It was back in the 1970s, when it was still a fairly recent film, that I first saw “A Study In Terror” – on a small, black and white TV, I believe.
I was very happy with it at the time. I very much liked John Neville (a top rank English stage actor who never quite made the A list in the movies) as Holmes. I was delighted when Robert Morley showed up as Holmes’ brother Mycroft (Mycroft’s first appearance ever on screen). And I relished a fight scene where Holmes snapped a spring-loaded blade from his walking stick and fenced with his attackers (“Nothing like cold steel, eh, Holmes?” says Watson).
I watched it again on YouTube the other day. I didn’t like it quite as much this time (my tastes have matured, I think) but it deserves more attention than it’s gotten.
This 1965 movie was produced in collaboration with Sir Nigel films, a company controlled by the Conan Doyle estate. However, it’s not based on any Doyle adventure, but is rather an original story in which Holmes investigates the Jack the Ripper killings. The story flirts with the slasher/horror genre, within the bounds of what you could get away with in theaters in those days. The blood and gore is mostly just suggested. Which is fine with me.
I was somewhat disappointed by the look of the film. This was “Mod” 1960s, and the costuming is unnecessarily bright for Victorian tastes. I also regretted Donald Houston’s performance as Watson. He’s closer to Nigel Bruce than to Edward Hardwick – though not quite as cartoonish as Bruce.
If you’re fond of Hammer Films’ “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” “A Study In Terror” is very much in the same vein, and John Neville was every bit as good a Holmes as Peter Cushing (whom I revere) was. In some ways, I think, he anticipated Jeremy Brett’s approach. I wish Neville had had a chance to play the role again.
Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-stated performance.”
The last Sherlock Holmes novel (as opposed to short stories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote was The Valley of Fear, which was serialized in the Strand Magazine during 1914-1915. Doyle set the story well back in time, before Holmes’ “death” in a fight with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Doyle places Moriarty in the story’s background, laying some preemptive groundwork for the story, “The Final Problem,” where Moriarty, one must admit, appears a little suddenly for an arch-enemy and nemesis.
In The Valley of Fear, Holmes gets a cipher message from an informant inside Moriarty’s organization, warning him of danger to a man at a country place called Birlstone House. Soon after this, a police detective named MacDonald arrives to ask him to help solve a grisly murder at that very place.
They arrive at Birlstone, which is a stately house surrounded by a moat, whose drawbridge is drawn up every night. So it’s virtually impossible that anyone sneaked into the house during the night. But some time that night, the owner of the house, Douglas, was murdered in his study, his face destroyed by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun. The circumstances make suicide unlikely, but in that case how did the murderer get away? Holmes, of course, goes over the crime scene carefully with his magnifying glass, and it’s not long before he hits on the solution.
I have to admit that The Valley of Fear is one of my least favorite Holmes stories. It follows the pattern Doyle used in A Study In Scarlet, where you have half the story describing the investigation, and the other half consisting of the killer’s confession, in which he explains his back story and motives. (Borrowed loosely in this case from the story of the radical American labor group, The Molly McGuires.)
Doyle seemed to believe (and perhaps he was right in terms of his audience at the time) that people would enjoy stories about far-away, exotic places like the American West or India. I find Doyle a pretty pedestrian writer in these narratives. He tends to get the local details wrong – his American slang here is pretty clumsy, for instance. When I read a Holmes story, I want Holmes, and London. Or at least Victorian England.
So I can’t say I love The Valley of Fear. But if you’re a Holmes fan, you’ll want to read it.
A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. It filled the whole air, and yet it was impossible to say whence it came. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy throbbing murmur once again. Stapleton looked at me with a curious expression on his face.
“Queer place, the moor!” said he.
“But what is it?”
“The peasants say it is the Hound of the Baskervilles calling for its prey. I’ve heard it once or twice before, but never quite so loud.”
I looked round, with a chill fear in my heart, at the huge swelling plain, mottled with the green patches of rushes. Nothing stirred over the vast expanse save a pair of ravens, which croaked loudly from a tor behind us.
