Susan Knight's Blog, page 8

Blundering through

Writing Sherlock spin-offs has many pit-falls, notably in the need to avoid anachronisms and errors. For example, a pedantic reader of my stories recently asked if I had ascertained whether or not it was permitted to smoke on trains in Victorian times (as relevant to my story, Mrs Hudson and the Vanished Man, where the man disappears after going off for a smoke). My reader cited John Stuart Mill whom he remembered had something to say on the topic. I had not checked but assumed, possibly influenced by all those films showing Sherlock puffing away on his pipe as the train races through the countryside.

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Actually, though, Conan Doyle himself was notoriously cavalier with facts. Apparently among all Holmes’ train journeys, only one conformed to an existing timetable. And scholars over the years have had fun combing through the stories to find other inconsistencies and errors. The famous example is of course in the story, The Blue Carbuncle, in which the jewel is secreted in the crop of a Christmas goose, a zoological miracle, since geese don’t have crops.

Other errors include the Japanese martial art, baritsu, which Holmes claims to have employed to escape from Moriarty and the deadly tumble into the Reichenbach Falls. There is no such martial art although a mining engineer called Barton-Wright had worked in Japan and developed a martial art he called bartitsu.   

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Similarly the venomous snake in The Speckled Band is identified by Holmes as a swamp adder. However, there is no such snake, which hasn’t stopped a multitude of Sherlockians from surmising what the snake might actually be. Candidates include a skink and a Gila monster, both lizards, a constrictor and a western taipan. Some of these, however, are not speckled, which would rather disprove their claim.

In 1912, Ronald Knox, a priest, published what is perhaps the first exegesis of Dr Watson’s accounts, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek. Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes catalogues discrepancies from the changing first name of Watson from John to James, from the colour of Sherlock’s dressing gown from blue to mouse brown. Conan Doyle himself was amused by Knox’s article but confessed, ‘you know a great deal more about it than I do, for the stories have been written in a disconnected (and careless) way without referring back to what had gone before.’

So perhaps we who follow on shouldn’t be too hung up on accuracy. After all, the main intention is to entertain.

PS While smoking was banned in first class carriages on Victorian trains, in 1868, the Regulation of  Railways act, supported by John Stuart Mill, stipulated that there should be one smoking carriage on every train containing more than one carriage of each class. So I am in the clear. Phew!

Sherlock at Christmas

As all good Sherlockians know, Christmas features in one of Conan Doyle’s stories, The Blue Carbuncle, where the famous jewel ends up in… well, I won’t spoil it for the rest of you. But it made me wonder how many more Christmas Holmes stories are out there.

If the answer had been a snow ball, it would have knocked me for six.

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It seems nearly everyone who has written a story about the famous detective has at least one set at Christmas. First and foremost, among David Marcum’s estimable ongoing series, the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part V of November 2016 is devoted to the festive season. It contains thirty new Holmes stories, with tantalising titles, among them The Case of the Christmas Trifle and The Adventure of the Christmas Stocking and what has to be my favourite, A Perpetrator in a Pear Tree.

My researches led me to another discovery. We are all aware of the fourteen films made between 1939 and 1946 starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, but what I didn’t know before was that the pair also made 220 episodes of an ‘old-time’ radio show, ‘The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’. It was broadcast from Hollywood and on Armed Forces Radio Service.

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The notion is that Watson has retired to California and is regularly visited by a guest to whom he recounts an adventure from the past. The episode I found on YouTube was entitled The Night before Christmas, and was aired on December 24 1945. There are also frequent references to Petri wine, sponsors of many of these episodes.

Watson has been prevailed upon to dress up as Santa Claus to give presents to Mrs Hudson’s nieces, Holmes intending to stay home and work on a monograph analysing teeth marks on pipes (‘Fascinating,’ says Watson dryly). But then, Lord Widdicombe, a friend of Holmes, arrives, not to play their usual game of chess or to discuss medieval pottery, but with a note rather conveniently sent from thieves threatening to steal the valuable gifts his lordship intends to present to his relations. Mayhem and confusion ensue.

