January 19, 2014, here in the U.S. at any rate, we find out how Holmes did it.
The video is interactive. Keep your cursor hovering over the left corner of the screen and watch for the targets to slide by. Click and you’ll get to see other clips and photos. Minor spoilers, if you’re fussy about that sort of thing.
My favorite bit in the trailer is when Holmes learns Watson has grown a mustache during his absence and determines it will have to go. It makes the good doctor look ancient and, Holmes says, “I can’t be seen wandering around with an old man.”
Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) watches as his brother Mycroft (Rhys Ifans) blows up Sherlock’s cache of private papers for reasons not worth explaining here. But I’m hoping the fact that Mycroft knows how to build a bomb is a clue he isn’t just the playboy restauranteur he’s seemed to be so far on CBS’ Elementary.
The writers of Elementary have introduced their versions of Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and Mycroft Holmes and the disappointment of the blatant revisions of their characters as they originally appeared in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories is nothing compared to the infuriation caused by less immediately noticeable but even more truly fundamental changes.
Making Irene Adler a criminal and Holmes’ erstwhile lover has been done in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Jr movies and, to kinkier effect and with more amusing perversity, in the BBC series Sherlock. And it’s nothing to have Moriarty a woman, especially after working a gender change on Watson, except that rather than the effect being feminist, it’s subtly misogynistic, depending on whether you think the good of having Holmes’ intellectual equal a woman outweighs the fact that evil female nemeses are a staple of insecure males’ nightmares. Also, it’s been done too: In Law and Order: Criminal Intent. By the way, Olivia d’Abo, who played Nicole Wallace, Bobby Goren’s female Moriarty, appeared in last week’s episode, The Marchioness, I hope as a wink to fans of both series and not just coincidentally. It’s even less than nothing to have slimmed Myrcroft down and sexed him up, and the idea that the Holmes Brothers are rivals with a complicated family history isn’t at all faithful to Conan Doyle’s stories, in which, although Sherlock is affectionately critical of his older brother’s apparent laziness and lack of ambition, the two men like and admire and trust each other, but it is a nod to---or an out and out steal from---Sherlock, where, however, the rivalry, animosity, and distrust are all on one side and symptoms of Sherlock’s personal dysfunctions. It’s also implicit in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and it's the stick---and schtick---that drives the plot of Gene Wilder’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, although the smarter brother isn’t Mycroft, it’s Sigerson, Wilder’s in-jokingly named invention.
Reducing Mycroft not just in bulk but in achievement and status from an important government official who likes a good meal to a playboy restauranteur may turn out to be a good, that is, actually creative, change. It’ll depend on how things play out and what surprises are in store. Mycroft is going to be a recurring character this season and it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s a good reason Alan Moore made Mycroft the second head of the agency that would become the MI6 of the James Bond universe in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. (See The Bruce-Partington Plans.) He’s also the second in what, judging by Skyfall, is a long line of M’s for whom M is not just short for Minister.
So these changes don’t bother me---too much---because they hardly strike me as changes, except in the Been There, Done That, Bought a Higher-Quality T-Shirt way.
But having Irene Adler outsmart Holmes by being sexually manipulative, taking away Moriarty’s mathematics degree and professorship, and not allowing Mycroft to demonstrate he’s smarter than his brother diminishes those characters and diminishes Holmes in the process.
I’ll have a lot more to say about Moriarty and Irene Adler in a future post, but for now I need to say this about Elementary’s Irene versus Conan Doyle’s original:
I think it’s a given among casual fans of Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia that Holmes comes to admire Irene Adler and compliment her with the title the Woman because she outsmarts him. but that’s not quite the case. She barely does. They play a game of chess, trading pieces, until she contrives to upend the board.
Correction.
It turns out that they’re playing against a clock, a fact she knows, because she’s arranged it, and he doesn’t, because she manages to keep him from discovering it until time’s up and it’s too late.
So she does outsmart him in that way.
But he’s used to being outsmarted. It happens. Not very often, and he doesn’t like to admit it when it does. But it does. There are cases he’s failed to solve, criminals who got away. Irene’s almost certainly the first woman to do it, and he admires her for pulling that off. But his admiration is for her is based on something more and less than that, as well.
Until she comes along, Holmes doesn’t believe that any women are capable of outsmarting him. It’s not that he thinks they’re unintelligent or less intelligent than men. He thinks they’re too emotional. Too flighty. Too undisciplined in their thinking. He doesn’t doubt their brains. He is contemptuous of their characters. However inherently intelligent they may be, they don’t have the willpower or the moral fortitude to act intelligently. (This, by the way, is his excuse when he is outsmarted by other women or feels that he might be: You can’t out-think someone who isn’t thinking.) Irene surprises him not just by being smart but by being pure of motive. She's honest and decent and, instead of indulging herself emotionally, she does the right, that is, the intelligent thing in the end.
This doesn’t change his opinion of women. He just makes an exception---the Exception---for her.
By having their Irene “outsmart” their Holmes by sexually beguiling and emotionally toying with him, the producers of Elementary have made her into exactly the sort of inferior being Conan Doyle’s Holmes takes all women to be. If he saw what happened to his 21st Century counterpart, he wouldn’t dub Adler the Woman. He’d say, “Isn’t that just like a woman” and feel confirmed in his misogyny.
Back to Mycroft.
Here’s how we’re introduced, through Watson, to Conan Doyle’s Mycroft in The Greek Interpreter.
Mycroft Holmes was a much larger and stouter man than Sherlock. His body was absolutely corpulent, but his face, though massive, had preserved something of the sharpness of expression which was so remarkable in that of his brother. His eyes, which were of a peculiarly light, watery gray, seemed to always retain that far-away, introspective look which I had only observed in Sherlock’s when he was exerting his full powers.
“I am glad to meet you, sir,” said he, putting out a broad, fat hand like the flipper of a seal. “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler. By the way, Sherlock, I expected to see you round last week to consult me over that Manor House case. I thought you might be a little out of your depth.”
“No, I solved it,” said my friend, smiling.
“It was Adams, of course.”
“Yes, it was Adams.”
“I was sure of it from the first.” The two sat down together in the bow-window of the club. “To anyone who wishes to study mankind this is the spot,” said Mycroft. “Look at the magnificent types! Look at these two men who are coming towards us, for example.”
“The billiard-marker and the other?”
“Precisely. What do you make of the other?”
The two men had stopped opposite the window. Some chalk marks over the waistcoat pocket were the only signs of billiards which I could see in one of them. The other was a very small, dark fellow, with his hat pushed back and several packages under his arm.
“An old soldier, I perceive,” said Sherlock.
“And very recently discharged,” remarked the brother.
“Served in India, I see.”
“And a non-commissioned officer.”
“Royal Artillery, I fancy,” said Sherlock.
“And a widower.”
“But with a child.”
“Children, my dear boy, children.”
“Come,” said I, laughing, “this is a little too much.”
“Surely,” answered Holmes, “it is not hard to say that a man with that bearing, expression of authority, and sun-baked skin, is a soldier, is more than a private, and is not long from India.”
“That he has not left the service long is shown by his still wearing his ammunition boots, as they are called,” observed Mycroft.
“He had not the cavalry stride, yet he wore his hat on one side, as is shown by the lighter skin on that side of his brow. His weight is against his being a sapper. He is in the artillery.”
“Then, of course, his complete mourning shows that he has lost someone very dear. The fact that he is doing his own shopping looks as though it were his wife. He has been buying things for children, you perceive. There is a rattle, which shows that one of them is very young. The wife probably died in childbed. The fact that he has a picture-book under his arm shows that there is another child to be thought of.”
I began to understand what my friend meant when he said that his brother possessed even keener faculties than he did himself.
Over the course of last season, Elementary got better and better, and cheekier and cheekier, about riffing off the Conan Doyle stories, and when Mycroft was brought on screen (in the person of Rhys Ifans) in the first episode of this season, I expected the writers to play around with that.
Didn't happen.
Didn't happen last week either when Mycroft showed up in New York and there was an actual opening in the plot for the dueling deductionists bit as Mycroft followed his brother around through a clumsy homage to Silver Blaze (made clumsier by the writers having used the big reveal of that story, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, in a previous episode). But Mycroft doesn't interrupt as Sherlock walks and talks his way through his investigation to point out something Sherlock's missed or even show signs he's taking in at least the same things if not more than Sherlock observes, and Sherlock gives no clues he's expecting Mycroft to chime in and one-up him.
Maybe tonight, but I'm not holding my breath.
There’s some cheating by Conan Doyle in that scene from the Greek Interpreter. The Holmes brothers are indulging in guesswork and basing too much on assumptions and prejudices like the idea that an expression of authority can be seen, never mind defined, from a view from an upstairs window or that there’s such a thing as the cavalry stride. But otherwise they are working from observable physical facts that Watson could have and, Sherlock would say, should have seen himself. The difference is that Sherlock and Mycroft know what to look for.
Shawn is hyper-observant. He solves cases by seeing things that are there to be seen by anybody if only they knew to look (and they like him have 40-20 vision; some cheating by the writers goes on) and that they often do see but don't grasp the significance of or connect to other clues. Shawn makes the connections and this is how a case can turn on something as simple as his reading the shipping label on a packing crate and Shawn still comes off as the smartest person in the room, and keep in mind the room usually includes Gus, Juliet, Lassiter, and Henry, none of whom are dummies. Shawn's genius isn't in the deduction, but in his having thought to read the label.
This isn't how Elementary's Holmes works, though. He doesn't make deductions based on observable clues. He doesn't do much observing at all. He doesn't have to. He's able to pull things out of his head no one else could know unless they'd read ahead in the script. We've seen him perform the trick of taking in another character's life story at a glance, but without explaining how he's done it so we're left to infer he's seen something that was there to be seen by anyone if only they'd looked more closely, if they'd not just seen but observed. It turns out, however, this isn't what's been going on.
In another recent episode, Holmes takes Watson to the police station on a Friday night as part of her training as a junior detective and orders her to deduce what's landed each of the prisoners in the holding cell in jail. He doesn't flat out say, "You know my methods, apply them," but that's her assignment. And she comes through by...reading their body language.
Well, actually, by reading time-worn bits of business actors have used since the days of the Ancient Greeks to convey their characters ' emotional states to audience members way up in the cheap seats. But still, that's what she does, treats gestures, postures, and expressions as if they are as signifying as smudges of dirt on a shop clerk's trousers, wax drippings on a lost bowler hat, or a children's picture book under the arm of a man wearing widower's weeds and ammunition boots. And presumably this is how Holmes does it, which means, since real human beings aren't as obvious and predictable as mediocre actors, he's not so much observing clues as reading minds.
And when he's not solving cases by telepathy, he's solving them by being literally a know it all. This Holmes knows stuff. Tons of stuff. He reads and watches and memorizes everything. We've seen him training his mind to do the impossible, take in streams of information from multiple sources at once and file it all away in his mental attic from where it can be retrieved instantaneously the moment he needs it. Conan Doyle's Holmes makes a point of not knowing stuff. He keeps his mental attic as uncluttered as possible so that nothing extraneous is there to get in the way of his thinking a problem through, confident that if there's information he needs he can find it quickly outside his head. Transported to the 21st Century, Conan Doyle's Holmes would be a cheerful and enthusiastic user of Google. In fact, Sherlock's Sherlock is. He's as wedded to his smart phone as other, more traditional Holmeses have been wedded to their magnifying glasses. (Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes uses one of those too, a sign that there are things there to be seen. Jonny Lee Miller's Holmes doesn't need one since there's nothing he needs to see to solve a crime. Even if there was, he still wouldn't need one,because it turns out he has superpowers. "My senses are unnaturally keen," he's boasted, which makes him more like Adrian Monk than like Sherlock Holmes, although Monk has the good grace to be sorry about it, calling his OCD inflected abilities a blessing and a curse.) Elementary's Holmes has his smart phone with him at all times too and has an impressive computer set up at home as well. But when he takes to the internet it's generally to confirm what he already knows, which makes it basically a trope the writers use to convince us of the reality of Holmes brilliance: See, he really is that smart!
But what it all comes down to is that the only way Mycroft, or Irene Adler, or Moriarty, or Watson can be smarter than Holmes is by knowing stuff he doesn't know. But the show's already established that he knows everything. So the only way he can be outsmarted is by his lapsing into sudden stupidity, which is how it comes about that Irene Adler bests him by getting him to think with his...um...heart...and not his head.
It'll be interesting to see what they finally do with Mycroft and if and how he's revealed to be the smarter brother. I'm pretty sure there's more going on with him than he's letting on. I’ve heard that an episode based in part on The Bruce-Partington Plans is in the pipe. Maybe it's tonight's.
I don’t know if I should get my hopes up. Mycroft hasn’t shown he’s the more intelligent brother so far, but he’s proving to be the more sensitive one. Which is in keeping with Elementary’s emphasis on recovery and relationships. Whatever the case Holmes and Watson are working on in the main plot, the subplot is usually about someone getting in touch with their feelings. Although their originals got along happily, Elementary’s Sherlock and Mycroft have a number of issues to work out, starting with the reason for their current estrangement---Sherlock slept with Mycroft’s fiancée.
Yep, both these Holmes brothers are robustly heterosexually sexual.
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The Non-Adventure of the Dueling Deductionists continues. Friday morning update with minimum spoilage: Last night's episode, Blood is Thicker, did do a take-off on The Bruce-Partington Plans, using the central gimmick of that story, a body mysteriously appearing on the roof of a moving vehicle, a delivery truck here instead of a train car. And it turned out to be a rare occasion when Holmes did the Shawn Spencer routine and came to a conclusion based on observable physical clues that anyone could have seen had they thought to look. But Mycroft didn't figure in solving the mystery at all. And there was another missed opportunity for him to one-up Sherlock or what would have been an opportunity had the writers been setting things up for it in Mycroft's two previous appearances. Early on, Mycroft wonders why Sherlock missed the opening of Mycroft's new restaurant, the Diogenes (Get it?), and Sherlock testily replies that he was busy solving the abduction of a teenage girl. Here, if the writers had been doing it right, Mycroft should have said quickly, "It was Adams, wasn't it?" He didn't and the brothers just continued on working out their personal issues.
There was a nice in-joke bit of casting though. Back in the 1980s there was a TV Movie called The Return of Sherlock Holmes in which Holmes wakes up in the late 20th Century after having been frozen like Austin Powers for 80 years and teams up with his old friend Doctor Watson's grand-daughter, Jane Watson. Jane was played by Margaret Colin. Last night's guest star on Elementary? Margaret Colin.
Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, Aidan Quinn, and Jon Michael Hill, with, from time to time, Rhys Ifans. On CBS, Thursdays at 10 PM Eastern, 9 Central. Recent episodes are available to watch online at the Elementary website.
Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson and Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes travel to London in the Season Two premiere of Elementary, tonight at 10 Eastern, 9 Central on CBS.
Like all true fans of Sherlock Holmes, I’m impatiently waiting for the return of Sherlock. Not happening for a few months yet.
Tonight, though, CBS’ Elementary begins its second season with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as Holmes and Watson and I’m looking forward to that. It’ll be a nice filler until the real updated Holmes and Watson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, return.
You might remember I was less than enthusiastic about Elementary last season. I felt that its Holmes, while Miller looks exactly like my ideal Sherlock, wasn’t active and adventurous enough, and that the show’s writers had no idea what to do with Watson and were wasting Lucy Liu in the part. Both things changed in the last five or six episodes. Miller’s Holmes is still not the swashbuckler Cumberbatch’s is, but he’s gotten more dangerous and Liu’s Watson, while still too much of a junior detective to Holmes and not enough of the independent grown up the rea'l---that is Conan Doyle’s---Watson is or as simultaneously funny and deadly serious as Freeman’s Watson, has been given more to do and, more importantly, more to say that isn’t a string of self-help cliches and contemporary versions of “Oh, I say, Holmes, how the deuce did you deduce that one?”
At any rate, I’m liking the show more and more and I’m not just saying that because the great Wev McEwan has threatened to kick me in the shins if I don’t agree with her that it is the best TV show ever.
Tonight, Holmes and Watson go to London where they meet [possible spoiler redacted] who’s played by [possible spoiler redacted], a nifty piece of casting against type of which I heartily approve.
Below, are my two posts from February when I was just getting into the show and wishing it was more like what it’s subsequently grown to be. A third post, this one on not just Elementary’s but Sherlock’s, Robert Downey Jr’s, and Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler is in the works.
Mostly it’s the forehead, but Jonny Lee Miller, who plays Sherlock Holmes in the CBS television series Elementary, looks more like Sherlock Holmes than any Sherlock Holmes I can name.
More than Benedict Cumberbatch. More than Jeremy Brett. Certainly more than Robert Downey Jr.
Also, I know. I’m leaving out somebody important. I’ll get to him later.
When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young.
The last was important to my conception of Holmes and not just in helping me identify with him. Every Holmes I’d seen on TV when I was a kid---that would have included Rathbone, Cushing, and Stewart Granger, an undeservedly forgotten Holmes but to my mind then disqualifyingly white-haired---looked to me like an old man and I knew from the stories, where I encountered Holmes first, that he was in his twenties when he began his career as the world’s first and only private consulting detective and still only thirty-seven when he apparently went over Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarity.
But as much as he looks like Sherlock Holmes as I’ve always imagined him, he hasn’t convinced me he is Sherlock Holmes.
In fact, of all the Holmeses I’ve mentioned and the one I haven’t yet, he’s the least convincing Holmes. Downey is more like Holmes, even though his Holmes is something of a joke, the joke, being, however, the answer to the questions, What if Holmes and Watson were more like the sides of themselves that only occasionally show in Conan Doyle’s stories, usually in references to cases Watson hasn’t chronicled yet but from what little Watson tells us we can guess are much more adventurous, dangerous, violent, and outlandish than any of the stories on hand? What if instead of being the staid and proper Victorian gentlemen they’re usually portrayed as we get to see them as a pair of swashbuckling soldiers of fortune, not just the prototypes for a long line of movie and TV and mystery novel detectives but the precursors of James Bond?
