BOOK REVIEW: “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

Martin Powell, Jamie Chase, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Publisher: Dark Horse (February 2013)

"Watson won't allow that I know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy, because our views upon the subject differ. Now, these are a really very fine series of portraits." (HOUN)

I come by my uniquely passionate personality honestly – at least, that’s what I like to tell myself. When I was growing up, my mother was (and still is, actually) an ardent devotee of all things Arthurian. My childhood home was resplendent with reproductions of medieval tapestries and framed prints of dragons. The shelves of my mother’s not insignificant library overflowed with a wide and unique array of literature in her chosen field, including a rather beautifully illustrated children’s edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which she had to keep on her own shelves because the vivid sketches of the beheaded green knight (complete with bloody stump – trust me, I remember) made my sister and I scream in unholy terror. I myself am now the owner of two of her favorite Arthurian swords, which she had to give up when she moved into a smaller living space (her immense library was also one of the casualties of the move). And while she would never admit it outright, I imagine she must have felt a speck of disappointment that neither of children ever shared her interest.

But what she must have recognized in her children was elements of her own personality – and all of its obsessive, ardent nuances – and she was good at planting seeds. I remember vividly being a teenager – my discovery of Sherlock Holmes and his world still fresh and new – and being excited to learn that the 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (starring Peter Cushing) was going to be on television that afternoon. “No,” my mother said, taking the remote from my hand. “You can’t watch that one. It’s too scary. It gave me nightmares as a child.” Well, saying something like that to a teenager is essentially like waving red at a bull, and my mother must have known it. She only put up the most cursory of arguments when I protested. I didn’t find the movie even remotely frightening – heaven knows that I had seen infinitely more gruesome things by the time I was a teenager – but watching that film with my mother has always been a very sweet memory.

As such, it was a thrill to open Martin Powell’s and Jamie Chase’s new graphic novel adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles and be instantly reminded of that time. There’s more than a little bit of Hammer Horror’s Hugo Baskerville about Chases’s rendition. The iconic blood-red riding jacket and distinctive eighteenth century hairstyle of the famous villain are immediate visual cues. Suddenly, I’m watching David Oxley chase an unfortunate young woman across the moor, with the moon highlighting his silhouette as he lays eyes on the Hound for the very first time. And a few pages on, with the slope of his brow and the curve of his hawk-like nose, it is Peter Cushing ensconced in the Baker Street sitting room, draped in the famous purple dressing gown and wielding his eyebrow like a weapon. However, it’s not just the Hammer Horror version of HOUN that leaps from the pages of this novel. There is also a Dr. Mortimer whose thin mustache and distinctive, round spectacles are more reminiscent of the Mortimer seen in the 1939 film version of HOUN starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Lionel Atwill (as the late Sir Charles’s closet friend). In the strikingly handsome features of Chase’s Sir Henry, there is more than a little of Richard Greene’s face and all his classic, movie star qualities. And in the single panel in which Sherlock Holmes answers Dr. Watson’s question about the existence of the Hound, (saying simply, “It does.”) it is difficult for the reader not to hear Jeremy Brett’s delivery of that iconic line, complete with his sonorous timbre.

Chase’s illustrations are atmospheric and impressive, but not just for the way in which they harken back to some of the most famous cinematic adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous novel. The color palette is striking and mesmerizing. Dominated by a dark, sometimes harsh, selection of hues, the occasional pinpoints of color have just that much more impact: the rosy blush of sunlight coming through a window, the golden glow of a single candle, or – as mentioned previously – the ominously, maliciously red jacket on Sir Hugo. In his illustrations, Chase uses color with a stunningly magnificent expertise, and to the fullest, most profound impact.

