Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #20. Arthur Conan Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ high-functioning autistic/recovering drug addict. Even the one-off Mr Holmes, with a more traditional-seeming Ian McKellen, is concerned with the shortfall between the man Holmes seems to be and the person he actually is.

      As radical is the way these takes on Doyle focus on Holmes (and Watson) almost to the exclusion of their cases. Mysteries sometimes seem like distractions from storylines more concerned with Holmes’s psychological state and his thorny relationship with the version of him popularised by Watson (which is to say, Doyle). The shift in the direction began as early as Billy Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-per-Cent Solution (1974)—outliers for the 21st century Sherlock—though William Gillette probably kicked it off in 1899 by having Holmes fall in love. Typically, contemporary Holmes franchises stay away from “faithful” adaptations of the original stories—fair enough, since they’ve all been done so often that yet another straight Red-Headed League or Baskerville Hound is scarcely worth the effort. Instead, scripts braid together clues, characters, bits of business, the skeletons of Doyle’s plots, fan fiction-like speculations about secondary characters like Mrs. Hudson and Irene Adler, increasingly complicated layers of metafiction, and kinetic displays of illustrated deduction or steampunk action-adventure. The upshot is a series of plot mazes which allow Holmes and Watson to explore themselves rather than simply find out who did it and how.

      So we come to The Abominable Bride—perhaps the most convoluted essay in post-modern Holmesiana imaginable. Debuting on New Year’s Day, it’s a feature-length episode of Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s BBC Sherlock, intended as a stopgap between limited-run series which are getting harder to fit into the actors’ busy schedules. In three sets of three adventures (beginning in 2010), Sherlock has presented Holmes (Cumberbatch) and Watson (Martin Freeman) in contemporary London, ingeniously fitting the consulting detective into a world of mobile phones, the internet, 24-hour surveillance, forensic science, and selfies. Here, Watson is still just back from Afghanistan but with post-traumatic stress disorder and a thrill-seeking danger junkie streak. He chronicles his adventures with Sherlock on a blog. Moriarty (Andrew Scott) is a Joker-like giggling nemesis/dark doppelganger/putative slash fiction love interest. Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington) is an ex-secret agent. Irene Adler (Lara Pulver) has a website for sexual services. Crucially, it’s all about Sherlock, as the mercurial Cumberbatch misreads social cues disastrously, turns up naked at Buckingham Palace, squabbles childishly with his spymaster brother (Mark Gatiss), fakes his death and is shocked people are upset by the jape and—at the end of His Last Vow, the series three closer—shoots dead the master blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnusson and is sent on a suicide mission to make up for it.

      All this is rushed through in a “previously…” montage at the outset of The Abominable Bride before a timer rolls back and we meet an alternative version of this Holmes and Watson in a Victorian setting. There’s a brief remake of the first episode (A Study in Pink) with a setting more closely approximating Doyle’s, populated by people who are Victorian versions of the modernised versions of Victorian characters. Gatiss is buried in a Robert Morleyish fat suit as a Mycroft intent on eating himself to death for a bet, Una Stubbs’s Mrs. Hudson is sulking that Watson never gives her anything to say in his Strand magazine stories, Mary Watson is a simmering suffragette who resents being neglected by her adventure-seeking husband and Lestrade (Rupert Graves) is back to being a grumpy plodder. Only after all this do we get a story nugget—spun out of Doyle’s throwaway mention of Ricoletti and his Abominable Bride (the aluminium crutch has gone missing)—about the veiled and painted Emilia Ricoletti (Natasha O’Keeffe) who publically shoots herself before murdering her abusive husband. Though Emilia is demonstrably now as dead as Jacob Marley, her spectre keeps popping up to kill a series of unlikeable men, which tips the viewer off as to which big issue is going to be raised and then dropped before the show takes another direction and reverts to its usual business of getting under Holmes’s skin.

      With the widespread acceptance of the series’ take on Holmes, it was a clever notion to put all the characters into Doylean dress. Even forensic bods Molly (Louise Brealey) and Anderson (Jonathan Aris), essentially inventions of Moffat and Gatiss, show up with false whiskers and starched collars. Some moments of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are paraphrased as Holmes complains about the way Watson has misrepresented him in his stories—with the stinging comeback from his biographer that he has had to work hard to depict “an unprincipled drug addict as some sort of gentleman hero.” In common with Moffat’s tenure as the showrunner of Doctor Who, there’s a strange insistence on having characters usually depicted as altruistic good guys taken off their pedestal as their best friends repeatedly—in long dialogue scenes—tell them what shits they are. Maybe so, but the way modern culture is uncomfortable with the notion of friendship is oddly disturbing. In recent years, many characters traditionally thought of as fast friends have been shown as dysfunctional couples at best and arch-enemies at worst: Batman and Superman, Napoleon and Ilya, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Iron Man and Captain America.

      For an hour or so, The Abominable Bride is dazzling. Like its manic-depressive hero, it has great highs as writers and cast seize opportunities to enjoy themselves and lows as they have to get back to a story no one cares much about and which (spoiler) turns out not to be happening at all. It offers more in-jokes than a generation of scholars will be able to catalogue—note the way Holmes assumes a Paget-like ruminative pose which also evokes the way Steve Ditko drew Dr. Strange, the character Cumberbatch is currently playing. Five orange pips pop out of an envelope, and a monstrous regiment of women manifests (Lily Clarke is a great new addition as the Watsons’ know-all maid). The goings get gothic with black Klan hoods and Latin chants and creeping through Hammer Films sets. It’s as much comforting fun as a BBC holiday ghost story of yore. But it can’t last.

      A few anachronisms (“a virus in the data”) hint this isn’t a straight historical adventure after all, and the penny drops that all this has been Cumberbatch/Sherlock high on a cocktail of many drugs retreating into his “memory palace” (a feature of the Hannibal franchise too) to explore an unsolved case from the 1880s that bears on the quandary raised in the last minutes of His Last Vow (how can someone blow their brains out and survive to commit more crimes?). So, not only has Sherlock been puzzling out the solution to the abominable bride business while zonked out in a private jet but has masochistically imagined versions of all his friends being horrid to him (and each other), exposing all his failings as a human being and as a detective (he takes the case of a threatened husband in his imagination and then stands back while the odious client is murdered). He even realises this was irrelevant to the Moriarty case too, which means this runaround won’t impact on the ongoing story.

      Back in the memory palace/dreamworld/holodeck, Holmes has his imagined versions of Watson and Moriarty join him at an (impressive) waterfall for another group therapy session which will end with someone (or everyone) taking the plunge. Here, the writers acknowledge we’ve been here before—in Sherlock and in every other incarnation of the stories all the way back to “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House”—and that we will be here again as endless variations on the conflict and the outcome play out over and over. Like so much else in The Abominable Bride, it’s brilliant, clever and funny—but feels like a cheat if you tuned in expecting a story.

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      Kim Newman is a prolific, award-winning English writer and editor, who also acts, is a film critic, and a London broadcaster. Of his many novels and stories, one of the most famous is Anno Dracula.

      for crown and country |

      SHERLOCK HOLMES FOR CROWN AND COUNTRY, by Dan Andriacco

      The Great Detective in Public Service

      A slightly different form of “Sherlock Holmes for Crown and Country: The Great Detective in Public Service” was originally delivered as a talk at the inaugural meeting of the Diogenes Club of Washington, D.C., on September 20, 2014. Author Dan Andriacco had always been fascinated by the number of spy stories in the Canon. As a boy he fantasized about putting СКАЧАТЬ