That side of them is in the stories. Holmes can wield a sword, he’s a crack shot with a pistol, and he’s a master of martial arts. He has actually been a spy on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Even the part of the first Downey Holmes movie you might have thought was an outrageous invention by director Guy Ritchie, Holmes “relaxing” by taking part in a bare-knuckle prizefight, is inspired by a moment in The Sign of Four. Holmes, we find out, has been an amateur boxer and good enough that one of his old opponents, a professional named McMurdo still thinks Holmes missed his true calling when he left the ring to take up detective work.
“Very sorry, Mr. Thaddeus,” said the porter inexorably. “Folk may be friends o’ yours, and yet no friend o’ the master’s. He pays me well to do my duty, and my duty I’ll do. I don’t know none o’ your friends.”
“Oh, yes you do, McMurdo,” cried Sherlock Holmes genially. “I don’t think you can have forgotten me. Don’t you remember that amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?”
“Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes!” roared the prize-fighter. “God’s truth! how could I have mistook you? If instead o’ standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question. Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”
“You see, Watson, if all else fails me, I have still one of the scientific professions open to me,” said Holmes, laughing. “Our friend won’t keep us out in the cold now, I am sure.”
I don’t think his name gets said in the movie, but according to IMDB, the boxer Downey’s Holmes defeats with a trick of a handkerchief is McMurdo.
Physical strength, athleticism, a capacity for violence even a relish for it, and a love of adventure and danger for their own sakes are intrinsic to Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Holmes. Holmes’ brother Mycroft spells it out for Watson and us in this exchange from A Scandal in Belgravia.
Jeremy Brett’s Holmes may not ever have aspired to be a pirate, but there’s a roguishness to him that suggests he’d be sympathetic to the pirate’s point of view and would have made a good one if he’d wanted. Brett was fifty-one when he took on the part---Cumberbatch was thirty-four when he started---and he knew better than to try to play Holmes young. But his Holmes is a man in his prime, still vigorous, and full of pent-up physical energy, which often shows most when he’s at his most still. It’s the stillness of a big cat, relaxed for the moment but always prepared to pounce. So it isn’t surprising that his Holmes can straighten out a bent fireplace iron, knock down a local bully in a bar, scale walls and climb drainpipes, and, as he does at the beginning of The Final Problem, take on and fight off three of Moriarty’s hired thugs in a scene that, with a little strategic slow-motion, could have come right out of Guy Ritchie’s movies, and it’s a scene that’s not entirely made up for television. At the beginning of the Doyle story, Holmes shows Watson the knuckles he bloodied punching a club-swinging goon in the mouth in the course of escaping a string of Moriarty-plotted attempts on his life that afternoon.
While we’re on the subject, Basil Rathbone---who made The Hound of the Baskervilles when he was forty-seven---couldn’t help inspiring images of swashbucklers and pirates, swordplay and feats of derring-do in his audience, since it was movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood that made him a star. Of course, he played villains in both and in more than his fair share of other movies, but that was also an attractive feature of his Holmes. It added a sinister cast to his character. Which fits. As Doyle’s Holmes himself likes to point out, he’d have rivaled Moriarty as a master criminal if he’d turned his talents to crime, an idea Holmes seems to think is a recommendation.
But I’ve seen no pirate in Miller’s Holmes. No swashbuckler. I get no sense of any pent-up physicality. His Holmes vibrates but with a nervous energy that seems fueled more by caffeine and sugar than a sign of eager muscles demanding to be put to use. A 21st Century Londoner living in contemporary New York City, Miller’s Holmes is something of a hipster, which is fine. Doyle’s Holmes is a “bohemian,” and bohemians were sort of the hipsters of their day. But Miller’s Holmes looks to be in about the same physical shape and about as likely to spring into violent action as any average frequenter of Brooklyn coffee houses on a Sunday morning engrossed in the Times Style section and still a chai latte and a third biscotti shy of operating at peak performance.
Miller gives his Holmes a number of very Holmesian qualities and puts his own, attractive spin on them. He’s persuasively brilliant. We can see he’s keenly observant, clearly taking in everything Holmes would take in, including all that he’ll decide can be disregarded. He wouldn’t, as Downey’s Holmes does, claim to see “everything.” That would be a waste of effort. But he is seeing.
He’s witty. Every good Holmes has a wicked sense of humor. He’s a quick and crafty liar. He knows when and how to play games with witnesses, suspects, the police, and anyone blundering into his way or tries to interrupt his thinking while he’s pursuing a clue. He’s brusque past the point of rudeness, but he’s not wholly insensitive. It’s just that when he’s focused and at work, his thoughts run away with him and his mouth. He enjoys being a difficult character and even seems to think it’s one of his charms. He talks a lot for someone who’s said to often go days without speaking. In fact, he’s something of a motormouth. But that’s in keeping with Doyle’s Holmes, who, for all he pretends otherwise, enjoys explaining himself and discoursing on his methods and past cases.
But he just doesn’t strike me as sufficiently dangerous.
Or danger-addicted.
He’s not inactive. In fact, he can hardly sit still. And he’s not physically timid. He hasn’t done anything like it in the episodes I’ve watched, but I can imagine him climbing out a window and out onto the ledge of a high-rise apartment to test a theory, just as Cumberbatch’s Holmes does in The Blind Banker. But I see him doing it because he has to and not for the thrill of it as well, as Cumberbatch’s Holmes also does. Miller’s Holmes has strength he can muster when needed and he can be violent and to effect. We see him swing a police baton the way Doyle’s Holmes sometimes does his walking stick, with the confidence that comes from lots of practice and the determination that comes from an intent to cause real damage.
Depressingly, in this case he’s not motivated by practical necessity. He does it for that most clichéd and disingenuous TV detective show tropes---revenge for a crime committed against someone he loves---which writers employ to permit their heroes anything while still making a claim on our sympathy.
He could do more of this. It’s just that he’s not been required to. And that’s what I’m getting at. For all his lapses into lethargies and long periods of silent meditation, Doyle’s Holmes is a man of action, a swashbuckler with a touch of pirate, because his stories require him to be.
Doyle’s Holmes and Watson travel in a fictional world where the violent, the macabre, the bizarre, and the borderline supernatural are routine. While many of the stories are, on the surface, realistic in a 21st Century literary sense and some are even humorous, and the mysteries and crimes in them are somewhat tame---A Scandal in Bohemia,The Blue Carbuncle,The Red-Headed League---most of them at least hint at much darker and dangerous realities. They might start out in a puzzler as seemingly comic and inconsequential as in A Case of Identity but any one of them might turn into The Sign of Four and send Holmes and Watson out into the night and the fog to dodge poison-tipped blow darts and shoot it out with the villains boat to boat during a chase down the river. In short, a lot of what happens in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey movies are only exaggerations of what happens in the stories. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are adventures, romantic action-adventures, and Holmes and Watson are action-adventure heroes.
Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t set out to invent the modern detective story and, apparently, quickly lost interest in Holmes, even as Holmes grew in popularity. He even grew to resent him, which is why he killed him off in The Final Problem. The Holmes stories were getting in the way of his writing the kind of adventure tales he preferred to tell and on which he thought his reputation as a writer would be made. Consequently, he routinely used Holmes as an excuse to tell one of those sorts of stories.
So Doyle wasn’t writing about puzzling out mysteries and solving crimes. At the center of most of the Holmes stories is a romantic adventure tale that may include a crime but is more likely building towards one and Holmes and Watson have to work fast to prevent it. They are often coming to the rescue and to do this Holmes usually, but not always, has to puzzle out a mystery. It’s interesting and amusing that Holmes figures out that Doctor Roylott is using a trained swamp adder as a murder weapon, but it’s important that Holmes is there in the nick of time to beat back the snake and save the girl.
For this to matter, we have to care about Helen Stoner as an intended victim and about Roylott as a villain. (By the way, there’s never a doubt that he is a villain. Few of Holmes’ cases are whodunits. Most are howdidtheydoits or howdotheyplantodoits or willtheygetawaywithits.) This means she and he have to matter as characters in a story that matters. It's the same for the heroes, heroines, victims, and villains in the other adventures. They matter because the story matters. The story matters because they matter. You can look at it either way. What it amounts to is that Holmes and Watson are characters in their adventures, quite often supporting characters, arriving like the cavalry as those adventures are reaching their climaxes.
If we weren’t afraid for Helen Stoner, if we weren’t afraid of Doctor Roylott, it wouldn’t strike us as such an impressive feat on Holmes’ part when he figures out what the speckled band is. If we didn’t come quickly to like and admire Irene Adler and develop a rooting interest in her outwitting Holmes, his tricking her into revealing where she hid the photograph would be just that, a neat trick. If we weren’t made to fall half in love with Lady Brackenstall ourselves, it wouldn’t worry us that every bit of evidence Holmes turns up points towards her lying about the circumstances of her husband’s murder.
The stories matter. The characters matter. The mysteries are secondary. And many of the stories are sensationalistic. Doyle's influences include more than Poe’s Dupin and his influence extends beyond Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. Doyle crosses over into high Kipling---The Sign of Four, The Crooked Man---or gives in enthusiastically to the influences of Wilke Collins and his fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson---The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Resident Patient, The Creeping Man, The Sussex Vampire. Sometimes---The Dancing Men, The Gloria Scott, Wisteria Lodge, and The Greek Interpreter---he’s paving the way for Jack London and Joseph Conrad.
Of the eight episodes I’ve seen, only two have had plots like those kind of stories. In an episode titled Dirty Laundry, Holmes investigates the murder of a woman who turns out to have been a member of a sleeper cell of Russian spies living as an average American family in the suburbs. I know. Shades of The Americans, right? But Elementary got there first and, besides it’s based on a real and recent news story. And Doyle would have approved of the plot. Holmes finds himself drawn into the world of spies and international intrigue in a number of stories, including The Second Stain, The Red Circle, and The Bruce Partington Plans. But in those adventures, the real stories belong to the people caught up in the intrigue. In Dirty Laundry, what the spies were up to barely matters. Holmes is never in danger of being drawn in to their adventure because there isn’t any adventure. Their story is just the background for the puzzle the writers have given Holmes to solve.
Thursday night’s episode, The Red Team, was about a conspiracy to kill off all the members of a federal counter-terrorist study group that had devised an unstoppable plan for devastating New York. (It’s telling, though, that the title isn’t an allusion to The Red-Headed League.) It came closer to providing Holmes with an actual adventure. The characters almost came to life in their own rights and their story was almost a story. But in the end it was about solving another puzzle and what story it had was a continuation of the revenge trope that excuses the hero for everything.
The show’s writers seem to think we’re interested in Holmes only because we enjoy his being brilliant, But in their struggles to contrive problems for him to solve that require him to be brilliant, they over-complicate the plots, pile on the red herrings, play games with suspects and motives, and, when all else fails, kill off another character in order to give Holmes more clues to chase, making Holmes less of brilliant deductionist than an indefatigable multi-tasker, the opposite of Holmes’ approach in the story which is always to narrow his focus. By the end they’ve tied their stories into so many knots that there is no way for Holmes to be brilliant enough to figure it all out because it can’t be figured out, it can only be described. It’s left to Holmes to explain it to us in a way that makes it seem that he solved the case by the simple trick of reading ahead in the script.
What the writers forget---or failed to observe in their reading of the stories---is that Holmes’ brilliant deductions are often a matter of a single, but simple close observation. He’s noticed something that’s easily overlooked by others---the dirt on a shop assistant’s knees, the dog that did nothing in the night time. And when Holmes explains it, Watson or someone is bound to respond something like, “But that’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?” The suspense isn’t in our wondering if Holmes will solve the problem or how he we will solve it---we know he will and we know when he does our own response will be the same as Watson’s. Part of the fun is chuckling over our own obliviousness.---the suspense is in our worrying that he might not solve it in time.
And the tension comes from the problem’s having been set by a particular person.
Even in the stories where Holmes’ detective work is more central, it’s not a one-man show. Holmes is matching wits with someone at least smart enough to challenge Holmes’ intelligence for a time. There’s a war of wills going on between Holmes and whoever it is, and although sometimes we can’t see his adversaries right away, because they’re as yet unknown or they are offstage and have to be chased down or, at least in one case, dead and, in another case, apparently dead. The point is that an adversary is an active and intelligent character worth Holmes’ time and energy. They don’t need to be and rarely are up to Moriarty’s level, but they have enough in them to present Holmes with a challenge that’s more than solving a puzzle.
Again, this makes them interesting characters in their own rights and gives them stories of their own. In Elementary this has been the case in one case. In the other episodes I’ve seen, the adversary has been only an explanation for the puzzle he or she has supposedly presented Holmes with, as if the writers are always working backwards, starting by saying, “This is a neat mystery we’ve concocted. Now what kind of person would do this?”
So the bad guys don’t matter because they’re just devices to explain the plots, and it’s the same with the victims, who are usually dead from the beginning anyway. And Holmes’ clients don’t matter because…he doesn’t have any clients.
Correction. He has one client. The police.
This Holmes is not a private consulting detective. He’s a full-time consultant for the NYPD and his cases are brought to him by the police, which is a significant change from the usual convention of Doyle’s stories. Many of Holmes’ most intriguing cases are brought to him straight by the victims or intended victims and this means they get to speak for themselves and immediately involve us in their distress.
On Elementary, however, we hear about them second-hand, from the mouths of cops in the voices of and words of cops delivering a report. It’s distancing and it has the effect of reducing them to plot devices in stories that are all about Holmes being brilliant, which, as I’ve pointed out, turns out to be trouble for the writers.
I don’t know why the show’s creators felt they had to give their Holmes this quasi-official position. It’s not true to the stories and it’s not original. Instead of connecting him with Doyle’s Holmes, it makes him just another in a line of TV detectives. Monk, Psych’s Shawn Spencer, Castle are “consultants” to the police too. In fact, Doyle’s Holmes would find this idea offensive. Holmes is routinely insistent that he did not work for the police. He’s a freelancer’s freelancer, a freebooter even, a soldier of fortune (I’m back to the swashbuckling.) and he demands a privateer’s freedom to conduct his business as he sees fit and not as the Law requires. And if that means doing things that are extra-legal or illegal---breaking and entering being one of his favorite tactics---that’s all to the best. More than that, he wants the freedom to choose his own cases. Most of all, though, he wants the freedom to decide for himself whether or not to hand someone over to the Law for punishment.
“…My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And now–and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!” He burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.
There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing, and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’s finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.
“Get out!” said he.
“What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”
“No more words. Get out!”
And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.
“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief feature.”
So…no adventures or potential adventures, no stories only plots, no real deductions only obviously scripted exposition, no clients, no worthy villains, no real characters besides Holmes and Watson and the police, not even any sense of time and place. Too much can be made of the theatrical trappings of Doyle’s Holmes’ Victorian London, the fog, the gas lamps, the top hats and hansom cabs and cockney voices calling out in the dark. But Holmes lives in a particular place and he knows it inside and out, because he has to in order to do his job, and he knows it in more ways than geographically. He knows its characters and its character. New York City as a particular place doesn’t figure in Elementary hardly at all. It’s a generic city and its crime scenes are generic, a hotel laundry, a bank, a beach, a hospital, a corporate boardroom, an airport hangar, all of which for all we see and hear and for all it matters could be and might as well be in Boston, or Chicago, or Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, or Honolulu, anywhere that’s Big City, USA.
It all adds up to this. Jonny Lee Miller hasn’t convinced me that his Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes because so far he hasn’t appeared in anything like a real Sherlock Holmes story.
That could change, quickly and easily enough. I hope it does. As I’ve said, Miller’s Holmes has many Holmesian qualities and the swashbuckling side of him might show itself if he’s ever given a real adventure. And he has other traits that weren’t part of Doyle’s Holmes but which has become standard, thanks to that one Sherlock Holmes I didn’t name up top. Nicol Willaimson.
In The Seven Percent Solution (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer in 1976), Williamson made Holmes manic, neurotic, and more than a touch paranoid. He also made him dashing, overtly swashbuckling---the movie’s climax is a swordfight between Holmes and the villain on top of a moving train---and, if not young, youthful.
The Seven Percent Solution has finally been re-released on DVD and New York Times has a good article about how Williamson is The Holmes Behind the Modern Sherlock.
Of course, Williamson was playing Holmes as a drug addict, so some of these qualities are signs of his being coked out of his head. Brett’s and Cumberbatch’s are recreational users. Miller’s Holmes isn’t using. He’s in recovery. Which brings me to a couple other things that keep me from accepting Miller as the Sherlock Holmes.
He’s young, yes. The youngest Holmes yet, even though Miller is several years older than Cumberbatch. But he’s not young in the sense of being a young man. He’s young in the sense of being boyish. And not just any sort of boy. A little boy lost.
Doyle’s Holmes appears to have no parents. His only family is his brother Mycroft. We don’t know if Miller’s Holmes has a brother but he most definitely has a father. A very stern and demanding one. We haven’t met him yet but his presence is felt in that Holmes’ recovery is being paid for and overseen by his father. So instead of Holmes being in the position of an independent grown-up, he’s essentially a teenager who’s been grounded and who’s always looking for opportunities to sneak out of the house and have some fun.
He even has a babysitter to outwit and avoid.
You’ve probably noticed I haven’t mentioned someone very important to every Holmes. I’ll get to him…I mean her…no, both, him and her in a follow-up post. But for now it’s enough to know that Miller’s Holmes’ Watson is a stand-in for Daddy Holmes.
And if that’s not enough, Holmes’ addiction isn’t due to a habit of self-medication that got out of control.
He was driven to it by heartbreak and grief. Someone near and dear to him was murdered and he can’t forgive himself because he failed to save her.
It’s not much of stretch to play Holmes as psychologically damaged in some way. But I cannot accept as Sherlock Holmes a Sherlock Holmes we’re meant to feel sorry for.
CBS is showing a new episode tonight after the Super Bowl. I’ll be tuning in. There’s still a chance the show will grow on me and that Miller’s Holmes will grow up. I hope so, because, again, he still looks the most like my Sherlock Holmes.
Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, Aidan Quinn, and Jon Michael Hill, airs on CBS, Thursday nights at 10 PM Eastern time, 9 Central. A new episode will air tonight after the Super Bowl.