For his part, Martin Powell has managed to craft a gorgeous adaptation of Doyle’s original novel. As an adaptation, not a duplication, there are elements of the story that are missing. For instance, readers who tend to skip over Dr. Watson’s lengthy, sometimes tedious, descriptions of landscape and setting will be pleased; there is none of that present – the drawings certainly give voice to those elements on their own. As another reviewer has pointed out, the famous phrenological exchange between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Mortimer is also missing. The story is streamlined, with much of the exposition and introspection omitted. What remains, however, practically vibrates with intensity. Many of Watson’s reports to Holmes (whom he believes is back at Baker Street) are written across the background of a panel, while the action plays out in the foreground. It’s a powerful and evocative way of showing the complexity of Watson’s role, and the depth and intricacy of the story that Doyle wove together.

Powell wields his chosen dialogue for maximum emotional effect. When Watson speaks to a shadowy figure off-panel, saying simply: “You! I thought you were still in London!” There is a frisson of fear, even if readers already know that they will turn the page to find the Great Detective as the man being addressed. When Holmes tells his friend: “Your reports did it justice, Watson. The house does, indeed, have a menacing personality all its own” – that personality is practically tangible, as the reader sees Sherlock Holmes as a small, isolated figure standing in the grand hall of the Baskerville estate. Martin Powell’s story and Jamie Chase’s artwork are symbiotic, and they likewise do more than justice to a story that is more than a classic – Doyle’s HOUN is as immortal as the Hound itself.

Occasionally I’m asked by someone new to the Canon about where they should start – what short story or novel is a great introduction the Great Detective? Invariably, they wonder if it shouldn’t be The Hound of the Baskervilles – it is the most recognizable, after all, and the one that most people seem to have on their bookshelves, even if they have never read it. I usually shy away from that suggestion – explaining that Sherlock Holmes is actually absent for the majority of the story and that the lengthy and frequent descriptive passages are often tiresome. Powell and Chase’s adaptation of HOUN alleviates both of those issues. With Powell moving Dr. Watson’s activities and the related action into the foreground, Holmes’s absence really seems secondary. And Chase’s artful illustrations mitigate the need for prolonged descriptions and soliloquies on landscape. The resulting work is the version of HOUN that readers visualize when they pick-up the original novel, that they take away with them with they watch one of the many film or television adaptations. It is, in many ways, the best possible version of HOUN and does justice to the story's enduring nature.

oOo

 

The Hound of the Baskervilles, adapted by Martin Powell and Jamie Chase, can be found on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Martin Powell can be found online at: http://martinpowell221bcom.blogspot.com/.

 

“Better Holmes & Gardens” 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 Retired Colourman," in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of Mrs. Josiah Amberley, and offers a bleak outlook on human existence: "But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow – misery.”

The current story is "The Red-Headed League," in which Sherlock Holmes investigates a seemingly irreverent case, with rather more sinister designs, and in which the Great Detective reminds the reader: “I begin to think, Watson, that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico,’ you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid."

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.

“The Meaning of This Extraordinary Performance” (COPP): Granada Television’s “The Six Napoleons”

“Now let me endeavour to show you the different steps in my reasoning. To begin at the beginning.” (“A Study in Scarlet”)

"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” (“A Case of Identity”)

There is no better place to begin a discussion of Granada’s adaptation of “The Six Napoleons” than at the beginning. The episode opens on an odd note: a young woman sensually washes herself at an open window while an old man watches lecherously from across the way. The camera pulls back from the depraved onlooker to reveal a young man (Pietro Venucci, played by Vincenzo Nicoli) and a young woman (his sister, Lucrezia, played by Marina Sirtis of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fame) arguing heatedly in Italian. The argument takes a sudden, violent turn as the man strikes the woman across the face, but their argument carries on without pause. The elderly voyeur finally intercedes, but the young man eventually devolves into hysterical screaming before he runs from the room – the young woman chasing after him, sobbing, her hair falling out of its neat arrangement and blood running from her lip. The first five minutes of Granada Television’s adaptation of SIXN could be quite accurately described as bizarre, with dialogue almost entirely in un-translated Italian and the opening sequence ending with the episode’s main antagonist laughing maniacally while being taken away in a straitjacket. Topped off with a well-filmed fight scene and a strange ritualistic moment involving a photograph and a jewel-encrusted dagger, these opening scenes are indeed odd, but are also punctuated with perfect, memorable moments.

