“Mere random sketches of children” (DANC): Young Adults and Disseminating Knowledge in the Stories of Sherlock Holmes

[As presented at "A Scintillation of Scions V," in Laurel, Md., on June 9, 2012.]

Of all the verbal cleverness in the Canon, of all the subtle linguistic quips and well-placed witticisms, I am especially fond of one particular use of the word strategically. “’Dear little chap!’ said Holmes strategically.” This application is from The Sign of Four in which the reader finds Sherlock Holmes seeking information about the steam launch Aurora and he presents the “dear little chap” with two shillings for seemingly nothing more than being “a rosy-cheeked young rascal.” The Detective uses young people – quite often small children – regularly in the course of his canonical investigations. Information gleaned from young people was frequently instrumental in providing the solution to more than one case, but Holmes was also known to use children as actual clues. In “The Copper Beeches,” for example, Holmes explains how he was able to infer the behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle by considering the behavior of the family’s youngest member: “I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.” And as Edward Quayle said in his 1948 essay “Suffer the Little Children,” there are even canonical stories where children act as both clue and contributor: “In The Sussex Vampire a boy was the miscreant and a baby boy was exhibit A,” he says. And so the use of the word strategically found in The Sign of Four is just another example of Holmes’s often purposeful view of young people. 

But Sherlock Holmes uses the young people he encounters in the Canon not only to collect information from them, but to convey it to them. It is no great secret that Sherlock Holmes often seemed to casually pass along life lessons in the same way that he would pass along a box of matches or a pencil stub – that is to say frequently and easily. But it is to the young adults of the Canon – those characters who are nearly grown or merely believe themselves to be so; as opposed to the incorrigible and childish Irregulars who immediately leap to mind when one thinks of young people in the Canon – that Holmes imparts to, and therefore preserves with, his most valuable information: the lessons that were really the nucleus of some of his most remarkable cases. And in this narrow, specific distribution of information, the reader suddenly sees a Sherlock Holmes who has an eye towards his own future; a Detective who was, in fact, very concerned with ensuring his own posterity. Furthermore, the Canon is dotted with linguistic clues that highlight these passages. Each instance (or example) includes a single key word that indicates a descending relationship or succession, or implies a patriarchal or familial relationship (if only metaphorically, of course).

In “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Holmes advises: “…it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.” And the three students we find featured in the story of the same name (“The Three Students”) are no longer children, but they are still quite young in the way of most university or college students – convinced of their own experience and maturity, which only serves to emphasize how inexperienced and immature they really are. Indeed, Giles Gilchrist has managed to surreptitiously obtain an advance look at the exam, and in doing so has committed a youthful blunder, a rather common one, in fact – Gilchrist is not, for example, robbing a bank by tunneling beneath it while his employer copies an encyclopedia by hand. And his actions ultimately harm no one but himself. His decision is ill-advised and he is suitably remorseful. For his part Holmes reacts with a proportionate level of concern: “…it is human to err, and at least no one can accuse you of being a callous criminal…For once you have fallen low. Let us see, in the future, how high you can rise.” The word future speaks to what is fundamentally at stake in the story – both for Gilchrist and in terms of the lesson that Holmes imparts. The story concludes with Gilchrist revealing his decision to join the Rhodesian police and with that pronouncement, there is a glimpse of a future where he might apply the lesson he learned firsthand from Sherlock Holmes – a lesson about leniency and second chances. This is, of course, nearly the exact same lesson that Holmes imparts to James Ryder in “The Blue Carbuncle” – a man whose desperate concern for what his parents are going to say when they hear about this, harkens back to an uncomfortable moment in almost everyone’s formative years. Furthermore, Holmes’s ability to intuit Ryder’s eventual fate – should he have ended up in prison – demonstrates the same empathetic streak he showed to Gilchrist.

