Rohase Piercy's Blog - Posts Tagged "sherlock-holmes"
Sherlock Holmes - a Decadent Detective?
It's hard to believe that a hundred and thirty years have now passed since a young doctor living in Southsea with time on his hands due to a less than thriving practice put pen to paper and introduced Sherlock Holmes to the reading public! It's also hard to believe, in the era of Sherlock and Guy Ritchie's 'bromance' movies, how outraged the mainstream media was by the publication of my short, non-explicit romance My Dearest Holmes a mere thirty years ago!
1987 marked the centenary of the first publication of A Study in Scarlet, and the bookshops were full of Holmesiana – spin-offs, scholarly analyses, scrapbooks, shiny new editions. Jeremy Brett was camping it up in the Granada TV adaptations, and I was as hooked as everyone else. I bought myself The Complete Sherlock Holmes and got stuck in to the original stories. The homoerotic subtext between Holmes and Watson, so immediately apparent to me and yet so ignored by every mainstream study of the 'Holmes Phenomenon', was inspiration enough: I set out to write 'the story behind the stories'.
A year or so later, courtesy of The Gay Men's Press, I found myself in print. I also found myself on Page Three of the Sun, next to the lady with the boobs: 'Sherlock Homo!' screamed the headline, 'He's gay in new book!' Captain Bill Mitchell, then Secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society, was positively apoplectic: 'Just because two chaps share digs, doesn't mean they're queer!' 'So dangerous, this urge to update the past!' warned A N Wilson in a page-long Daily Mail rant, complete with illustration of an outraged-looking pair of geriatric old buffers in tweeds. How dare I interfere, I was asked, with Conan Doyle's original representation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson? What gave me the right to present them as potential lovers? Doyle, I was assured, must be turning in his grave.
Well, if he is, I thought, it's more likely to be because his iconic creation has been well and truly interfered with already by the twentieth-century media. The healthy, square-jawed hero striding purposefully around London with pipe clenched between his teeth beloved by film makers from the 1930s onwards bears no more relation to Doyle's languid, ennui-ridden, cocaine-using original than his senile, slow-witted sidekick does to the handsome, soldierly, energetic Dr Watson of the Canon. I found myself driven to question and explore, if only for my own satisfaction, how the character of Sherlock Holmes would have been viewed by his contemporaries, in his own late Victorian context. What would The Strand's readership have made of him, and how does this differ from what we have made of him since? What sort of character did Doyle originally mean to present to the world, and what conclusions did he expect his readers to draw about him? I wrote an essay entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – Some Points Of Interest', laying my out findings. Unpublished, the typescript lay mouldering in a drawer until 2015, when an updated, spruced-up version appeared in 'The Baker Street Journal' under the title I've used for this blog.
It's important to recognise, I began, that Holmes had his predecessors. As regards real-life influences, Doyle admitted to endowing him with the gifts of observation and deduction he'd observed in Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University as a young medical student. But there were literary precedents too.
'You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin', says Watson in A Study in Scarlet; 'I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.' 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting me', responds Holmes; '… in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow … he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine'.
'Have you read Gaboriau's works?' asks Watson; 'Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?' Here Holmes' reaction is even more scathing: 'Lecoq was a miserable bungler … that book made me ill … I could have done it in twenty-four hours, Lecoq took six months or so!'
Obviously Doyle anticipated the comparison of his character with Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allen Poe'sThe Murders in the Rue Morgue and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, and wished his readers to be left in no doubt as to Holmes' superior powers (to say nothing of his superior arrogance!)
