sherlock Holmes’s past – Victor Trevor, for example. Although the plot of MUSG was slightly altered for the Granada adaptation to compensate for the somewhat advancing ages of the series’ stars – Jeremy Brett, for example, was 53-years-old at the time of filming and was therefore perhaps ill-suited to play the 25-year-old Sherlock Holmes as seen in the original text of MUSG – the dynamic between Holmes and Reginald Musgrave remains true to the source material. Holmes and Musgrave are not friends. That is not to say that they are antagonistic, far from it. They are merely acquainted. Musgrave spins in and out of Sherlock Holmes’s orbit in much the same way as any of his other clients. At times there seems to be no difference between Reginald Musgrave and Violet Hunter, Victor Hatherley, or Grant Munro – that is to say, once they have served their purpose, they are rarely, if ever, heard from again. Musgrave at least has the added benefit of being openly appreciative of Holmes’s talents, where many had seemed initially incredulous: “Once or twice we drifted into talk, and I can remember that more than once he expressed a keen interest in my methods of observation and inference.”

But like Victor Trevor, Reginald Musgrave intrigues because he knew Sherlock Holmes when. He knew him when he was young and was not yet fully formed or fully in possession of his powers. He knew him when his career as the world’s only consulting detective was not yet sculpted out or defined to his satisfaction. More importantly, Reginald Musgrave knew Sherlock Holmes when Dr. Watson did not. Reginald Musgrave was present at the beginning of Sherlock Holmes – which for some Sherlockians is somewhat equivalent to being present for the Big Bang – and so he is in possession of a piece of the puzzle, which we are not. But does that truly lend any extra weight to Musgrave’s presence in the Canon – does that give him more merit as a character, when Holmes appears to give him the same level of consideration as the dottles and plugs of tobacco left on the mantelpiece of Baker Street every morning?

Unlike Victor Trevor, who was present from the very inception of Holmes’s career (“And that recommendation, with the exaggerated estimate of my ability with which he prefaced it, was, if you will believe me, Watson, the very first thing which ever made me feel that a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby.” [GLOR]), Holmes appears to lose track of Reginald Musgrave for a bit of time before their paths cross again: “For four years I had seen nothing of him until one morning he walked into my room in Montague Street. He had changed little, was dressed like a young man of fashion–he was always a bit of a dandy–and preserved the same quiet, suave manner which had formerly distinguished him.” Holmes’s description of this first meeting with a long-lost acquaintance is rather interesting, in that he manages to both insult and compliment Musgrave in the same sentence. It is up to the reader to determine if the balance of the remark is ultimately neutral. But the casual way in which Holmes marks the length of their separation indicates that it was all the same to him if Musgrave had never walked through his door at Montague Street at all, save for the puzzle he brought with him.

According to Leslie Klinger: “Holmes and Musgrave were never more than ‘slight acquaintance(s)’: thus it is possible that the struggling young detective saw not a social visit but a business opportunity when Musgrave walked through his door. June Thomson speculates that Holmes may have charged Musgrave a fee for his services, pointing to his ‘living by my wits’ remark as ‘possibly a hint that he had turned professional and expected to be paid’” (534). And so, the reader sees Reginald Musgrave present at the time when Holmes has begun to realize that his services had value. Musgrave may not be the Detective’s first paying client, but he was probably one of the earliest. Victor Trevor may have been present for the beginning of Sherlock Holmes, but Reginald Musgrave was present for the event horizon – for the point of no return, for the moment when Holmes’s fate was fully determined and guaranteed.

As has been mentioned before, Holmes ultimately lost track of Victor Trevor – just as he lost track of Musgrave – but that was hardly Holmes’s fault entirely – the sordid circumstances surrounding his father’s death were certainly enough to make a reasonable man want to escape any and all places and persons associated with the events. The weight and merit of Trevor’s character rest largely on what he was present for, and Musgrave bears much the same burden. Though of the two men, Victor is the only one who can honestly wear the title of “friend,” Musgrave is the only one who can be honestly called a “client” – in the fully paying sense of the term. And while Victor Trevor sought out Sherlock Holmes in his hour of need, Reginald Musgrave walked through the door of Montague Street looking for a detective.

oOo

“Better Holmes & Gardens” now has its own Facebook page.  Join by “Liking” the page here, and receive all the latest updates, news, and Sherlockian tidbits.