The manner in which Holmes speaks to Gilchrist could be described as “fatherly,” perhaps, although that specific description is never given explicitly in the text of “The Three Students.” In fact, the story, “The Noble Bachelor,” is the only one to feature this particularly telling descriptor – one suggestive of a patriarchal relationship. In relating to Dr. Watson how he found the secretly married Mr. and Mrs. Moulton, he says, “I ventured to give them some paternal advice and to point out to them that it would be better in every way that they should make their position a little clearer both to the general public and to Lord St. Simon in particular.” Hatty Doran is no longer quite a child either – in the strictest sense – but she is, by Lord St. Simon’s own description: “wild and free, unfettered by any sort of traditions”; he also uses the words, “impetuous” and “volcanic.” And so she is a young woman, childish if no longer a child, and like Gilchrist (and Ryder), she has made an impulsive decision that she would rather her father never learn of – as unlikely as that might be. And it is the word paternal that speaks to Holmes’s view of this young bride – who is also likely to soon be a young mother. Holmes has a view to a future full of little Moultons, with whom their mother can share the valuable lesson of a how a truth, no matter how painful, is better than a lifetime of uncertainties. And the fatherly advice that Holmes bestowed to her and her husband is not unlike that he which imparts in “The Yellow Face”: “Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”

Finally, in “The Illustrious Client,” the reader finds Violet de Merville. Although no specifics about her age are given, she is referred to as “young” no less than five times throughout the course of the story. Violet has also found herself at a rather childish impasse – much like Gilchrist’s academic dishonesty or Mrs. Moulton’s clandestine union – but Violet is stubborn in the way of so many young women and men who find themselves newly in love and unreceptive to the words of parents, who know that their child’s new paramour is just no good – whether it is because he rides a motorcycle, was caught smoking under the bleachers, or has a documented history of murdering his wives. In any event, Holmes confesses to Watson, somewhat shockingly: “I thought of her for the moment as I would have thought of a daughter of my own.” The word daughter places emphasis on a family relationship and clearly indicates and stresses Violet’s gender. Holmes has given advice to young women before – and furthermore, he is used to having young women disregard that advice (having already dealt with another Violet – Miss Hunter – in 1890). He already knows that his next steps with Miss de Merville will have to be resolute, dramatic, and probably somewhat unpleasant. And so when Holmes says, “All my hot words could not bring one tinge of colour to those ivory cheeks or one gleam of emotion to those abstracted eyes” – it brings to mind his advice from “A Case of Identity”: “If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”

As we know, Holmes was never pleased with Watson’s efforts to preserve his methods for posterity – often stating that his Boswell’s stories were too romantic or florid for his taste. So, Sherlock Holmes never saw his deductive methods put to paper in a way that was precisely to his liking – his oft-mentioned monographs only partially served this purpose and cannot be considered a complete compendium of Holmesian investigation. And for the purposes of the Canon, Holmes died unmarried and childless (my apologies to Mr. Baring-Gould), and he speaks of his own family in an absent, off-hand manner as if it were a footnote in one of those monographs. Perhaps Holmes chose young adults, rather than small children (of whom he was also famously fond) because young adults had the most potential for an immediate payout on his lessons. The canonical characters mentioned just now were all just on the cusp of a significant age-related milestone – a career, a marriage, children. These characters were all just old enough to really appreciate the enormity of Holmes’s lesson (if not the finer details of his methods), but also young enough for the lesson to still have a real impact. There was still time for the lesson to sink into their skin and linger there, rather than be brushed off as just one more lecture in a collection of a lifetime of experiences.

But ultimately what was at stake was the lesson, and as has hopefully been demonstrated, that lesson was shared, and Sherlock Holmes once again succeeded. Young people are mere random sketches of both children and adults – close to both roles without fully encompassing either. They are able to pick and choose details, disregarding irrelevancies, until their self-portrait is finally complete. Just as the lessons Holmes conveyed to them were mere random sketches of lessons he had outlined in previous stories – rough mirror images, cleverly concealing their significance, as well as their potential for so much more.

oOo

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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

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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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