Lucy Liu as Joan not John Watson doing what she does too often on CBS’ updating of Sherlock Holmes, Elementary, fade in the background while Holmes gets down to work.
Following up on my post from last week, Elementary! He’s elementarily not my ideal Sherlock Holmes: From time to time, in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, after Holmes has asked (ordered) Watson to join him in an investigation, Watson will make polite noises turning him down, saying he doesn’t want to get in Holmes’ way. Watson is a modest man and well aware that Holmes doesn’t need to have him along. In fact, very often, Holmes doesn’t let him come along or even tell him he’s about to go out on a case without him.
But Holmes is certain to reply something along the lines of Stuff and nonsense! Actually, his most famous reply to one of Watson’s polite refusals is “I am lost without my Boswell.”
This is Holmes’ way of telling Watson that he does need him and, more importantly, wants him along. It’s a statement of affection. He needs and wants Watson along because he’s a good friend.
He needs and wants Watson’s company.
But, as a purely practical matter, let’s ask. Where would Holmes be without his Boswell?
Pretty much in the same fix as Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes in Elementary. A little lonely, a little less confident, but basically functioning as well as ever as a detective. Mainly, though, not lost but incomplete.
Miller’s Holmes doesn’t need his Boswell but he’d be better off with him…I mean, her.
Sorry. From what I’ve seen, Lucy Liu is not Watson. I don’t know who she is. Apparently, neither do the show’s writers, which means Liu doesn’t know who she is either. She’s trying to figure it out without the writers’ help but she’s struggling. Whoever she is, though, it’s not Watson.
It’s not because they’ve made Watson a woman. That’s not even new. Two TV movies in the 1980s had female Watsons. So does one of my favorite movies from when I was kid, They Might Be Giants. And plenty of TV Holmes avatars and manqués have had female Watsons. Monk and Sharona and then Nathalie. Castle and whoever he’s paired with. The best played Watson to the best Holmes avatar, Vincent D’Onforio’s Bobby Goren of Law and Order: Criminal Intent was Kathryn Erbe as Detective Alex Eames, who is a number of things Doyle’s Watson is and Lucy Liu’s isn’t, among them, independent, capable, and confident enough in her own skills and intelligence that it’s truly persuasive that she’s impressed by Goren and impressed enough to ignore his weirdness and that he’s far from her idea of an ideal partner. She makes us think that if Eames can put up with and even like this guy, then he must be worth putting up with and even liking, a very Watson-esque thing for her to do. All Watsons have the job of helping us appreciate the great gifts and see the humanity of their Holmeses.
So, it’s not the gender change. It’s the career change.
Doyle’s Watson and just about every Watson who’s followed is a former Army surgeon. Liu’s character is a former surgeon.
She’s quit medicine out of guilt at having lost a patient on the operating table.
Her confidence shot, her career over, she’s more or less adrift. But she’s on the lookout for something to do that will give meaning back to her life, and in this her situation is somewhat similar to that of Doyle’s Watson when we first meet him.
At the opening of A Study in Scarlet, Watson has come home from Afghanistan traumatized by his wounds and his experiences in the war there and still suffering the effects of a tropical fever that nearly killed him. His military career’s over but he’s having trouble getting a civilian one going.
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air–or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought.
Then he meets Holmes.
Soon he has moved into 221B Baker Street and is helping Holmes---or at least accompanying Holmes---on an investigation that exhilarates him and brings him back to life. By the end of the novel he’s not practicing medicine again---that doesn’t happen until after the next book, The Sign of Four, and then it’s due to his having met, fallen in love with, and married Mary Morston---but he’s snapped out of his depression and ready to begin work on his second career, the one that will make him and, more importantly, Sherlock Holmes famous.
“I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them.”
Effectively, then, the first person Sherlock Holmes saves with his detective work is Watson, something the BBC’s Sherlock brings to the foreground in its first episode. In Elementary, this appears to be working itself out more slowly and subtly and with an ironic twist. Holmes is saving Watson by drawing her into his work as a detective but she thinks she’s saving him.
But this is where and why the career change works against her achieving real Watson-osity.
Before he returns to medicine, Doyle’s Watson is paying his bills with his army pension. Elementary’s Watson is paying hers by taking work as a “sober companion.”
The central conceit of Elementary is that exactly what Doyle’s Watson worried would happen happened. Holmes’ habit of alleviating his boredom between cases with seven percent solutions of cocaine became a habit. This Holmes is a recovering addict. His move to New York is part of his recovery. He’s left behind bad company and old haunts, presumably like the opium den in The Man With the Twisted Lip, to start his life and his career over, clean and sober. His father---not his brother Mycroft---paid for the move and his rehab, which, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t like, because it defines Holmes as a son, a child. But now Daddy Holmes is paying Watson to keep an eye on his kid, see he doesn’t fall into old ways and take up with the wrong friends, drag him to his support group, and nag and scold and lecture and plead with and badger and boss and bully and emotionally blackmail Holmes to keep him from backsliding.
This makes Watson two things, besides annoying, no other Watson is or has been.
A glorified babysitter.
And an employee.
This is a significant and as far as I’m concerned damaging change.
The popular conception has Holmes and Watson joined at the hip, with Watson playing a definite secondary and supporting role. But that notion is Watson’s own doing and a sign of his innate modesty. It’s how he presents himself in the stories. In fact, he has an independent and successful life of his own. And this is key to our appreciating Holmes.
Time to back up a bit and ask the question, Why does Holmes need Watson?
At the most practical level it’s simply that Watson has useful knowledge and experience Holmes lacks. His medical skills and training come in handy particularly at a time when forensic medicine was still a developing field. Doyle’s Holmes and Watson frequently arrive at a crime scene where no competent pathologist is at work. If there’s a local coroner around, it’s usually the case that he’s never seen anything like this before. A 21st Century Holmes, though, shouldn’t face that problem. If the local forensics unit can’t answer a question, there’s always the internet. On the BBC’s Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes needs his Doctor Watson because, unlike Jonny Lee Miller on Elementary, he’s not a quasi-official member of the police department and has no authority with the technicians on the scene who therefore aren’t obliged to answer his questions or show him any evidence they’ve collected. On top of that, he’s alienated practically the entire department. He doesn’t like them and he doesn’t respect them, especially not their supervisor Anderson. They don’t work fast enough and they have a bad habit of interrupting Holmes’ thinking by offering their own (wrong) interpretations of the evidence, when they actually find evidence or evidence Holmes recognizes as having real importance.
Liu’s Watson’s medical training occasionally makes her useful at a crime scene, but so far it’s usually been a matter of her saving Holmes the trouble of asking one of the police medical officers at the scene or taking out his smart phone and googling for a fact. And they’ve made him such a walking encyclopedia that often he tells her what she out to be telling him, leaving her nothing to do but confirm he’s correct. At least, though, they haven’t had her sputter a 21st Century American version of “By Jove, Holmes! How the deuce did you know that?”
And it’s damning that Holmes never introduces her as Doctor Watson. It’s always “Joan Watson” or “Miss Watson.” Also, he never calls her his “colleague and associate.” She’s just his associate and he says it in a way that makes it sound like a synonym for assistant. In other incarnations, Doctor Watson’s title opens doors and loosens tongues for Holmes. Being able to introduce his friend and colleague Doctor Watson---or as often happens being introduced himself by Doctor Watson---confers an authority and respectability and an air of professionalism people might not be inclined to grant an amateur private consulting detective, if they can even conceive what such a creature might be. But they’re used to talking freely to doctors and answering their most probing and intimate questions. Elementary’s Holmes doesn’t need help in that way. After all, he’s basically a cop. In real life, he’d be flashing a badge. Watson needs his stamp of legitimacy. She’s allowed on the scene and tolerated because she’s with him.
There’s more to it.
As a doctor and former soldier, Watson has a breadth of experience and acquaintance that’s different from Holmes’. Holmes, who, nevermind the popular conception, has friends besides Watson and his own extensive social circle, but most of those friends and acquaintances belong to London’s underworld, the part of the city he most often visits when he leaves Baker Street. He doesn’t know people who aren’t connected with the criminal side of life. When he meets so-called respectable people of his own class and station it’s usually because somehow or another they’ve been drawn into that world.
But Watson, the doctor, is used to dealing with people in distress not of their own making, and he has learned to treat most everybody the way he treats his patients, with…patience, a virtue Holmes does not practice regularly, and with kindness, tact, and sympathy. He know when and how to employ diplomacy, to show respect towards people Holmes is disinclined to respect, and in short to be polite and charming. Which frees Holmes to be rude and obnoxious or at least less than ordinarily civil. More to the point, it frees Holmes to concentrate on a problem while ignoring the distractions presented by the person with the problem. This, of course, comes most into play when that person with a problem is a woman.
And Watson’s bedside manner, so to speak, is not incidentally a form of information gathering, something else Holmes relies on Watson for. Watson is an extra pair of eyes and ears, and by temperament and training, he’s able to pick up on things Holmes might miss.
After all, he is a trained observer and collector of evidence. Doyle didn’t make Watson a doctor just because he was a doctor himself. Doyle saw his medical schooling as an education in scientific thinking. Watson is every bit the scientist Holmes is. Watson may not be brilliant but he is intelligent and his intelligence is educated and developed by training, experience, and continual practice. This makes him useful to Holmes in another and maybe the most important way.
Watson is someone Holmes can talk to, because Watson can keep up.
Never forget that the reason we can follow Holmes’ line of deduction (if only after the fact) and grasp how he’s solved a case is that Watson has followed it and grasped it and explained it to us.
Holmes can think out loud in front of Watson, try out theories on him, ask him questions he’s asking himself, because, knowing that Watson’s following right along and expecting him to ask intelligent questions back and taking in Watson’s own observations helps him focus and work his way through a problem. Holmes isn’t always polite about acknowledging this. In fact, he can be downright insulting---
“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”
He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.
“Interesting, though elementary,” said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”
“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”
“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.
---but he does acknowledge it and he counts on it.
If Watson sometimes seems not to have much to say in reply to Holmes’ monologing, it’s because he’s also smart enough to know his own limits and when to keep his mouth shut so as not to interrupt Holmes when he’s on a tear.
Liu’s Watson is not smart in that way.
She’s not particularly smart in any way Doyle’s Watson and other Watsons are.
I blame this on the writing, not on Liu’s acting. She’s just not given any smartness to play. Going by the stuff the writers have her saying, it’s easy to forget she is---was---a doctor, and a gifted one, according to a former colleague who can’t understand any better than we can why she’s given up her career to play nurse to a rich man’s spoiled brat of son. As far as we can tell, when she practiced she paid less attention to her patients as individuals with feelings than Holmes, any and every Holmes, does to clients. All her knowledge and experience of human nature seems to have been acquired during her time spent in the field of self-help. Her language is the language of self-help and recovery. She says things like:
“That relationship stabilizes him…”
“I just need to re-open those lines of communication…”
And:
“If I feel you’ve compromised his sobriety…”
No wonder Holmes doesn’t talk to her. He talks at her. She’s an excuse for him to soliloquize. Often he seems to be talking to keep her from talking. And why wouldn’t he, if what he’s going to hear out of her is stuff as banal and devoid of independent thought as that?
On top of this, she’s intrusive.
Years go by before Watson learns Holmes has a brother. That’s because he’s too much of an Englishman to pry into a friend’s personal life. Liu’s Watson won’t stop prying. She’s convinced that he needs to dredge up his past in order to achieve the kind of emotional self-awareness necessary to recovery. Other Watsons admonish their Holmes to show some feeling or at least remember that other people have feelings. This Watson is constantly encouraging her Holmes to get in touch with his own.
To be fair, the writers know this is part of her problem. They know they’ve made her a pill. In a clever bit from this past Thursday night’s episode, we see Holmes at his support group relating to his fellow addicts not the latest news from his road to recovery or details from his past struggles with his addictions but the facts of a case he solved back in London, when he was, as it happened, coked out of his skull. Sherlock Holmes fans would recognize the case as an only slightly updated retelling of The Crooked Man. Watson finds this an appalling breach of group etiquette and at the end of the episode, dragging him back to another meeting, she says, scoldingly, “You’re not going to talk about some old case. You’re going to share something real…” depriving us of the real pleasure of hearing him re-tell, as he’s threatening to do, the adventure of The Blue Carbuncle.
Now, here’s where Watson’s not being a doctor and working at a dead-end job that reduces her pretty much to a stand-in for Holmes’ father, whom for the moment the show’s producers are keeping off screen---presumably until they can persuade Christopher Plummer to guest star---makes her less than useful not just to Holmes but to us the audience.
Considered purely as a literary device, Doyle’s Watson does several things for us readers. First, he keeps us out of Holmes’ head. We never get to read Holmes’ thoughts directly, which means we never see him working at being brilliant, we only get the results of his brilliance and thus the mystery and surprise of that brilliance is maintained. Next, Watson as the teller of tales provides us with a point of view that is warm, humane, sympathetic, insightful emotionally as well as intellectually, colorful, and literary. We know what the stories would be like if they were told from Holmes point of view---not stories. They’d be dryly scientific case studies, of interest only to other professionals, like his monographs on tobacco ash, tattoos, 160 separate ciphers, and---Holmes being a world-class violinist as well as a great detective---the polyphonic motets of Lassus. Although Holmes routinely criticizes Watson’s prose style and his taste for the sensational, the romantic, and the dramatic in his accounts of their adventures at the expense, Holmes feels, of the scientific, we sense that Holmes is secretly glad that it’s Watson doing the writing and not himself, recognizing that Watson’s “sensational” stories are better for business and Holmes’ reputation than his own accounts would be and, perhaps, enjoying the way they humanize himself to himself. But, finally and most importantly, seeing that this smart, decent, independent, highly competent and successful doctor is impressed by Sherlock Holmes tells us that it’s right for us to be impressed by him too and, at the same time, seeing that this smart, decent, independent, highly competent and successful doctor is often baffled by what does not baffle Holmes allows us to not to feel bad about being baffled ourselves---in fact, we can enjoy our bafflement just as much as Watson does his.
But Liu’s Watson does not have an independent, self-contained, successful life of her own. In what we see of her life apart from Holmes’, she’s not capable. She’s barely a grown-up.
She’s…
…a self-doubting daughter convinced she’s disappointed her mother.
…a lonely single woman looking for love and failing at the dating game.
…a sulking professional failure, a former doctor who can’t get over her one mistake that proved she’s not perfect.
…a put-upon renter about to be evicted from her rent-controlled apartment until Holmes comes to her rescue.
We’re not impressed that this screw-up is impressed by Sherlock Holmes. We’re astonished that she can stand to be alone in her own company. It’s no wonder that as her term of employment is nearing its end she’s scheming to stay on his sober companion. She’s even lying to him and his father about the progress of his recovery.
This may be part of the producers’ plans for the development of her character. Watson needs to reclaim a life of her own and she may be on track to do it through her admiration and affection for Holmes. He’s inspiring her. But it’s not promising that she doesn’t seem inspired to get back into medicine. She’s not contemplating opening her own clinic somewhere. What she seems attracted to is the idea of working with Holmes as a partner in crime-solving. I suppose the producers think that in this way she’ll become his equal. But she can’t be his equal unless he’s not really Sherlock Holmes. By definition, Holmes has no equal as a detective. But even if she does learn his methods and how to apply them, she will still have no real life of her own apart from his. At best all she’ll be is a junior detective.
Doyle’s Watson and every real Watson who’s followed is not Holmes’ equal as a detective, but he’s his equal in other ways and even his superior in some. He’s not Holmes’ partner in crime-solving because the world’s greatest detective does not need a partner, not even a junior partner. Watson is Holmes’ partner in adventuring.
This brings me back to my point in my previous Holmes post. The reason Jonny Lee Miller hasn’t convinced me his Sherlock Holmes is the Sherlock Holmes is that so far he hasn’t shown enough of that side of Holmes, the adventurous, swashbuckling, freebooting, violent and dangerous side. Almost all original stories centered around wild and violent and romantic adventures that had swept up Holmes’ clients and other characters and there was always the chance that if they weren’t careful or if their investigation went awry Holmes and Watson would be caught up in the wildness and the violence themselves. This happens in a number of the stories and, Watson tells us, has happened on cases he hasn’t written up yet and, apparently even more frequently, on cases Holmes tackles alone.
Where would Holmes be without his Boswell? From what we can tell, working more often in secret as a late Victorian combination of James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Batman.
So Holmes has to be prepared to turn into an action-adventure hero at any moment, and part of his preparation is to call on Watson. This is a very real way Holmes needs Watson. He depends on him to have his back in a fight.
Don’t forget, throughout most of the stories both Watson and Holmes are still young men.
Watson is brave, dogged, quick-witted, keen-eyed---he may not observe according to Holmes’ lights, but he can see what’s coming at them---and unflinching. When Holmes suggests he bring his trusty service revolver along on a case, it’s not because Watson owns a gun. It’s because he’s good with one.
Like Holmes, Watson, the war hero, is a dangerous and potentially violent man.
This is one of the reasons I get such a kick out of Jude Law’s Watson in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes movies. Downey’s Holmes is an exaggeration of Doyle’s Holmes. But Law’s Watson could be dropped as is into a more traditional adaptation---say one starring Jonny Lee Miller---and Law would hardly have to change anything except to shave closer.
The last three episodes of Elementary---The Red Team,The Deductionist, and A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs---have allowed Miller to show a more dangerous side to his Holmes. He’s not as much of swashbuckler as he is a thug, more Daniel Craig as opposed to Pierce Brosnan in his inner Bondness. But he’s capable of inflicting pain and damage on the bad guys and willing to put himself in danger, not for danger’s sake but out of sheer ruthlessness and a desire to punish the villain.
Liu’s Watson, however, has not shown any sign she’d be useful in a fight, not even to call 911. She’d drop her cell or discover she’s forgotten to charge it. In A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs she does manage to help out by knocking out the bad guy while his back is turned by smashing a plaster bust of Napoleon over his head, reaching for the nearest literary allusion because no flower vase is handy. And this takes so much out of her that right after she collapses into bed and sleeps for six hours. So she’s not exactly the kind of partner in adventure Holmes can depend on to have his back.