Currently on Twitter...

As part of an ongoing project on my Twitter feed, I'm delivering stories from the Sherlock Holmes canon in tiny installments of 140 characters or less. I recently finished up "His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes," which opens "upon the second of August – the most terrible August in the history of the world," and closes with "the last quiet talk" Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson may have ever had.
 
The current story is "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange," which finds Sherlock Holmes acting as judge, and Dr. Watson in the role of jury (but the executioner is conspicuously absent).
 
Check out my Twitter feed for a daily installment, although I am usually inspired to post more than once a day. And don't forget you can read through the original canon online.

“My advice to you, sir, is to speak the truth”: In Defense of “The Resident Patient”

“For in those cases in which Holmes has performed some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified in laying them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish.”

If you have ever been to a meeting of any of the many Sherlock Holmes scion societies, you know that these meetings tend to be rather boisterous. Rambunctious, even. Loud, to put it in even more simple terms. Members laugh and shout and argue, but it’s all in good fun, even if it is rather spirited. So, you can imagine my surprise, when attending the most recent meeting of Watson’s Tin Box, when the Gasogene opened up the discussion of “The Resident Patient” only to be met with silence. It was an awkward silence, complete with cricket sounds and forced coughing. After waiting a moment for someone, anyone, to speak, the Gasogene finally prompted: “So, I take it that none of you liked this story?”

“No,” someone finally spoke up. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“You liked it, then?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that either,” said another Tin Box member.  “I wouldn’t say I feel much about the story either way.”

And that was the problem then. How does one verbalize: meh (complete with indifferent should shrug)? Is there even a way to discuss a story that appears to inspire such little feeling? Stories that are either greatly loved or greatly hated can inspire magnificent discussion, but a narrative that inspires no feeling likewise inspires no conversation. And relatively speaking, Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really do very much in RESI to inspire any kind of traditional response. The story begins with Holmes and Watson discussing the latest news, followed by a typical Holmesian deduction of Watson’s thought -process, and then the two men take a walk around London. They return to Baker Street, and spend the majority of the story listening to Dr. Percy Trevelyan relaying his very strange story. Holmes doesn’t even meet the man at the heart of the strange tale – Mr. Blessington – until more than halfway through the narrative, and even then he refuses to help him. Blessington is then killed in the middle of the night, and the murderers are eventually lost on the steamship Norah Creina, and thus come to no justice, except perhaps that of a karmic variety. 

So where do readers find the value in a story like RESI? If the mystery itself invokes only a feeling of lukewarm indifference, then what is there to which the reader can respond? And readers do respond to RESI – the story tied for 42nd place (along with “The Engineer’s Thumb,” “The Retired Colourman,” “Shoscombe Old Place,” and “The Yellow Face”) in the 1999 poll of invested members of the Baker Street Irregulars.  If the case itself teaches the reader nothing, then the reader is learning something from somewhere else in the tale, otherwise RESI would have been relegated to the very bottom of the list with the three stories tied for 54th place: “The Three Gables,” “The Mazarin Stone,” and “The Veiled Lodger.”

There’s actually quite a bit of information to gather about Sherlock Holmes from RESI – about his talents and methods – even if they are not on display to their fullest possible extent in this story. Watson begins by sharing with the reader:

“[Sherlock Holmes] loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime. Appreciation of nature found no place among his many gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-doer of the town to track down his brother of the country.”

This insight into Holmes’s character is followed by a magnificent string of deduction on the Detective’s part. The deductions are of little import to the overall scope of the narrative, but he is able to catalog Watson’s entire train of thought and is even able to accurately remind Watson of how this train of thought began when the Doctor himself was unable to remember. This exercise into fundamental Sherlockian method is followed by the two men taking a stroll around London: “For three hours we strolled about together, watching the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and the Strand. His characteristic talk, with its keen observance of detail and subtle power of inference, held me amused and enthralled.”

