Initial reflections on Sherlock Holmes

A couple of weeks ago I got a package in the mail. I get a lot of packages in the mail, generally because I order a lot of things online. Which come in the mail. In packages.

But this one was different because I did not order it. It was from Barnes & Noble, though, and it had my name on it, so I opened it. Some anonymous person had sent me The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Since my father is not usually in the habit of sending me packages, of course I had to read it. (I'd been meaning to read it anyway, but had never gotten around to looking it up.) It took a little while to finish my current backlog, but soon I was in need of a fresh book, so I got started.

Delightful. Absolutely delightful. Several times I have found myself laughing out loud, not because it is hysterically funny, but out of sheer delight.

More on that later.

Today I want to talk about Sherlock Holmes.

At some point, when I was a teenager, I devoured every word of the Holmes canon, including the Pointless Mormon Interlude in the middle of A Study in Scarlet, because I didn’t know any better.

Then, not wanting to stop, I kept working through the library’s collection of Conan Doyle’s complete works in a couple of massive hardcover volumes. I read Brigadier Gerard. (I liked Brigadier Gerard.) I read the weird quasi-science fiction stuff, including the very bizarre story where it turns out that the earth is alive and they drill down and it’s all squishy and stuff. (Professor Challenger, I think, is the guy. Normal mad scientists would find him rather odd.) I read all the short stories, not knowing that some of them tended more toward horror than toward mystery. ("Lot 249" scared me so badly that, to this day, I am afraid to reread it so that I can find out if it really was all that scary. According to the introduction in one edition, it gave Rudyard Kipling nightmares. So I'm not a total wimp, or if I am, at least I'm in good company.) I read until I ran out of Conan Doyle to read.

So, for a start, let me just say: Conan Doyle was one weird guy. You know the Sherlock Holmes story with the fellow who starts to sort of turn into a monkey? I’m sure he believed that was totally plausible. And that's really one of the less wacky things he believed.

And also: Not all of his stuff is as good as you think. You know Moriarty, the great arch-villain? In the actual Holmes canon, there is no foreshadowing. There is no suspense. Moriarty is not in the least bit scary, because you only just heard of him five minutes ago, and you haven’t had time to get scared, much less to actually care. “The Final Problem” is wholly unsatisfying. The Reichenbach Falls sequence is a cop-out. The explanation you get for it in “The Empty House” is unconvincing. It only works at all because you care about Holmes and Watson. Homes and Watson are the thing: the rest is just window-dressing. Sometimes it’s really fantastic window-dressing, but sometimes it’s just a bare pane of glass.

The bizarre and yet totally believable relationship between the egocentric genius and the one person on the planet who is prepared to tolerate (and even like) him is really the heart of the matter. Sherlock Holmes by himself is just a few good tricks tied together with quirks, eccentricities, and bad habits. He is a walking, talking cliché of The Great Detective. Once the novelty wears off, there is nothing much to keep our attention.

Holmes with Watson, though, is a compelling character.

A complete discussion (or even a partial discussion) of Watson's actual role belongs in another blog post. (Another, much longer, blog post.) But it's the existence of the relationship between the two that is absolutely key. That relationship can be interpreted in different ways, but it has got to be there. (Although I am only halfway through, this appears to be one of the major themes of Beekeeper's Apprentice.) In the rare instances in the canonical stories where Watson does not appear, that relationship remains central because it's only because of Watson that Holmes is writing down the story.

So, you can have a modern-day Watson with sniper training and a purely psychosomatic limp. You can have him played by Jude Law, in which case, well, it's Jude Law. You can have a Mary Russell, who is in many ways the anti-Watson, and it can still work out brilliantly. You can have a team of doctors who are brilliant in their own right and whom you rotate in and out as if they were interchangeable. There is no reason, in theory, why you could not even have a female Watson, so long as you do not do anything so trite as to reduce the relationship to a romance.

But the one thing you cannot do is have a stupid Watson. It doesn't work.

Just to annoy Benedict Cumberbatch, I am currently cautiously optimistic about CBS's Elementary. It could be good. It can't possibly be the worst thing ever to happen to Sherlock Holmes. And if it turns out to be lousy, I can ignore it just as easily as I do all the other non-canonical stories that aren't The Beekeeper's Apprentice.