These perfect moments carry over throughout the episode and the first scenes at Baker Street (nearly six minutes into the production, but chronologically a year later) are no exception. The viewer finds Inspector Lestrade (Colin Jeavons) comfortably ensconced in the sitting room of 221B, drinking brandy and smoking cigars with Dr. Watson (Edward Hardwicke) while Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett) peruses a tattered folio. According to Richard Valley, “A man of considerable reticence where companionship is concerned, Sherlock Holmes has no close friends save Dr. John H. Watson, which perhaps explains why it’s so utterly charming and delightful to find, at the start of this episode of THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, that Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is given to dropping by 221B Baker Street every now and then to pass the time.” The casual intimacy between the three men is only reinforced by perfect, punctuating moments, like those already seen in the episode’s prologue. The knowing way in which Holmes lowers the folio to encourage Lestrade to “tell us about it,” understanding intuitively that the man has something of interest to share, but is restraining himself. Or Lestrade’s pleased expression when Holmes rubs his hands together and admits that the Inspector’s story “is certainly very novel.” Or the way in which the Great Detective laughingly tells Watson that the Doctor’s theories “will not do” – dismissively, but without any real venom.

Granada’s adaptation of SIXN is also a demonstration of how well Dr. Watson and Inspector Lestrade know their dear friend, the lengths to which they will go to in order to accommodate him, and how deeply they admire him. While in the morgue, Sherlock Holmes closely inspects the corpse of Pietro Venucci, paying no mind to his proximity to the dead man or the appropriateness of examining him with a magnifying glass. Once the Detective leaves, Lestrade leans down to inspect the corpse himself, his actions a pale imitation of Holmes’s own, before pulling the sheet back over poor Venucci. Later, when Holmes insists that a visit to Chiswick would be timelier than Lestrade’s plan to visit the Italian Quarter, the Inspector actually protests the change in plan very little, and compliantly takes up space upon 221B’s sofa until Holmes tells him that it is time to go. And while waiting in the dark and cold at two o’clock in the morning (we know, because Watson dutifully checks his pocket watch), his only question is “I don’t suppose we can smoke, can we?” Watson offers Lestrade a hard candy so as to ease some of the Inspector’s suffering, only to be told (in another one of those perfectly memorable moments) by Sherlock Holmes: “This is no time for humbugs!” Lestrade’s apparently blind faith in Holmes is soon validated, however, by the appearance of Beppo (the raving lunatic from the opening sequence).

Holmes’s mutual admiration for Watson and Lestrade is also present. When Holmes reveals to Watson how he has baited the journalist Horace Harker into writing a sensational (though inaccurate) article for his newspaper, Watson is visibly pleased with his friend’s cunning and tells him so. The Detective’s reply of thanks is both sincere and enthusiastic (with a mannered tip of his cane to set off his words). Moments later when Holmes and Watson return to Baker Street and approach their sitting room, they find that Lestrade is already present and unaware of their arrival. The Inspector is trying to surreptitiously view the folio that Holmes left on an end table (presumably the same one Holmes was reading at the beginning of the episode). The Detective is more amused by these actions than anything else, and rather than embarrass the Inspector by catching him in the act of prying, he instructs Watson to quietly walk away from the sitting room door – and return a moment later, much more loudly, giving Lestrade a moment to jump out of his seat and away from suspicion.

Inspector Lestrade in close examination of his shoes.

In his role as Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett never wasted a gesture, a facial expression, or a well-timed inflection on a word of import. And so, whether Holmes chokes on his coffee at Watson’s command to be ready in “two minutes,” lowers his head to stare meaningfully but silently at Mr. Horace Harker, or trills slightly over the letter “R” in the word “morgue,” the viewer knows that these are moments of consequence and therefore they take notice. Although some moments may seem hyperbolic to almost the point of overacting – such as when Holmes greets Mr. Sandeford of Reading (and the sixth Napoleon bust) with an exaggerated turn and flourish from his dramatic posture at the fireplace mantel – the actions are not without purpose. For Sherlock Holmes is a theatrical man, with dramatic sensibilities, and the instance lays the framework for the scene just moments later when Holmes takes a cane to the plaster bust of Napoleon – violently and without warning. And instead of being shocked by the sight of the shattered bust, Watson and Lestrade are merely surprised, greeting with delighted astonishment the priceless pearl the Detective finds within – because they know their friend’s nature. They understand what he is made of.