The origins of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book, The Hound of the Baskervilles, are fairly well known. When Doyle returned from medical service in the Boer War in 1901, he had not written a Sherlock Holmes story since 1893, when he killed the detective off for good and all (or so he thought) in The Final Problem. Doyle was tired of writing detective stories. He found them formulaic and uninspiring. But the public was still hungry for more, and, after a tour of Dartmoor with a journalist friend, he hit on a fresh kind of Holmes adventure. Technically he didn’t resurrect his character at that time – he set the story back in 1889, before his “death.” He seems to have been inspired by the legend of Squire Richard Cabell of Brook Hall in Devon, who was remembered as “a monstrously evil man.”
As the story begins, Holmes and Watson are visited by Dr. James Mortimer, who tells them the story of his late friend Sir Charles Baskerville of Baskerville Hall in Devonshire, who died (apparently) of fright on his country estate one night. Mortimer says that he himself observed the footprint of “a gigantic hound” near the body – and Sir Charles had been living in fear of a legendary hellhound said to haunt his family on account of the wicked deeds of one of their ancestors.
Now, Mortimer says, the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, is coming from Canada. Although, as a man of science, he has a hard time believing in demons, he is uneasy about Sir Henry’s safety, and wishes Holmes to help protect him. Shortly after Sir Henry’s arrival, he receives a sinister warning letter made of words cut out of a newspaper and pasted on paper, and Holmes also observes him being followed by a bearded man in a cab.
Nevertheless, Holmes claims prior commitments that prevent his traveling to Devon for the moment. Instead he sends Dr. Watson, with instructions to keep him informed of developments by letter.
What follows is a rather delicious gothic mystery, complete with a bleak setting on the moors, the baying of an unseen hound, the presence of a fugitive murderer, and a mysterious figure observed watching from a hilltop in the nighttime. It all leads to a headlong, shocking climax.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was the first Holmes story I ever read (my Aunt Midge gave me a copy when I was in junior high), and it made me an immediate – and lifelong – Holmes fan. I find it hard to believe that Doyle – in spite of his expressed weariness with his character – did not have fun writing it. If he was looking for a fresh approach to telling detective tales, he found it.
I might also mention (and this impressed me) that way back in 1902, Doyle (perhaps because he was a physician) had the sense (unlike a thousand mystery writers who came after him) to realize that the right way to break down a locked door is to kick it in with the sole of your foot, not slam your shoulder into it.
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must be the truth?”
In 1889, Arthur Conan Doyle, struggling young London physician and aspiring writer, had one of those magical moments that save a career and change literary history. He’d already sold a detective story called A Study In Scarlet to an English publication, and now an American publisher, Joseph Marshall Stoddart of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, was asking for a follow-up. His company proposed to start an English version of their magazine, and they wanted the rights to a new story that would be printed both in Britain and America (music to a writer’s ears!). Stoddart invited Doyle, along with several other writers (Oscar Wilde was one of them, and would influence one of the characters in the final story), to a dinner at the Langham Hotel on August 30. Doyle agreed to bring Sherlock Holmes – who’d never been intended as more than a one-off character – to life again in a serialized novel to be called The Sign of the Four.
The story opens in Holmes’ and Dr. Watson’s lodgings, where Holmes is suffering a period ennui for lack of work. (This is the first time we learn of his cocaine use, to which Watson strenuously objects.) Then they are visited by Miss Mary Morstan, a young woman Watson finds extremely charming. She tells them that a mysterious benefactor has been sending her periodic gifts of valuable pearls. Now she has an invitation to visit a man named Thaddeus Sholto, who tells her she has been grievously wronged, and he wishes to put things right. Holmes and Watson agree to accompany her to see the man, who proves to be a hypochondriacal esthete (the Wilde influence). He says he is the son of a recently deceased retired officer from India, who was a close friend to Mary’s father. But his father, he says, cheated her father, taking possession of a treasure that should have been shared by both. Now his brother Bartholemew also refuses to divide the wealth. Thaddeus asks them to go with him to face Bartholemew and get Mary’s rights for her.