She’s not dependable in any way, in fact, except in the way she keeps offering to be and urging him to take advantage of, as a friend Holmes can open up to, and we can only hope he never takes her up on the offer.
Ok. It’s network television. The target audience isn’t obsessive Holmes fans like me. It’s fans of TV detective shows looking for something fun to cap off their Thursday nights. If you miss Monk, miss House, and can’t get enough of Castle and The Mentalist, Elementary will fit the bill. And things might change. In fact, as I’ve said, there are signs they are changing. We don’t need to find out that Liu’s Watson has her own Army issued .45 in her sock drawer or that she has hidden martial arts skills that like Kane she’s Zen enough to keep in check until pushed too far. I really hope she doesn’t. I would love it if the writers could find ways to show that she is brave, stalwart, capable, and in her own way dangerous than just by having her turn out to have been one of Charlie’s Angels.
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Nicol Williamson was the first Sherlock Holmes who looked and acted like my ideal Sherlock Holmes, and his Watson, Robert Duvall, was the first Watson who was at all close to my ideal Watson. David Burke and Edward Hardwicke were both excellent Watsons but they were something of a step back in being more decidedly middle-aged. An unsung but fine and youthful Watson was Ian Hart who played Watson to two different fine and youthful Sherlock Holmeses, Robert Foxburgh and Rupert Everett. But I was thrilled when I saw Jude Law in the part. That, I said, is my Watson, well, except for the homo-erotic sexual panic. And he’d still be my all time favorite Watson, but now Martin Freeman has come along.
Freeman’s Watson, who besides having the advantage of working with what may be the best Sherlock Holmes ever, is Watson through and through, dependable in every way every Holmes needs his Watson to be, including having his back in fight. Despite looking like a hobbit, Freeman’s Watson is every bit as dangerous as Law’s. This has been dealt with comically---
But it’s demonstrated to ruthless effect in the very first episode when Watson takes aim and shoots a murderer in the back and then coolly shrugs it off without remorse or regret.
The first person Cumberbatch’s Holmes saves is Watson. But ever since they’ve pretty much kept it even.
I crept forward and looked across at the familiar window. As my eyes fell upon it, I gave a gasp and a cry of amazement. The blind was down, and a strong light was burning in the room. The shadow of a man who was seated in a chair within was thrown in hard, black outline upon the luminous screen of the window. There was no mistaking the poise of the head, the squareness of the shoulders, the sharpness of the features. The face was turned half-round, and the effect was that of one of those black silhouettes which our grandparents loved to frame. It was a perfect reproduction of Holmes. So amazed was I that I threw out my hand to make sure that the man himself was standing beside me. He was quivering with silent laughter.
“Well?” said he.
“Good heavens!” I cried. “It is marvellous.”
“I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety,” said he, and I recognized in his voice the joy and pride which the artist takes in his own creation. “It really is rather like me, is it not?”
“I should be prepared to swear that it was you.”
“The credit of the execution is due to Monsieur Oscar Meunier, of Grenoble, who spent some days in doing the moulding. It is a bust in wax. The rest I arranged myself during my visit to Baker Street this afternoon.”
“But why?”
“Because, my dear Watson, I had the strongest possible reason for wishing certain people to think that I was there when I was really elsewhere.”
“And you thought the rooms were watched?”
“I knew that they were watched.”
“By whom?”
“By my old enemies, Watson. By the charming society whose leader lies in the Reichenbach Fall. You must remember that they knew, and only they knew, that I was still alive. Sooner or later they believed that I should come back to my rooms. They watched them continuously, and this morning they saw me arrive.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I recognized their sentinel when I glanced out of my window. He is a harmless enough fellow, Parker by name, a garroter by trade, and a remarkable performer upon the jew’s-harp. I cared nothing for him. But I cared a great deal for the much more formidable person who was behind him, the bosom friend of Moriarty, the man who dropped the rocks over the cliff, the most cunning and dangerous criminal in London. That is the man who is after me to-night, Watson, and that is the man who is quite unaware that we are after him.”
My friend’s plans were gradually revealing themselves. From this convenient retreat, the watchers were being watched and the trackers tracked. That angular shadow up yonder was the bait, and we were the hunters. In silence we stood together in the darkness and watched the hurrying figures who passed and repassed in front of us. Holmes was silent and motionless; but I could tell that he was keenly alert, and that his eyes were fixed intently upon the stream of passers-by. It was a bleak and boisterous night, and the wind whistled shrilly down the long street. Many people were moving to and fro, most of them muffled in their coats and cravats. Once or twice it seemed to me that I had seen the same figure before, and I especially noticed two men who appeared to be sheltering themselves from the wind in the doorway of a house some distance up the street. I tried to draw my companion’s attention to them; but he gave a little ejaculation of impatience, and continued to stare into the street. More than once he fidgeted with his feet and tapped rapidly with his fingers upon the wall. It was evident to me that he was becoming uneasy, and that his plans were not working out altogether as he had hoped. At last, as midnight approached and the street gradually cleared, he paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. I was about to make some remark to him, when I raised my eyes to the lighted window, and again experienced almost as great a surprise as before. I clutched Holmes’s arm, and pointed upward.
“The shadow has moved!” I cried.
It was indeed no longer the profile, but the back, which was turned towards us.
Three years had certainly not smoothed the asperities of his temper or his impatience with a less active intelligence than his own.
“Of course it has moved,” said he. “Am I such a farcical bungler, Watson, that I should erect an obvious dummy, and expect that some of the sharpest men in Europe would be deceived by it? We have been in this room two hours, and Mrs. Hudson has made some change in that figure eight times, or once in every quarter of an hour. She works it from the front, so that her shadow may never be seen. Ah!” He drew in his breath with a shrill, excited intake. In the dim light I saw his head thrown forward, his whole attitude rigid with attention. Outside the street was absolutely deserted. Those two men might still be crouching in the doorway, but I [491] could no longer see them. All was still and dark, save only that brilliant yellow screen in front of us with the black figure outlined upon its centre. Again in the utter silence I heard that thin, sibilant note which spoke of intense suppressed excitement. An instant later he pulled me back into the blackest corner of the room, and I felt his warning hand upon my lips. The fingers which clutched me were quivering. Never had I known my friend more moved, and yet the dark street still stretched lonely and motionless before us.
Online friend and longtime blogging comarade in arms, Kathy Flake, recently watched a few episodes of Sherlock and was disappointed. She thought the plots were unrealistic.
I was shocked.
“You watched it for the plot?” I tweetered at her.
Of course, she tweetered back. What else do you watch a detective series for?
“In this case,” I said, “For the way the plots riff on the original stories."
So far she’s not had an answer for that. I guess she’s still mulling it over.
When she gets back to me on it, if she does, I’ll add:
“But mainly you watch it for two things.”
What are they? I expect she’ll say.
And I’ll say:
“Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch!”
The blonde doesn't tweeter, but if she tweetered, she'd tweeter, “Primarily Cumberbatch.”
By the way, the title of the first episode of the new season? The Empty Hearse.
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Kathy's responded in the form of a post on her blog, No Lort, Sherlock. Great GIF for fans like me who root for Molly.
Never judge a book by its cover, and I'm not about to.
I'm going to judge a cover by its book.
The cover of The Thing about Thugs, a new literary thriller by Tabish Khair, gives the wrong impression of the book or not enough of the right impressions.
It's old-fashioned, for one thing, too plain and simple and innocent. I can't place it but I'm sure I read a novel in junior high with a cover very much like this in style, color, and stinginess of information. There's mystery here but no threat. And no blood. And no evil. There's no hint of the horror inside. The Thing About Thugs isn't just a mystery. It's a tale of murder, body snatching, and head hunting. Skulls literally pile up.
The gas streetlamp and the cobblestone street announce that The Thing About Thugs is a period piece set in a city but it doesn't tell for certain that the period is Victorian and the city is London, but not necessarily a historical London, more of a literary London, a Dickensian London, Sherlock Holmes' London, Jekyll and Hyde's London. The lone figure walking away from us is obviously East Indian, which is a clue to the novel's central incongruity, which Khair carefully and steadily turns into a given, the presence of a community of immigrants from all over the empire helping to define a London we might think, based on movies and other books, was populated only by colorful Cockneys and top-hatted proper English gents and their pale and ringletted ladies, as long as those other books aren't by Arthur Conan Doyle. And there's no direct references to those books that are. There's no suggestion of the complexity of the narrative, or the eerie beauty of the prose, or the literariness of the whole conceit.
Novels and stories and poems by the likes of Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Jane Austen inform the plot, the themes, the structure, and the writing of The Thing About Thugs. Works like The Body-Snatcher and The Man With The Twisted Lip, The Secret Agent, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood can be read between the lines. Which makes The Thing About Thugs sound like a pastiche or a senior honors thesis. It's not. It is, to sum up, what the cover barely hints at, a literary thriller about murder, body snatchers, head hunting, and the disruptions and disquietudes caused by imperialism set in a London more ethnically and culturally diverse than casual viewers of Masterpiece Theatre might expect.
Amir Ali, a young man from a small village in India, is living in London, brought here on a whim by a well-meaning but naive and gullible British Army officer who's given Amir an unusual employment. His job is to live in the officer's house as a servant with one responsibility, to tell the story of his life as a member of a band of murderers and thieves back home, that is to tell his master and whatever audience the officer puts him in front of him things about thugs.
Amir's employer, Captain Meadows is writing a book. Having inherited a sufficient income to retire from the army and live the life of a gentleman of leisure, he's returned to England to devote himself to his intellectual passion, phrenology.
Meadows is something of a maverick in the field, which he and his fellow phrenologists think of as a science. Meadows believes that you can tell a lot about people by reading the bumps and dents on their skulls but not everything. More heretical, at least in the eyes of his rivals in the phrenological debate, he rejects the idea that biology is destiny. He argues that individuals have a degree of freedom in deciding what kind of person they'll be.
This means he thinks it's possible for a good man to turn evil --- shades of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are invoked but not let loose---but, as a good liberal, he prefers to focus on the corollary, that a bad man can reform.
Amir is his prime example.
Meadows has Amir dictating the story of his career as a thug and his reformation and then repeating it to meetings of the society of phrenologists Meadows hopes to win over to his reformist views. The thing about this reformed thug is that at the same time Amir is telling Meadows this story, he is telling a very different and more innocent, though just as violent, story in letters to the young woman he’s in love with, a hired girl named Jenny who fills in from time to time as a Jill-of-All-Trades in the captain’s house. For a while the narrative jumps back and forth between Meadows’ credulous account of his conversations with Amir and the story is telling Jenny in his letters, a story we can’t help suspecting is a self-serving lie, except that we have good reason to believe he may be lying to Meadows instead or as well.
Meanwhile, there’s a third narrator at work, a seemingly traditional omniscient third person narrator telling us about what’s happening outside the Captain’s house and club, in the streets, alleys, pubs, sewers, and opium dens of London’s demimonde. A trio of murderers is at work collecting skulls.
This narrator reveals himself early on as a youngish Indian scholar writing from the library of his late grandfather’s house, with all the books he’s going to be alluding to on the shelves behind him. The narrator is someone much like Khair and may or may not be Khair. He doesn’t tell us. He doesn’t tell us if he’s a real person or a fiction himself or if the story he’s telling, the one we’re reading, is a fiction or if within the fiction the narrator---if he is a fiction---inhabits it's a true story. All he admits is that he’s having some trouble with the period details and, consequently, there’s much he has to imagine and he’s struggling as he goes with how to handle that and with, essentially, how to tell this story. In short, we’re being told a story that, we’re told, is being made up and revised right before our eyes.
There’s a point here about the nature of stories and the purpose of storytelling that I’ll get to in a bit.
The leader of the murderers is John May, a “resurrection man”, as one of May’s literary precursors styles himself in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities---body snatcher, to use Robert Louis Stevenson’s words---who has been making his living digging up fresh graves and selling the stolen corpses to medical students for study and practice. All of his customers aren’t doctors in training, however; his highest-paying client has been a brutal-minded nobleman who happens to be Meadows’ chief antagonist in the phrenological debates. John May has been providing Lord Batterstone with specimens for his collection. But Batterstone has grown dissatisfied with May’s wares. He’s looking for "things" more interesting and unusual than what Mays has been digging up. When you rob a grave, you have to take what you find. There are unusual specimens to be found all over London but they are riding around on top of still living bodies that don’t show any inclinations of walking into a grave any time soon.
May hits on a plan.
When the murders begin and headless corpses start turning up around London, the respectable citizens---that is, the white citizens---assume that that such horrific crimes could not be the work of any true-born Englishman, no matter how depraved. Of course not only do true-born Englishmen commit such crimes routinely, the Empire is based on even more horrific ones (Lord Batterstone’s collection of specimens ultimately recalls the spiked skulls fencing Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness), but the populace and the police, goaded by the gutter press, look for suspects among the outsiders in their midst. And unfortunately for Amir, Captain Meadows has made him something of a celebrity. People know the story of the reformed thug and they immediately begin to doubt that he’s actually reformed.
Amir becomes the focus of the police’s investigation.
Fortunately for Amir, an unlikely detective appears on the scene and, with the help of her band of “irregulars”, sets out to solve the murders and prove Amir’s innocence.
That’s my word for them, “irregulars,” as in the Baker Street Irregulars and at this point I’m tempted to start making comparisons to The Sign of Four. But I think I’ve already over-emphasized the literary allusiveness of Khair’s novel. As I said, The Thing About Thugs isn’t an amusement for grad students or a pastiche, although Khair rather too helpfully names one of Amir’s friends Gunga and there’s a scene between the chief police inspector and one of his officers that turns into a heavy-handed joke at Arthur Conan Doyle’s expense. Khair acknowledges---or at any rate his narrative alter-ego does—his influences but he doesn’t bring them directly into his story, except in the case of Jane Austen, whom he cites as a source, as if Pride and Prejudice was a history text, for the sections of his book dealing with the social background against which Captain Meadows and his fiancee play out their courtship, which implies that all the other fictions that The Thing About Thugs recalls were for the author---or rather the narrator---sources as well, as if they’re textbooks too and The Thing About Thugs is itself a history, even though the narrator---or Khair---tells us he’s telling a story.
The thing about The Thing About Thugs is that in addition to being a meditation on storytelling and the the role of stories in creating and shaping individual identities, it’s also, I think, a reminder that national and cultural identities are created and shaped by the stories we tell each other. Khair isn’t simply writing a story that is like those other, classic stories. He’s writing a story that’s meant to be part of the larger story those stories are part of. He’s adding what was mostly kept offstage in the works of 19th Century authors, the fact that Victorian London was, because it was the center of an empire, an Asian city as much as a European one. The stories of Kipling and Conrad weren’t post cards from exotic and faraway climes. They were stories from home. We’re meant to see that there were people behind Amir and his friends as real and as British as the young women behind Oliver Twist’s Nancy, whose murder, by the way, is recapitulated in The Thing About Thugs.
There, I’ve overdone it some more.
The Thing About Thugs doesn’t come with a required reading list. You don’t have to have been an English major or do homework first in order to enjoy it.
All that I’ve said about those books that sit alongside and beneath and on top of and within and without The Thing About Thugs is true, but it’s still a story in its own right.
A story of murder, blood, body snatching, ghoulism, thuggery, and…revenge!
The Thing about Thugs, by Tabish Khair, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is available from Amazon in either one of its dual identities, hardcover and kindle edition.
Further proof that CBS’ in-the-works Sherlock Holmes reboot will take the iconic franchise in a radical new direction: The network has cast Lucy Liu as Watson!
Nothing radical about it. In a not as awful as I feared TV movie in the late 1980s, Margaret Colin played Watson to Michael Pennington’s Holmes.
Ok, she was Jane Watson, Doctor Watson’s great-grand-daughter. Holmes was Holmes, waking up after an 80 year nap---he’d had himself frozen. I forget exactly why. Something ridiculous involving Moriarty. But the effect was the same after you got used to the gimmick and his calling her Watson.
Watson became a woman, and what did it add to the story? Some mild sexual tension. How radical.
Also, there was a movie I loved when I was a kid but I’ve never seen again since, They Might Be Giants, with George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward. They weren’t really Holmes and Watson. He was a madman who thought he was Sherlock Holmes and she was his psychiatrist. But over the course of the movie the line between delusion and reality blurred and by the end they’d become pretty much who he thought they were.
TV Line also reports, breathlessly, as if amazed by the producers’ audacity:
Another key change: Sherlock and Watson now live in New York City.
Guess where the TV movie was set.
But it’s not that the idea of a female Watson is not new now, it’s that even back then, when the TV movie aired, it was second-hand. The Return of Sherlock Holmes was itself a knock-off of 1979s Time After Time with Pennington as Holmes replacing Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and Margaret Colin standing in for Mary Steenburgen and a cryogenic sleep chamber doing the work of a time machine. And it was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series and Remington Steele and Moonlighting.
And not only is a female Watson not a new idea. These days it’s practically retrograde. The pairing of an eccentric, unorthodox, or at least unconventional genius male detective (or detective manque) with a tough, no-nonsense, more by the book female detective is a TV staple. Castle. The Mentalist. Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Monk. Chuck. Warehouse 13. They all work this conceit. Bones flips it and puts the woman in the role of Holmesian eccentric and genius, which is at least a little more unexpected. This “new” Holmes series will be able to call itself a radical departure if it resists having its Holmes and Watson become romantically involved and who wants to bet that will happen?
One of the beauties of Sherlock, the BBC series CBS’ Elementary is trying to cash in on, is that in moving the setting to 21st Century London nothing essential is changed. Holmes and Watson are still Holmes and Watson. The inside joke turns out to be that there’s no need to modernize them, they always were modern. They didn’t know they were living in the past. They thought of themselves (that is, Conan Doyle presented them) as living on the cutting edge of the future. If anything, they were ahead of their time, in their attitudes as well as in their reliance on the latest in science and technology. What makes the stories what they are is the relationship between Holmes and Watson and that has not changed. That’s what sells the series. It’s also what sells the Robert Downey-Jude Law movies. Both are doing variations on the theme, but it’s still the same song.
It also helps that the casting is superb. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are each excellent on their own, but together they are the best Holmes and Watson team ever, and I’m still a big fan of Brett and Edward Hardwicke and Brett and David Burke.