And so the reader finds this particularly charming sketch of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson as friends – a sliver of insight into the relationship that fuels the narratives of the Canon for so many readers. We see Holmes and Watson in a companionable, easy intimacy that comes with a long acquaintance. We see Dr. Watson charmed by his friend on the mere merit of Holmes being himself, nothing more. We see Sherlock Holmes at ease, and at his best.

I once got into a discussion with another Sherlockian about just how many of the stories in the Canon are owed to characters making extremely poor life choices, or being otherwise unable to spot glaring red flags. Obviously, RESI is one of these stories. Where would the reader be if Dr. Trevelyan had reflected for only a moment on the peculiarities of this stranger’s generous offer, and had decided to try his hand at researching nervous disorders for a bit longer? Likewise, what if Mr. Melas had said, “No, I don’t think I shall accompany you to an undisclosed location to translate for you at this late hour” (GREE)? Or if young Englishwomen had paid more cautious attention to those rumors circulating around that Baron Gruner fellow (ILLU)? Or even if Dr. Watson has said to young Stamford, “Beating the subjects in the dissecting room, you say? Oh, never mind. I’ve always imagined that I would be better off living on my own anyway” (STUD). So every story in the Canon has something to recommend to it, even if it is only a reminder of what might have been, or what never was.

oOo

“Better Holmes & Gardens” now has its own Facebook page.  Join by “Liking” the page here, and receive all the latest updates, news, and Sherlockian tidbits.

Currently on Twitter...

As part of an ongoing project on my Twitter feed, I'm delivering stories from the Sherlock Holmes canon in tiny installments of 140 characters or less. I recently finished up "The Resident Patient," a story which begins with a quiet walk through London and ends with yet another case in which the Great Detective misses out on bringing his quarry to justice because of a shipwreck.

The current story is "His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes," which opens "upon the second of August – the most terrible August in the history of the world," and closes with "the last quiet talk" Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson may have ever had.

Check out my Twitter feed for a daily installment, although I am usually inspired to post more than once a day. And don't forget you can read through the original canon online.

GUEST BLOG: “You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.”

Rarely can a telegram – sardonic; impatient; written in haste – have exerted so profound an influence on the course of popular literature. The author of the note in question was Arthur Conan Doyle, replying in 1896 to the actor-manager William Gillette, then in the midst of composing one of the earliest stage plays about Doyle’s most famous creation, in which Gillette was eager to include a romantic interest for the detective. The performer got his way (“it’s good to see the old chap again” was Doyle’s mordant response on seeing the final draft, amorous interludes and all) and the play was a success (and in at least two centuries – it was revived in the 1970s by the Royal Shakespeare Company). But Gillette’s new drama was only part of the first wave of stories about Holmes not to be written by his creator. What an army of pasticheurs has followed in its wake! Its members have written in such number and with so full a spectrum of approaches that the telegram has come to seem a kind of license, one which continues to be exploited to its furthest limits.

Here are questions which any pasticheur must ask before embarking upon a new Sherlock Holmes story: how closely do I cleave to the style and milieu established by Doyle? With what degree of fidelity do I try to emulate the originals? How closely can I approach Doyle’s intentions? And how far can one diverge from them before the result ceases to feel like Holmes at all? The range of answers has been considerable – from those who endeavour to come as near as possible to the kind of thing that Doyle might actually have written (Bert Coules’ artful Further Adventures or Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr’s pallid Exploits) to those who take the title character and, as in those accounts in which the sleuth is discovered battling zombies or meeting Tarzan of the Apes, place him in a story which Doyle would never have countenanced. Then there are the spoofs and the send-ups, the fashionable reimaginings and that subgenre which subverts Doyle’s originals to suggest that the stories in the Strand were in some sense mendacious (Robert Lee Hall’s bizarre Exit Sherlock Holmes; Michael Dibdin’s blackly comic The Last Sherlock Holmes Story; Nicholas Meyer’s ingenious The Seven-Per-Cent Solution).

