In light of the ever-expanding popularity of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries in conjunction with recent adaptations including the Warner Brothers films, the BBC series, and the CBS reimagining, it falls to me to discuss certain disturbing tendencies on the part of new devotees to refer to that venerable institution, the Baker Street Irregulars, as a “fandom” when it is actually a literary society. The youth of the Sherlockian world will be excused for making this dare I say elementary error, since the case for the distinction has not been hitherto laid out. Following the summation of this article, however, fans and traditional Sherlockians alike will have reached a much clearer understanding, and the unfortunate misnomer of referring to the present Irregulars as a “fandom” will doubtless cease and be swiftly forgotten.

(Note: for the purposes of this intellectual exercise, the possibility that the BSI may potentially be a storied and erudite literary society and a happily thriving fandom simultaneously will be ignored. This decision was made in light of the fact that a noun cannot be two things concurrently, the way the Empire State Building is not both a functioning office tower and a tourist destination, and the way Bill Clinton is not both a former president and a saxophone player. Arguments that the BSI is peopled by both cultured readers and by eager fans would only muddy the issue, and therefore will not be entertained here.)

[Clarification at last...]

First of all, I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. If you love CBS’s new crime drama Elementary starring Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson—if you adore it, and have already started making plushies resembling the co-stars and are considering relocation to a dilapidated Manhattan brownstone—then I applaud you and your taste in television. With all sincerity. I think you are wonderful, and I’d like to take you out for a pint. There is room for every new Sherlock Holmes to come down the pipeline; The Great Mouse Detective can coexist in the same world Sherlock Hound occupies, be their species ever so incompatible on paper. Sherlockians like watching new Sherlock Holmes adaptations, period, and we will continue to do so until a production so wholly embodies the detective and the doctor that lo, Paget’s illustrations will have sprung to heady life before our very eyes, and the spirit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters will at last be recreated to definitive perfection.

But that day has not yet arrived, so we can move forward! (That is, if you're prepared for slightly spoiler-y comments on plot elements.)

[Fuggedabout it! Let's go already!]

From the day I started watching House MD on November 16, 2004, right up until this last month when the eighth (and final) season finished delicately extricating my heart with a dull ice cream scoop, the show has been a mainstay of my highly selective television viewing. Because, see, I don’t have a television. My husband and I have been without one for eight years now, preferring a projector screen for DVDs and the laptop for more casual fare, and House was the only program—literally solo contender—that was such consistently good programming that I have seen Every. Single. Episode. Bar none.

Well, that’s because I’m a Sherlockian, of course. But we’ll get to that. All in good time.

[Hmmm, whatever could she mean?]

In 1971, Universal Pictures produced a film titled They Might Be Giants starring George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward as, respectively, “Sherlock Holmes” and Dr. Mildred Watson, chronicling their adventures fighting crime in New York City. Sound familiar? But wait, it gets better. This Holmes is in fact a mental patient by the heroic name of Justin Playfair, whose life is in real danger due to his grasping elder brother’s attempt to usurp the family estate. When Dr. Watson is naturally seized upon as Playfair’s partner in imaginary mayhem, the pair gallivant about Manhattan fighting foes both real and illusory, all the while pretending to be the dynamic duo of the Victorian era.

But They Might Be Giants, for all its Sherlockian iconography, isn’t a Sherlock Holmes reimagining. In fact it’s a Don Quixote pastiche, and an admirable one—it’s about defying reality when reality is too grim or too dull or too heartbreaking, about falling in love with heroism and refusing to be told that the world no longer needs justice served up by brilliant vigilantes.

It takes Cervantes’s novel as its inspiration and delightfully tweaks it for a modern era.

It respects the spirit of the source material.

And that, makers of CBS’s Elementary, is why I must apologize to you for recent murmurs of Sherlockian pissiness. Because some of us fear you don’t get that principle. At all.

[But lest you think our hearts are barred. . .]

Yesterday in Part 1, we examined three Watsons (speaking of which, did you catch The Two Watsons comic?), but there are more modern Watsons yet to peruse.