The episode ends, as so many viewers already know, with one more perfectly punctuated moment, with Colin Jeavons delivering Inspector Lestrade’s memorable monologue from SIXN:

“I’ve seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don’t know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that. We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.”

 

But even more remarkable than the words, delivered exactly as written in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original story, is the way in which Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes reacts to the words. Something that a reader of the Canon had only supposed, but had never before seen, is the way in which the Detective is moved by the Inspector’s compliment. As Watson says, “[Holmes] was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him,” but Granada’s presentation has the visual appeal that the written word sometimes does not. The camera angle is tight on Holmes’s face, rarely breaking away, and the subtly evolving emotions are viewed in full – a slightly more open and softer expression, a dropped lip, and eyes that seem instantly, impossibly brighter. And when Sherlock Holmes thanks the Inspector twice – once with passion and once more as his rational side asserts itself – the scene is perfectly punctuated, the episode perfectly executed.

oOo

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Some Thoughts on Character: Colonel Sebastian Moran

Moran, Sebastian, Colonel. Unemployed. Formerly 1st Bangalore Pioneers. Born London, 1840. Son of Sir Augustus Moran, C. B., once British Minister to Persia. Educated Eton and Oxford. Served in Jowaki Campaign, Afghan Campaign, Charasiab (despatches), Sherpur, and Cabul. Author of Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas (1881); Three Months in the Jungle (1884). Address: Conduit Street. Clubs: The Anglo-Indian, the Tankerville, the Bagatelle Card Club… The second most dangerous man in London. ("The Adventure of the Empty House")

In the 2011 film, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Professor James Moriarty signs copies of The Dynamics of an Asteroid in Paris. His signature is an elegant scrawl from a fountain pen as he speaks in effortless French to those who have come to praise him. A man in an inconspicuous tweed suit slides into the empty seat next the Professor, a pair of opera tickets in his hands. There is a long pause as he waits for Moriarty to address him. Finally, the Professor turns, only slightly, to look at the man at his side: “My ticket?” The man nods, gesturing with the object in question.  “Unfortunately,” the Professor says, “you won’t be needing yours.” The man’s expression is largely unreadable as he looks back down at the tickets in his hands, but his sardonic tone is telling: “It’s a shame, Professor. I was looking forward to Don Giovanni.” The identity of the man in the unprepossessing suit isn’t officially revealed as Colonel Sebastian Moran until a bit later in the film, but there are enough clues in even that brief scene for the viewer to make the logical deduction on his or her own. For is that not how we always picture Colonel Moran – the slightly uncouth man on Moriarty’s right hand?

Paul Anderson as Colonel Sebastian Moran and
Jared Harris as Professor James Moriarty 

Colonel Sebastian Moran was first introduced to readers in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” but like many of the minor characters in the Canon, he has taken on a life of his own, appearing in numerous pastiches and television and film adaptations. In A Game of Shadows, mentioned above, he was played by Paul Anderson, and in the Granada television adaptation of EMPT, Patrick Allen. In the 1946 Basil Rathbone film, Terror by Night, Alan Mowbray took on the role of the Colonel (inexplicably masquerading as Major Duncan Bleek). In a recent episode of the new television series, Elementary (simply entitled, “M.”), actor Vinnie Jones takes a turn as Moran – a slightly more bloodthirsty, more unhinged version. And while the Colonel has not yet appeared in the BBC series, “Sherlock” (although who can say who was on the other end of those sinister red laser sights at the end of “The Great Game”?), don’t tell that to the legions of fans who have already imagined Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s 21st century version of Professor Moriarty’s trusted assassin in full. Several pastiche writers have also imagined their own versions of Colonel Moran. Kim Newman’s Moran of The Hound of the D'Urbervilles is every bit as vulgar, crass, ruthless and merciless as so many have imagined (I fully recommend The Well-Read Sherlockian’s excellent review of the novel available here). In John Gardner’s novel, The Return of Moriarty, Moran’s appearance is pitifully, though logically and necessarily, brief – and raises a host of questions.

Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and Patrick Allen as Colonel Moran

But what do readers really know about Colonel Sebastian Moran? The above description – found in EMPT and taken from Sherlock Holmes’s own “index of biographies” – is concise and informative enough, providing details of birth and ancestry, education and military career, even his current address and preferred recreational spots, but the apparent glut of explicit knowledge ends there. Prior to EMPT (chronologically speaking), Moran is mentioned alongside Professor Moriarty in their brief cameo in The Valley of Fear: “[Moriarty’s] chief of the staff is Colonel Sebastian Moran, as aloof and guarded and inaccessible to the law as himself.” So readers can add those three remarkable descriptors (aloof, guarded, inaccessible) to what they already know about the man. To put Moran on the same level as Moriarty in terms of demeanor and position is quite a lofty compliment indeed. But it is also contrary to the man that readers know from EMPT. The Colonel found there is a man of barely contained rage, snarling, savage and “wonderfully like a tiger himself.” As Watson recounts, “The fury upon [Moran’s] face was terrible to look at.” This is a man impulsive and hotheaded enough to murder a man because he could expose the Colonel’s unethical card practices, but patient and methodical enough to be really clever about how he did it. There is the “man of iron nerve,” that Sherlock Holmes describes, a man ruthless enough to relentlessly pursue a man-eating tiger, but possessing of the necessary quietness of disposition to be successful.

At the end of EMPT, the Great Detective seems more than confident that the Colonel will no longer be a concern, but Moran doesn’t disappear from the Canon entirely. In “The Illustrious Client,” which according to William Baring-Gould’s chronology takes place in 1902, Holmes comments: “If your man is more dangerous than the late Professor Moriarty, or than the living Colonel Sebastian Moran, then he is indeed worth meeting.” And in “His Last Bow,” which according to the same chronology takes place in 1914: “The old sweet song… How often have I heard it in days gone by! It was a favourite ditty of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. Colonel Sebastian Moran has also been known to warble it.” This means that Moran was most definitely alive as of 1902, and most probably alive as of 1914 (Holmes refers to the Colonel in the present tense, but a life of international espionage is a busy one, so it might be worth arguing that Holmes’s information could be outdated). Surviving an incarceration of twenty years or more certainly shows a certain resilience of character, or perhaps just a mulish intractability.

At the end of A Game of Shadows, Moran covertly executes Professor Moriarty’s undercover assassin (discreetly, with a blowgun) and then walks out of the Swiss chateau, into the shadows, and away from Professor Moriarty, who is currently engaged in a cerebral battle out on the balcony with Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Watson runs towards his friend, while the Colonel just simply walks away, his intended direction unknown. It is a curious divergence, but not entirely unexpected. As Holmes himself points out in EMPT:

"There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family... Whatever the cause, Colonel Moran began to go wrong."

The Great Detective refers to Colonel Moran as a shikari, which is a Persian word in two parts: the main “Shikar,” meaning “of hunting” and the suffix “i” denoting possession. And it would seem that Moran too was a character in two parts. He comprises a certain cold reservation that made him equal to sit beside Professor Moriarty, but also a contrary savagery that made him effective in his role. Like so many remarkable characters, it is the dichotomy that makes Moran interesting, makes him memorable. Sherlockians return to Colonel Sebastian Moran not simply because he sits beside Professor Moriarty, but because he stands on his own, and cuts his own path.

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.

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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 Beryl Coronet," in which Watson imparts some sage advice about the treatment of madmen, and Holmes shows that even the most damning evidence does not necessarily indicate a concrete conclusion.