All of this has been much on my mind lately as I’ve just contributed a pastiche of my own – The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner – to a line of high-quality, full-cast Sherlock Holmes audio dramas produced by the British company Big Finish (specialists also in Doctor Who, Dark Shadows, Stargate and more). Mine is their eighth Holmes tale and so far the producers, eager to cater for all tastes, have answered those questions about fidelity to Doyle in a variety of ways – from ultra-faithful adaptations (The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Final Problem) to straight pastiche (George Mann’s impressively authentic The Reification of Hans Gerber) to the wilder possibilities of the doctor and the detective squaring up to Count Dracula (in a version of David Stuart Davies’ novel, The Tangled Skein).

Artwork Credit: Alex Mallinson

It was my intention to combine the strengths of these approaches – to be as faithful as I could to Doyle’s style while taking into account the tastes and expectations of a twenty-first century audience. The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner is designed to fit snugly between two stories in the canon – The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane and His Last Bow. We begin with Holmes languishing in retirement, keeping bees in Sussex and believing himself to be done with solving mysteries.  The Titanic disaster has occurred only four months previously and, in the aftermath of the tragedy, Holmes receives two visitors in quick succession – the first being Dr John Watson, the second J Bruce Ismay, the (real life) Manager of the White Star Line and survivor of the sinking. Naturally, it isn’t long before those strange events which once dogged the great detective do so again and one of the most baffling cases of his long career begins.

I’m proud of the script for The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner and I was more than delighted with the cast. Holmes and Watson are played by Nicholas Briggs and Richard Earl, both highly accomplished British stage actors (and, in Briggs’ case, well-known to television viewers as the voice of the Daleks in Doctor Who) and their interpretations of their famous roles are emblematic of Big Finish’s take on Holmes – a melding of the traditional and the revisionist. Briggs is a mostly classical Sherlock, warmer than Benedict Cumberbatch, less eccentric than Jeremy Brett while remaining spikier and more intolerant than Basil Rathbone. Earl, playing the capable military man of the stories, is as soberly efficient as Edward Hardwicke though with a little of Jude Law’s dash and just a scintilla of the lovability of Nigel Bruce. Perhaps the team they most resemble – in their brio and full-blooded theatricality – is the delightful 1950s pairing of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Meanwhile, Michael Maloney – that distinguished Shakesperean and frequent collaborator with Kenneth Branagh – plays Ismay with all his customary intellect and skill.

As is often the case in Baker Street, one adventure suggests another. In the course of writing the script – and also while listening to the cast bring it to life in the recording studio – something struck me as odd which had never, in repeated readings of the canon, seemed so to me before. Why does Holmes retire? He can’t be particularly old and his powers show no signs of waning (indeed, in His Last Bow, Holmes seems to be at the very top of his game). And so I began to wonder whether something might have happened to trigger his resignation, something about which the doctor has hitherto remained tight-lipped.

There are no answers suggested or theories propounded in The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner – but only hints and thinking aloud. Now, of course, it’s nagging at me – the question of why Watson is so coy about Holmes’ motives for devoting himself to the bees. I’m still thinking about it and I’ve set nothing down on paper but perhaps, in some form or another, I’ll return to Doyle’s creations again and explore them just a little further – always bearing in mind, of course, Sir Arthur’s invitation about marriage and murder and more. How generous he was to grant us all such freedom.

oOo

Photo Credit: Amelia Wallace

Jonathan Barnes is the author of two novels, The Somnambulist and The Domino Men, both published by HarperCollins. His website is www.jonathan-barnes.com.

