Incoherent Memoirs

An unusually stressful month has becoming an unusually stressful week, but I have an escape - the box set of the Ronald Howard 'Sherlock Holmes' TV series. This tends to be looked down upon in the pantheon of media Holmes. The episodes are short, 20/25 minutes, it was filmed somewhat cheaply in France with limited sets, and the copies that have survived, if any decent copies exist in the first place, have not been served well by some ropey looking DVDs which appear to have been mastered in some cases straight from VHS! But.... they have some secret ingredients. For starters, Ronald Howard as Holmes and H. Marion Crawford as Watson are excellent in the roles, with great chemistry. Howard's Holmes is a lofty, aloof but chummy character, not at all acidic, and Crawford's Watson is blustery, forthright and prepared to bop evil-doers on the chin at the drop of a deerstalker. More often than not they're joined by Archie Duncan as a Scottish and grumpy Lestrade (who impre...

Seemingly oblivious to these insults to the feelings of his wife, Watson risks yet more dramatic wifely disapproval in TWIS when he makes two blunders.  The first is that on finding Mary's friend's errant husband (the old sot had repaired to an opium den) he doesn't rush back home - and this is after midnight, mind - but packs the drug-fiend into a cab with a hastily scribbled note and then dashes off with Holmes on an overnight adventure.  Which is the second blunder - for on joining Holmes he finds himself spending the night in the house of Holmes' client, a Mrs Neville St Clair: the door flew open and a little blonde woman stood in the opening [...] She stood with her figure outlined against the flood of light... Mary must have blown her top over this one! It is the closest a Victorian gentleman could politely get to saying "phwoaarr" in print.  In fact it is to be strongly suspected that here is the real reason for Watson's temporary return, in 1887, t...

For some weird reason this 2-part post has been languishing as a Draft since I started re-reading the (un-annotated) Holmes canon last year! So, better late than never, may I humbly present these notes on Dr Watson - the early years! * 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'  relate the saga of a man who positively danced with danger, threw caution to the winds and found himself skating on increasingly thin ice. That man is our friend John H Watson! Dr Watson, as all his readers know, is the most noble and romantic of men. He makes this wonderfully clear throughout SIGN. Immediately smitten with Holmes' latest client Miss Mary Morstan, he nevertheless keeps his feelings silent out of the belief she'd think him something of a male gold-digger (for of course she is the apparent heir to a horde of Andaman jewels). When he wins her hand in marriage at the novel's end we cheer his good fortune. And yet, in setting down his first impressions of the woman who is to later becom...

(sorry for the tortured title...!) 'The Retired Colourman' shows us a Holmes in philosophical mood. As he has just seen the decrepit form of Josiah Amberley leave 221b it's easy to assume he is thinking on his case. But is it not possible that Holmes is, prompted by the shambling form of Amberley, himself considering retirement, and the possible Pros and Cons of such a decision? In CREE ( as we have seen ) there is case to be made that Holmes is on the brink of considering retirement. There are a good many touches in RETI that can be discerned as backing this up.  The character of Barker seems important in this connection. Is he really a "hated rival" as Holmes says? The phrase seems lightly ironic. Their behaviour and conversation, indeed the way in which they can be said to have 'teamed up' on this case, seems much more friendly than that - although of course there is such a thing as friendly rivalry.  Is Barker more than merely a rival detective? Is h...

After being summoned by Holmes' laconic telegram at the start of The Creeping Man (the famous "if inconvenient..." ) Watson is given a quick summary of the matter at hand. But Holmes adds "I had hoped for a longer chat". Is this purely because he wanted to go into greater detail? I think not, as the client arrives immediately thereafter to give a more than ample account. I think there were other things Holmes wanted to discuss with his old friend. I think he was finally considering retirement and he was hoping to get Watson's opinion. We are told that this was "one of his very last cases" - perhaps even the last? Watson himself is rueful at the opening of the story as to how he had become simply a part of the furniture. Clearly things had lost some of their sparkle and the now re-married Watson himself had less time for gallivanting about with his detective friend (we're a far cry from the early days of The Adventures ). With Watson summone...

Part 4 - 'The Horror in the Eyes' Having survived three brushes with death by whatever the 'lurking fear' might be, our narrator continues his quest "with even greater zeal" - and he is still aware of being close to madness ( "There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who..." ) but not yet fully over that threshold. When I first read the story, it wasn't immediately clear to me what actually transpired at the end of Part 3 - helpfully it is explained more coherently here, with the narrator making it clear that the creature appeared over the shack ( "twenty miles away" ) at the same time he was being transfixed by the sight of a horrible claw and eyes in the underground tunnel. Weird Tales may have been primarily a horror magazine but it was 'pulp' through and through, and all such pulps - horror, sci-fi, thrillers, even Westerns - shared a kindred DNA. HPL himself may have loftily aspired to literature (or at least pretend...

Reading 'The Adventures of Conan Doyle' by Charles Higham recently, he describes a possible source for Professor Moriarty. One 'George Moriarty' appeared as a rather strangely behaved criminal in the pages of The Times: It appeared that the person was of an unsound mind, and had been sent to prison from this court several times during the last 15 or 20 years with drunkenness and assaults. He had also been committed from there several times as a lunatic. He then went on to brandish a knife, smash a window and try to throw himself through it, apparently unsuccessfully. It must be said that as a source for Holmes' arch-nemesis this chap seems unlikely. He's a drunken violent lout, hardly a criminal mastermind. There is by no means enough there to even warrant us supposing that the name stuck in Doyle's mind as some sort of byword for criminality. Even Higham's telling us that Doyle "always read The Times" is hardly cast iron proof. Higham is so ...