As I said when we began: this one’s for the lovers of brave soldiers, able medics, and steadfast friends. And here’s to John Watson, who flew that flag before it was cool. This one’s for the other half of the partnership: the narrator, the everyman turned superhero, the teller of tales, the conductor of light. Sláinte.

[Watsons, Watsons, everywhere...]

He emerges from a hellscape, bullet-pierced and feverish. Still game for trouble and drawn to the dangers that lurk in the dark. He survived a war-torn desert by the very skin of his teeth, and all the while he was engaged at healing. The perennial paradox of the Army doctor, giving life and taking it, all in the name of honor. When he arrived in London “worn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships” he had undergone, with “neither kith nor kin in England, and…therefore free as air,” he found himself bored. Shaken. In financial trouble and spiritual turmoil.

Then Dr. John H. Watson, MD, meets Mr. Sherlock Holmes. So it all works out for the best. Particularly for us: admirers of the fabled pair, and readers grateful for Watson’s efforts with a pen and a service revolver. 

Here’s to the lovers of brave soldiers, able medics, and steadfast friends. This one’s for you.  And here’s to John Watson, who flew that flag before it was cool. This one’s for the other half of the partnership: the narrator, the everyman turned superhero, the teller of tales, the conductor of light. Sláinte.

[And to the men who have portrayed him...let’s raise a glass!]

In December of 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was guilty of the premeditated and willful murder of Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, a consulting detective of some public renown. “I have had such an overdose of [Holmes] that I feel towards him as I do toward pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day,” he had said previously. He wasn’t just whistling Dixie. In a reader response famed for its brevity and the universality of the sentiment among Victorian fans, “You brute,” a woman penned to the author, whose greater work—he imagined—was unfairly shackled to Holmes.

(Perhaps unfairly, SPOILERS abound for those daring to read on.)

The suggestion that people wore mourning bands in the streets to honor the fallen character may be apocryphal. But if I had a mourning band, I’d likely be sporting it today. So maybe it isn’t. And the Strand Magazine did lose approximately 20,000 subscriptions.

“You brutes,” I now address Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, creators of BBC’s hit series Sherlock. But “brutes” as in the High and Holy Poobahs of Most Excellent, Thoughtful, Affecting, and Generally Heart-Incinerating Creators of Dramatic Television Content, Department of Ferocious Winning. Just to be clear.

[—Crystal. Go on!]

It might be the most widely recognizable phrase in the Sherlock Holmes canon, barring that business about “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” (which Holmes did say), and “Elementary, my dear Watson” (which he didn’t say).  The statement is so loaded with the pungent Victorian scent of melodrama and succinctly rendered spookiness that when reading it—somewhere between the ages of around twelve and twenty, as is often the case—one sees the usefulness in fainting couches.

“Mr. Holmes,” Dr. Mortimer asserts, “they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

If this final sentence of chapter two of The Hound of the Baskervilles frightens you upon reading it, fantastic.  If a faint shiver or a surge of curiosity instead takes place, well and good.  The fact remains that the statement has become legendary as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does.  Dr. Mortimer has never seen the devil hound, which is the stuff of local legend and is said to have “tore the throat out of” Hugo Baskerville, and frightened Sir Charles Baskerville to death.

But he has seen footprints.  What made them, and how, and to what extent can he trust the evidence of his own eyes?

Be also warned: Your eyes will see SPOILERS about this episode if you continue!

[A gigantic hound, I believe you said?!]

[No, you did not miss the US premiere of the BBC’s Sherlock Season 2. Some of us watched the UK feed and were anxious to discuss it. Believe me, we’ll be doing so again on May 6, when it premieres on this side of the pond! But if you don’t mind a few spoilers, dive on in!]

In the year 1891, when publishing a short story in the Strand Magazine no one realized would change the world of fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a brave storytelling decision. Yes, it was also ballsy to take his eccentric, but not very lucratively received, “independent consulting detective” from A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four and turn him into a serial hero—a man who solved crimes not in novella form, which is difficult, but in jewel boxes of perfectly constructed short stories. Which is impossible. Read a tale lifted from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and try to write something as audacious and delightful and efficient.