But when they all go together to see Bartholemew, they find him hideously murdered and the treasure missing. The police, when they arrive, arrest the hapless Thaddeus. Holmes and Watson take their own line in the case, following up Holmes’ scientific observations and deductions. Eventually it will all lead to a reckless chase down the Thames in steam launches, and a lurid confession from the true murderer.
One can discern an acquisitions editor’s hand in the framing of The Sign of the Four. To appeal to readers’ tastes, Doyle has added a couple elements missing from A Study In Scarlet. First there’s a romance (one is happy for Watson in finding a wife, though Doyle never knew what to do with her in later stories and fans have happily wasted tons of paper arguing back and forth how many times Watson was married). Secondly, there’s a chase, employing about the fastest transportation technology available at the time.
TSOTF has never been one of my favorite Holmes stories. Mainly (as I said in my previous review) I don’t much care for the foreign excursion; I like Holmes in his element – yellow fog and hansom cabs, top hats and bowlers. And Doyle generally does foreign cultures somewhat poorly – this story features three Sikhs in India named Mahomet Singh, Dost Akbar, and Abdullah Khan. Of all those name elements, only Singh would be used by actual Sikhs. The rest are Muslim names, absurd in context.
Doyle was not the first or last detective writer to distort police procedures for the sake of his plot, but the deviations seem pretty extreme here – would a police inspector actually allow a treasure box that’s material evidence in a homicide case to be carried to a private person’s home before examining it before witnesses? Whatever happened to chain of custody?
This is also the story where Doyle’s memory fails him, and he informs us Watson is suffering from a leg wound from Afghanistan, rather than the shoulder wound he had in A Study In Scarlet. More inexhaustible fuel for controversies among Holmes scholars.
Still, it’s a Holmes story, and not a bad one in its best parts. (The quotation at the top of this review, one of Holmes’ best-remembered lines, comes from TSOTF.) I always had the idea that it was this story that made Sherlock Holmes a public sensation, but that’s not true. It was the short stories, which Doyle would now begin writing, that would really put him on the literary map.
“Poor devil!” he said, commiseratingly, after he had listened to my misfortunes. “What are you up to now?”
“Looking for lodgings,” I answered. “Trying to solve the problem as to whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price.”
“That’s a strange thing,” remarked my companion; “you are the second man to-day that has used that expression to me.”
“And who was the first?” I asked.
“A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital….”
Back in 1886, Arthur Conan Doyle was a struggling physician in the London suburb of Southsea (I’ve always understood that he was an ophthalmologist, but his Wikipedia bio says he didn’t turn to eye medicine until a few years later). Lacking patients, he devoted some of his abundant leisure time to writing, with some success. He sold a detective story called “A Study in Scarlet” to Beeton’s Christmas Annual, a publication remembered today almost solely for that story. It was a one-off; Doyle took the modest fee and went on to other things.
But the story came to the attention of the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine in the US, and he commissioned a sequel. This would be “The Sign of the Four.” Doyle’s fictional detective, based to a large degree on the analytical methods of his medical teacher Dr. Joseph Bell, was off like a galloping horse – one that would eventually (in Doyle’s view) run away with its owner.
Having, as I mentioned before, started re-watching the excellent BBC Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett, I decided it would be pleasant to re-read the stories – something I haven’t done, I think, since the 1970s. I was right. I enjoyed “A Study in Scarlet,” which I read in this inexpensive Kindle collection (they’re all out of copyright now) immensely.
If you’re not familiar with the story (it’s never been properly dramatized, for reasons I can understand), it’s narrated by Dr. John H. Watson, an army surgeon recently returned from Afghanistan, where he was wounded in action. He’s living on his medical pension while recovering, and starts looking for a roommate. (See the extract above.) He soon finds himself living at 221B Baker Street with the eccentric Sherlock Holmes, whose profession is a mystery to him for a while. Finally, Holmes reveals that his frequent visitors, Lestrade and Gregson, are Scotland Yard detectives. He himself is the world’s first “Consulting Detective.” When the policemen ask Holmes to come view a body found in an empty suburban house, Holmes asks Watson to come along.
