The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (17 page)

I prize that story above all the others, in part because of Watson’s free rein. Delivered from Holmes’s shadow, this visitor to Devonshire is gallant, fearless, impeccably well-mannered, and a strong shoulder for the troubled young baronet to lean upon, emotionally and physically. He’s the perfect houseguest. Were the situation reversed, and Holmes in residence sans Watson, the detective might find his bags packed and waiting for him in the entrance hall after three days, mystery or no.

Above all, Watson has the virtue of self-effacement. He allows himself to appear less astute than the reader, rendering himself more approachable than the aloof and awesome Holmes, without sacrificing respect for his native intelligence. The thinness of this particular highwire is best appreciated when someone falls off—a frequent occurrence among those who have attempted to duplicate the stunt. Said the detective, sorely missing his friend’s assistance in “The Blanched Soldier”: “A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate.”

In recent years, the best and bravest companion any detective ever knew has fared better on the big and small screens. Two different takes on Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper, 1965’s
A Study in Terror
and 1979’s
Murder by Decree
, gave us Donald Huston and James Mason, respectively, and David Burke and Edward Hardwicke took turns balancing out Jeremy Brett’s nervous, arrogant Holmes in the Thames Television series of the 1980s. In 1976, Robert Duvall, one of the best actors of his generation, immersed himself in a stirring, sympathetic role opposite a manic Nicol Williamson in
The Seven-Percent Solution
. These were intelligent and sensitive characterisations, involving bouts of heroism and masculine charm, and any of them could have sustained a long and loyal relationship with the eccentric sleuth. But it took a new century and a new kind of moviemaking to give us Watsonians what we’d craved from the beginning.

Critics who had obviously been reared on Nigel Bruce dismissed Jude Law as “too pretty” for the role, unaware that until “Charles Augustus Milverton,” one of the last entries in the series, when the character was well into middle age, he had never been described in detail. Certainly, internal evidence regarding his popularity with women suggest dash, personality, and a pleasing figure and countenance: a hunk, in postmodern terminology. And he is a man of action, a fit partner for Holmes the fencer, prizefighter, and practitioner of martial arts. When we first see Law in
Sherlock Holmes
, he is seated in a Black Maria in full gallop beside Lestrade, buzzing the cylinder of a loaded revolver in the Wild West tradition; within moments, he’s flattening henchmen with his fists and coolly swapping lead with killers. More than once he saves Holmes’s life, when he isn’t sniping at his friend’s annoying eccentricities. This is no overstuffed geezer, ducking his head and smiling cherubically at a condescending pat on the head from his master.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
followed in 2011, with all the same counters in place (as well as the delicious wrestling match between Holmes and Professor Moriarty atop the boiling Reichenbach Falls, accompanied by whole snatches of narrative and dialogue taken straight from the Canon). Both films were huge commercial successes, and more are promised.

This first big franchise of the third millennium was advertised, and accepted by reviewers, as a “reimagining” of the Canon, but there is nothing here that was not there from the beginning. Holmes and Watson were the predominant action heroes of the horse-and-buggy era. When they were discovered by Hollywood, the “buddy picture” was born.

If there is a Valhalla for superhuman sleuths and their all-too-human compatriots, it will allow them freedom at night to leap aboard a hansom in the fog and provide them a cosy cluttered place by day to feast upon cold fowl, whiskies-and-soda, and tales from Watson’s storied tin box. If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow-lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timbre of a feminine voice, so much the better, for us and them. Literature never produced a relationship more symbiotic, nor a warmer and more timeless friendship.

There is nothing so important as trifles.

—Sherlock Holmes

T
his essay represents my sole contribution to
The Baker Street Journal
, the late great publishing organ of the Baker Street Irregulars. Named after Holmes’s unofficial spy network of street urchins, the BSI is a national organization whose members meet in regional groups throughout America and at an annual banquet in New York City to discuss and celebrate the lives and adventures of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, and whose pleasant conceit is that the pair are historical figures, not creatures of fantasy. The piece appeared in the March 1982 number. It’s an affectionate takeoff on learned discourse in general, which is a hallmark of the BSI. It has not been in print in thirty years.