Nicholas Rowe and Alan Cox of Young Sherlock Holmes have a special place in my heart too.
Many writers have proven that Holmes can be Holmes on his own. It doesn’t belittle Watson’s importance to say that he can be left out of an adventure, because it turns out he often is. But if you put Watson in it, then he should be Watson or else the fundamental relationship changes and you don’t have Holmes and Watson. You have Holmes and some other sidekick and that’s not new either.
It’s not a bad thing. It can be a very good thing. But it’s not a new thing.
Of course, if your Watson isn’t Watson, your Holmes might as well not be Holmes. You can call him any other name you want. And then you can begin to do some truly new things with that character.
You can call him Adrian Monk or Bobby Goren or you can make a pun and call him House.
Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes and Jared Harris as Professor Moriarty play out one of the two seriously Holmesian moments in Guy Ritchie’s not actually unserious Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
The central joke of director Guy Ritchie’s first Sherlock Holmes movie was that Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law are not your grandparents’ Holmes and Watson.
Instead of a pair of proper Victorian gentlemen doing their civic duty with a minimum of fuss and bother, Ritchie asked us---forced us---to re-imagine them as a couple of swashbuckling Cockney bully-boys having a high old time getting into trouble with police and criminals alike and fighting and shooting their way out of it. In other words, as characters in a Guy Ritchie movie.
The joke within the joke was that this reconception of Holmes and Watson wasn’t all that far-fetched, relative to Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. There’s enough in them to suggest that Doyle’s Holmes is capable of the kind of fisticuffs and gunplay Downey’s Holmes engages in and, not only that, in the course of his career he’s had plenty of opportunities to put these capabilities to use, it’s just tended to happen when Watson wasn’t there to witness it and write it down. Even Watson, as Watson himself hints, is capable of more vigorous and violent action than he usually has a chance to show. Not only is he awfully handy with his trusty service revolver, he states candidly, and a little proudly, that his time in the war in Afghanistan has left him somewhat unsuited for civilian life. In the new BBC series, Mycroft observes that Watson’s problem is that he misses the war and its excitement and adventure. Again, taking the cue from Doyle, this is plausible, and in the Ritchie movies it’s the subtext that explains why, even though Watson thinks he wants to settle down and get married, he eagerly joins Holmes in whatever fight comes their way and matches him shot for shot and blow for blow. It’s why in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Holmes can throw Mrs Watson off a moving train and still count on Watson’s concentrated help in shooting it out with Professor Moriarty’s henchmen. Holmes knows that even though Watson loves Mary, he’s not looking forward to a quiet honeymoon at the seaside as much as he’s eager to get back in the fight and reflex will kick in.
By the way, Holmes did time it perfectly.
But now, having established the joke, Ritchie feels free to tell us he was only half-kidding. Seeing Holmes and Watson in A Game of Shadows brawling, dueling, and exchanging gunfire with the bad guys and dodging canon fire and outrunning fireballs isn’t the joke, just the occasion for jokes and wisecracks. Even though we’re meant to laugh, we’re also meant to take the adventure seriously.
More to the point, Ritchie wants us to take his Sherlock Holmes seriously.
The key to our doing this is Jared Harris’ superbly understated malevolence as Professor Moriarity. A Game of Shadows is an amusing---and thrilling, as in a roller coaster ride---fantasia on The Final Problem. But the beauty of it is that Harris’ Moriarty could be spliced seamlessly into a more straight-forward and faithful adaptation of the tale Doyle intended as Holmes last case. And in Harris’ scenes with Downey we can see that Downey himself has been playing it straight all along as well.
Downey’s Holmes isn’t meant to be canonical. He’s not the Sherlock Holmes, but he is a Sherlock Holmes, an entertaining not quite parallel universe Holmes. Holmes’ reputation as an anti-social neurotic has been greatly exaggerated, in some cases by Holmes himself. Doyle’s Holmes can be rude and tactless and he doesn’t always show the sympathy his clients hope for and, often, deserve. But this is professional necessity as much as temperament. Holmes holds himself aloof in order to keep his mind free of emotional distractions while he concentrates on the case at hand. So we’ve come to expect that a faithful portrayal of Holmes will have a coldness at its heart, although not so cold it can’t be melted or at least thawed. What Downey does differently from Rathbone, Brett, and now Benedict Cumberbatch, is substitute selfishness for the coldness. He’s selfish, self-centered---as opposed to professionally self-absorbed---and petulant. In the BBC series, Cumberbatch’s Holmes describes himself as a high-functioning sociopath. He’s kidding. (Maybe.) What he means is that he has been too busy and abstracted to learn how to work well and play with others. What looks like lack of feeling is cluelessness, impatience, and thoughtlessness. Downey’s Holmes is just as clueless, but he can be thoughtful. He just thinks that everybody ought to want to play by his rules, and Rule Number One is he gets to be the center of attention, at all times. Basically, he’s a child and, faced with the prospect of Watson’s marriage, he’s a very jealous child who has figured out that mommy and daddy are up to something in the bedroom from which he is most emphatically excluded.
By the end of the first movie, it appeared that Holmes had accepted Mary’s permanent presence in Watson’s life because he’d realized she was not only going to allow Watson out of the house to play with Holmes, she was going to come along to join in the fun. At the beginning of A Game of Shadows he seems to have backslid. It turns out that what we, and Watson, take for a resurgent jealousy is actually fear.
This fear isn’t psycho-sexual, although there may be some of that going on as well. Holmes is afraid that he’s losing his only friend to a rival with whom he can’t compete. But that’s something to deal with later. At the moment, it’s Professor Moriarty he’s afraid of and he’s very afraid.
Just as in The Final Problem, A Game Shadows begins with Holmes and Watson not having seen each other in a while. Watson has moved out of 221B Baker Street and into the home he plans to share with Mary after they’re married. Holmes has been busy identifying and tracing all the strands back to the center of Moriarty’s great spider web of crime. In doing so he’s discovered that Moriarty is up to something far more sinister than simply controlling London’s criminal underworld.
Unfortunately, Moriarty now knows that Holmes knows. While before, the Napoleon of Crime was willing to put up with Holmes’ occasional interference and even enjoy matching wits with the great detective, the stakes have gotten too high.
Holmes is confident that given time he can outwit Moriarty. The problem is the Professor has grown bored and impatient and has decided to cut the time short. Of course, he could have Holmes killed, but A.) that’s easier said then done, B.) Moriarty is ambivalent about losing so worthy and amusing an adversary, and C.) the prospect of dying might have the opposite effect on Holmes and instead of scaring him off, intensify his pursuit. Moriarty decides the best course of action is to distract Holmes by threatening Watson and Mary.
In a gem of a scene, Moriarty invites Holmes to meet with him in order to make two things clear. One, he will kill the Watsons. Two, when he does, Holmes will be partly responsible because he’s brought them to Moriarty’s attention.
Harris is terrific in the scene, calm, soothingly reasonable, almost apologetic, and charming but in the practiced way of a temperamentally shy and retiring man, an academic most at home in the library, who has accidentally become something of a public figure and has forced himself to learn to be sociable. He’s almost an attractive and sympathetic figure, except that Harris has also given him a chilling emptiness at his center. Moriarty is all brain, no heart and no soul. He is, in fact, what Holmes is thought to be.
I wouldn’t say that Downey’s Holmes reacts to this as if recoiling from a long look in the mirror. But he is shaken. Of course he’s suddenly afraid for Watson. But he’s also suddenly appalled at himself. It’s dawned on him that what he’s been up to all his career has not been a game that Watson has enjoyed playing with him in spite of himself. He’s never considered the potential consequences for himself, mainly because he’s never doubted his own abilities and even now he’s still fairly sure he’ll be able to beat Moriarty. But suddenly he not only doubts that he can protect Watson and Mary in the process, he realizes that he’s never actually protected Watson in the past. Watson has protected him. What he’s done is risk Watson’s life again and again and it’s only been luck that’s saved him because Holmes himself hasn’t ever even thought about the danger he’s placed his best friend in time and time again.
For the rest of the movie, Downey carries a look in his eyes that mixes fear, guilt, remorse, and the pain of real and potential loss.
This and Downey and Harris’ one other scene together make A Game of Shadows a serious Sherlock Holmes movie. Of course, there’s serious and then there’s serious, and all this new subtext is being played out in an action-adventure movie that comes close to being as outrageous and overblown as a Bond film.
Your willingness to accept A Game of Shadows as a Sherlock Holmes adventure will depend on your willingness to accept the explosions, fireballs, super-slo-mo, freeze frames, rapid zooms, and other 21st Century action adventure movie cliches and Guy Ritchie signature touches.
Meanwhile, Stephen Fry shows up as the delightfully dotty and distracted “Other Holmes.” Kelly Reilly returns, spunkier and feistier, as Mary Marston Watson, who while having less to say than in the first film has more to do. And Paul Anderson is perfect as Moriarty’s right-hand man and chief gunman, Colonel Sebastian Moran, although to appreciate how perfect you may have to have read The Empty House recently and, possibly as well, George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Tiger, the tiger being Moran.
Noomi Rapace is nominally the female lead but she isn’t required to do much more than bring attitude to her scenes. She isn’t given a character to play so much as a job to do, which is to strike poses that tell us just what sort of movie we’re in now. Along with being a Holmes film, a Bond film, and a Guy Ritchie cops and robbers film, A Game of Shadows also takes turns being a Western, a War movie, and a Hitchcock film, with homages to Two Mules for Sister Sarah, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and It Takes a Thief.
But the heart and soul of A Game of Shadows is just what it was in the first movie, the biplay between Downey’s Holmes and Jude Law’s Doctor Watson. Downey’s Holmes will probably never be anyone’s idea of the definitive Sherlock Holmes, but Law’s irritable, hot-tempered, roguish, thug with a touch of a gentleman passing as a gentleman with a touch of thug Watson is either the first or second best Watson ever---it will depend on where Martin Freeman takes his Watson in the next installments of Sherlock.
“Where,” Sherlock Holmes is fond of asking Dr Watson, when inviting him along on a case, “would I be without my Boswell?” It’s a question Anthony Horowitz doesn’t answer, or even ask, in his new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk. Watson is where he’s always been, doing what he’s always done, being who he’s always been. (Illustration by Sidney Paget from The Blue Carbuncle.)
If you set out to write a new Sherlock Holmes story, as Anthony Horowitz has done with his new novel, The House of Silk, first thing you need to do is decide what you’re going to do with Watson.
Holmes himself and whatever mystery you’ve devised for him to solve are secondary.
Horowitz tries to do exactly what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did with Watson. Me, I’d take advantage of the opening Doyle provides to whisk Watson off the stage and keep him there.
Watson---Doyle---often reminds us that there’s a lot about Holmes he doesn’t know. Besides Holmes’ temperamental reticence about his past and his inner life, he and Watson are not the constant companions the movies and most of the TV adaptations portray them as. They aren’t living together at 221B Baker Street in any of the stories between The Sign of Four and The Empty House. Watson has his own home with his wife Mary. Plus, he’s a busy doctor and spends a great deal of his time away from home at his surgery. Days, even weeks go by, without he and Holmes getting together and during those times Holmes takes on cases that he either doesn’t tell Watson much about or doesn’t tell him about at all. At the opening of The Final Problem, the two haven’t seen each other for months and all Watson knows of what Holmes has been up to in that time---he’s been working for the French government “on a matter of supreme importance”---he knows from reading the newspapers. The little that Watson does know about other cases Holmes tackled on his own hints that they are more lurid, more sensational, more adventurous, involving more danger and requiring more physical derring-do on Holmes’ part, than any of the cases Watson has written down.
Then there’s Holmes’ habit of dashing off on his own in the middles of cases to pursue leads without Watson and when he returns not always bothering to fill Watson in on what he was up to.
That Holmes leads an even more exciting and romantic life without Watson is an opening the Robert Downey-Jude Law movies and the new and wonderful BBC series have had a lot of fun taking advantage of, in different ways. One of my favorite bits from Sherlock has Watson at the grocery store getting into an argument with a cash register that won’t accept his debit card while back in Baker Street Holmes is fighting it out with a sword-wielding assassin. When Watson gets home, he tells Holmes about his “row at the shop,” but Holmes not only doesn’t mention the assassin, he hides the sword his defeated opponent left behind.
In the movies, there are things about Holmes that Watson doesn’t know, such as Holmes’ taking part in illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches and that his relationship with “the woman” is, well, warmer than Watson’s has so far been able to observe. In fact, Isabel Archer herself is quite a different sort of person than Watson imagines her to be. But part of the central conceit of the movies is that now when Watson is about to settle down and is looking forward to a quiet and safe life as a family man and successful doctor with a growing practice, Holmes has suddenly started dragging him into his more exciting and dangerous and sensational adventures. This works because those adventures are there in the original stories, they’re just happening out of Watson’s sight. So that’s how I’d approach my Sherlock Holmes story, by leaving Watson out of it and writing about the wild, violent, sexy stuff Watson almost never gets to take part in.
It’s not that I don’t like Watson. Not only do I like him, I respect him as a man, a character, and---this is key---a writer. And, yes, I mean Watson the writer, not Doyle.
But there are three reasons I’d give Watson the day off. First, leaving Watson out of it makes the writing easier. It’s not a simple trick, sounding like Watson. Even if you manage it, and I’ll get to why that’s difficult, what you’ve pulled off is an act of imitation, and if that’s what you’re doing then, ahead of everything else, the cleverness of your mystery, the vividness and vitality and originality of your characters, the deft hand with which you move the plot along, you get judged, as I’m about to do to Horowitz, on how well you’ve succeeded in imitating Conan Doyle. Second, I think it would be fun to see Holmes through a different pair of eyes, one that’s not as sympathetic, maybe, or one that’s not as sharp. And third, If I was going to write a Sherlock Holmes adventure, I’d want it to be my Sherlock Holmes story, not Watson’s. And by that I mean, not another of Watson’s Sherlock Holmes stories and not Watson’s own personal adventure.
All the original Holmes stories are Watson’s stories in that (ostensibly) he wrote them. But they are all his story in that they are about him. They are the many multiples-part autobiography of the closest, keenest, most sympathetic observer of Sherlock Holmes, his methods, and his cases, the one person close enough to Holmes to have a clue as to what makes the great detective great and the effect of Sherlock Holmes, his methods, and his cases upon that person. And that effect is, generally, astonishment.
No matter how hard he tries, Watson never quite catches up with Holmes, never quite has Holmes figured out. Holmes solves all the mysteries that come his way (although he doesn’t always catch the criminals), but Watson never solves the central mystery of his own life, just who is Sherlock Holmes and what is he up to?
Of course, this is Doyle’s great narrative trick. It’s nothing that Holmes is always a step ahead of the likes of Inspector Lestrade and all of his clients and all the criminals he pursues, except for you know who. (“The woman” isn’t either a cop, a client, or a criminal.) But Doyle has us identifying with the one person smart enough and familiar enough with Holmes and his methods to have a chance at keeping up
Holmes occasionally scolds Watson for seeing but failing to observe. By observe he means see a thing for itself and not as a part of the general picture and then question its significance. But it’s important that Watson does see and he observes. He has a keen eye. He’s a doctor and he’s trained to look closely. He sees more and more clearly than most people, which is why it’s a surprise to him and us readers when Holmes finds something Watson missed or saw but failed to observe, and if Watson missed it or failed to grasp its significance, then we have no reason to think we wouldn’t have missed it too. If Watson’s fooled or baffled then we know that Holmes must have pulled off something truly astonishing.
Consequently, and necessarily, the narrative eye is Watson’s and it has to be extremely well-focused. It has to see almost everything but at just the wrong angle. Everything we see we see through Watson’s eyes, everything we learn about a client or a case (at least at first) we know as Watson learns it, whatever we know---or think we know---about Holmes himself, we know only to the degree that Watson knows it and it turns out that there is a lot Watson does not know.
This is why the decision about what to do with Watson is so important. If you set out to tell your story in the traditional Conan Doyle fashion, with Watson as your narrator, you aren’t setting out to re-create Sherlock Holmes. You are setting out to re-create Holmes as seen by Dr Watson and that means that the first character you have to re-create is Watson, which is tricky.
The trick is this. Watson constantly has to present himself as not knowing what he in fact knows.
He’s not writing the stories as they unfold. In fact he routinely opens a story with the news he’s writing it years after the events took place. He knows the ending. He knows the solution to the mystery. He knows what Holmes deduced and when he deduced it, which means he knows what he himself didn’t know.
For instance, when he writes about Holmes calling attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, Watson knows that it was curious that the dog did not bark. But he has to write about it as if he doesn’t because at the time he didn’t. In short, he has to write about himself as a character in a story. What we’re seeing, then, isn’t simply Watson observing Sherlock Holmes at work. We’re seeing Watson observing Watson observing Holmes at work.
To write that, you have to know who your Watson is. What does he see, what does he miss, what does he think and feel about what he sees, how does he see something important and yet not see it---this is important because it’s cheating to spring certain kinds of information on a reader later. If we’re not told there was a dog until we’re told that the dog behaved curiously in the night, Holmes hasn’t been brilliant, Doyle’s merely been clever, and too clever by half.---how well does he know Holmes anyway? How well does he know himself?
Your answer to those last two questions are your opportunity. Watson regularly reminds us that he is picking and choosing the stories he’s writing up from his notes and there are stories he’s not telling, either because tact or propriety requires that he save them for another, much later day, or because they are too “sensational.” This is the opening Horowitz takes advantage of in the House of Silk.
In The House of Silk, Holmes takes on the case of a young art dealer who believes a gang of train robbers has followed him back to London from America in order to seek revenge for his part in the death of their leader. In the course of his investigation, Holmes has to deal with the torture and execution of one of his Baker Street Irregulars, the shooting of a teenage girl, and his own arrest on the charge of the girl’s murder. Drug dealing, prostitution, sexual perversity, poison, and conspiracies within the highest reaches of the government also come into play.
The result of all this sensationalism is, oddly, unsensational. And this is because, I think, of what Horowitz has decided to do with his Watson, which is, pretty much, try to make him as close as possible to Doyle’s Watson. Notice, I didn’t say Watson’s Watson.