Like Dupin, Doyle's detective displays startling eccentricities. His devotion to his profession is obsessive; he pours over crime reports and agony columns, and owes the solution of many cases to the ease with which he is able to put himself in the place of the criminal, and imagine what he would do in similar circumstances. He alternates between feverish activity when engaged upon a case and black depression when he is not. He lounges on the couch in his dressing gown in the middle of the day. He uses cocaine (not at that time illegal, but certainly viewed askance by mainstream society). He smokes to excess – not only pipes and cigars, but also cigarettes, viewed at the time as a rather foppish method of consuming tobacco. He keeps this commodity in the toe of a Persian slipper! He plays the violin – an instrument traditionally favoured by the Devil (a view gleefully exploited by Holmes' hero Paganini, whose abandoned virtuosity on the instrument was viewed by many as proof of supernatural and unsavoury antecedents). He indulges in obscure chemical experiments, which ever since the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein some seventy years earlier had been regarded as rather worrying. His rooms at Baker Street, in true Bohemian fashion, are untidy, littered with papers, overflowing ashtrays and discarded syringes. He has small regard for the social niceties; indeed he 'loathes all forms of Society with his whole Bohemian soul'. He is tall, thin and pale, with dark hair and hawk-like features, piercing grey eyes, nervous, long-fingered hands; he is clean-shaven at a time when a moustache at least was de rigeuer. He is not a churchgoer; he does not even possess a Bible. What did Doyle mean to imply by all this?
By endowing him with the traditional qualities of the Victorian anti-hero – pallor and thinness, dark hair, black depressions and a drugs habit – Doyle liberates Holmes from the limits set by the respectable sphere. Readers of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly would have recognised aspects of the Gothic villain who was still sending a pleasurable shiver down the spine of many a late Victorian reader. And remember: the earlier stories of the Canon were written, and most of the later ones still set, in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century – a period when the cult of Decadence was unravelling the frayed edges of Victorian society with its pursuit of social, spiritual and sexual ambiguity. Holmes is a child of the 'fin de siecle'. At the end of The Red Headed League he complains of that must-have Decadent affliction, 'ennui'; and his listless pose, so perfectly captured in Sidney Paget's original illustrations, is reminiscent of that champion of Decadence, Oscar Wilde.
Bearing in mind that The Sign of Four was commissioned from Doyle by Lippincotts magazine at the same time as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, it's interesting to compare the opening paragraphs of these stories.
'Dorian Gray' opens with Lord Henry Wotton lying on 'a divan of Persian saddle-bags' conversing with Basil Hallward 'through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whirls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette'. He throws himself down upon the sofa and complains of ennui.
'The Sign of Four' opens with the famous description of Holmes taking cocaine: 'With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.'
Watson, the medical man, tries to remonstrate with him: 'Which is it today?' I asked, 'morphine or cocaine?' He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. 'It is cocaine', he said, 'a seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?'
Mention of Watson leads, of course, to the all-important relationship between the great detective and his Boswell; but this is a subject for another blog! Watch this space, and I'll catch up with you all again in a couple of weeks …
1987 marked the centenary of the first publication of A Study in Scarlet, and the bookshops were full of Holmesiana – spin-offs, scholarly analyses, scrapbooks, shiny new editions. Jeremy Brett was camping it up in the Granada TV adaptations, and I was as hooked as everyone else. I bought myself The Complete Sherlock Holmes and got stuck in to the original stories. The homoerotic subtext between Holmes and Watson, so immediately apparent to me and yet so ignored by every mainstream study of the 'Holmes Phenomenon', was inspiration enough: I set out to write 'the story behind the stories'.
A year or so later, courtesy of The Gay Men's Press, I found myself in print. I also found myself on Page Three of the Sun, next to the lady with the boobs: 'Sherlock Homo!' screamed the headline, 'He's gay in new book!' Captain Bill Mitchell, then Secretary of the Sherlock Holmes Society, was positively apoplectic: 'Just because two chaps share digs, doesn't mean they're queer!' 'So dangerous, this urge to update the past!' warned A N Wilson in a page-long Daily Mail rant, complete with illustration of an outraged-looking pair of geriatric old buffers in tweeds. How dare I interfere, I was asked, with Conan Doyle's original representation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson? What gave me the right to present them as potential lovers? Doyle, I was assured, must be turning in his grave.