Go on.

I dare you.

As I say, the mere notion of creating a supersleuth and then presenting him in a series of articles was an innovative enough notion—yes, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin also appeared in magazine short stories, and Edgar Allan Poe created the detective genre. But Poe died poor, and Doyle had no intention of doing likewise. No, what I consider to be the unprecedented move for pure talent, wit, and stones in the Adventures is as follows:

Why don’t I create a protagonist, argued Doyle, who is irresistible and eccentric and very nearly omnipotent?

And then, while I’m still building his resume and talking him up in his first short form adventure, why not have him beaten by a girl?

[Why not, indeed?]

I like testosterone.  Always have. If you like your testosterone served piping hot, with more than a splash of Tabasco, a creamy dollop of ultraviolence, and a healthy slice of goggle-wearing, tin car-driving, machine gun-wielding steampunk pie for dessert, look no further than this film.

I’ve a rather rueful confession to make: I collect Sherlock Holmes pastiches (including the ripely terrible ones) and would probably think fondly of a wet paper bag on the side of the road so long as it had the words “Sherlock Holmes” written on it.  That being said, did I enjoy Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the latest installment in the ever so brawny Ritchie franchise?

Yes. I enjoyed it like a house on fire. In many aspects I loved it, and in one single aspect, the storytelling improves on Arthur Conan Doyle. Heresy! you shout, but I’ll come back to that.

There are SPOILERS ahead, nothing too drastic, but a few salient points. Without giving the Game away, of course.

[Onward, we must!]

On December 24th of 2009—long, long ago, eons past, before Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch elevated Belstaff winter wear to the crown prince’s robes of Sherlockian culture—Roger Ebert wrote a review of Guy Ritchie’s hotly anticipated film Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.  “The less I thought about Sherlock Holmes,” he said, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, “the more I liked Sherlock Holmes.” 

It’s a fair assessment.  The film is a grimy pageant of pseudo-Victorian steampunkery, in which murder, melodrama, mayhem, and yes, an ever-so-slight thread of mystery, too, are churned together into a gloriously gritty Sherlockian piña colada.  That the film isn’t thoughtful is largely irrelevant—it’s cracking good fun, and most critics agreed that the fact things hardly ever exploded in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty-tale series is no reason why things should not explode now.  Sherlock Holmes, he of the masterful intellect and the cherrywood pipe, can exist in a world where things explode indiscriminately and not suffer much by it.  The question now seems to be, will Sherlockians remain pleased with Downey’s manic wit and the explosions surrounding him, when the BBC series Sherlock is also cracking good fun, and deeply thoughtful to boot?

[Hmmm.  Let’s have a puff and cogitate upon it, shall we?]

I’ve never downloaded an electronic book.

My book has sold a number of Kindle copies, which leads me to feel a strange imbalance—what does it mean that I produce material for a media I don’t engage in?

I am not one of the people who insist that all books must be printed matter, and can sympathize with the argument that denigrating e-books is classist. While the Harry Potter series was being released while I was in college, for example, I would go quite unashamedly to Barnes and Noble down the road from my dorm and read them cover to cover.  (I was careful to leave them in pristine condition.)  An e-reader might have saved me from awkward moments sitting on industrial carpeting, but given a choice, I’d much prefer to read a book with pages and ink and binding.

Otto Penzler—editor of over fifty mystery anthologies, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop, longtime Mystery Writers of America board of directors member, and a man whose name has been synonymous with mystery fiction for decades, not to mention a nifty fellow—has just launched a digital version of his publishing house, MysteriousPress.com. My Luddite tendencies are many and varied, so I asked why a leader in the field of print publishing for so many years would delve into the digital market.

Otto Penzler:  I don’t own a Kindle or Nook or iPhone or anything technical beyond my 25-year-old television. There’s a cell phone around here someplace, but I have no idea where. I read real books. Yes, I think e-books will ruin (no, let me rephrase that—have already ruined) many bookstores, and more will die because of them. Still, I can’t help but recognize that they are terrific in terms of affordability and accessibility.