None of the sensational plot elements are out of keeping with what we know or can infer from the stories but they are outside Watson’s usual experience with Holmes. You’d think then that Watson would have some sort of reaction to them, that at the very least they’d change his perception of Holmes and Holmes’ career. Beyond that, though, you might also expect that, in observing himself and his reactions to a case so unusual, to himself at least, his perception of himself might be challenged if not altered, and that this would put him in the position of having to explain why he chose to tell the later stories as if the adventures in The House of Silk never happened.
This doesn’t happen. Watson expresses some rather conventional shock and outrage, Holmes admits to having a few regrets, but in the end both are virtually the same characters we know from the original stories. And this appears to be by design. Horowitz’s intention seems to have been to write a book that despite its more lurid and bloody plot points fits in comfortably with the original stories. He has set out to tell a new tale but not to add much new to the mythology.
Now, as I said, if I was writing a Sherlock Holmes’ story I would find a point of view for telling the story that was not Watson’s. (I’m sure that over the years stories have been told from points of view within the stories---Holmes’ own, Mrs Watson’s, Mrs Hudson’s, Lestrade’s, Mycroft’s, Moriarity’s---but I’d invent a new character or just tell it in the third person.) In order to recreate Watson as the character he appears to be in the original stories you are obliged to recreate his prose style. And that’s a trap.
Sounding like Watson isn’t a matter of sounding like someone writing in late Victorian England or even of sounding like a particular someone writing in late Victorian England for the simple reason that Watson is not a typical late Victorian Englishman. Watson is out of step with his times (literally, in those stories in which Doyle forgot and moved Watson’s war wound from his shoulder to his leg), which is why he’s able not just to put up with Holmes and his eccentricities but appreciate his brilliance. Some of this is temperament, some of it is due to a sense of detachment from civilized society acquired during his time in Afghanistan, and some of it is due to his medical training and experience. Watson isn’t a scientist, but he thinks and sees things scientifically. He’s inquisitive but skeptical, with an eye for detail, objective, inclined to withhold judgment until the facts are in---he just sometimes assumes that they’re in before they in fact are---and above all open-minded about just about everything. All these qualities make him a good companion for Holmes and the perfect biographer, but they also make him a good writer. For a late Victorian writer, Watson is remarkably economical in his prose and unsentimental.
Horowitz’s Watson strikes me as more of an intellectual than a scientist. He’s fussier, somewhat effete, a bit of an aesthete, more prone to subjective and emotional reactions, and when he sets pen to paper wordier, more flowery, and, frankly, not as good a writer.
Some of this can be excused by Watson’s age. Horowitz has Watson telling this as a grief-stricken old man, a year after Holmes has died, apparently peacefully but maybe not, after a long and rightly celebrated life. Adrift in his private sea of melancholy and loneliness, Watson can be forgiven for growing sentimental and a tad self-indulgent. And without having Holmes there as his first and toughest critic---Holmes was often hard on Watson’s writing---he might not be editing himself as rigorously as he used to.
On the one hand, since Watson is nearing the end of his life he can look back on all of it. This means he knows every case Holmes took on. Well, at least the ones he took on with Watson in tow. And this provides fun for Holmes fans, as Watson (Horowitz) drops plenty of references and allusions to the stories and novels as he goes. Characters from the stories, some well-known, some you might have to search your memory for, make cameo appearances. Inspector Lestrade is on hand and is given a welcome rehabilitation. Mrs Hudson serves tea. Watson’s wife Mary performs her usual service of making her presence felt while remaining conveniently offstage. Holmes calls on the services of his Baker Street Irregulars. And the House of Silk is something of a pastiche, as well, with Horowitz cribbing scenes, characters, tropes, and settings from Doyle. The introduction of one character recalls the introduction of the heroine of The Abbey Grange. The attitude and plight of another mirrors that of a client in The Naval Treaty. The novel even opens with Holmes performing a variation of the mind-reading trick he pulls on Watson in The Cardboard Box and The Dancing Men. Horowitz knows his Doyle and probably worked with The Complete Sherlock Holmes within easy reach.
Which is why it’s surprising, and annoying, when he strikes a crashingly wrong note.
He has Watson tell us, as he describes himself leveling his trusty service revolver at a villain, that this was the first time he’d ever thought seriously about killing a man, which, given Watson’s military record, seems unlikely. He sends Holmes into an opium den without having Watson make any mention of The Man With the Twisted Lip, a case, that, as Doyle’s Watson states right up top, Holmes tackled and solved in 1889, a year before the events in The House of Silk. At another point, he has Holmes talking out loud to himself as he searches for clues at a crime scene and has Watson treat this as a habit, instead of wildly out of character. And he even implies that Holmes likes being in the country.
But this turns out to be part of the fun, having your memories and feelings about the stories and the characters challenged, and you’ll be grateful to Horowitz if he has you running to the original stories to fact-check him.
On the other hand, having Watson narrating the story from his old age, turns out to be an opportunity missed as Horowitz doesn’t have him feeling confessional only nostalgic. Watson doesn’t take advantage of the circumstances to tell us things he held back when writing the other stories. He doesn’t take a new and more critical look at either Holmes or himself. He does make a stab at presenting Holmes and his career within an historical and sociological context and describing his and Holmes’ London as nastier, dirtier, more squalid and poverty-ridden than it appears in any of the stories. But that doesn’t lead to his questioning his and Holmes’ place within that London or late Victorian society. He only shakes his head ruefully at his having not noticed how awful it was at the time. The House of Silk is set in 1890, a year before The Final Problem, which puts Holmes and Watson in their mid-thirties, and it might have been interesting if Horowitz had a kind of dual-narration going on with the old man observing his much younger self observing the young man (Holmes) Watson has since come to know as an old man, the older Watson amused and exasperated by his and Holmes’ younger selves, forgiving or censorious as the case warranted. But there’s apparently not much difference between the young Watson and the old one, none that Horowitz has him see, at any rate. This Watson has grown older but not any wiser. In fact, except for that shakiness in his prose style and some softening around the edges of his character, he doesn’t seem to have aged at all. His old Watson doesn’t come across as any older than his young Watson or, more to the point and more problematic, his young Watson doesn’t come across as any younger than his old Watson---he doesn’t come across as being any particular age at all. The same goes for his Holmes. They come across as a pair of stolid, middle-aged Victorian gentlemen, a generic Holmes and Watson. It’s hard not to picture Holmes wearing a deerstalker. In fact it’s hard to see anything else about him except the deerstalker. Horowitz’s Watson sees and quite often observes, but his observations of himself and his great friend are rather vague and indistinct as if disappearing into the London fog.
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To see Holmes from an unsympathetic (but comic) point of view, check out George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and the Tiger, in which Fraser’s, ahem, hero, weasels his way into The Empty House.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable. ---from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses have lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure… from The Hobbit: or, There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien.
“Nothing ever happens to me.”---Doctor John Watson.
Got a big kick out of Sherlock on PBS' Mystery! Sunday night and got another big kick out of it last night when I watched it again online. I’ll be writing about it, but right now I just want to mention how much I particularly enjoyed Martin Freeman’s portrayal of Watson.
I’ve always been happy to see youthful, intelligent, active, determined, and even dangerous Watsons, even before Jude Law got into the act. It’s the plodding, middle-aged Watsons I’ve always had to adjust to. Robert Duvall and James Mason were fine in their ways. But the only way I was able to accept the change from David Burke to Edward Hardwicke was to tell myself that Watson had been worn down by grief, care, and boredom during the three years he thought Holmes was dead. Conan Doyle’s stories seem very clear on this. Watson is a young, romantic adventurer and the only reason many of the refined lady clients Holmes is rude to stick around to continue to confide in him is they’re intrigued and charmed by Watson.
Watson needs to be young and active because Holmes is younger and more active and an older man just couldn’t keep up.
Before Jude Law met Robert Downey Jr, Ian Hart played a youngish and slightly raffish Watson to twodifferent properly youngish Sherlock Holmes.
So I wasn’t surprised to see an active, determined, and dangerous Watson. What took a little getting used to was seeing an active, determined, and dangerous Martin Freeman.
As the melancholy and passive-aggressive Tim on the British original of The Office and then as Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, his biggest movie role to date (a bigger one’s on the way, and that’s where this post is actually headed), Freeman made a strong play to have his picture put in the dictionary as the illustration for the definition of diffident.
Activity, determination, and danger were present in those characters mainly as qualities Tim and Arthur hated themselves for lacking. Both men were moved to whatever degree of boldness they could manage by their love for smarter, braver, more active women who you had to suspect were attracted to them because they reminded them of puppies they’d loved when they were little girls.
Jude Law’s Watson has it well over Freeman’s Watson in the departments of activity, dangerousness, and charm. mainly because he exists in a Guy Ritchie universe---and because he’s played by Jude Law---but Freeman’s Arthur Dent is a lot farther away from Freeman’s Watson than Freeman’s Watson is from Jude Law.
So Freeman’s Arthur Dent did not prepare me for his Watson.
He, Freeman’s Dent, did prepare me for Freeman’s next big movie role though. In fact, he made it seem like perfect and inevitable casting.
After all, Arthur Dent is a hobbit.
Think about it. How hobbit-like is it when you’re whizzing back and forth across the universe, bouncing through space and time, solving the secret of life, the universe, and everything, to have as the primary thought occupying your mind, “Where can I get a good cup of tea?”
Actually, Arthur and hobbits grew out of the same caricature of the non-London-dwelling, British middle-class. Dents and Bagginses are homebodies, live and let live sorts, who prefer the company of a small circle of friends and relatives, happy just to be warm, well-fed, and comfortable in their own homes, without any wish to go adventuring.
Arthur and Bilbo are yanked out their doors and set on their respective roads to adventure by forces beyond their control and that they never suspected existed.
The comparisons end there, except in identifying similarities in their roles as the main characters in archetypal heroes’ journeys, and those depend on which version of Arthur Dent we’re talking about, the Arthur of the books, the Arthur of the radio shows, the Arthur of the television mini-series, or the Arthur of the movie. Douglas Adams was constantly tinkering with his own story. Basically, however, Arthur and Bilbo are alike in learning that they have talents, skills, resources, and virtues they never knew they had because their previous quiet and boring lives didn’t require them.
Neither one completes the hero’s journey in unmitigated triumph. Bilbo’s task is left for Frodo to finish and it takes him three more books to finish it in.
But those similarities are the result of plot points, not character.
The difference between Arthur Dent and Bilbo Baggins is that although Arthur is like a Baggins, Bilbo isn’t. Not deep down. He has too much Took in him.
As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit---Bilbo Baggins, that is---was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer.
The uncontrollable force that yanks Bilbo out the door and sets him on the road to adventure is his own pride. He’s infuriated and roused to action when the dwarfs scoff that he’s up to the job Gandalf’s recommended him for.
There’s no Took in Arthur Dent. He’s pure Dent, through and through. Mr Prosser, the civil servant in charge of bulldozing Arthur’s house for a bypass, is tormented by memories of fire, violence, and blood he’s inherited from his distant ancestor Genghis Khan, but apparently Dents have spent millennia dreaming of tea.
When the situation demands it, Arthur is capable of acting heroically or at least bravely. But usually he deals with the situation by trying to reason with it or with whatever sentient being that’s brought the situation about and dragged Arthur into it.
Arthur’s typical line of argument is that since he, Arthur, has no business being where he is, does not want to be where he is, and is only where he is because of a galactic-sized mistake, he, Arthur, and the situation have no basis for engagement and they should part company immediately with he, Arthur, allowed to continue on his way unharmed and unbothered to find his way home. Which of course is part of the problem. Arthur can’t go home. His home and the planet where his home was have been obliterated to make way for an interstellar bypass.
Arthur never quite gets his head around the fact that the Earth has been destroyed. So he never adapts. He often makes do but he never resigns himself to things as they are. He persists in acting as if, if he walks far enough and in the right direction, he will eventually walk home. Which, in the books, he more or less does.
This is admirable, but it’s not heroic.
Bilbo, on the other hand, has no trouble adapting to life on the road to adventure.
He does a fair share of complaining and wishing he was back in the Shire, safe, warm, and well-fed in his hole at Bag’s End. But in his encounters with the trolls, with Golem, with the goblins, the spiders, the elves, and finally with Smaug, he’s active, resourceful, determined, and even dangerous. He quickly gets down to the business of saving day as if he was born to be a hero. Which, as Gandalf knew, he was.
And that brings me back to Freeman as Watson.
If his turn as Arthur Dent prepared me to see him as a hobbit---he even looks like a hobbit---now his Watson has prepared me to see him as a hero.
When we meet Watson in the first episode, A Study in Pink, he’s home from the war in Afghanistan and apparently wishing he’d never left for that particular adventure. But he soon shows that Mrs Hudson is wrong, he’s not the sit at home type. As one shadowy character says, correctly, “You are not haunted by the war, Dr Watson. You miss it.” This Watson is an adventurer by nature.
He may look like a Baggins. But there’s a lot of Took in him.
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and carry a sword instead of a walking stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Then suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up…and he thought of plundering dragons…
The song that wakes up the Took in Watson and calls him to adventure has only one line, slightly rewritten for the series, and I’ll quote the original:
Quick trivia question. What was the only one of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies that was set in Victorian England?
(Trivial update: I’m holding off publishing some comments on this one to give more folks a chance to answer the question. But actor212 and crayolathief reminded me that there are actually two Rathbones set in period. Only one of those, however, is a faithful adaptation of an original Doyle story and it’s the only one out of all the Rathbone movies that is.)
Way back when, when we were desperately trying to figure out what the problem was that was making it so incredibly hard for a very smart, very conscientious, very curious,very creative, and very nice little boy to get through a day of school without a meltdown of some kind, I was continually surprised that none of the psychologists and social workers reached for the diagnosis I was prepared to reject out of hand.
ADHD.
Looking back, when we finally felt we had a handle on things, I came to two conclusions.
One was that the professionals, deliberately or reflexively, had probably been avoiding ADHD as the easy answer, because of the concern that ADHD had been over-diagnosed and kids diagnosed with it over-medicated in the ten years before.
The other was that my determination to resist that as the diagnosis wasn’t just based on my knowledge of the kid needing help. It also wasn’t based on my own feeling that ADHD was a fad diagnosis that was being applied irresponsibly or recklessly as an excuse to drug normally rambunctious little boys into submitting to the dull routines of classroom discipline.
I’d had a student with ADHD, a good, hardworking, B+/A student who visited my office early in the semester to explain to me why he might have some trouble completing work on time and why it might look sometimes like he wasn’t paying attention. He assured me, however, was going to try his hardest and he was taking Ritalin and it was helping.
“Ritalin,” he told me, “Saved my life.”
He did have some trouble. It did look sometimes like he wasn’t paying attention. He did try his hardest. He finished all his work and earned an A.
This was just before we became parents.
So if I’d seen the signs of ADHD myself, I would have thought immediately of my student.
I just wasn’t see what I thought were the signs.
But one of the (small) good things about going through what we’ve gone through is that we’ve had to learn things about how the mind works and how the behavior is regulated. And one of the things I learned is that I didn’t actually know what ADHD was.
The first thing I didn’t know was not to call it ADHD.
Hyperactivity is a different just not always separate issue.
I wasn’t mentally pronouncing the silent and/or:
AD/HD.
It’s not always written with the and/or, but it should always be thought of as containing it.
One of the possible diagnoses we were given, the one that seemed to us to explain the most and the one that gave us strategies to work with and suggest to teachers, was Sensory Integration Disorder.
The problem the kid had to deal with was not that he couldn’t pay attention, it was that he didn’t know what to pay attention to. There was so much information coming at him every single minute of the day that his thought-processes just short-circuited and then shut down.
To get an idea of what I think it was like for him, watch the scene in the restaurant in Sherlock Holmes before Watson and Mary join him for dinner and Holmes, sitting there all alone with his thoughts, has nothing to do but observe the people all around him. He almost runs screaming from the place right there because he observeseverything, all at once.
This suggests a new twist to the Holmes-Watson relationship. The movie, to the extent that it is faithful to the mythos, shows us that Holmes is dependent on Watson as his one connection to a normal, late Victorian, middle-class, adult life. And part of that connection is the help Watson provides Holmes in focusing. In the original stories, Holmes chides Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” But the movie Watson must be constantly reminding Holmes, “Stop observing, man, and just take a quick look. That’s usually enough.”
Most of us are Watson-like. We are bombarded by the same over-abundance of information as Holmes---as an experiment, walk into any room and try to see everything in it all at once; keep in mind that before you’ve “seen” anything, your brain has already sorted out thousands and thousands of bits of information in order to turn the play of subatomic particles into recognizable solid objects so you’re already close to overload before you’re conscious of “seeing” anything---but we deal with this by ignoring almost all of it.
The trick is in “knowing” what to ignore and what to pay attention to.
Someone, like Robert Downey’s Holmes, can’t ignore anything without significant mental effort and may actually only be able to pay attention afterwards. They can’t see what they need to see until they’ve withdrawn to someplace quiet where they sit and think it all over while smoking a pipe. A lot of their lives are three-pipe problems.
I’m using “seeing” here as shorthand for sensing. We observe by taking in information collected by all our senses. We see, hear, touch, smell, and thanks to the connection between our noses and our tongues, taste our current situation all at once. All that information has to be assembled, sorted, rejected as not necessary or applied immediately to making decisions about what’s going on around us and how to react. Someone with sensory integration disorder gets hung up in the sorting. Which means that for a lot longer time than the rest of us (fractions of seconds make the difference) they are seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting everything and all at once.
That has got to be maddening.
And it explained a lot, about being in grocery stores, in shopping malls, on the school bus, in a classroom. Remember how busy the walls of your grade school classrooms were? Imagine trying to follow what the teacher’s writing on the blackboard while you are also reading the names of all the Presidents, all 50 states, the calendar, the map, the charts, the the health posters, the titles of the books on the shelves, and while you are counting over and over again the stars on the flag and the flowers on the teacher’s dress and meanwhile listening to the noises out in the hall, the shifting in their seats and the whispering and sighing of your classmates, and the birds chirping outside the windows.