I’ll leave it at that. The story is to get hold of, and easy to read. Doyle’s prose is certainly Victorian, but not stuffily so. His characters are vivid; his dialogue is sharp, even after all these years.
I’ve always rated “A Study in Scarlet” as one of the weaker stories, mainly because of the “back story” chapters, where the murderer – arrested (he uses the delightful Americanism “snackled” for it) after being lured in by Holmes, explains how and why he came to commit the terrible murders he is confessing. The story takes us back to the American Wild West and the Mormon state of Utah. This back story works better than I remember, though (although I have no time for Mormon theology) I still think the Mormons are portrayed pretty harshly.
But taken all together, I found “A Study in Scarlet” more entertaining than I expected. And I have even better stories to look forward to, as I move into Doyle’s stronger work.
One caveat about this edition – it appears that, in scanning, the OCR software incorporated the page numbers into the text. So you’ve got to ignore those when they show up.
I’ve found myself watching some of the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes from the 1990s, on YouTube. They’re all there, I think, or at least most of them. I’d forgotten how truly excellent they were, especially at the beginning. Toward the end, Jeremy Brett was visibly unwell and putting on weight, and those scripts, based on inferior Conan Doyle stories, were (in my opinion) weaker.
I was surprised to discover that Jeremy Brett played Freddy in the 1964 film version of “My Fair Lady.” He was good in that role, but playing what they used to call “Juvenile” parts was not his true destiny. (I always thought Freddy should have gotten the girl, and indeed that’s what happens in G. B. Shaw’s original play.)
Granada Productions made a serious effort to do Sherlock Holmes in a manner faithful to the original stories. The series bowled me over back in the day, and it has aged excellently. Brett got the job because he resembled Sidney Paget’s original illustrations – except that Paget’s Holmes was pretty bald. The sets were great, the costumes were great, and Brett’s performance was at once faithful to Doyle’s descriptions and wildly original. Doyle tells us that Holmes would have made a great actor, and Brett plays him as an actor, affecting theatrical gestures and vocal flourishes. One wonders whether the man is quite sane (Brett’s life story suggests he wasn’t entirely), but we always wondered about Holmes the same way.
If you’re looking for top-shelf literary adaptations, check these out.
I was familiar with Anthony Boucher (real name William Anthony Parker Wright), mainly because he wrote the scripts for the old Sherlock Holmes radio program. He was a prominent writer, editor, and critic in his heyday, working both in mystery and science fiction. Among his mystery heroes was a detective named Fergus O’Breen. But Fergus doesn’t appear in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars; his sister does.
If you’re a fan (like me) of Sherlock Holmes, you’re probably familiar with two different groups known as the Baker Street Irregulars. The original group showed up occasionally in the Holmes stories, a ragtag gang of London street urchins who ran errands and served as informants for the Great Detective. The second group is an organization of Sherlock Holmes fans, originally organized in 1934 by Christopher Morley. It might be (I’m not sure) the first Fandom group. I’ve occasionally considered joining our local affiliate, which was called (last I heard ) The Norwegian Explorers.
Anthony Boucher was himself a member of the Irregulars, and paid his BSI friends the compliment of making them look like complete horses’ rear ends in his novel, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars.
This is the scenario – the president of Metropolitan Studios in Hollywood is planning to make a movie based on the Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” But he made the mistake of hiring Stephen Worth, a drunken, opinionated hard-boiled mystery writer, to do the script. Worth, however, actually hates the Holmes stories, and has been very public about it. The members of the BSI, of course, are outraged – and some of them are quite prominent and influential (membership has included, over the years, Alexander Woollcott, Isaac Asimov, and Franklin Roosevelt). So the studio head invites a group of BSI members to come to Hollywood at his expense and serve as technical advisors. He puts them all up in a large Hollywood house, and the very first night Stephen Worth shows up drunk and unleashes a tirade on them all. Later that night, he is shot to death in his room. Then his body disappears.