[Hidebound, yet forward-looking. . .]

Edward Hardwicke, known to fans round the globe as the second actor to play Dr. John Watson in Granada Television’s beloved Sherlock Holmes series, passed away due to cancer at the age of 78 on the 16^th of May, 2011.  A former pilot officer in the Royal Air Force, he is survived by daughters Kate and Emma, stepdaughter Claire, and his second wife, Prim Cotton.

Known by his friends and co-workers as a man of great warmth and generosity of spirit, Hardwicke’s connections to the Sherlockian world were almost uncannily extensive.  Hardwicke’s father, contract RKO actor Cedric Hardwicke, was close friends with Nigel Bruce, of the iconic Rathbone and Bruce productions of Sherlock Holmes for the big screen, when the family lived and worked in Hollywood.

[A fine actor and uncommon Everyman. . .]

or A Good Nemesis is Hard to Find

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously thought about as much of writing new tales for his Great Detective as Scarlett O’Hara thought of farming her own vegetables.  While necessary for continued survival, the task didn’t exactly thrill the gentleman, and by December of 1893, he had succumbed to his darkest urges and shoved Sherlock Holmes from the top of a very tall, very wet waterfall in Switzerland.  The key problem with “The Final Problem,” Holmes’s temporary swan song, was Doyle’s urgency; he thirsted so for the detective’s blood that he produced a frankly ridiculous short story in which an elderly maths professor with odd spinal curvature manages to wrestle a 37-year-old boxer, singlestick expert, and “baritsu” fighter—who can untwist bent steel fireplace pokers, by the way—to his death.  Enter Messrs. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss of BBC’s television series Sherlock, who in episode three of the first season go one better than Doyle himself by giving us an arch-rivalry that actually makes a lick of sense.

[Maybe Sherlock forgot to limber up?]

or the End of a Perfectly Good Moustache

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as they were genuine adventures, were always embellished with flourishes of the exotic.  Doyle knew his audience, and Britishers who had never so much as set foot outside their own nation thrilled to accounts speckled with not merely Indian swamp adders (which do not exist) but pint-sized, blowdart-wielding, cannibalistic, “naturally hideous” Andaman Islanders (who do not exist either) and “rascally Lascars” (who may possibly exist, but surely would fail to appreciate the description).  As stories, they are products of an empire-building nation preoccupied with tales of faraway lands.  I wonder, though, when presented with the second episode of BBC's rightly lauded series Sherlock, entitled “The Blind Banker,” whether we need quite such a dose of the same aesthetic these days, within the context of modern adaptations.  I strongly suspect we don't.

[Orientalism: the good, the bad, and the ugly.]

I'm one of the very few Sherlockians I know possessed of a rabid aversion to deerstalkers.  When I think about the iconic chapeau of our personal hero, I get an expression on my face not dissimilar to Keith Olbermann's moments before the glasses are torn off and Camera Three gets a wet lensful of disdain. 

There are only two good reasons for this quirk, really.  First, the deerstalker was a spring-in-the-countryside sort of accessory, the kind that required a rifle and muddy tweeds and a spaniel called Byron or Lulu, and they are tragically overused by peddlers of Sherlock Holmes-related culture and paraphernalia, and the proper use of fashionable accessories is a practice very dear to my heart.  And second, I was born right around when AC/DC was busy releasing Back in Black, which means that “my” Sherlock Holmes was never going to be Christopher Plummer in Murder By Decree, leaving the opera wearing a. . .a thing on his head resembling a sordid affair between a pancake and a tartan skirt.  I've never sat through an entire Basil Rathbone film, because the instant poor Nigel Bruce opens his mouth, I start seething.  Jeremy Brett, he of the Sidney Paget-appropriate sartorial choices, undeniable theatrical talent, and slightly overcaffeinated facial expressions, came within a close shave.

And now there is Benedict Cumberbatch swanning ferociously about in a Belstaff coat and wine-colored dress shirts, and the Holmes in my head is alive and well and living in London.

[Who needs a deerstalker when you've got looks like these. . .?]