The current story is "The Retired Colourman," in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of Mrs. Josiah Amberley, and offers a bleak outlook on human existence: "But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow – misery.”

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.

“At four yards, I could deceive you.” (DYIN): The Art and Necessity of Deception in the Stories of Sherlock Holmes

“The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me – many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead – but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.” (“The Creeping Man”)

Most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, wouldn’t have been able to live with Sherlock Holmes for very long. I’m sure there would always be a stalwart few who would soldier on under any circumstance – convinced that the benefits of living with the Great Detective would far outweigh any “minor” annoyances. But I’m not one of them. When I was in college, I had a roommate that inexplicably began leaving the peanut butter in the refrigerator and the resulting animosity nearly ended our now decades-long friendship. (Sorry Claire, but have you ever tried to spread cold peanut butter? Have you?) So, if I’m clearly that sensitive about my sandwiches, can you imagine how I feel about my personal possessions, my living space, my life? The first time I arrived at Baker Street to find the sitting room filled with papers and noxious chemical fumes, 221B would suddenly be minus one tenant.


Clean. Up. NOW.

But Dr. John Watson was no such person. He seems to find certain behaviors charming when most other people would find them intolerable. He mentions the Detective’s numerous, dangerous chemical experiments off-handedly, merely describing them as “weird” (DYIN) and “malodorous” (SIGN), when others would have expressed more palpable concern. “My flatmate might kill me,” some might have said. Even Holmes’s indoor pistol practice doesn’t seem to bother the Doctor too much: “I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime” (MUSG), he says flippantly, when for others this would have been serious cause for renegotiating the terms of the lease. “My flatmate is going to kill me,” would have certainly been a logical deduction. But Dr. Watson certainly seems to take most of Holmes’s eccentricities in stride.

But certainly some eccentricities are more serious than others. It is one thing, for example, to cleverly execute a disguise in the semblance of a wizened, old sailor (SIGN) or elderly woman (MAZA). Watson, after all, is always so amused when Holmes sheds a disguise to reveal himself beneath it. Amused, and often charmingly befuddled. As in The Sign of Four, when the cantankerous sailor in the Baker Street sitting room is replaced with the Detective, Watson says, “Holmes! […] You here! But where is the old man?” Is it a tribute to Sherlock Holmes’s skill in the art of disguise, or to Dr. Watson’s guilelessness that he cannot, at first, conceive that his friend might have played a lighthearted trick on him? On the other hand, Watson does get angry with Holmes, earlier in the same story, when he presents Holmes with a pocket watch and asks him to deduce what he can of the watch’s former owner. Holmes is successful, of course, in divining the existence of Watson’s unfortunate older brother. At first Watson is furious – convinced that Holmes already somehow knew about his sibling and is trying to play him for a fool – but once Holmes reveals precisely how he made his deductions, Watson is contrite: “It is as clear as daylight… I regret the injustice which I did you. I should have had more faith in your marvellous faculty.”


Holmes, quit waving that fake beard at me. I need to figure out where that old man went!

But neither of these ruses is quite on the same level as, say, a long and protracted ploy in which Watson is led to believe that Holmes is dying of a rare tropical illness. Even worse, Holmes does not want Watson to help treat him or even assist him beyond bringing Culverton Smith to Baker Street – a man who isn’t even a doctor (DYIN). A clever disguise can hardly be equated with leaving Watson to his own devices in Dartmoor, where he conducts a supposedly solitary investigation into the “ugly, dangerous business” and unknowingly cavorts with the most sinister of villains – all while Holmes watches on, but does not act, only revealing his presence when he finds Watson sitting in his den (HOUN). Oh, and of course, there was the time that Sherlock Holmes let Dr. Watson, and the world, believe he was dead. For three years. And then shows up on Watson’s doorstep – in disguise, yet again – making only a passing reference to the Doctor’s late wife, instead suggesting dinner and a quick skirmish with an assassin (EMPT). It’s enough to make the reader feel angry on Dr. Watson’s behalf, even if it seems he can’t quite manage the emotion on his own.

