The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

January, 2006

If you've never read any Holmes, you're in for a treat. If you have, this is the perfect time to revisit some old favorites. Even in southern California, the weather's been mostly bad lately. It's legal to read Holmes on a sunny day, but it's just wrong, you know? Sure, some of his adventures take place in decent weather (one of them, "The Cardboard Box," begins on what the author claims was "a blazing hot day in August," but bear in mind that this is England we're talking about. It was probably 72 degrees and almost not cloudy. They don't get to talk about blazing hot over there any more than I get to lay claim to witnessing a London fog every time that lovely ocean mist rolls by my window); but still, Holmes is winter reading. So shut your curtains against that rain, put the kettle on for a pot of tea, and curl up with The Adventures.

Actually, almost anything featuring Mr. Holmes is fine. But I do think that The Adventures is a wonderful place to start, even if, technically, A Study in Scarlet is really the first Holmes adventure. I enjoy Scarlet all right, but it's not the strongest Holmes work by any means. That huge piece of exposition in the middle is too abrupt. The doings at Baker Street are more compelling than the horrors of the Mormon western migration; and will someone who has read the book kindly tell me who exactly was supposed to have written that whole chunk anyway? It couldn't have been Watson. It's all information that he never has the chance to learn. It couldn't have been told to him by Jefferson Hope, since if you follow the line of narration carefully, you'll see that there's no place at all for such a tale-telling to fit in. He gives Holmes, Watson, and the cops a brief account of how he did what he did, but says first thing that it doesn't matter why; and then before he can go to trial for his crimes, or give another speech about them, he dies. Whose hand, then, penned the history of poor Lucy Ferrier and her fate at the hands of the Mormon Avengers?

And why hasn't anyone but me ever asked this? If this were any novel but a Sherlock Holmes tale, it might be excused for slipping from first-person limited to third-person omniscient. Actually, a Holmes novel can be excused for this by any normal creature. But admirers of Holmes, though common, are anything but ordinary. Elvis fans are rational and restrained in comparison. And lest you think that this is a strained analogy, I would like to point out that in the introduction to the newest and brilliantly annotated collection of Holmes stories, the editor says -- well, let me quote it. I don't want you to have to take my word for it.

There is no credible record of any further activities of Holmes. His death, if it occurred at all -- and there are those who claim that his mastery of chemistry and bee-keeping led him to an elixir of immortality derived from the royal jelly of the queen bee -- has not been reported. Some attribute the ultimate triumph of reason and order over the madmen of the twentieth century -- the downfall of Hitler, Stalin, and the Communist Party -- to his continued undercover work, but present no evidence for this supposition. Others, such as Laurie King, author of a series of books about Mary Russell, record Holmes's life post-1914, but these works are plainly fiction.

Don't adjust your set. You read that right. Holmes might well be the one to thank for the downfall of Hitler. And he might be immortal. But don't confuse any of that with the works of Laurie King. Those are just fiction.

Do you understand the kind of people we're dealing with here? (They're called Sherlockians in America, by the way, and Holmesians in England. If you find out why, I'd love to know.) These are people who spend more time in a week than I have purely at my own disposal in a year spinning theories about how many times Watson was really married (and what was his real name, anyway? if it was John, why did his wife call him James that one time? and what about his war wound?) and triumphantly culling evidence from the novels and short stories (collectively referred to, without any irony that I've been able to perceive, as the Canon) to prove that Holmes was gay, female, and/or married. And not only didn't I make any of those up, but it wouldn't have mattered if I had, because there are so many OCD-afflicted Sherlockians out there, pens in hand and word processors at the ready, that any wild idea you might just toss out there (did Sherlock Holmes' mom have an affair with Dracula's brother?) has already been covered, either in fan fiction or by the serious theorizers.

Okay, look. First off, before I get accused of being the enemy of joy and fun, I think it's pretty darned obvious at this point that I am exactly the last person on the planet who could ethically condemn anyone else for discussing characters from literature to the point that ordinary people in the room are moved to thoughts of murder and/or suicide. It's not just that I'm trying to make something like a living at it; I'll do it for free, and for decades at a stretch. That's what I call a good time. I realize this.

And it isn't as if I think that playing make-believe is or should be the realm of the very very young. We suspend disbelief (to a certain extent, anyway) every time we read a novel or watch a movie -- if we didn't, what would be the fun? I don't even mind when people take their pretending to extremes that might seem, well, extreme. I've done it myself. I worked for years as a street actress at the Renaissance Faire, happily piling on layer after layer of throat-high, ankle-length clothing and pretending to be a bread-monger's apprentice who had the good fortune to live several hundred years ago in a time and place where it was much cooler than southern California and people talked funny. I will honestly say that the six weekends a year that I spent cheerfully winning calling contests and throwing myself into truly legendary street fights with other apprentices were not only the happiest times I've ever spent; they were the only days that really seemed to count. All the rest of the year, I would mend my costume and work on my character's family tree (how many brothers did I have? how old was my mother when she died in childbirth?) and read Shakespeare and biographies of Elizabeth I and work on my accent and voice projection in preparation for the twelve days that mattered. As the opening of the Faire approached, I would go to the workshops that taught all the character development and dancing and singing and cursing that would transform me into Gillian Baker and allow me to leave the mundane world of homework and suburbia far, far behind.