The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner is available now and can be purchased directly from Big Finish (on CD: http://www.bigfinish.com/Sherlock-Holmes-The-Adventure-of-the-Perfidious-Mariner or as a download: http://www.bigfinish.com/Sherlock-Holmes-The-Adventure-of-the-Perfidious-Mariner-DOWNLOAD-ONLY

You can read more about Big Finish’s range of Sherlock Holmes adventures at: http://www.bigfinish.com/ranges/Sherlock-Holmes

Some Thoughts on Setting: “The strange setting in which their fate was cast” (VALL)

"But there can be no grave for Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Watson... Shall they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this moment, as one writes? ...Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea coal flames upon the hearth and Holmes and Watson take their well-won ease... So they still live for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895.” (Vincent Starrett)

So, it is always 1895, as the Sherlockians say – indicating that time is a rather stagnant thing for those who love Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson well. That time neither moves forward, nor backward – and Holmes and Watson are perpetually seated in their chairs in front of a fire at 221B Baker Street. But in reality, the canon manages to encompass a rather broad scope of time and space. Even by examining just the original novels, the reader finds “The Country of the Saints” (STUD), “The Strange Story of Jonathan Small” (SIGN), and “Lodge 341, Vermissa” (VALL). These backwards-reaching passages allow the reader to visit Utah, India, and Pennsylvania, respectively – with each separate episode set several years, even decades, in the past from the moment of their telling. Even The Hound of the Baskervilles features a brief foray into the past – the year 1742 specifically – with the reading of the Baskerville legend.

Do you think this is going to have future
consequences? Nah, probably not.

Pastiche and especially film and television adaptations seem to make easy work of time and setting in terms of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures. The Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone famously transported the Great Detective and Dr. Watson out of Victorian England, and into a variety of plots centered largely on war propaganda and jingoist sentiment – and based only very tenuously on the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Only two of Rathbone’s Holmes films were set in the nineteenth century: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). Author Barry Grant, on the other hand, defrosts and revives the Great Detective after nearly a century of being frozen in an Alpine glacier in his two novels, The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter. And in a similar plot device, Holmes is transported even farther into the future in the animated series, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, where he is paired with a semi-robotic Watson and a female Lestrade.

So how does Holmes survive all these shifts through time and space (sometimes “space,” in a very literal, astronomical sense)? The Rathbone-Universal Pictures films opened with an explanatory title card: “Sherlock Holmes, the immortal character of fiction created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the present day he remains as ever the supreme master of deductive reasoning.” Surely the BBC’s series, “Sherlock,” with its modern Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson equipped with smartphones and Wifi, has more than proven that a fully contemporary adaptation can be done and done well. However, there is a distinct difference between Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock using video chat with Martin Freeman’s John Watson – or even Basil Rathbone’s Great Detective and Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson traveling via airplane – and a Sherlock Holmes who has been forcibly transported to another century, set against of the backdrop of a digital Big Ben and trying to interact with a cyborg. Are we speaking merely to the issue of success or failure in concept and execution?

But Holmes’s body of knowledge and unique strengths were based as much on his knowledge of his time and place as it was upon anything else. So, to forcibly transplant him into another era – via frozen glacier or ill-timed temporal vortex – is to severely weaken him. Cumberbatch and Rathbone’s versions of Sherlock Holmes are certainly not creatures of 1895 in the way of Jeremy Brett’s Great Detective, but they are creatures of their time and place. Because if nothing else, Sherlock Holmes must be comfortable in his own world in the same way that he is comfortable in his own skin. He must know it in the same way that he knows varieties of tobacco ash, or bicycle tires, or the typefaces of various newspapers. To put him in a world in which he fights to understand basic concepts, tools and interactions, is to cripple the Great Detective in a very fundamental way – to see Sherlock Holmes struggle with the world around him would compromise the authenticity of his observations and the authority of his conclusions. A nineteenth century London would be quite alien to both the Rathbone and Cumberbatch versions of Sherlock Holmes, but their own worlds and spheres of existence were not.

All right, someone is going to have to bring me
up to speed here. The "CliffsNotes" version is fine.