"I'm not dead! Let's have dinner."

And there’s the rub – Dr. Watson doesn’t really seem to be bothered by any of these things, from the most innocent disguises to the most devious, emotionally-charged deceptions. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson is positively relieved that Holmes has arrived (“…a crushing weight of responsibility seemed in an instant to be lifted from my soul,” he says), rather than put-out that the Detective has apparently had him running through hoops while he watched. In “The Empty House,” Watson’s initial response to Holmes’s apparent resurrection is to faint, and when he comes back to himself, he announces, “My dear chap, I’m overjoyed to see you. Sit down, and tell me how you came alive out of that dreadful chasm” – as if it were no small thing for a previously dead friend to be alive and well and standing before him in his consulting room. Fans of the BBC’s “Sherlock,” can expect a different scene from the modern adaptation’s take on EMPT. According to series’ creator Mark Gatiss, "I always found it a little unlikely that Dr. Watson's only reaction was to faint for instance – as opposed to possibly a stream of terrible swear words." The only exception from the examples above is "The Dying Detective" – where the reader doesn’t get to experience Watson’s reaction to Holmes’s deception at all. The story ends with Holmes explaining his process, and one supposes it’s too much to imagine that Watson slugged the Detective once the story closed.

There’s a range of trickery and deception present in the Canon, but for the most part, Dr. Watson’s reactions to those instances don’t seem to vary. Rather than turning to a discussion about the reliability of Watson as a narrator (perhaps he did slug Holmes at the conclusion of DYIN, but if he left it out of the manuscript, how would the reader ever know?), is it equally as likely that Watson merely understood Holmes’s process even more than he would ever let himself realize? The deductive steps may have always been a mystery to him in varying degrees (such as his reaction to Holmes’s pocket watch analysis), but that didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate the result. Watson could have wasted valuable time and energy getting upset when Holmes let him run about Dartmoor to seemingly little end, or he could just skip right to being relieved that Holmes had arrived. What is the benefit in arguing whether or not Watson should have been angry about Holmes’s three-year deception, when the fact remains that he was, in fact, overjoyed to see his friend? Whenever Holmes managed to mislead Watson, whether it was a small trick of disguise or a large-scale deception, the Doctor was always able to move right to the necessity of it. And he was invaluable to the Detective’s process by always appreciating the art of it.

oOo

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BOOK REVIEW: “Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes”

Maria Konnikova; Publisher: Viking (U.S.)/Canongate Books Ltd. (U.K.) (January 2013)

“I am inclined to think –” said I.

“I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently. (VALL)

Not long after I began reading Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, by Maria Konnikova, I found myself having to attend an all-staff meeting at my office. This wasn’t unusual, occurring at least once a week, and often lasting anywhere from one hour to as many as three hours in duration. Typically, I will take a cup of coffee or a bottle of water with me, but as this meeting promised to be much shorter than a usual one, I decided to hold off. As I was seated in the conference room, waiting for the meeting to begin, my supervisor sat down next to me. She looked over at me with a strange expression. “Why do you have a coaster in front you?” she asked. I looked down only to discover that she was right – I had arrived for the meeting and mindlessly grabbed a coaster for the cup of coffee I did not have – but usually did. I had been on auto-pilot, moving thoughtlessly through my actions without giving the slightest thought to what I was doing.

Cover artwork of U.S. edition

Konnikova would say that I was using my Watson system of thinking, and with good reason. I wasn’t far along in her book before I realized how many things I did mindlessly, distractedly, how little thought I sometimes put into my daily life. I actually became very concerned as I progressed through the book – forget trying to think like Sherlock Holmes, I just wanted to correct what I began to think were terrible deficiencies with my brain. In one instance, Konnikova off-handedly mentions learning to drive, which, for me, set off a train of thought – beginning with a memory of a friend learning how to drive a manual transmission in the middle of a particularly brutal winter – and spiraling down a rabbit hole of related remembrances until I ended up in a rather dark corner of my memory, deeply depressed and resentful of Konnikova’s book for reasons I couldn’t fully comprehend. But that was my Watson thought system in action again. “Think of the Watson system as our naïve selves,” Konnikova says, “operating by the lazy thought habits – the ones that come most naturally, the so-called path of least resistance – that we’ve spent our whole lives acquiring” (18).