I wasn't alone in this. The other members of the guild -- grownups, responsible people with actual jobs and everything -- often got together throughout the year to discuss the Faire. Sometimes we'd just have a party in our costumes, but more often we would natter about the plot lines of our own ongoing sixteenth-century soap opera. Would this be the year that Luke finally married Susan (they'd been talking about it for years)? Should they have an actual wedding at the Faire, or just announce it as a fait accompli? The guy who played the sheriff had asked if my character could be his illegitimate daughter -- if I agreed, how (if at all) would that affect my position in the guild? Nell had a crush on someone in another guild -- could they make it work, or would she have to either give him up or switch to his? And on, and on, and on. Our relations thought we were insane, but it was a cheaper and slightly less destructive addiction than, say, heroin, so they ignored or indulged us with as much good grace as they could muster.

Given, then, my own past and present eagerness to slip into fictional universes, I ought to be the last one to complain when, say, a previous annotater of the Holmes chronicles (the legendary William S. Baring-Gould, to be exact) devotes whole paragraphs to whether or not the day in the case in question was Wednesday or Friday. Sure, Watson says it was Wednesday; but he also says that it was "a perfect day," and if you check the historical records, Wednesday, April 4, 1883 (the date claimed by the writer) was only sunny for two hours and two minutes. Whereas Friday of that same week was sunny for nine hours and two minutes.

It's not just that at this point I stop caring. I move right into flat-out complaining. Call it screaming, if you insist on being accurate. And if you can make out any words at all in the midst of all those howls, they're probably something along the lines of would you people please kindly GET A LIFE?

I don't think that contradicts everything I said before at all. Yes, I love visiting the world of Sherlock Holmes. Yes, I think he's one of the single most compelling characters ever. Yes, I own multiple editions of the books and even some of the movies. (Two words, people: Jeremy Brett.)

But there is something at once too precious and too meticulous about the loving vivisection the stories are subjected to by some of their most ruthless admirers. I don't want to have to worry about what the weather was really like on April 4, 1883. If I wanted the real world, why would I be reading this lovely fiction?

That's what bugs me, I guess. The insistence on fitting Sherlock Holmes and his adventures into our world. When what I really want, and what I would think any reader would want, is to travel to his.

It reminds me of one of his most famous lines from one of his most famous stories, "A Scandal in Bohemia." Holmes receives a rather mysterious note from a client-to-be. Watson asks Holmes what he thinks it means, to which Holmes replies, "I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." I do not wish to twist Holmes' universe in order to fit it neatly into ours. I want to stretch ours to include his.

However, I am apparently the only incessant re-reader of Holmes who finds the game not worth the candle -- who wants, in fact, to blow the damned candle out. I'm afraid I'm losing all perspective, not to mention patience. If you'll excuse me for a minute, I'm going to go relax and watch some Star Trek.

Thanks. I feel much better now. As I was saying, we're reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Some are also going on to The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. If you don't have time for all the stories, or if you're some kind of weirdo commie freak who actually doesn't enjoy them, at least read the following stories to get your dose of cultural literacy:

• "A Scandal in Bohemia," so you can enjoy watching Holmes being outsmarted, and by (gasp, horror, faint, thud) a woman;
• "The Red-Headed League," one of the best-known, most entertaining and easily the most humorous of the Holmes stories;
• "A Case of Identity," since I think it is one of the cleverest of the Holmes stories, one in which although a great wrong takes place technically no crime is committed; and also one of the most genuinely Victorian of the stories, steeped in the time and place and absolutely impossible to transplant or transport elsewhere without damaging it fatally;
• "The Man With The Twisted Lip," a riveting story and, as Leslie Klinger (editor of the new annotated edition) points out, one of the first "play-fair" mysteries -- one in which we have all the same clues at the same time as the detective has them, and so if we can't figure it out and he can, it really is because he's smart and we're dumb;
• "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," one of the best-written, worst-premise mysteries ever;
• "The Greek Interpreter," which as a story is just okay, but in reading it you do get to meet Holmes' bigger (in every sense), smarter brother Mycroft; and
• "The Final Problem," in which we catch a glimpse of Holmes' nemesis Moriarty ("The Napoleon of crime").

All but the last two of these stories are in The Adventures; the others are in The Memoirs. If you only have time or patience to read one story, flip a coin and choose between "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Red-Headed League."

I know I mentioned this a minute ago, and also got into quite a spittle-emitting fit of enthusiasm about it at the last two meetings, but I must say it again: please, please, please do yourself the great favor of watching Jeremy Brett play Sherlock Holmes. No, not in person -- he's dead, and yes, now you know why I'm always wearing that black veil. But the library or Netflix ought to have the DVDs of his performances.

The movies aren't always the most faithful renditions of the stories. In fact, some of them feel distinctly padded, plot-wise. But Jeremy Brett gives an incredibly compelling performance of what Holmes might really have been like if such a creature ever could have existed. Not the tall, smiling, suavely urbane London-gentleman-who-just-happens-to-be-a-detective that Basil Rathbone gave us (and in case that sounds disrespectful, I want to say right now that I was crushed out on Rathbone for years and still think he is quite, quite fine). Instead a bizarre, brilliant loner, all genius and no social skills, who seems at once unutterably full of himself and yet, while on a case, possessed of no ego at all; coldly logical but capable of real compassion. Brett manages to bring this all across with irresistible force and unshakable authority.

I almost never enjoy movies made from or based on books. Pretty much the only times I do are when the movies can in some way illuminate the text, throwing needed light on characters or plot. Amanda Root's Persuasion made me (and a lot of other Janeites) understand why the main character could ever have been in love with a man like Captain Wentworth; the movie of The Accidental Tourist convinced me that Macon Leary was right to go with Muriel Pritchett, when the book still had me wondering. Jeremy Brett proved to me that Holmes lived and breathed.

(But he didn't take down Hitler and Stalin. I have to draw the line somewhere, people.)

Happy reading (and Happy New Year) from
The Book Lady

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