While paging through Walter B. Gibson’s fascinating potpourri,
The Shadow Scrapbook
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), which recounts the career of that dark avenger who for twenty-five years kept audiences glued to their radio sets to find out “what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” I was struck by the resemblance of The Shadow as depicted by various illustrators to another avenger whom we all know and admire.

Between the black slouch hat and cloak was that same hawklike profile which, reproduced in wax and cast upon a drawn blind, caused Colonel Sebastian Moran to expend both a bullet and his freedom in the spring of the year 1894. Equally as prominent were the piercing gray eyes, bushy brows, and tightly pressed lips so suggestive of a red Indian. Sidney Paget, the man whose pen-and-ink drawings in
The Strand
magazine set the pace for all representations of Sherlock Holmes to follow, and Tom Lovell, whose artistic talents graced the pages of
The Shadow
magazine for many years, might have been working from the same model.

I thought little of this at the time. Similarity of features is hardly conclusive evidence, and wasn’t The Shadow a fictional character created by Gibson writing under the pseudonym of Maxwell Grant, later to find greater fame through the media of radio and the screen?

But hold. What was this item reproduced from the very first story, “The Living Shadow”?

Who was The Shadow? In
The Shadow Unmasks
, he is said to have been famed aviator Kent Allard, lost and presumed dead when his plane went down over the Yucatan Peninsula years before, although Grant made the same claim about millionaire Lamont Cranston, only to reveal later that Cranston was just another of the many guises The Shadow assumed to continue his war on crime. Accepting The Shadow’s existence (for who can prove a negative?), it seems probable that the chronicler’s subject supplied him with equally false information regarding Allard in order to protect his own identity.

Physical appearance having been dealt with, what are the other “handles” by which we may hope to grasp the secret?

1. Wrote Gibson/Grant, in Otto Penzler’s
   The Great Detectives
   (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1978): “The most inimitable of The Shadow’s features was his laugh, which could be weird, eerie, chilling, ghostly, taunting, mocking, gibing, sinister, sardonic, trailing, fading, or triumphant.” In
   The Hound of the Baskervilles
   , Watson, writing of
   his
   hero, stated: “He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter.… I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.”
   
2. The Shadow was a master of disguise, with “the ability to assume new identities with chameleon rapidity.” This talent enabled him to counterfeit the appearance and actions not only of financiers Cranston and George Clarendon, but also of various denizens of the underworld, so well that he could infiltrate their ranks without suspicion. Holmes’s felicity in this area is legendary, as his “very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.”
   
3. In his youth, The Shadow journeyed to the Orient, where he acquired, among other things, “the power to cloud men’s minds.” Holmes spent most of his Reichenbach-induced hiatus in the East, where he amused himself “by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama.… passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum.” Later, Watson made mention of his friend’s “almost hypnotic power of soothing,” and confessed upon more than one occasion to a sensation of dullness in the presence of the great man’s brilliance.
   
4. An expert shot with either hand, The Shadow displayed his marksmanship time after time against overwhelming odds with an automatic pistol in each hand. Certainly it would have been no feat for him to accomplish Holmes’s “patriotic V.R.” in bullet-pocks on the wall of the sitting-room at 221B.
   
5. Returning to physical description, a contest held among The Shadow’s many fans during the 1930s, in which clues to the identity of the Knight of Darkness were passed over the airwaves, established him as tall and slender: two of Sherlock Holmes’s most striking physical characteristics.
   
6. Despite his spare physique, the great detective possessed exceptional strength, which allowed him to perform such stunts as the straightening of the fireplace poker twisted by the villainous Dr. Roylott in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Holmes’s “grasp of iron” is mentioned in “His Last Bow.” In
   The Living Shadow
   , would-be suicide Harry Vincent was saved from a plunge off a high bridge by “an iron grip” that lifted him back onto a solid footing “as though his body possessed no weight whatever.”
   
7. The term most often employed in describing The Shadow’s purpose is that of “avenger,” likening him to a fierce angel sent straight out of the Old Testament to punish evildoers. Similarly, Holmes once said, “I am the last court of appeal,” and, in “A Case of Identity,” resorted to the threat, if not the actual intention, of smiting a particularly disagreeable adversary with a riding crop.
   