There may be no one who has spoken more on the topic of setting – time, place and context – in the canon than the Sherlockian Vincent Starrett. He is, of course, the composer of the iconic poem “221B,” and the gorgeous lines that captured the imagery that so embodied the world of the canonical Sherlock Holmes. But canonical setting is more than just romantic gaslight and cobblestone streets, even for Starrett: "How often have I myself, in other years, climbed those seventeen steps that lead upward to the famous rooms and listened for the voices of their most famous occupants. Sometimes I have been almost certain that I heard them. And the old house in Baker Street still stands for all who remember it. It will stand as long as the cold London fog rolls in with the winter and mischief is planned and thwarted and books are written and read." What he speaks of is being able to recognize Holmes and Watson on sight – of the characteristics of time and setting that make them instantly identifiable – of their being when they should no longer be.

In 2009, the animated series Batman: The Brave and the Bold aired an episode entitled, “The Trials of the Demon,” in which Batman is summoned by Sherlock Holmes into the past to solve a series of inexplicable crimes. Upon first meeting, Holmes is able to accurately deduce Batman’s identity through a series of (humorous) observations. Then with apparently only one observation, Batman is able to likewise deduce Sherlock Holmes’s identity. That observation? “The hat,” Batman says, to which Sherlock Holmes self-consciously adjusts his deerstalker. At the end of the episode, as they say their farewells, Holmes asks Batman to reveal how he really knew his identity. Batman smirks at this question, and finally answers before vanishing:

“Everyone knows who you are. You’re the world’s greatest detective.”

"All right, 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' and then
we'll know who has the silliest outfit."

oOo

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Sherlock Holmes on Screen: “Sherlock – A Case of Evil” (2002)

With his youthful good looks and at times his gauchness and immature arrogance, James D’Arcy presents a very believable, feisty portrait of how the young Sherlock Holmes might have been. (Holmes ‘with an L’ as he points out to a police officer). Indeed, not only do Lestrade and Watson dislike this jumped up private detective on first encountering him, but so do the audience. This is the cleverness of the script by Piers Ashworth, for we see as the story progresses the character’s growing and credible maturity. Holmes changes, the process culminating in a very telling symbolical scene where he burns all his past press cuttings, which earlier had meant so much to his vanity” (David Stuart Davies).

A young Sherlock Holmes – the idea never fails to tantalize. Perhaps a child or teenage Sherlock, furtively collecting samples of soil and ash; or Sherlock Holmes as a young man, living on Montague Street and passing time at the British Museum. Whether it is a Sherlock Holmes in short pants toddling after an older Mycroft, learning to distinguish amongst the treads of bicycle tires, or a young detective just out of university, trapped somewhere between “The ‘Gloria Scott’,” and “The Musgrave Ritual” – devotees of Sherlock Holmes want to know the Great Detective before he ever was the Great Detective. It’s almost as if we think a full understanding of Sherlock Holmes is connected to being there from his beginning – as if we will know him better if we know him from the start. 

And a young Sherlock Holmes is exactly what the 2002 made-for-television film Sherlock: A Case of Evil offers. A Sherlock Holmes who is still developing the finer points of his talents and skills; a Sherlock Holmes who is still figuring out how deep and malevolent the intricacies of his problematic relationship with Professor Moriarty are; a Sherlock Holmes who has not yet met his Dr. John Watson – and when they finally do meet, it is clear that they do not know what to make of each other. This is a Sherlock Holmes without his full set of armor in place, who is not immediately distrustful and who does not yet know that “the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money” (SIGN). This is Sherlock Holmes before the reader meets him in A Study in Scarlet, supposedly. This is the Great Detective before he was ever great.

But those viewers seeking that faithful adaptation of A Study in Scarlet, seemingly ever elusive, must look elsewhere. There is no youthful Sherlock Holmes bent low over a chemical table and studiously examining his “retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames” (STUD) in this film. Instead, the audience finds a young detective who drinks copious amounts of absinthe in a dodgy establishment, flamboyantly tells stories of his (for the moment, solo) escapades to clutches of enraptured debutantes, and who finds himself waking up next to these same young women at an alarming and illogical rate. James D’Arcy as Sherlock Holmes is shades of Benedict Cumberbatch – magnificently tall, with gloriously sharp cheekbones and a deep, sonorous voice. But his arrogance seems misplaced and misdirected, as if he has not yet earned the right to act in such a fashion, and the audience is hard-pressed to imagine him ever being allowed such liberties. He is a man in desperate need of some humility, but whether the film’s conclusion finds him humbled or defeated is a matter of debate.