It would be an easy thing to say that the Holmes system of thinking is just the opposite of the Watson one – that it is unnatural and difficult, and that anyone who wishes to acquire it will have to spend the rest of his or her life doing so. But it’s not that simple, nor is the outlook that grim for someone who wishes to think like Sherlock Holmes. There is hope for people like myself, who have been running on autopilot for years and who sometimes experience terrifying and inexplicable thought processes. Thinking like the Great Detective is not just about thinking harder – spending hours with your eyes narrowed in endless concentration until you develop a monstrous headache – nor is it just about learning expansively. Even Sherlock Holmes didn’t know everything, Konnikova points out. Did he not have to look up information about the villainous jellyfish in “The Lion’s Mane”? For once, he did not have the material at his fingertips – but he knew where to find it. To think like Sherlock Holmes is to think with awareness.

Cover artwork of U.K. edition.

Konnikova provides a perfectly plotted map to the brain of Sherlock Holmes – that previously undiscovered country so often remarked upon. Each road and pathway charted in wholly accessible detail, making it possible for her readers to retrace and recreate, to redesign their own minds in the model of the Great Detective. If Holmes’s mind was akin to an attic, as has so often and so famously been stated, then like any attic it must have a framework, and the framework can be replicated, in theory. Within the pages of Mastermind are the instructions on how to create, stock, explore, navigate, and maintain a Brain Attic of one’s own. And it’s all just so marvelously comprehensible. Pulling evidence not just from the Canon, but also from 21st century psychological studies and neuroscience, a book this entrenched in scientific theory could have easily been a difficult, tiresome slog. Instead, Mastermind proves fresh and vital, pertinent to readers of all ages, because as Konnikova points out – it’s never too late to learn something new (really, science has proven it).

There is no limit to the instances that Konnikova could have referenced from the Canon – from Holmes’s first impression of Dr. Watson (“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”) to the Doctor’s mostly incorrect deductions based on a walking stick left behind at Baker Street in The Hound of the Baskervilles (and Holmes’s much more correct ones) to the changes in the Detective’s deductive system as seen in “The Yellow Face” and then later in “The Red Circle” (demonstrating the growth and flexibility of his process). Konnikova doesn’t waste a single one. She even adroitly uses examples from the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, such as his role in the case of George Edalji (a perfect demonstration of how the creator influenced his creation) and in the instance of the Cottingley Fairies (showing how even Doyle had human failings, capable of the same mental weaknesses as the rest of us). Mastermind shows that the intellect of Sherlock Holmes was indeed as limitless as Sherlockians always thought it would be, but as Konnikova demonstrates, the limitlessness of the Great Detective’s mind is not predictive of the untapped resources of our own.

“See the value of imagination,” said Sherlock Holmes in “Silver Blaze”. “It is the one quality which [Inspector] Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.” Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes is not a lecture, nor a series of cleverly reiterated Canonical tales – it is a book built to grow on, for forward movement, for proceeding. But even that is not necessarily enough if one truly wants to think like the Great Detective. “Education is all well and good, but it needs to be taken from the level of theory to that of practice, over and over and over – lest it begin to gather dust and let out that stale, rank smell of an attic whose door has remained unopened for years” (221). There was once a time when a coaster unaccountably at my seat would have thrown me entirely off track, and I would have found myself trapped in an endless cycle of wandering into rooms and forgetting what I wanted, opening up a blank document and no longer remembering what I wanted to write, and dialing a phone number without a clear sense of what I wanted to say. But awareness of the thought process is the first step, and awareness of my own mindlessness helped break me from the cycle. In short, to think like Sherlock Holmes, one must first know that they are thinking.

“How absurdly simple!” I cried. (DANC)

oOo

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