Is it just a coincidence that the dark punisher made his first appearance shortly after Holmes took “His Last Bow”? There is, of course, a question of age, as the Canon indicates that at the time of The Shadow’s entrance in 1930 the Victorian detective would have been seventy-six, hardly capable of the exploits assigned this swashbuckler. But are we to believe that the royal jelly derived from Holmes’s bees would prolong his life without extending the properties of youth? Would he have bothered to partake of it if it could not, like Fu Manchu’s
elixir vitae
, be expected to retard the aging process in order to spare his great mind the horrors of dissolution? It’s a reasonable theory at least, and far more of an explanation than either Holmes or Watson offered for this bizarre choice of hobbies in retirement.

Granted, The Shadow’s methods are not those of the Sherlock Holmes we know. But the Master was always ahead of his time, making use of the latest advances in criminal scientific research—indeed, in devising his own—while Scotland Yard bustled about photographing murder victims’ retinas in hopes of lifting images of their assailants. As more law enforcement units adopted his strategy, is it so inconceivable that he would advance yet another step, the better to stay ahead of his opponents? New York City having replaced London in importance, would he not contemplate a change of scenery, secure in the knowledge that to the world at large he was enjoying a life of meditation and apiculture on the South Downs? Would not the experience gained from Sherlock Holmes’s war with Professor Moriarty aid The Shadow in his never-ending struggle against Shiwan Khan, lineal descendant of Genghis, who plots to rule the world?

Was it coincidence that Orson Welles’s voice was heard over the ether as both The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes? Or was it a mocking clue dropped by the man who returned the naval treaty to a distraught Percy Phelps in a covered dish?

Accents are immaterial. Holmes had disguised his voice before, to suit his various masquerades. Should professional assistance be required, not all the voice coaches of the Broadway stage were in Hollywood, helping former silent-screen stars improve their diction to suit the era of sound. They could train the others in his circle to trade their crisp
t
’s and short
a
’s for the broader Yankee pronunciation.

Could Watson have been the mysterious Burbank, who relayed The Shadow’s instructions to his nameless ring of adherents? Could they have been the adult counterpart of the Baker Street Irregulars? Was the lovely Margot Lane, Lamont Cranston’s confidante and The Shadow’s female accomplice, Irene Adler? Could thickset, sedentary desk man Claude Fellows have been Mycroft, persuaded to abandon the Diogenes for Cranston’s and Clarendon’s exclusive Cobalt Club? Or are we straying too far?

Only The Shadow knows.

T
he best source, of course, is the original. For those who know Sherlock Holmes only through the many adaptations of his adventures, or the thousands of tributes and pastiches written by other authors, I recommend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
A Study in Scarlet
,
The Sign of Four
,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
,
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
,
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
,
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
,
His Last Bow
,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, and
The Valley of Fear
; for those who know him already from these books, I recommend a return visit. They’re as enchanting the twentieth time round as they were the first.

A complete bibliography of writings
about
Holmes would command as many volumes as the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and more than most lifetimes. He has been written about more than any other character in literature, including Hamlet and Don Quixote, and more material appears by the day. The following is a limited listing of some of the best that have come my way. They have all been of immense help in all my writings about the world’s greatest detective and his loyal partner.

Baring-Gould, William S., ed.
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967.

Baring-Gould dedicated much of his life to Sherlockian scholarship, and this is the end result, a massive two-volume compilation of all the stories and novels in the Canon, arranged chronologically in the order in which the cases occurred (as opposed to order of publication; a Homeric effort of internal and external reasoning), with sidebars and footnotes provided by hundreds of the editor’s colleagues, and reproductions of the original illustrations that accompanied the stories. It’s a treat for old-school aficionados and fresh converts alike, the ideal pastime for an inclement weekend when the wind “sob(s) like a child in the chimney.”

Baring-Gould, William S.
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
. New York: Bramhall House, 1962.

This is a delightful biography of Holmes, citing numerous references in the Canon for its speculations on the life and times of the world’s first consulting detective, and a fitting preparation for Baring-Gould’s magnum opus (see above).

Bullard, Scott R., and Collins, Michael Leo.
Who’s Who in Sherlock Holmes
. New York: Taplinger, 1980.

What it says it is, concentrating upon the clients, witnesses, victims, and villains who crossed Holmes’s path.

Carr, John Dickson.
The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
. New York: Harper & Row, 1949.

One of the first, and still the best, of Conan Doyle’s many biographies. Carr, who collaborated with (some say ghosted for) Arthur’s son Adrian on
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes
, provides a thorough, respectful, and enormously readable take on one of the most popular writers in history, with insight into the sources of his inspiration. The biographer makes the case that Conan Doyle’s simultaneous championship of rational thought and embrace of spiritualism were entirely consistent with his character.

Hardwick, Michael and Mollie.
The Sherlock Holmes Companion
. New York: Bramhall House, 1962.

One of the first encyclopedic references to the characters, events, and settings employed in the stories. An entertaining read as well as a life- and time-saver for scholars and pasticheurs. The Hardwicks spent hour upon hour poring through the Canon so we don’t have to.

Harrison, Michael.
In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes
. New York: Drake, 1976.

What was significant about Fleet and Harley streets? Where is Covent Gardens, and what do they grow there? Can one still get a meal at Simpson’s? These questions and hundreds more are answered here. A fine guide to have on your desk, or under your arm during a walking tour of London. Harrison walked it, you can be sure.

Park, Orlando.
Sherlock Holmes, Esq., & John H. Watson, M.D.: An Encyclopedia of Their Affairs
. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1962.

Until Jack Tracy’s exhaustive reference appeared (see below), the existence of “dueling encyclopediae” helped to fill in certain gaps found in one or the other. I still recommend Orlando and the Hardwicks for their slightly different cataloguing procedures, which together provide direct access to certain elusive details. (Reprinted in trade paper by Citadel as
The Sherlock Holmes Encyclopedia
in 198l.)

Rosenberg, Samuel.
Naked Is the Best Disguise
. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.

I’m not sure whether Rosenberg’s written a satire of literary scholarship in general or is dead serious about his assertions. He draws a fuzzy parallel between Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
and the life of Friedrich Nietzche, but for the life of me I don’t see what they have to do with each other, or for that matter what either of them has to do with Sherlock Holmes. But watching the author leap from one absurd conclusion to the next is great fun, like watching a clown shot from a cannon into a vat of Reddi-Wip.

Starrett, Vincent.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Not to be confused with Billy Wilder’s clever film of the same name (and which gives us not a bad Watson in Colin Blakely), Starrett’s was the first Holmes biography, as well as one of the first to treat a character generally regarded as fictional as if he really lived. The book raises and answers many of the questions that still interest Sherlockians, and may have been the catalyst that created the Baker Street Irregulars, with the inspiration of the older Sherlock Holmes Society of Great Britain. It’s as much fun to read (and reread) as Conan Doyle’s stories themselves. (WARNING: This book contains material that may turn the reader from a casual fan into a diehard Holmes fanatic. It did me.)

Tracy, Jack.
The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.

This is the be-all and end-all of its kind: Everything you always wanted to know about the stories and novels, organized alphabetically and with an eye towards swift access between two covers, with illustrations and photographs. It appeared while I was writing
Sherlock
Holmes vs. Dracula
, sent to me by my copy editor, and was indispensable during the process of revision and later when I wrote
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
. I still keep that tattered copy at my elbow when I’m writing a new Holmes story. But you don’t need to be a pasticheur to find it valuable, as well as a diverting read when nothing else on your shelves seems to fit your mood.

Tracy, Jack, with Jim Berkey.
Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes and the Cocaine Habit
. Bloomington, IN: James A. Rock, 1978.

This slim paperback, out of print for many years, wastes not a word in examining Holmes’s grim addiction, the drug itself, its importance to the detective’s life and work, and the harrowing consequences were he to continue in the practice. Much has been written about this side of his life, but this book eschews fulsome speculation in favor of cold hard facts. It’s horrendous and riveting.