The important point, however, is that it is all being taken in.
There isn’t an attention deficit here. There’s attention overload.
Quizzed later, a kid with this problem, can, Holmes-like, tell you everything he’s observed.
This is a kid who, while you thought he was zoned out or lost in deep thoughts about the cultural lives of elves and dwarfs, caught that fleeting grimace of pain on your face as you went to lift his sleeping little brother out of his car seat and asks you later, “Are you all right, Dad?”
The psychologist who suggested the problem was sensory integration disorder was a friend who couldn’t take on the case and he really was offering it as a suggestion for whatever counselor we eventually found as something to look into. But it sounded like the kid we knew and it gave us something to work with or, rather, towards---smaller and quieter classrooms, a seat near the front of the room, teachers who knew to speak in softer voices, one-on-one tutoring with a special ed teacher who understood that the point wasn’t to teach the kid what he’d missed in class but help him figure out what he’d actually learned but couldn’t separate from the thousand other pieces of information he’d also taken in and in effect memorized.
It was a big first step, even though sensory integration disorder didn’t turn out to be the problem or, I should say, the main problem.
Ironically, our psychologist friend also warned us to be wary of what he thought was becoming the new fad diagnosis.
Asperger’s Syndrome.
As I said, over time we learned a lot of things, and, to finally get to the point, one of the things we learned was that in looking out for a misdiagnosis of ADHD I was looking out for signs that would not be there if ADHD actually was the problem or a problem.
I was looking at a kid who paid too much attention not at one who couldn’t pay any attention.
But people with ADHD (or AD/HD or ADD) don’t have a problem paying any attention.
They pay lots of attention.
Just not to what teachers and parents and most of their peers think they should be paying attention to.
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is a terribly named disorder. The reason is simple: There is not an actual deficit of attention. We’re used to thinking of illnesses as resulting from a shortage of something – people with a thyroid disease are missing TSH, just as people with scurvy are missing Vitamin C – but ADHD doesn’t seem to work like that. Instead, recent evidence suggests that people with ADHD have plenty of attention – that’s why they can still play video games for hours, or get lost in their Legos, or devote endless attentional resources to activities that they find interesting.
What, then, is the problem in people with ADHD? The disorder is really about the allocation of attention, being able to control our mental spotlight…
Exactly!
If I’d read something like that nine or ten years ago, it would have been a light bulb moment.
As it is, Lehrer’s post is an excellent clarification of things I already knew but haven’t always been able to keep in mind because I’ve been busy dealing with other problems.
Now I’ve got an answer to a question I got asked the other night.
“Do I have any super-powers?”
We were talking metaphorically about exceptional talents and abilities that one brother saw his younger brother possessing that he didn’t.
My muddled answer was that very few of us, including and especially his father, possess superpowers and the way we get through life is to be like Batman---we work hard and train ourselves to use the talents and abilities we do have to maximum effect. Which, I think, was the right answer not just at the moment but generally. Hard work and patience and making the effort to know ourselves, our abilities as well as our limitations, trumps having superpowers or as Roy Hobbes’ father puts it:
“You’ve got a gift, Roy. But if you rely too much on your gift, it’ll fail you.”
But he does have a superpower. A gift. A gift that is wrapped up in a curse but still there to be unwrapped.
He pays attention.
As Holmes would put it, “He does not see, he observes.” Watson would clarify, “He observes, he just needs to learn how to see.”
It’s faddish to say that a lot of well-known geniuses, particularly in the sciences, may have had Asperger’s. This is said because Asperger’s kids are, like these geniuses, notoriously smart but socially clumsy. They’re happier and more comfortable dealing with things and concepts rather than people.
There’s probably some truth to this, although I think that being a genius makes it hard for other people to deal happily and comfortably with you.
The eccentricities and social ineptitude (often to the point of being a psychopathology) of some artists and scientists might very well be an effect as a cause. Early in life they might have learned that most people don’t want to have anything to do with them, that most people actually regard being smarter than average as a hostile act, and there’s no point in trying to get along and play well with others. This includes teachers. While many teachers dream of the day when a truly talented and brilliant student will show up in their class, there are plenty for whom the appearance of such students is a nightmare. They appear to them as bigger challenges to their control of the classroom than class clowns, bullies, babies, and other natural disrupters of order and decorum.
Every Asperger’s kid is himself before he’s an Asperger’s kid. Not every Asperger’s kid is brilliant. Not every Asperger’s kid is nice.
But you can see how having Asperger’s can be, if not conducive to genius, then useful to being one.
If you don’t care what other people think---because you just don’t grasp that they aren’t thinking like you do or about some things with the same passion and intensity that you do---then in societies that don’t place a particularly high value on intellectual or creative achievement, which is to say most societies, it’s easier to go about doing things that make you in most other people’s eyes something of a weirdo.
The first thing a genius who cares what other people think of him learns is that it’s probably best to keep some things to himself.
An Asperger’s kid can’t keep it to himself so he’s going to do some things that will help him in his career as a genius besides being smart. He’s going to try to do the work that interests him and he’s going to talk about it enough and in all kinds of company that he’s inevitably going to talk about it with someone else who shares his interest and passion and can help him refine his thinking and channel his efforts. No genius in any field works and succeeds alone.
Being smart is a collaborative achievement.
So maybe it’s true that many successful scientists and artists have had Asperger’s.
This morning, though, I’m thinking that’s it’s maybe more true that many have had more than a touch of ADHD.
If ADHD isn’t the inability to pay attention but instead the tendency to pay too close attention to what other people consider the wrong things, then it would certainly be useful to any one devoting their time and energy to figuring out the behavior of subatomic particles or the exact right shade of green to use on one leaf in one tree in the far background of a painting or a shot in a movie to be able to pay too close attention.
Not every one with ADHD is brilliant. Not every one with ADHD can learn to pay attention to the “right” things even with the help of medication. It’s not a superpower. If there’s a gift in having ADHD it’s wrapped up in a curse. Hard work and patience and making the effort to know ourselves, our abilities as well as our limitations, and knowing not to rely too much on our gifts are the keys to success.
But I like the quote from William James, the founder of American psychological studies and, incidentally, the novelist Henry James’ brother, that Lehrer finishes off his post with. James, describing a colleague who was apparently an archetypal absent-minded professor, said, “He is not absent-minded. He is just present-minded somewhere else.”
Have finally admitted to myself I won’t be writing a conventional review of Sherlock Holmes. At least not before it comes out on DVD. The reason isn’t the same as the reason I won’t be reviewing Avatar at all. I didn’t miss the train on this one. I was on board right from the first shots of the the black carriage rolling through the shadowy streets of London apparently in pursuit of a bowler-hatted thug barreling on through the dark ahead of it, shots pretty much lifted from the Johnny Depp adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, From Hell, which was pretty much lifted from a dozen or so Sherlock Holmes movies and stories, especially Murder By Decree, starring Christopher Plummer and James Mason as Holmes and Watson in pursuit of Jack the Ripper.
If I ever do get around to writing a review of Sherlock Holmes I think I will pair it with From Hell and point out that Robert Downey’s Holmes and Depp’s drug-addicted, clinically depressed detective chasing Jack the Ripper, Frederick Abberline, are counterbalancing reflections in the same distorting three-way mirror---it’s as if Basil Rathbone’s Holmes is looking into that mirror and seeing Downey in the right-hand glass, Depp in the left, and Jeremy Brett in the middle.
A comic neurotic, a tragic neurotic, and a realistic one that is a mixture of both.
No, I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, pretty much start to finish. But it’s just so slight that the farther away from it I get the vaguer it grows in my memory.
It’s a big noisy mess of a movie, but everything that’s wrong with it has nothing to do with its unfaithfulness to the Sherlock Holmes of Conan Doyle’s stories, and everything to do with director Guy Ritchie’s sloppiness and self-indulgence plus the fact that the script is lazy, incoherent, and only smart in some passages of dialogue that might very well have been ad-libbed on the set by Downey and Jude Law.
There’s no mystery for Holmes to solve, and there’s practically no attempt to work particular scenes into the plot and how could there be since there’s barely a plot to work anything into---what passes for a story is only an excuse for fight scenes, chases, explosions, and Robert Downey and Jude Law’s banter. The problem with having Holmes enter a bare-knuckled cage match with a homicidal bruiser twice his size and beating him isn’t that Holmes wouldn’t or couldn’t manage this---Rathbone’s and Brett’s Sherlocks wouldn’t and couldn’t, but Conan Doyle’s most certainly could and probably did or at least he did things like it---it’s that the fight comes out of nowhere and leads nowhere when it wouldn’t have been difficult at all to fix it so that Holmes had to enter the ring in order to follow a clue or find one.
And what’s right about the movie hasn’t much to do with its cheeky iconoclasm towards fans’ more traditional, and dull, conceptions of Holmes and Watson, and pretty much everything to do with Downey and Law’s performance. They are a perfect movie star pairing, like Redford and Newman, GableandTracy,Hope and Crosby,Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, and think about the implications of that last pair.
But Jones raises a point about the movie’s ambiguity on the subject of Holmes’ sexual ambiguity. Her review, by the way, is headlined Sherlock Holmes Gets Queered. Jones writes:
You can build whole interpretations of Holmes out of single traits and ticks described by Arthur Conan Doyle. Basil Rathbone did him keen and hawk-eyed, Jeremy Brett favored sniffy and precise, and Downey goes for Holmes as a brilliant wild card, driven and erratic, and so devoted to Watson he can’t bear to part with him. Much of the humor of the film involves Holmes’ attempts to break up Watson’s impending marriage, which threatens their happy bachelor home. Holmes was always a fairly non-heteronormative character, as the academics say, but this movie makes a big point of it. Is he homosexual? Bisexual? Pansexual? Or to paraphrase 30 Rock, is he “only gay for Watson”? You be the judge!
Now, Ritchie and Downey and Law have a good time playing on the question about Holmes’ sexuality and the nature of his relationship with Watson, but the funny thing is that I thought it was Watson we’re meant to suspect is actually the closed gay man or at least he’s the one who is gay for his friend.
If Downey’s Holmes is gay for Law’s Watson, he’s robustly and obsessively straight for Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler.
Law’s Watson, on the other hand, seems almost appalled at the idea that his wife-to-be, Mary Morstan (played by an almost asexual Kelly Reilly---she’s both prim and playful, but the only times she comes close to flirting it’s with Holmes, not Watson) is also his soon-to-be sexual partner.
Doyle’s Holmes is notoriously cold to women. Movie and television adapters have made more out of his admiration for Irene Adler than Doyle intended. In fact, Doyle, or Watson, at any rate, is adamant that there is nothing but admiration in his admiration.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer--excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained teasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
On the other hand, when Doyle’s friend, the playwright and actor, William Gillette asked Doyle for permission to have Holmes fall in love in the play he was writing, Doyle told Gillette to go right ahead.
He also told Gillette it was fine with him if he killed Holmes on stage too. Doyle had a love-hate relationship with the fictional monster he’d created.
But Doyle’s Holmes is cold towards everyone, including Watson, with whom he’s friends but not necessarily best friends---Watson has a full life outside of Baker Street and apart from Holmes---and they’re not all that intimate. Even after having worked together and lived together for a while, it comes to a surprise to both of them that each man has a brother.
So it’s up to the actors playing them to measure the depth and define the nature of Holmes and Watson’s feelings for and about each other.
Clearly, in this movie, Holmes needs Watson in a way no other movie or TV Holmes has needed his Watson. But that need, I think, is something other and more desperate and more intense than one based on sexual desire or even on friendship.
Downey’s Holmes is to a great degree a little boy lost playing at being a grown-up. He’s that immature because his extraordinary talents and intelligence, not to mention his neuroses, eccentricities, and possible sensory integration disorder, have made it impossible for him to relate to any normal adults in his life. He has never been able to follow the examples of his peers, since he has no peers, and therefore never learned how to act like a normal grown-up human being. This leaves him both desperately lonely and more than a little afraid.
Watson is the only adult friend he has and the only normal human being who will put up with him. He loves Watson as a brother but he needs Watson as a father, mother, teacher, guide, and protector. Basically, Watson is Holmes’ only connection to that part of human life that is not out and out criminal or insane.
Of course he’s terrified at the prospect of Watson’s moving out and leaving him alone. Holmes, the little boy, can’t imagine that it’s possible for a well-adjusted adult to have a family life and a professional life.
There may be some jealousy at work, but I think what Holmes is jealous of is Watson’s having things he can’t have himself, a normal family life and the love of a decent and non-criminally inclined adult woman.
Watson, on the other hand, seems more desperate to break away from Holmes than Holmes seems desperate to keep him. Naturally, living with a demanding and totally solipsistic lunatic would drive anyone crazy and alternating fantasies of escape and murder would be totally understandable in even the most detached and tolerant of men (like Conan Doyle’s and most movie version’s Watsons), but add to this Watson’s decided ambivalence about his engagement and his almost complete lack of sexual rapport with Mary and the Greek nudes on the windowsill of his consulting room at Baker Street, and what we have is a portrait of a Victorian closet case trying like mad and failing to run away from his true feelings.
And then it turns out to be Mary herself who resolves the problems for both men, and she does it in a way that solves a couple of problems of her own.
It’s Mary who gives Watson “permission” to maintain his friendship with Holmes, the only catch is that she gets to develop her own friendship with the great detective. Mary convinces Watson that he needs to stay partners with Holmes because Holmes would be lost without him (which is true) and because Watson has a responsibility to write up the stories of Holmes’ adventures. She gives Watson an excuse---duty---to continue his friendship with Holmes. But she intends to be a part of things, if by nothing more than helping Watson turn his notes into the stories we know, and thus she places herself as a shield between Watson and the object of his desire.
But as I said, as Kelly Reilly plays her, Mary feels more of a spark between herself and Holmes than between herself and her husband-to-be, and by allowing Watson his excuse she’s given herself one to remain close to the new object of her desire. She’s arranged it so that she gets to keep her husband in her bed and to spend time around Sherlock Holmes.
Meanwhile, she’s given Holmes a big sister-figure to go along with the big brother-figure he’s depended on Watson to be, doubling both his protectors and his connections to normal adult life.
And so they all live happily ever after, at least until the sequel.
__________________
Meanwhile, back on Pandora. I went to see Avatar expecting to get swept up in it and that just didn’t happen. I don’t blame the movie. I blame my own mood. Our old pal Nancy Nall went expecting it to be a waste of an afternoon, but she got swept up. Now she wants to see it again, in 3D, at an IMAX.
I don’t mind that Guy Ritchie seems to have turned Sherlock Holmes into an action figure since Arthur Conan Doyle regularly implied that Holmes was in fact an action figure.
Saving Avatar for New Year’s Day and taking Pop Mannion to Sherlock Holmes this afternoon---Mom Mannion will be using the opportunity to rest up from all her Mother Christmasing over the last few days.
Is any fan’s ideal Sherlock Holmes the character as Conan Doyle wrote him or as Sidney Paget drew him? Pop Mannion’s Sherlock Holmes was Basil Rathbone. Mine is Jeremy Brett. But Brett taught both of us that there is no one way to play Holmes, although having seen and enjoyed The Seven Per-Cent Solution I’m not sure it’s a lesson I hadn’t already learned from Nicol Williamson, who come to think about it played Holmes as a bit of an action figure himself.
For the most part his Holmes was a strung-out, drug-addled, hyper-neurotic Freudian case study, but then there was that sword fight on the top of the cars of a speeding train. And I don’t remember thinking that was out of character for Holmes.
That’s because Doyle’s Holmes probably could fence. Why not? He was a crack shot. He could box. He was strong, as strong as Downey appears to be playing him in the movie. Take this scene from The Speckled Band in which the villain shows up at 221B Baker Street to try to scare Holmes off the case:
"I will go when I have said my say. Don't you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here." He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
"See that you keep yourself out of my grip," he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
"He seems a very amiable person," said Holmes, laughing. "I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own." As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.
It’s true Doyle rarely showed Holmes in situations that required him to duke or shoot it out with a bad guy. Rarely. And, remember, Doyle only showed Holmes as Watson saw him, and Watson was not the constant companion that popular imagination has him. Watson and Holmes shared rooms on Baker Street, but not a room. Watson spent his days at his surgery. Then he got married and moved out. He moved back in after Doyle widowed him but the Watsons were married for a while and during that while Holmes and Watson saw each other only on occasion. When they got together, Holmes usually hinted at three or four cases he had solved in the meantime without Watson’s aid and advice. And those cases often sounded more romantic and dangerous than any of the ones that became the basis for Watson’s stories.
In fact, Holmes seemed to encourage Watson to write up those cases because they were less romantic and violent and then objected to the little bits of romance Watson worked into those. Holmes wanted Watson to record and tout his methodsof detectionnot his adventures while detecting.
"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes celebres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province."
"And yet," said I, smiling, "I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records."
"You have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood--"you have erred perhaps in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing."
We also know that Holmes had extensive connections among the denizens of London’s underworld and spent lots of time there, and not always because he was investigating a case. Holmes led a double life and he enjoyed keeping the details from Watson. He also seemed to think Watson wouldn’t be able to handle it if he did let him in on what he’d been up.
Then there were the years after Reichenbach Falls during which, Holmes wasn’t, as he says he’ll be doing at the end of The Seven Per-Cent Solution, spending his time on the stage passing as a concert violinist named Sigerson.
I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.
I think I’d like to know what made that short visit to the Khalifa interesting.
As for the scenes in the trailer that show Holmes as a robust, randy, and somewhat kinky heterosexual, well, there isn’t anything in Doyle’s stories that insists definitively that he wasn’t. Holmes is usually brusque to the point of rudeness with women who cross his path---upper class women, at any rate---and he leaves it to Watson to act the gentleman with them. And he routinely drops remarks that are more than typically Victorian in their sexism. They border on misogyny and shock Watson, who has a high regard for women in general and is regularly quite admiring of individuals---he makes a point of noting female clients’ intelligence, courage, and level-headedness. Holmes talks as if he thinks all women are borderline hysterics. Watson is always ready to assure his readers that no actual hysterics have ever showed up at Baker Street.
Of course, we know that Holmes knows that there is at least one woman who is not an hysteric.
