Susan Knight's Blog, page 10

Holmes the musician

Anyone at all versed in Holmesiana knows that for relaxation from his mental exertions the detective likes to play his violin, a Stradivarius he bought from a pawnbroker’s shop in Tottenham Court Road for 45 shillings, thus displaying both his excellent taste and his eye for a bargain, since the same instrument would easily have been worth 500 guineas.

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In The Red-Headed League, Holmes reveals to Watson his preference for German music. ‘It is introspective, and I want to introspect,’ as he remarks after attending a concert of German pieces given by the famed violinist Pablo de Sarasate (right) at St James’ Hall.  

Watson describe Holmes’ own playing as ‘very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces I knew well, because at my request he has played me some Mendelssohn’s Lieder and other favourites.’ (A Study in Scarlet)

Music thus provides a colourful thread running through the stories and novels, and in 2015 Holmes’ favourite tunes were featured in a BBC prom.

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Contralto Christine Rice sang arias from Wagner’s ‘Götterdämerung’ in the guise of Holmes’ female nemesis, Irene Adler (A Scandal in Bohemia). In that same story, Holmes attends a concert performed by the Halle orchestra, featuring ‘the female Paganini’, Wilhelmine Norman-Neruda (left), and later tells Watson. ‘It was magnificent.’  

As well as Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs without Words’, the BBC concert also included a Caprice for violin by Paganini himself, whom Holmes greatly admired (The Cardboard Box), the Bacarolle from ‘The Tales of Hoffmann’ by Offenbach, which Holmes was supposedly playing in The Mazarin Box (fans will know this was a bluff – it was a recording) as well as pieces from Meyerbeer’s ‘Les Huguenots’ which Holmes and Watson go to see at Covent Garden Opera House after the detective has solved the mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles.  

Holmes is even revealed as a musicologist, having written a monograph on the suitably somewhat obscure polyphonic motets of the Dutch Renaissance composer Orlando di Lassus, pieces also played at the BBC prom. Watson adds that the monograph has ‘since been printed for private circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word on the subject.’

Review: Memoirs from Mrs Hudson’s Kitchen by Wendy Heyman-Marsaw

This delightful little book is packed with fascinating facts relating to late Victorian times and specifically the world of Sherlock Holmes and his landlady, Mrs Martha Hudson.

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It’s not only recipes you’ll find here, which is just as well, since tastes in food have moved on massively since those times. Surely few people today would relish sitting down to a boar’s head in aspic or a coffee beef stew. Who would fancy munching on tobacco cookies, except as a curiosity (steep inner leaves of a cigar in warm water for ten minutes; ‘it will be quite strong with a nicotine sting’)?

Food was stodgy and overladen with butter and cream and one
wonders how anyone could have survived Mrs Beeton’s dinner party menus with
their numerous courses, even if they did end with the ‘poetry of the dessert’.

Interestingly it was in Victorian times that service changed
from ‘à la française’, with everything heaped on the groaning table at once, to
the ‘à la russe’ style we know today, with courses served one after the other.

Wendy’s book also gives fascinating insights into many
others aspects of the Victorian world. For instance, the invention of labour-saving
devices such as the rotary knife cleaner or the insulated ice chest. She takes
us into gentlemen’s clubs and Turkish baths, and describes the fashions. Holmes
may have worn ‘a deer-stalker hat in his travels, but never in London, where it
would have been a serious faux pas.’

Each chapter was originally published as a column in the journal,
Canadian Holmes, and here are accompanied
by original illustrations from the Canon as well as contemporaneous
advertisements. My eye was caught by one for Geo. Roe’s whiskey, ‘endorsed by
the medical profession’.

Memoirs from Mrs Hudson’s Kitchen has been reissued
as a bundle with Barry S Brown’s The
Unpleasantness at Parkerton Manor, as well as my new short story
collection, Mrs Hudson Investigates. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/BO7WRKFFYP

And of course each book can be bought separately.

Peter O’Toole and Sherlock Holmes

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The attenuated and gaunt look of Peter O’Toole would surely make him the obvious choice for a screen Sherlock, and yet it happened rarely enough. I reported last time that O’Toole voiced the detective in an animated version of ‘Valley of Fear’ of 1983, and in fact did the same for three other Australian animations of Holmes tales, ‘The Sign of Four’, The Baskerville Curse’ and ‘A Study in Scarlet’.

However, for different reasons he missed out on at least two
other incarnations of the detective. Billy Wilder had him in mind for the 1970 spoof
film ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, with Peter Sellers as Watson (that
would have been some casting!) but finally opted for Robert Stephens and Colin
Blakeley. 

In 1979 he was initially cast as Holmes in the Jack the
Ripper mystery, ‘Murder by Decree’, with Laurence Olivier as Watson. However,
the two gigantic egos, who had worked together before when Olivier directed the
young O’Toole as Hamlet in 1963, couldn’t get along, and the director opted for
the less volatile pairing of Christopher Plummer and James Mason, who received
special praise for his more thoughtful Watson.

In 1976 O’Toole played three detectives (Holmes, Lord Peter
Wimsey and Philip Marlowe) on stage in Australia in the wonderfully titled
‘Dead Eyed Dicks’ by Peter King.

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And, against physical type this time, he played Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself in the 1997 fantasy film, ‘Fairy Tale, a True Story’, about the Cottingley fairies (left).

Oh, but how I’d loved to have seen him in that Billy Wilder
film with Peter Sellers, fake Loch Ness monster and all.

‘The Valley of Fear’ Revisited

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What a strange book this last Sherlock Holmes novel is, a
real curate’s egg – good, as the cleric politely said to his host, in parts.
The first half could stand as a classic Holmes’ story of deduction, but then it
roars off into the coal mines of Pennsylvania, with a plot based around the secret
and notorious union organisation known as the Molly Maguires, called in the
book, the Scourers. That too is a story that can stand by itself with only a
tenuous link at the end to the first story.

The novel, while enjoyable enough, has the slightly tired feel of the later Holmes stories when Conan Doyle had become heartily sick of his creation and wanted to move on.

Still, it has inspired several films, Conan Doyle apparently loving to see his work on the silent screen. The first, made in 1916, is sadly now presumed lost.

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‘The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes’, made in 1935, is a black and white British film starring Arthur Wontner (on left) as a credible-looking Holmes and Ian Fleming (no, not that one) as a very stupid and vain Watson.

It starts with the murder but merges the two stories in the way that film can, with flash-backs and edits, and, though very dated, isn’t at all bad.

In 1983, an animated version of ‘Valley of Fear’ was made
with Peter O’Toole voicing Holmes.

The book has also been adapted for stage and television and
there is even an Italian TV version of 1968, La valle della paura’.

How Watson Learnt the Trick

The other night I was watching a repeat of the final episode Art, Passion and Power by the incomparable Andrew Graham-Dixon, concerning the art collected over many centuries by the British royal family. Suddenly I sat up in my seat. Graham-Dixon was discussing Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, now on display in Windsor castle. This was a present to the consort of King George V as a thank-you for her support of the British people during World War I and was designed by the famous architect, Sir Edward Lutyens.

The interior of the dollhouse is incredibly accurate and detailed, with replicas of many objects and furnishings from Windsor Castle itself. Tiny paintings by famous artists hang on the walls. The bathrooms are plumbed with running water and the toilets flush! The lifts work. The miniature bottles in the cellar contain real wine and champagne. Graham-Dixon recounted that over 1,500 artists and craftsmen were involved in creating the house.

[image error]The Library: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Postcard 4501-5

But what
struck me most was the library, containing hundreds of beautifully bound tiny
books all containing specially written texts, one of which was contributed by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (other writers included M.R.James, A.A. Milne,
J.M.Barrie, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham. George Bernard
Shaw, an anti-monarchist, refused to contribute).

Conan
Doyle’s story, How Watson Learned the
Trick, 503 words long, describes how Watson figures he has at last cracked
Holmes’ deductive method. He proudly outlines his discoveries to the great man,
only to be utterly debunked and put firmly back in his place.

‘But go on, Watson, go on!’ Holmes concludes. ‘It ‘s a very superficial trick, and no doubt you will soon acquire it.”

Order Mrs Hudson Investigates at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1787054845

Review: ‘The Unpleasantness at Parkerton Manor’ by Barry S Brown, MX Publishing

It was with
some trepidation that I started to read Barry S Brown’s novel, subtitled A Mrs Hudson of Baker Street Mystery.
How would his Mrs Hudson compare to mine? Would they be so alike as makes no
difference?

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In the event, I was delighted to find Barry’s Mrs H to be quite different from mine but in a most engaging way. In this novel that is the first of five (and counting, presumably) Mrs Hudson is a down-to-earth Cockney woman who, in an amusing twist on the original Conan Doyle stories, is actually the mastermind of the detective agency fronted by the two gentlemen, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

The ‘unpleasantness at the manor’, in a nice understatement, consists of two mysterious deaths. Holmes and Watson are dispatched undercover to investigate and report back to their boss, Holmes rather reluctantly, resenting her authority, while Watson, the more intelligent of the two, accepting her superior mind.

There’s an
intriguing plot, with something of a subplot relating to the white Rajahs of
Sarawak – of whom I knew nothing before – and a most satisfying and unexpected
denouement. In the meantime, there’s a deal of sly humour. I particularly
chuckled when Holmes, disguised as the bewhiskered insurance agent Smythe, gets
tied up in knots when asked about his family, and on the spur of the moment
invents a wife, Lydia, and seven children.

I can
recommend this book to all Holmes’ aficionados as well as to anyone who likes a
good murder mystery. It can be ordered through Amazon and is being re-released
this autumn in a bundle with my  ‘Mrs
Hudson Investigates’ and Wendy Heyman-Marsaw’s ‘Memoirs from Mrs Hudson’s
Kitchen’.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07WRKFFYP

The Mrs Hudson Collection

The Sherlock Holmes Journal

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When the latest Sherlock Holmes journal plopped through my letter box at the start of the summer, I was delighted with its sparkling new layout. Of course, fine feathers do not necessarily make fine birds, but I found the content equally attractive. Heather Owen’s fascinating editorial describes the evolution of the Journal from its first manifestation in 1952 to its present form. She describes the reluctance over many years for the Society’s Council to embrace change, replying to her requests to update with the answer ‘oh no, we must keep it the way it has always been. ‘

So she was pleasantly surprised when in February of this year, they replied ‘Yes, why not.’ The results will surely delight all readers.

Among the articles, stories and reviews are such whimsy as The Adventure of the Missing Tail, featuring Sherlock the Pooh.  On the more serious side, Simon Smyth investigates The Case of the Two Coptic Patriarchs mentioned in passing by Watson in The Retired Colourman, as one of the many he has not had time to write up. Another by Anthony Butler examines the case for Norman Collie to be viewed as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. Despite many telling similarities, both in personality and in appearance, however, Mr Butler is not convinced and sticks by Dr Joseph Bell.

For me as a crime writer, perhaps the most interesting article is by Vincent Delay, arguing the case for Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone as a forerunner of Holmes. In the course of a lively piece he quotes from Roger Knox’s 1928 ‘ten commandments’ of detective fiction. These include: ‘not more than one secret passage or room allowable’ and ‘no Chinaman must figure in the story’ (this at a time when there was a surplus of sinister Oriental characters in detective fiction).

[image error]Sergeant Cuff questions Miss Verinder, by George du Maurier

My favourite
concerns ‘the stupid friend’, whose intelligence must be slightly below
average, so that, having finished the story, the readers, although surprised by
the ending, can congratulate themselves with ‘I may have been a fool, but at
least I wasn’t such a  doddering old fool
as poor old Watson.’

See
http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk

pre-order ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1787054845

Mrs Martha Hudson biography

In my
stories, set in the late eighteen-nineties, Martha Hudson is a middle-class
widow approaching fifty years of age. She was born in the rural Home Counties
of England but has lived most of her adult life in London, in the celebrated house
at 221B  Baker Street. Her sister, Nelly,
lives in a city in the North of England as revealed in my story Mrs Hudson and the Vanished Man. Following
the death of her beloved Henry many years before, Mrs Hudson has had to take in
tenants, the most recent and long-lasting of whom is Sherlock Holmes. She has
two daughters, one of whom, Judy, is married to a Scottish doctor. In my story,
Mrs Hudson goes to Edinburgh, she
visits Judy who is about to give birth to her second child. It is only by
chance, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson being away when a young woman is in dire
need of assistance, that she starts her investigative career in the first story
in my collection, Mrs Hudson and the
Smiling Man. To her surprise, she finds she has a certain practical skill
in that regard, and is soon called upon to bring her particular feminine
expertise to bear on a number of cases. Sadly, her gentlemen tenants are
dismissive of her activities and since Dr Watson declines to write up her
adventures, she is forced to do it herself. 

The
collection will be launched in November, just in time for the Christmas market,
so watch this space.

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A note on the image: when hunting out a suitable picture of Mrs Hudson, I checked out an old family photograph album on my father’s side, dating from Victorian times and landed on this ancestor of mine without having a clue who she is. Actually, that’s not true, I recognised her immediately. She IS Mrs Hudson.

Mrs Hudson Investigates

When in my
innocence I hit on what I thought was a most original idea, a series of Mrs
Hudson Investigates stories, I had absolutely no idea what a weird and
wonderful world I was venturing into, a world inhabited by Holmes enthusiasts from
every corner of the earth. And I was joining hundreds of authors intent on
writing new Holmes stories, or stories from the point of view of Holmes’
side-kicks like Dr Watson, Mycroft Holmes and yes… Mrs Hudson herself.

The first
publisher I approached liked what I wrote but told me they weren’t interested
because others had written stories putting Holmes’ landlady centre stage.  For a while I was discouraged, but then I
thought, these stories are good and worth a readership, and so I consulted
Roger Johnson, editor of the Sherlock Holmes journal. He immediately suggested
I contact Steve Emecz of MX publishers which specialises in all matters
Holmesian. In record time, Steve gave me the thumbs up and so my stories will
be published by MX in November. I hope you will like reading them as much as I
enjoyed writing them, entering into the skin of a late Victorian lady and
writing in her voice.  

[image error]Steve Emecz and Susan Knight

pre-order the book at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1787054845