A Case of Evil is not the first film to tackle Sherlock Holmes’s early years, to imagine the intricacies of the Great Detective’s construction. In Sherlock Holmes on Screen, Alan Barnes highlights the many similarities between A Case of Evil and the 1985 film directed by Barry Levinson and written by Chris Columbus, Young Sherlock Holmes:

“…both purport to detail the first meeting of Holmes and Watson; both see Holmes engaged in hitherto unreported confrontation with Professor Moriarty; both see Holmes falling victim to a grim narcotic, bringing forth hallucinogenic sequences; in both, Holmes’s lady-love is shot dead by Moriarty before he and Holmes settle their quarrel in a vicious swordfight; and both would seem to assert that these experiences would leave Holmes incapable of love” (167).

Roger Morlidge stars as a Dr. John Watson who is not a quite a bumbling archetype of stupidity from the Nigel Bruce school of Watsons, but neither is he the model war hero and pillar of strength for which more recent Sherlock Holmes film and television adaptations have set a precedent. To begin with, Morlidge’s Watson does not treat the living, and is instead a mortician working closely with Scotland Yard. This Watson is clever, without question, as is demonstrated by the series of sometimes amusing and sometimes practical devices he invents over the course of the film. And that he cares for the young Sherlock Holmes is also without question. This Watson somehow manages to know Sherlock Holmes better than the Detective knows himself – even while he manages to remain largely perplexed by his new comrade. It is Watson who manages to intuit the existence of Sherlock’s brother Mycroft (played by Richard E. Grant), and reunites the somewhat estranged brothers. Grant’s performance as Mycroft provides one of the film’s strongest moments – taken largely from “The Greek Interpreter,” but highlighting that Sherlock Holmes is not just a product of his own contrivance, but also of his culture and context.

(Photo Credit: moviescreenshots.blogspot.com)

A Case of Evil also features Vincent D’Onofrio curiously cast as a flamboyant, gangland version of Professor Moriarty, sporting a red velvet top hat and an electric blue waistcoat – easily more robber baron than the academic villain with whom most readers are familiar. His portrayal is described in equal turns by Alan Barnes as “all thuggish Bill Sikes swagger” (167) and by David Stuart Davies as “a sort of Victorian Al Capone” (186). There even seems to be prescient elements of Johnny Depp’s version of the iconic Mad Hatter in the recent adaptation of Alice in Wonderland in the odd rhythms and tones of Moriarty’s speech patterns. Whatever the label or definition, there is something about D’Onofrio’s portrayal of the canonical villain that begs to acknowledge a cleverness that simply is not present. As Moriarty asks the imprisoned Holmes to help him name his new drug, he adds that the name should be “something…heroic.” The quip is followed by a long pause in which the audience is practically audible in its sarcastic reply: “That’s a very smart joke. Look at you and your smart joke.”

(Photo Credit: cinememories.blogspot.com)

A young Sherlock Holmes should be different from the man readers know in the canon. If the Great Detective was the same at ages eight and eighteen, as he was at ages twenty-eight and thirty-eight, then there would be no mystery, and nothing to learn. But the Sherlock Holmes presented to the audience in 2002’s Sherlock: A Case of Evil is so far removed from the man that readers know that it is incredibly difficult to reconcile them. David Stuart Davies, as referenced at the beginning of the post, mentions a scene in which Holmes burns his old press clippings – symbolic of his leaving his old arrogance behind. Rather perhaps it is symbolic of starting fresh, as there is no sign of the Great Detective as readers know him to be found, and then only option is to burn it all and start anew.

oOo

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