She is the only woman---the only person---who ever outwits Holmes and he likes that about her. He likes her. He may love her. It may be that every thing he says about women and the way he treats them, when on a case or considering taking a case, is defensive. He is pushing back against any feelings that could cloud his thinking. On a case, he needs to be cool-headed to the point of being a machine. (It makes perfect sense that Spock is one of his descendents, a possibility that requires us to believe that Holmes married and reproduced.) But it may also be that what we are hearing is the result of his comparing every woman who comes after to the woman.
Or to the women he knows from the opium dens and dive bars and---why not?---whorehouses he visits without Watson around to complain or fret or judge.
So it may be that Guy Ritchie has simply taken what’s implied is going on in the background of Conan Doyle’s stories and moved it to the foreground where Watson can see what his friend’s really been up to for once.
What I’m dreading is not what Ritchie might have done with or to the character. I’m dreading what he might have done with the movie, which is to have made it into a big noisy mess.
But I’m also dreading one more thing.
Rachel McAdams in a corset, garter belt, and thigh highs.
I’ll tell you why when we get back. Movie’s starting soon. We’re off. Catch you later.
___________________
Take a virtual tour of Holmes’ study at 221B Baker Street.
Strange and wonderful how the mind and memory work.
Beautiful early fall morning here, clear blue skies, the gentlest of breezes, temperature barely topping 65. Apple picking weather, the first of the season. So what are the sixteen year old and I doing this fine day? Disturbing the peace and quiet of the neighborhood by running the lawn mower.
For the record, it’s quarter of eleven and we just got started and I’ve checked with the experts on suburban etiquette on this. They’ve all assured me that it is not a violation of good neighborliness to mow your lawn on a Sunday morning as long as you don’t do it before ten. I usually wait until after one but my apprentice was anxious to get to it as soon as possible so he didn’t have that chore weighing on his mind all morning and I thought I’d better take advantage of this spasm of ambition and put him to work.
He and I trade off and I just finished off the front lawn and handed over the mower to him so he can start on the back yard. And while I was taking my turn, I noticed something I’ve noticed a few times before---like every time I’ve mowed the lawn since the end of the summer of 2004, our first summer in this house.
Sections of the lawn are now dedicated to the memories of great detectives.
The strip by the fence along the street side of the backyard? That belongs to Travis Magee. The patch above the culvert off to the side of the garage? Lord Peter Wimsey. The middle sections of the backyard and around the pool belong to Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. And there’s one small area where I have to mow around the stop sign at the corner where I always think of Stephanie Plum who also owns the grass growing around the swing set and behind the shed.
Up by the steps to our deck belongs to John Dortmunder, who of course is not a detective, he’s a thief, but I don’t hold that against him and neither does my insistent and peculiar memory.
Because what they all have in common isn’t their jobs but their lively existence as characters in books I happened to be listening to on tape on days when I had to mow the lawn that summer.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to recorded books but in 2004 I was addicted to it. It got to the point that I had stopped reading with my eyes and was doing all my reading with my ears. And I read like this everywhere. When I was out for a walk, when I was in the car, when I was alone for any length of time in the house, when I was doing chores. I even read---listened---myself to sleep. The only reason I kicked the habit is that my Walkman finally died and I couldn’t find a comfortable carrier for my portable CD player. If I ever get an iPod or a smart phone I could get hooked again easily. I recommend recorded books, especially to parents and caretakers of children who get restless on long car rides. I haven’t gone cold turkey either. We still listen to books on our long car rides. I’ll tell you something. All those Terry Pratchett novels I’ve read and pushed at you? I’ve actually only read three of them. All the rest I’ve listened to and then gone back to the paper texts to re-read selected passages. Still, back in 2004, it was maybe getting a little out of control.
It wasn’t just mysteries and thrillers. It was just the case that when I mowed the lawn I almost always chose a mystery or a thriller to read while I was doing it, mainly because it was hard to hear over the mower even with the volume turned all the way up and, as mindless a chore as mowing the lawn is, there are times when you have to focus in order to avoid mowing down the gladiolas or running over toads and small rodents so I knew I was going to miss a lot as I mowed. I love a mystery, but you can miss a lot and still follow the story, unless it’s by Raymond Chandler, and you can’t follow his stories even when your attention’s riveted so it doesn’t matter. By the way, Elliott Gould does a terrific job reading the Marlowe stories. I tried listening to one of Patrick O’Brien’s novels once and I was lost before Lucky Jack Aubrey had cleared port.
So, that summer I read The Scarlet Ruse, Strong Poison, Prisoner's Base, Ten Big Ones , and Bad Habits, among others. And I’m not surprised that the memory of having read those books comes back when I’m out mowing the lawn. What’s curious to me is the way the memories of specific books come back at specific spots. After all, I mowed the whole lawn each time, so why should any of the books be associated with any single particular patch of grass? Why do I remember The Scarlet Ruse when I’m mowing by the fence and not around the pool? Why do I think of Strong Poison in the front yard but not in the back? Why does Dortmunder own the upper part of the lawn and Stephanie Plum the lower part?
Here’s something even curiouser to me. I don’t simply remember having listened to those books. What happens is that I start listening to them again.
I can hear them in my head.
They don’t come back word for word, but I can hear the voices---Darren McGavin’s Travis Magee, Ian Carmichael’s Lord Peter, Lorelei King as Stephanie Plum---and I know what passage they’re reading. I know where I am in the story. Which means that these parts of my yard aren’t just associated with particular books, they are associated with particular chapters. How and why can that be?
Sound and smell are more evocative than sight. They are more powerful memory triggers, at any rate. For good reason. Human brains have learned to be highly selective. We’d go crazy if every bit of visual data touched off a memory storm. We’d drive our cars off the road and mow down all the gladiolas as well. But what happens when I mow the lawn? Something is triggering memories of particular sounds. And whatever it is, it’s extremely localized. It could be that every little patch of lawn has its own peculiar smells, smells that mix with the gasoline fumes in unique ways to create a new smell that I only notice when I’m mowing the lawn, otherwise wouldn’t those memories come back any time I happened to walk around the yard? It could be that there are things I only see when I’m mowing those patches, that the way I have to look out as I maneuver there forces me to notice details that I normally overlook. It could be that it’s not a sight or a smell or a sound or a combination of those stimulii playing games with my brain. It could be muscle memory. It could be the specific ways I have to move when I mow these particular parts of the lawn. Sometimes we say we feel things in every fiber of our being. Could it be that we remember things in every fiber too?
These our questions for a neuroscientist or an assiduous Googler. I’m far from the first and don’t have time to be the second right now.
The sixteen year old has finished up out back. My turn to take over.
Tom Arnold played the Ted Haggard character. He was very good in
the part and for some reason I wasn't the least bit surprised. I can't
find anything in his IMDB filmography, though, that would have prepared
me to be unsurprised.
The character was called Reverend Cal Riggins. Note the three letter
first name and the double g. Ted, Cal. Haggard, Riggins. Cute.
Arnold played him with a suggestion of emotional stuntedness, as if he
was trying to hide the fact that he was really an overgrown boy, which
seemed right for a man who thinks he can lead a double life in public.
Does Arnold have a lisp? He lisped a bit as Riggins. Not a
stereotypical effeminate lisp to suggest closeted homosexuality. A
little boy's missing a tooth lisp.
Even though Arnold was the biggest name guest star and the biggest
name guest star is usually the murderer, I knew the writers weren't
going to make Riggins the killer. That would have been piling on. The
motive would have been too obvious too.
I knew it wasn't Michael Nouri, who played Riggins' business manager, either. He was pushed forward too soon as a suspect.
That left the gay hooker and the scientist as suspects.
I guessed the scientist, although I was at first disappointed. The
Riggins character and the scientist have a road show together. They go
from city to city "debating" the existence of God. The scientist is a
prosletyzing atheist like Dawkins and Harris. The only reason I
mentioned Gould as a possible model is that Reg Rogers, the actor
playing the scientist, has a thick thatch of dark hair like Gould used
to have when he was young. No mustache though. And Gould was in his
less flamboyant way a professional debunker like the scientist in the
story. The reason I was disappointed when I realized that the
scientist was going to turn out to have done it is that, first, I knew
his motive would be so convoluted as to be absurd---Criminal Intent's
mysteries are often dependent on the real mystery being not the murder
but the mind of the murderer and that leads to some very tortured
psychoanalytical analysis in place of an actual solution---and, second,
I didn't like the obvious irony.
"Oh look. The professional man of reason turns out to be irrational! How about that?"
But as the show went on and it became more certain that the
scientist was the killer I began not to mind the irony and then not to
see it as an irony but as a continuation of the show's long-running
theme.
Of course the man of reason turns out to be irrational in this episode because that's how it turns out in almost every episode.
In the universe of Criminal Intent, no one is rational.
No one is rational because no one is immune to pain.
When the show debuted, the emphasis was on Bobby Goren's brilliance
as a detective. Goren was a present day Sherlock Holmes, and Vincent
D'Onforio's portrayal of Goren owed a lot to Jeremy Brett's hyperaware,
hyperactive, neurotic to the brink of hysteria Holmes.
But the show was also an homage to Columbo.
Goren was the weird, distracted, persistent but ingratiating detective the murderers both underestimated and, despite themselves, came to like---or came to want to make like them. And in those shows the killers were shown going about their business of killing and covering up their crimes without any attempt to fool the audience about their guilt because the fun was in watching how Goren/Columbo was going to trick them into tripping themselves up.
Back then, motives were usually simple and base. Money was often the root of all evil, and when it wasn't money it was sex.
Over time the emphasis shifted from the crime and the criminal to the intent. And when that happened the mind of the killer became the mystery and Goren changed from being a brilliant detective to being a brilliant, although manipulative, psychoanalyst. The denoument of many episodes wasn't the solving of the case but the solving of the criminal when Goren finally maneuvered him or her into letting the cat out of the psychological bag.
When this shift occurred, the show became far more sympathetic to its criminals. The point was sympathizing. Goren solved his cases by sympathizing and identifying with the killer. He felt their pain because it was like his pain. Goren himself began to grow edgier, darker, and more neurotic, and more of his personal life began to sneak into the scripts.
This season his personal life has come front and center, with the appearance of Rita Moreno as Goren's crazy mother, who, although dying of cancer, still has the strength and lunatic intelligence to torture and torment her guilt-ridden son.
Having her on the scene has helped bring Goren's character back from the edge. For a little while, starting last season and continuing into the beginning of this one, it looked as though the plan was to write Goren out of the show by having him crack up. Now Goren has to keep himself together in order to be there for his mother. We'll see what happens when she dies.
Goren's, and the show's growing sympathy for the killers, was an interesting mirror of what was happening on the original Law and Order, where more and more the scripts were tending in a Fry them all! attitude towards all their perps. As the original has grown more authoritarian, Criminal Intent has grown almost too forgiving and therapeutic.
Almost every murderer turns out to have been psychologically murdered, or at least assaulted to the point of permanent crippling, at some point in their past, even Goren's longtime nemesis, the apparent embodiment of Evil, Nicole Wallace, we've learned, was sexually abused by her father.
Lately, Goren, and Logan, haven't been such brillaint detectives. They are less like Sherlock Holmes and Lt Columbo than like Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, who doesn't solve his cases, he reports on them as they unfold and the criminals come to their inevitable bad ends. Archer goes from character to character, listening to their stories, until at last he manages to be on the scene when all the stories tumble into each other like dominoes and the last story, the killer's story, is forced out of him.
Goren and Logan wander around, listening, following the stories more than the clues, until they find themselves in the position of witness to the telling of the last story as the murderer's already unraveling psyche comes to its final thread.
The scientist turned out to have done it and his motive was convoluted to the point of absurdity. He did it because he was trying to hide the fact he had a developmentally disabled teenage son, he did it because he was ashamed of his son, he did it because he was ashamed of being ashamed, he did it because he was in love with the minister's wife and she'd betrayed him, he did it because he hated the minister, he did it because he didn't believe in God so he could do it, because without God all things are permitted, just as Ivan Karamazov said, and he did it because of God, he did it because he was angry at the God he didn't believe exists, angry at Him for not existing.
He did it because he was angry and in pain and he lost his head.
The professional man of reason acted irrationally because he was a human being and human beings aren't rational, they are only conditioned to act as if they are rational.
What we think of as our own good behavior, as the result of our own clear-headed thinking and the rational choices we have made, is really forced upon us by habit, societal constraints, and irrational and unconscious motivations that are the effects of causes we don't remember or can't admit happened.
The scientist, last night's show implied, was more likely to act irrationally than the preacher, because he didn't believe---not in God but in his own irrationality. The preacher has no defenses against his own biological compulsions because he doesn't believe in them. He believes only in sin, which is to say he believes he is rational and capable of making choices. If he makes the wrong choice, if he chooses to sin, it's either because he's weak or he's been tricked by the devil. But even so he does believe in his own capacity to commit evil and to a degree that protects him. It keeps him on his guard. The scientist was defenseless against the evil inside himself because he saw life as a matter of making rational choices. He hates the preacher's religion and idea of God as prime mover because they get in the way of people's being rational. Having rejected religion and God, he's decided that he has cleared his own mind. He is a rational man, and therefore he has nothing to worry about, nothing inside himself to guard against.
At the end of day, none of us, not even Bobby Goren, knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and women of reason.
I'm close to throwing in the towel on Robert Parker's Stone Cold. I've been sticking with it because I've been listening to it on tape and enjoying Robert Forster's dry, wised-up tough guy reading. But I don't know why I even started it. I've written before how, while I like Parker's first and greatest detective-hero, Spenser, I'm not much of a fan of Parker's Jesse Stone thrillers.
For one thing, I think Parker gives himself permission to write sloppily in the Stone novels. I don't mean his prose doesn't parse. I mean that he gives in to all sorts of thriller conventions and cliches that he manages to disguise, undercut, and avoid in the Spenser novels and his plots are less carefully worked out.
Stone has already had to do something improbable and dumb that he didn't need to do and that he knew was dumb, which means that Parker was aware he was making a bloomer but he kept at either because he didn't feel like backing up and starting over, and it just made it easier to write the next scene, or he felt it kept the action going, or he's setting up an obvious and unnecesary plot complication down the line.
A lot of writers of mysteries and thrillers seem to think they have an understanding with their readers that they can violate all laws of probability, human nature, and artistic inelligence in order to keep the plot moving and the bodies falling.
In his best Spenser novels, Parker rarely imposes on his readers' patience that way. When he does he usually offers his readers something in return, like humor or a good piece of descriptive writing.
All mystery novels and thrillers depend on improbable coincidences, but only the worst ones depend on their heroes growing suddenly improbably stupid.
And in the Stone novels the most annoying traits of the Spenser novels get out of hand. In Spenser's world the only men who count are big, violent men who either share Spenser's code of honor or who who have a special code of their own. All other men are wimps, weaklings, or fools. And in Spenser's world, all encounters between Spenser and other men are dominance games, which Spenser always wins.
The same goes for Stone's world, but without the sense of humor.
All that's annoying enough, but in Stone Cold, there's another factor. The Jen factor.
Stone spends a lot of his time off the job moping over his ex-wife Jen. He wants to get back together with her. She wants to get back with him, but she doesn't trust him to stay sober---Stone's an alcoholic who doesn't have his drinking under control but who can resist when he's working and even when he's off duty, sometimes---and she isn't sure he really loves her, partly because he won't give up the drinking, which is one thing keeping them apart, and partly because she suspects him of wanting her to control and possess. So they get together for wistful conversations that lead to nothing but frustration except for the times they lead to sex, after which comes the frustration, and Jesse mopes about it all. He mopes hardest over Jen's love life. She's seeing other men while she's waiting for him to get it together and be worthy of her. This eats him up inside, the poor guy.
But, wait, he's seeing other women. I don't mind that he's blind to his own hypocrisy on this one. I mind that every one he talks to about how miserable he is without Jen, including Jen, is blind to it too.
Nobody worries about Jen's feelings. They're all too busy feeling sorry for Jesse...or not feeling sorry for him and telling him to get over Jen and move on, but that only shows how much they care about the big lug.
So why keep going? There's a new novel coming out next month. Sea Change. I'll probably read it. Or let Robert Forster read it to me. Why?
Probably because like everybody else I enjoy mindless escapism once in a while. And because Parker and I share similar tastes in women. And because I'm nostalgic for the North Shore and Boston area locations. And because I like Spenser and the Stone novels, for all their weaknesses, are part of the Spenser universe. (Stone has made a guest appearance in one of the last two Spensers I read, either Cold Service or School Days, and it says something not good that I can't remember which, doesn't it.)
Still, I'm ready to give it up.
Because of the villains.
A pair of serial killers.
What the devil is the movies', TV's, and mystery writers' fascination with serial killers?
Is it just that they guarantee a high and bloody body count?
Or is there some facet of the twisted American pysche they appeal to that, twisted as I am in most other ways, I don't share?
At the convenience market where I routinely buy my morning coffee there are usually four pots cooking on the hot plate---three pots with black handles full of regular, and one with an orange handle for decaf.
Sometimes, though, like yesterday, there are two pots with black handles and two with orange.
This morning they were back to the usual arrangement of three and one.
, a new literary thriller by Tabish Khair, gives the wrong impression of the book or not enough of the right impressions.
. Watson is where he’s always been, doing what he’s always done, being who he’s always been. (Illustration by Sidney Paget from 
editions.
by Douglas Adams.
by J.R.R. Tolkien.
, wrote in 
, 
, and Bad Habits, among others. And I’m not surprised that the memory of having read those books comes back when I’m out mowing the lawn. What’s curious to me is the way the memories of specific books come back at specific spots. After all, I mowed the whole lawn each time, so why should any of the books be associated with any single particular patch of grass? Why do I remember 
when I’m mowing by the fence and not around the pool? Why do I think of 
in the front yard but not in the back? Why does Dortmunder own the upper part of the lawn and Stephanie Plum the lower part?
by Richard Dawkins and 
. I've been sticking with it because I've been listening to it on tape and enjoying Robert Forster's dry, wised-up tough guy reading. But I don't know why I even started it. I've written before how, while I like Parker's first and greatest detective-hero, Spenser, 
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