What follows is a very strange sequence in which each BSI member has a bizarre, improbable adventure which oddly echoes various elements from Sherlock Holmes stories. They report on these adventures to a gathering of the whole group, in monologues modeled after the ones you find so often in the Doyle stories (and I’ve always found those monologues the most tedious parts. They are no more riveting here). In the end they all gather once more to try to determine the real murderer.
There’s a lot of clever plotting in The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars. But it’s too complicated, too implausible, and too clever by half. Toward the end I stopped caring, but I did finish the book. (I might mention that Boucher was a leftie, and his political sympathies come through here and there.)
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars is worth reading for its historical significance, but it’s not a great mystery novel. I found myself sympathizing a little with the murdered, hard-boiled Stephen Worth.
In meetings at Kensington Cross For lingo I searched at a loss. One word—marinara Was all I could bear, uh, For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.
No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.
Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).
The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.
After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.
Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)
Dante’s Inferno: “Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.
“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)
Big news in the literary world today – as this article from the Chicago Sun Times reports, Sherlock Holmes will finally be wholly in the public domain as of tomorrow, the last copyrights for his stories having run out. (If I understand correctly, most of the stories are already out of copyright, but Doyle was still cranking the things out – reluctantly – in 1927).
That was two years before he was filmed doing the interview above. It’s ten minutes divided into two halves. The first half – the interesting part – tells how he came to write Holmes, and discusses the character’s fame. In the second half, Doyle climbs up on his perpetual hobbyhorse, Spiritualism. You, like me, might want to give that part a miss.
I think Doyle underrates himself as a writer in this monologue. He suggests that the great appeal of Sherlock Holmes was the logical, “scientific” approach to problem solving. I think the great draw was always the inherent interest of the characters, especially the friendship between Holmes and Watson.
One of the little stock speeches I often employ to repel prospective acquaintances involves a comparison between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. If you watch very old Holmes movies (and I’ve viewed a few lately), you might be surprised to see that they’re always set in the years when the film is made. Thus we see him and Watson tootling around in automobiles and talking over phones. (In one strange film, The Speckled Band [1931], Raymond Massey plays a youngish Holmes employing a stable of secretaries to continually collate information for him, like a primitive database.)
I like to point out that people in the early 20th Century saw Holmes just the way we see James Bond today. The Bond stories were originally written in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the movies began in the ‘60s and have gone on from there. Thus we think of Bond as a contemporary. We assume he’s operating in 2022 (soon 2023), and that he carries a cell phone and uses a PC, among other things. The fact that this is a very different level of technology from what’s found in Ian Fleming’s original stories doesn’t bother us at all.
In exactly the same way, people in the 1920s thought of Holmes as a man of their time. They expected him to drive a car and use a phone (and in fact, in the later Doyle stories he actually does those things). The idea that Holmes should be stuck in the late 19th Century only came later. The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone (1939) was the first movie to put him back in period, and that was an innovation.
What we have above is a genuine treasure of Sherlock Holmes lore. The original popular image of Sherlock Holmes came from Sidney Paget’s illustrations for the Strand Magazine in London (bald, long nose). But in American magazines, the foremost illustrator was Frederick Dorr Steele, who based his image on the handsome actor William Gillette, who played Holmes more than 1,300 times on stage in a play he wrote himself. Steele’s Holmes largely superseded Paget’s as the popular image of the great detective.
In 1916, Essanay Studios of Chicago filmed the play (with additions), and Gillette played the role yet again. This historic film was long believed lost, but in 2014 a print was discovered in France. This version had been released as a serial for the French audience, and included extra material not found in the American version. This French version has been splendidly restored, and the dialogue cards have been recreated using Gillette’s script. The orange and blue tinting is original.
Artist Paget bestowed Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker cap on him, but it was Gillette who gave him the curved calabash pipe, which did not wiggle so much when the actor talked. I hadn’t heard about the re-discovery of this film, and am still astonished I can see Gillette himself in the role.
Like many an aging actor before and since, he’s playing younger than his actual age, with a love interest about old enough to be his daughter.