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The story is dramatized with a variety of accents. Holmes, Watson and Lord Widdicombe are British to the core. Mrs Hudson is decidedly Scottish, but everyone else has an American accent, which is somewhat disconcerting since the adventure supposedly takes place in London in 1886.

If the sound effects to our sophisticated ears are clunky, the play remains a charming and diverting curiosity. I’ll certainly be listening to a few more of those old broadcasts.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Sherlock in Lego

What a bonkers idea! To recreate in LEGO scenes depicted by Sidney Paget from Sherlock Holmes’ stories. How can this possibly work? And yet LEGO enthusiast P. James Macaluso jr has done just that and for at least thirteen stories from the canon.

Apparently he sources his figures from existing collections, such as the Harry Potter sets, since the LEGO company has not yet realised the potential of Sherlock Holmes.

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The latest in the series, but the first I have seen, plopped through my letterbox the other day. It’s called A Baskerville Curse and is of course based on The Hound of the Baskervilles which by happy chance I recently reread. I have to report it is utterly delightful.

This time Mr Macaluso has decided to take one further step and structure it in the form of an Alphabet book. How childish, you might think, and yet I am not about to hand the book on to my grandson for two reasons. First, I want to keep it for myself. And secondly, the words chosen are hardly ones in the average seven-year-old’s lexicon: Jeopardy, Quagmire, Tor… Plus one I had to look up: Zoothapsis. You may be ahead of me, dear reader, but in case you haven’t a clue, it means ‘a premature burial’, and is a word I shall now be using at every possible opportunity.

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In fact, Mr Macaluso looks for his inspiration to the fantastical and creepy work of Edward Gorey, who also produced illustrated Alphabet books for adults. With A Baskerville Curse, I also received Mr Macaluso’s earlier A Sherlock Holmes Alphabet (I is for Irene, H is for my own dear Mrs Hudson, Z is for Zu Grafenstein, with explanatory notes), as well as instructions on how to build your own 221B Baker Street out of Lego.

Mr Macaluso appears to be almost as eccentric as his creations. Now living in England with his wife and dog and teaching English as a foreign language, he has recreated himself from the American academic who wrote a thesis on Descriptions and comparative studies of the hominin dental remains from Dmanisi, Georgia. And yet after all isn’t it most fitting that a keen fan of Sherlock Holmes started life as a forensic anthropologist.

All P James Macaluso’s books issued by MX publishing and are available from Amazon.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Sherlock Holmes Baffled

The very first film featuring Sherlock Holmes isn’t one starring Basil Rathbone nor even William Gillette, the American actor who embodied the detective in so many early stage and film versions, and who became a lifelong friend of Conan Doyle.

No, the very first film is entitled Sherlock Holmes Baffled and is all of thirty seconds long. It was produced by Biograph Company in 1900 (but not registered until 1903), under the direction of one Arthur Weed Marvin, later a cameraman for D.W Griffith.

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The film opens with a thief stuffing loot into a sack. Holmes enters and confronts him but to his amazement, the thief then disappears, abandoning the sack. Holmes, relaxed, lights a cigar only for the thief to pop up again. When Holmes tries to shoot him, he disappears. Holmes then picks up the sack, but it too mysteriously vanishes from his hands. He looks suitably baffled.

Originally the film was made to be shown in Mutoscope machines in arcades. Some of us may remember these from seaside piers as ‘What the Butler Saw’ peepshows revealing coy ladies in states of undress. The device had been invented in 1894 and was coin operated. Only one person at a time could watch the film, which was composed of individual images printed on cards attached to a central core. As the viewer turned the hand crank, so the images revolved giving the impression of movement, just the way a flip book works.