Well, if he is, I thought, it's more likely to be because his iconic creation has been well and truly interfered with already by the twentieth-century media. The healthy, square-jawed hero striding purposefully around London with pipe clenched between his teeth beloved by film makers from the 1930s onwards bears no more relation to Doyle's languid, ennui-ridden, cocaine-using original than his senile, slow-witted sidekick does to the handsome, soldierly, energetic Dr Watson of the Canon. I found myself driven to question and explore, if only for my own satisfaction, how the character of Sherlock Holmes would have been viewed by his contemporaries, in his own late Victorian context. What would The Strand's readership have made of him, and how does this differ from what we have made of him since? What sort of character did Doyle originally mean to present to the world, and what conclusions did he expect his readers to draw about him? I wrote an essay entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – Some Points Of Interest', laying my out findings. Unpublished, the typescript lay mouldering in a drawer until 2015, when an updated, spruced-up version appeared in 'The Baker Street Journal' under the title I've used for this blog.
It's important to recognise, I began, that Holmes had his predecessors. As regards real-life influences, Doyle admitted to endowing him with the gifts of observation and deduction he'd observed in Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University as a young medical student. But there were literary precedents too.
'You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin', says Watson in A Study in Scarlet; 'I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.' 'No doubt you think that you are complimenting me', responds Holmes; '… in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow … he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine'.
'Have you read Gaboriau's works?' asks Watson; 'Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?' Here Holmes' reaction is even more scathing: 'Lecoq was a miserable bungler … that book made me ill … I could have done it in twenty-four hours, Lecoq took six months or so!'
Obviously Doyle anticipated the comparison of his character with Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allen Poe'sThe Murders in the Rue Morgue and Emile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq, and wished his readers to be left in no doubt as to Holmes' superior powers (to say nothing of his superior arrogance!)
Like Dupin, Doyle's detective displays startling eccentricities. His devotion to his profession is obsessive; he pours over crime reports and agony columns, and owes the solution of many cases to the ease with which he is able to put himself in the place of the criminal, and imagine what he would do in similar circumstances. He alternates between feverish activity when engaged upon a case and black depression when he is not. He lounges on the couch in his dressing gown in the middle of the day. He uses cocaine (not at that time illegal, but certainly viewed askance by mainstream society). He smokes to excess – not only pipes and cigars, but also cigarettes, viewed at the time as a rather foppish method of consuming tobacco. He keeps this commodity in the toe of a Persian slipper! He plays the violin – an instrument traditionally favoured by the Devil (a view gleefully exploited by Holmes' hero Paganini, whose abandoned virtuosity on the instrument was viewed by many as proof of supernatural and unsavoury antecedents). He indulges in obscure chemical experiments, which ever since the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein some seventy years earlier had been regarded as rather worrying. His rooms at Baker Street, in true Bohemian fashion, are untidy, littered with papers, overflowing ashtrays and discarded syringes. He has small regard for the social niceties; indeed he 'loathes all forms of Society with his whole Bohemian soul'. He is tall, thin and pale, with dark hair and hawk-like features, piercing grey eyes, nervous, long-fingered hands; he is clean-shaven at a time when a moustache at least was de rigeuer. He is not a churchgoer; he does not even possess a Bible. What did Doyle mean to imply by all this?
By endowing him with the traditional qualities of the Victorian anti-hero – pallor and thinness, dark hair, black depressions and a drugs habit – Doyle liberates Holmes from the limits set by the respectable sphere. Readers of Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly would have recognised aspects of the Gothic villain who was still sending a pleasurable shiver down the spine of many a late Victorian reader. And remember: the earlier stories of the Canon were written, and most of the later ones still set, in the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century – a period when the cult of Decadence was unravelling the frayed edges of Victorian society with its pursuit of social, spiritual and sexual ambiguity. Holmes is a child of the 'fin de siecle'. At the end of The Red Headed League he complains of that must-have Decadent affliction, 'ennui'; and his listless pose, so perfectly captured in Sidney Paget's original illustrations, is reminiscent of that champion of Decadence, Oscar Wilde.
Bearing in mind that The Sign of Four was commissioned from Doyle by Lippincotts magazine at the same time as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, it's interesting to compare the opening paragraphs of these stories.
