Sherlock Holmes

As I stood mesmerized by the lacy green motion, the rich odour of earth, the endless sussuration of the flat leaves brushing the sky, it came to me that this country embodied the Chinese doctrine of paradox:  the apparently weak prevails over the overtly strong; soft and yielding will always overcome hard and rigid.
--Laurie R. King, Dreaming Spies (Bantam Books, 2015)

Sentences that include "skein" or "sussuration" ... --they're literary.
--James Parker, The New York Times Book Review, Feb. 21 2015

Laurie King's Dreaming Spies is a book about Sherlock Holmes and his wife Mary Russell, who first met in The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994 and have now appeared in thirteen books.  At the beginning of the series King's Holmes was not much different from Doyle's, except perhaps that he was more interested in women after he retired.  The first books in the series were interesting and appealing, as Holmes and Russell gradually fell in love and Holmes used her scholarly assistance in solving crimes, but gradually Holmes assumed less and less importance and in some later books in the series barely made a token appearance.  Dreaming Spies takes place in 1925 (before some of the earlier books in the series), mostly on a passenger ship going from India to Japan, Bombay to Kobe.  There is some marvelous stuff about the interactions of the people on the ship and much detail about traveling through Japan and taking the baths along the way.  But when the detecting begins, with an attempt to recover a book that contains some kind of secret plan or treaty, it becomes unconvincing and formulaic, with plenty of clichés about the differences between West and East and little ratiocination from Holmes.  King, at least so far, has largely failed to show how marriage and semi-retirement have changed Holmes from the character in Doyle.

I also recently watched Bill Condon's Mr. Holmes, a movie in which Holmes, in 1947, lives with a housekeeper and her son and is trying to recover the memory of his last case, even at one point going to find prickly ash, to aid his memory, in the destroyed Hiroshima of Japan, a country that has changed much from 1925.  He gradually recovers his memory, about a woman who wanted to live with him and committed suicide when he failed to respond to her broad hints. The movie reminded me of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), in which a detective fell in love with the woman he was following, and especially, Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), in which Holmes made the mistake of falling in love and being betrayed by the woman.  Condon, who also made Gods and Monsters (1998) about director James Whale growing old, does a beautifully low-key job of showing Holmes's love of beauty and the country after years of grimy London.  The irony of course is that nature provides its own share of violence.

Max Schmid, on The Golden Age of Radio (WBAI, 99.5, Sundays 7 PM to 9) has been playing the Sherlock Holmes radio dramas, in which Holmes was played by Basil Rathbone and Watson by Nigel Bruce, from 1939 to 1946.  On January 21st of this year he played Murder at the Big Top from Feb. 4, 1946, written by Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher (for many years a reviewer of mystery fiction for The New York Times).  Perhaps because this episode was near the end of the series the mystery was not that mysterious.  But Boucher and Green effectively conjured up the circus as Watson had remembered it (the stories were usually told by Bruce as Watson to Harry Bartell, representing the sponsor, Petri Wine) and Holmes was very much in the Doyle tradition, solving something of a locked room mystery with ratiocination.  To many people Rathbone is the radio and movie incarnation of Holmes (he and Bruce made 16 films during the time the radio show was running).

I have to admit that I do not care for the recent television versions of Sherlock Holmes but I do understand why some find them appealing:  in an age full of religious excess Holmes represents the triumph of reason and logic.  But Holmes's personality seems to me too deeply imbedded in Victorian and Edwardian England to survive an update to the 21st Century.