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A San Francisco newspaper first hailed the device as showing ‘amusing views’ but later condemned it. ‘A new instrument has been placed in the hands of the vicious for the corruption of youth… These vicious exhibitions are being displayed with an effrontery that is as audacious as it is shameless.’ Presumably the butler was seeing too much.

Sherlock Holmes Baffled, with its two anonymous actors, was filmed in New York in Biograph’s rooftop studio. There is nothing familiar about this detective, however, and it is thought his name was used simply because the public would be attracted by it. Probably the piece was simply intended to display the possibilities of film trickery, including the stop trick which enabled thief and bag to seemingly disappear. No youths would have been corrupted in the viewing of this particular film, anyway.

It was thought lost for many years until a paper copy was found in the Library of Congress in 1968, whereupon it was transferred to a 16 mm film and can now be viewed on Youtube with various musical accompaniments.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Holmes & Watson according to Gahan Wilson

I was sorry to hear of the death last month of American cartoonist, Gahan Wilson, at the venerable age of 89. I first came across his work years ago when from somewhere or other we acquired a book of his macabre, seriously disturbing and utterly entertaining images. But it is only since he died that, thanks to my son Leo Crowley, I have discovered that Wilson was also a big fan of Sherlock Holmes.

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His work appeared in Playboy, the New Yorker and National Lampoon, where his regular strip in the 1970s, ‘Nuts’, was a send-up of Charles Schultz’s ‘Peanuts’. A friend and collaborator, Neil Gaiman confesses that as a pre-pubertal kid he would thumb through copies of Playboy in newsagents, bypassing the ‘pneumatic ladies’ just to find Gahan’s cartoons. Here’s a seasonal one featuring Holmes that appeared in 1978.

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I was even more amazed to discover that in 1988 Wilson wrote a parody of classic detective fiction entitled Everybody’s Favourite Duck. In this, Enoch Bone and John Weston are clearly versions of Holmes and Watson, particularly as realised by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in those films of the forties, while the ‘Professor’, the Napoleon of Crime, is easily recognised as Moriarty. Wilson adds into the plot other characters, virtually forgotten now but once icons of the genre. Mandarin, a Chinese mastermind, is based on the Dr Fu Manchu stories of Sax Rohmer, while Spectrobert calls to mind the French villain, Fantomas.

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In the best tradition of cartoonists, Gahan Wilson’s work is not mere entertainment. ‘Art should lead to change in the way we see things,’ he wrote. ‘If some artist comes up with a vision which gives a new opening, it usually creates a lot of stress because it is frightening.’ The ordinary folk he depicts regularly encounter the unspeakable in a mundane setting, the alien round the next corner, the friendly mask falling from the monstrous being who haunts our nightmares, the certain knowledge that something somewhere is out to get us. And we laugh, we laugh…

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Dr Joseph Bell – the real Sherlock Holmes

Following disappointments in Edinburgh over the vanished statue of Sherlock Holmes and the demolition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthplace, I wondered what further disillusionments were awaiting me as I made my way over North Bridge and up Nicolson Street to the Surgeons’ Hall. This was where the young Conan Doyle commenced his medical training in 1876, imagining his future as a doctor.

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I was delighted to find the Hall standing firmly in place, in all its neo-classic glory. A modern addition can be found discreetly positioned behind the main building through a garden. This contains a museum where you can watch a virtual anatomy lesson from the eighteenth century, complete with a bewigged professor and life-sized mannequin. Or you can wander through galleries featuring all manner of pickled pathologies, cancers, deformities, and so on, as well pathetic little flayed babies, their veins picked out brightly in blue or red.   

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I didn’t linger among these delights although there were a number of absorbed visitors. What interested me was the little corner devoted to Dr Joseph Bell [pictured left]. Sherlock fans will know that this man is regarded as the main inspiration for the fictional detective and this is borne out by a letter contained in a glass case alongside other memorabilia. It was written to Bell by Conan Doyle on May 4, 1892. I copied out the text:

‘It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes and though in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place him in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the outpatient ward. Round the centre of deduction, inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate, I have tried to build up a man who pushed the thing as far as it would go, further occasionally – and I am so glad…’ (here sadly the page ends)

Another display reveals Bell’s own methods and how he discerned the background of one of his patients as a Scottish officer recently returned from the West Indies: ‘You see, gentlemen,’ he explained, ‘the patient is a respectful man but he did not remove his hat. They do not do this in the army. He would have learned this civilian habit had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority. He is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which could be West Indian but not European.’

Elementary, my dear Conan Doyle.

[image error]Dr Joseph Bell complete with deerstalker and cape

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

The Case of the Missing Detective

I recently had occasion to visit my daughter in Scotland and decided this would be a great opportunity to go on the Sherlock Holmes Walking Tour of Edinburgh. But when I emailed in a request, Toby, who runs the tour, replied that he was away on holiday.

Never mind, I thought, checking the itinerary, I will do it by myself. I will visit the Arthur Conan Doyle pub and have a typical Scottish lunch, see Picardy Place where Conan Doyle was born and take a selfie by the statue of Sherlock Holmes.

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Alas, the best laid plans and so on…Walking down from Princes Street guided by Google maps, I found that a vast swathe of the city has been torn up possibly to extend John Lewis from the megastore it already is and build a hotel of gleaming glass and concrete that has already been dubbed the Walnut Whip.

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The only sign of Conan’s Doyle’s birthplace is a miserable little plaque indicating that it was at a house opposite, now demolished (see image above, the very spot).

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At least the Arthur Conan Doyle pub proved to be a little haven of older civilisation, nudging the corner of a street of fine Georgian houses leading down to the gloriously Victorian folly that is the Portrait Gallery.

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The pub itself is cosy and full of Sherlock-related memorabilia, but, alas again, the cullen skink I had promised myself was ‘off’, and I had to settle for a Scotch broth. (Cullen skink, for those who don’t know, is a rich and creamy soup of smoked haddock, onions and potatoes, perfect for a damp, chilly November day)

All these disappointments, but the worst was yet to come. Hunt as I might, there was no sign of the famous statue of Sherlock Holmes. The detective had gone missing. I suppose I should have taken the hint when Tripadvisor told me it was ‘closed’, a strange fate indeed for a public statue.

[image error]Here he is, in happier days

Apparently, as I discovered subsequently, Sherlock is lying safely in some vault, swaddled in a duvet until the works are finished and he can be put back somewhere, if there’s a space made for him. No wonder Toby went on holiday.

Next time: Surgeons’ Hall and Dr Joseph Bell

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Mrs Hudson Pictured

Glancing through the images
of Mrs Hudson as realised on film, I find that mostly and predictably she is
portrayed as a plump and motherly elderly woman with grey or white hair. I
haven’t tracked down any illustration of her by Sidney Paget but please let me
know if you have seen one.

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A woman’s head in a mop cap peeps over the shoulder of the villainous Mr John Garrideb in an illustration by Frederic Dorr Steele in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin of 1925. I assume this must be Mrs Hudson but there is so little of her to be seen as to render it useless from the point of view of characterisation.

Apart from Una Stubbs, of
course, there are other deviations from the accepted view. The complicatedly
named Ingeborga Dapkunaite, who took the role in a Russian TV film of
2013, is slim and pretty, and Geraldine James, who was in the two movies of 2009
and 2011 starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, while not a young woman, is
certain no frumpy granny.

My vision of Sherlock’s
landlady is of a plump woman – her mother told her never to trust a thin cook
and she herself is something of a whizz in the kitchen. However, she is only
old in the sense that all women over thirty-five or so in past centuries was
considered, well, past it. I have given her two grown-up daughters but put her
age hovering around the fifty mark. She is still capable of having her head turned
by a young charmer, as in my story ‘Mrs Hudson and the Darlin’ Boy’.

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Still, I am fond of the personation of her by Rosalie Williams in what I consider the acme of Sherlock versions, with Jeremy Brett as the detective.

There is a delightful and touching reminiscence by her of working with the actor: “I used to call it embroidery. Jeremy used to embroider things for me in my part. There’s very little in the actual writing for Mrs. Hudson, and he used to come up with lovely little inventions… like when he gave me a flower in one episode. There were lots of moments like that, where Holmes revealed that Mrs. Hudson was so very close to him – which isn’t in the stories, but is something that developed because it was Jeremy and me. I miss Mrs. Hudson very, very much. I got to love her very much. Once, I was on the set, I was her and it was my room and everything had to be just so. I flooded into her with great ease and great pleasure”.

Buy ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Now also available on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates…/…/B081PDMJ9Z

Mrs Hudson on film, stage and radio

Having just launched my collection of Mrs Hudson stories, I thought I might look, in a series of blogs, at the different incarnations of Sherlock’s landlady. The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia lists no less than 53 actors who have played her over the years in various forms and in different countries.

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Going from A to Z, Grace Arnold played Mrs Hudson from 1964 to 1968 in three episodes of the TV series starring Peter Cushing, while Rina Zelyonaya [left] was in eight Russian TV shows and one movie entitled Sherlock Holmes in the Twentieth Century, all made in the 1980s.

Her earliest appearance was in a TV episode, entitled Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson: Acquaintanceship of 1980, which combines adaptations from A Study in Scarlet and The Speckled Band. Interestingly enough, when Watson tells Holmes he has just returned from Afghanistan, the censor demanded this be replaced on the soundtrack by ‘East’ because Soviet troops had invaded that country in 1979 and were engaged in a war there. However, it is possible to read the actor’s lips mouthing ‘Afghanistan’.

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Anyone familiar with the classic Basil Rathbone incarnations of Sherlock Holmes will recall his Mrs Hudson, who featured in ten movies in the 1940s. She was played by Mary Gordon, born in Glasgow but with a life and career in Hollywood. A homely, comfortable looking woman, she mostly played housekeepers, frequently Irish ones but with a Scottish accent that drove her Irish audiences mad.

Mary became friends with the director John Ford, while making Hangman’s House in 1928,and went on to make seven more films with him. Incidentally, a very youthful John Wayne played an uncredited role in the same film as Horse Race Spectator and Condemned Man in Flashback.

All in all, Mary Gordon made nearly 300 films in a career that stretched from 1925 to 1950, but it is as Sherlock’s landlady that she is now chiefly remembered.

Buy the book at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mrs-Hudson-Investigates-Susan-Knight/dp/1787054845 or at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1787054845/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ launched in style

[image error]Sherlock Holmes, Susan Knight, Mrs Hudson and Dr Watson at the launch

Last Thursday’s launch of my latest collection, ‘Mrs Hudson Investigates’ went off with a bang in the lovely Georgian surroundings of the Teachers’ Club in Parnell Square, Dublin, despite near monsoon conditions outside.

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So many friends and supporters turned up, in fact, that we had a full house, entertained by my special guests, none other than Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson themselves.

This was courtesy of the People’s College drama group and its director, Tom O’Brien, who had provided a comic script, consisting of eye-watering puns and some extremely dodgy deductive reasoning on the part of Holmes.

I was pleased, however, that, despite some dismay that Mrs
Hudson had been deducing behind their backs and was ‘out to launch’, instead of
making their lunch (see what I mean about the puns), they were resigned to
support her in her enterprise.  

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Whereupon Mrs Hudson herself appeared complete with feather duster, to dismiss them and quiz me, asking a few searching questions, including when it was I had first become interested in the second best detective in the world (herself clearly, the best), and where Holmes kept his shagging tobacco (luckily I knew the answer to that).

Yes, as you can tell, it was a very classy entertainment altogether that went down a bomb with those present and launched the book in some style. Thanks to those involved, especially Stephen, Willie, Una and Tom.

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