'Dorian Gray' opens with Lord Henry Wotton lying on 'a divan of Persian saddle-bags' conversing with Basil Hallward 'through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whirls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette'. He throws himself down upon the sofa and complains of ennui.
'The Sign of Four' opens with the famous description of Holmes taking cocaine: 'With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.'
Watson, the medical man, tries to remonstrate with him: 'Which is it today?' I asked, 'morphine or cocaine?' He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. 'It is cocaine', he said, 'a seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?'
Mention of Watson leads, of course, to the all-important relationship between the great detective and his Boswell; but this is a subject for another blog! Watch this space, and I'll catch up with you all again in a couple of weeks …
'Lost Without My Boswell' - Holmes & Watson
Without Watson, Holmes as we know him would not exist. As Fr Ronald Knox put it, 'Watson provides what the Holmes drama needs – a Chorus'. We see Holmes through his companion's eyes; the stories are presented as the personal reminiscences of a close friend. The two narrated by Holmes himself - Sherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Blanched Soldier and The Adventure of the Lion's Mane - and the two related in the third person - The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone and His Last Bow - bear witness in their relative unpopularity to the supreme importance of seeing Holmes from a Watson-eye view.
But in the course of his narratives Watson also presents himself to our view, and we get to know a fair bit about him: he's just two years older than his friend, in his early thirties when they first meet; he has been a soldier, invalided out of the Army following an injury sustained at the Battle of Maiwand; he is not lacking in courage, and often carries firearms in order to protect Holmes, who carries none; he's handsome, attractive to women; and he is totally and utterly devoted to Holmes. He agonises over his friend's mental and physical health; he's ready at a moment's notice to follow him anywhere, even when it means leaving his wife and marital home; he's devastated by his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls and so overcome by his unexpected re-appearance three years later that he faints, and has to be revived by brandy. Is it any wonder that the nature of such a friendship has been the subject of speculation?
Look at Sidney Paget's original depictions of Watson, published in 'Lippincotts' and 'The Strand'. This handsome young man with the slightly foppish demeanour could hardly be further from the geriatric buffoon portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the 1930s movies starring Basil Rathbone. This is the man who lives on intimate terms with Sherlock Holmes for seven years prior to his marriage, and returns to him with alacrity as soon as he is widowed. And that marriage is interesting in itself – a rushed, unconvincing affair in which Mrs Watson so obviously takes second place to Holmes in her husband's list of priorities that as far as the stories are concerned she might as well not exist. So why marry Watson at all? One wonders whether Doyle did, after all, consider the implications of such a close relationship between two good-looking men in their thirties, and felt impelled to try and diffuse speculation. He was not above reacting to public sensitivities – consider how in the later stories, some of which were written after the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, he plays down Holmes' drug use, hinting instead at a manic-depressive streak in his nature.
It's within these later stories that Doyle finally allows Watson to wonder whether his devotion is in any way reciprocated by Holmes.
'The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar', writes Watson inSherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Creeping Man. 'He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this, I had uses. I was a whetstone to his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me – many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead – but nonetheless, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject.'
It seems a rather sad state of affairs; but the following famous passage from The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, set in the same year (1902), suggests that this bitter view is exaggerated:
'"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time, I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.'
It has been rightly urged that the Sherlock Holmes Canon is pre-Freudian, and that Doyle would not, in the climate of his day, have deliberately implied a homoerotic relationship between the two men. Just before the first stories were published, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1886 had laid down a penalty of up to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for any sexual act between men, whether committed in public or in private. It was under Section 11 of this law that Oscar Wilde was tried and condemned in 1895, and passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray were quoted at his trial. Doyle later defended 'Dorian Gray' in writing, and also made it clear that he viewed Wilde's homosexuality as a medical rather than a criminal matter – a liberated view for its time, but he would hardly have deliberately saddled one of his own heroes with such a dangerous tendency. Nevertheless, there's an inner dynamic to the stories, and to the development of the Holmes/Watson relationship, which is all the more potent for not having been deliberately manufactured. It grows out of the creative tension between the two fictional characters themselves, and from a post-Freudian viewpoint that tension is definitely homoerotic. It lights the spark which enlivens the stories from the reader's point of view; by its development we can trace the growth of intimacy between Holmes and Watson, and the post-Freudian reader has the advantage when it comes to observation and deduction in these sphere. Consider how frequently Holmes touches, grasps and pinches Watson - 'His cold fingers closed around my wrist'; 'He drew me back into the shadows … the fingers which clutched me were quivering' – as well as the numerous references to Holmes' physical appearance, his long nervous fingers, pale face and penetrating gaze. Watson's intimate knowledge of his friend is stressed: he alone, he assures us, knows the fierce energy that slumbers beneath the languid exterior.
So to answer the question asked of me all those years ago when My Dearest Holmes caused such outrage amongst the Sherlock Holmes Society and such concern to the Conan Doyle Estate: yes, I do think I had a right to present Holmes and Watson as potential lovers. Charlie Raven, original author of A Case of Domestic Pilfering, obviously felt the same but employed a little more subtlety, which I've preserved in the recently published version: Holmes and Watson are clearly assumed by their young admirers, Max and Guy, to be an item but their relationship (unlike Max and Guy's) is never made explicit.
And no, I don't think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if he were alive today, would mind one bit. In my next blog, I'll take a look at Doyle's own attitude to his most famous literary creation, and at the ways in which the character of Sherlock Holmes has been altered and adapted to suit the changing fashions, morals and expectations of the reading public...
But in the course of his narratives Watson also presents himself to our view, and we get to know a fair bit about him: he's just two years older than his friend, in his early thirties when they first meet; he has been a soldier, invalided out of the Army following an injury sustained at the Battle of Maiwand; he is not lacking in courage, and often carries firearms in order to protect Holmes, who carries none; he's handsome, attractive to women; and he is totally and utterly devoted to Holmes. He agonises over his friend's mental and physical health; he's ready at a moment's notice to follow him anywhere, even when it means leaving his wife and marital home; he's devastated by his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls and so overcome by his unexpected re-appearance three years later that he faints, and has to be revived by brandy. Is it any wonder that the nature of such a friendship has been the subject of speculation?
Look at Sidney Paget's original depictions of Watson, published in 'Lippincotts' and 'The Strand'. This handsome young man with the slightly foppish demeanour could hardly be further from the geriatric buffoon portrayed by Nigel Bruce in the 1930s movies starring Basil Rathbone. This is the man who lives on intimate terms with Sherlock Holmes for seven years prior to his marriage, and returns to him with alacrity as soon as he is widowed. And that marriage is interesting in itself – a rushed, unconvincing affair in which Mrs Watson so obviously takes second place to Holmes in her husband's list of priorities that as far as the stories are concerned she might as well not exist. So why marry Watson at all? One wonders whether Doyle did, after all, consider the implications of such a close relationship between two good-looking men in their thirties, and felt impelled to try and diffuse speculation. He was not above reacting to public sensitivities – consider how in the later stories, some of which were written after the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, he plays down Holmes' drug use, hinting instead at a manic-depressive streak in his nature.
It's within these later stories that Doyle finally allows Watson to wonder whether his devotion is in any way reciprocated by Holmes.
'The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar', writes Watson inSherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Creeping Man. 'He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this, I had uses. I was a whetstone to his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me – many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead – but nonetheless, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject.'
It seems a rather sad state of affairs; but the following famous passage from The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, set in the same year (1902), suggests that this bitter view is exaggerated:
'"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!" It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time, I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.'
It has been rightly urged that the Sherlock Holmes Canon is pre-Freudian, and that Doyle would not, in the climate of his day, have deliberately implied a homoerotic relationship between the two men. Just before the first stories were published, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1886 had laid down a penalty of up to two years' imprisonment with hard labour for any sexual act between men, whether committed in public or in private. It was under Section 11 of this law that Oscar Wilde was tried and condemned in 1895, and passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray were quoted at his trial. Doyle later defended 'Dorian Gray' in writing, and also made it clear that he viewed Wilde's homosexuality as a medical rather than a criminal matter – a liberated view for its time, but he would hardly have deliberately saddled one of his own heroes with such a dangerous tendency. Nevertheless, there's an inner dynamic to the stories, and to the development of the Holmes/Watson relationship, which is all the more potent for not having been deliberately manufactured. It grows out of the creative tension between the two fictional characters themselves, and from a post-Freudian viewpoint that tension is definitely homoerotic. It lights the spark which enlivens the stories from the reader's point of view; by its development we can trace the growth of intimacy between Holmes and Watson, and the post-Freudian reader has the advantage when it comes to observation and deduction in these sphere. Consider how frequently Holmes touches, grasps and pinches Watson - 'His cold fingers closed around my wrist'; 'He drew me back into the shadows … the fingers which clutched me were quivering' – as well as the numerous references to Holmes' physical appearance, his long nervous fingers, pale face and penetrating gaze. Watson's intimate knowledge of his friend is stressed: he alone, he assures us, knows the fierce energy that slumbers beneath the languid exterior.
So to answer the question asked of me all those years ago when My Dearest Holmes caused such outrage amongst the Sherlock Holmes Society and such concern to the Conan Doyle Estate: yes, I do think I had a right to present Holmes and Watson as potential lovers. Charlie Raven, original author of A Case of Domestic Pilfering, obviously felt the same but employed a little more subtlety, which I've preserved in the recently published version: Holmes and Watson are clearly assumed by their young admirers, Max and Guy, to be an item but their relationship (unlike Max and Guy's) is never made explicit.
And no, I don't think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if he were alive today, would mind one bit. In my next blog, I'll take a look at Doyle's own attitude to his most famous literary creation, and at the ways in which the character of Sherlock Holmes has been altered and adapted to suit the changing fashions, morals and expectations of the reading public...
The Mystery of Sherlock Holmes' Fitness Regime
Well, the Winter Olympics are in full swing and once again our TV screens are dominated by images of athletes in their prime, running, bounding, leaping and gliding with what appears to be effortless speed and grace towards Olympian glory. I admire them, of course; I take my hat off to the lot of them! As someone whose exercise routine consists of a daily walk with an elderly dog and a weekly Pilates class specially modified for ladies over fifty-five with dodgy backs, I can only shake my head in wonder at the gusto with which these muscled-up young things embrace seemingly inpossible physical challenges.
No, I'm not the sporty type; my energy supply is easily exhausted, and I'm all over the shop on anything less than nine hours' sleep. I'm with Sherlock Holmes – the original, decadent, pre-Rathbone version - who regularly spends days at a time in bed and likes to lounge on the couch in his dressing-gown in the middle of the afternoon. Mental rather than physical exercise is our forte …
… but hang on a minute; whilst proof-reading My Dearest Holmes - Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, I was struck for the first time by the discrepancy between Holmes' account – lifted straight from the Canon- of his struggle with Moriarty on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls, and his ennui-prone, cocaine-addicted lifestyle. He claims not only to have used a Japanese system of wrestling called 'baristu' (a mis-spelling of 'bartitsu'?) to defeat his opponent, but also to have run, on awaking from a spell of unconsciousness, ten miles over the mountains to safety. Did he do this under the influence of cocaine, or desperation? Was his defeat of Moriarty a stroke of luck?
In A Study in Scarlet, Watson famously makes a list entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – His Limits', in which he describes his new flatmate as being 'an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman'. (Singlestick, also known as cudgels, was yet another martial art). However as the stories develop, quite when he gets to practise and maintain these demanding skills remains something of a mystery. When does Sherlock Holmes ever visit a gymnasium? Could it be during the long walks which, according to Watson, take him into the 'lowest portions of the city'? Both Watson's description and Sydney Paget's original drawings show Holmes as tall, thin, pale and gaunt – hardly a muscle to be seen. Yes, he has a fierce energy when engaged upon a case – