Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #20. Arthur Conan Doyle
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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 them together into a small anthology. Instead, he wrote about them.
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When Sherlock Holmes hung out his shingle as the world’s first consulting detective, his original clients were what he called “government detectives” and private ones who needed his unique help. But over the years he also served crown and country on numerous occasions—although not always both at the same time. This should not be surprising in one whose patriotism was reflected in the V.R. design of the bullet holes on the wall at 221B.
Leaving aside the sometimes contentious issue of chronology, the first published case in which Holmes’s client is a government official is “The Naval Treaty.” Watson’s old school fellow Percy “Tadpole” Phelps, working at the Foreign Office through the influence of his mother’s brother, appeals to the doctor to get Holmes on the case of a secret naval treaty which had been stolen on his watch.
This treaty between Italy and Great Britain is of enormous importance, says Percy’s uncle, Lord Holdhurst: “The French or the Russian embassy would pay an immense sum to learn the contents of these papers.” Alfred Hitchcock would have called that a McGuffin, his name for the goal or valuable object that the protagonist pursues in a story. Think “The Purloined Letter” or The Maltese Falcon. The Bruce-Partington Plans, the Mazarin Stone, the Beryl Coronet, Baron Gruner’s diary, and the provocative letter at the heart of “The Adventure of the Second Stain”—all of which Holmes sought for Crown or country—are also McGuffins.
Watson’s description of Lord Holdhurst, the foreign secretary and “future premier of England,” is quite telling: “Standing on the rug between us, with his slight, tall figure, his sharp features, thoughtful face, and curling hair prematurely tinged with grey, he seemed to represent that not too common type, a nobleman who is in truth noble.” As Watson hints here, not all noblemen—and not all cabinet ministers—are portrayed so positively in the pages of the Canon.
The dramatic high point of “The Naval Treaty” comes when Holmes has Mrs. Hudson serve up the missing treaty on a breakfast plate. Some commentators have called this cruel, but Watson describes Holmes as having at this point “a mischievous twinkle.” It’s all in good fun for Holmes. But Phelps, just recently recovered from nine weeks of brain fever, is only saved from fainting dead away by having brandy poured down his throat. Fortunately for him, Watson was always equipped with medicinal liquor for just such emergencies.
When he sufficiently recovers, Phelps kisses Holmes’s hand (surely an odd way to show appreciation) and then blesses the detective for saving his honour. Holmes responds: “Well, my own was at stake, you know. I assure you it is just as hateful to me to fail in a case as it can be to you to blunder over a commission.”
In other words, Holmes claims self-interest. But I think he doth protest too much. For later on he says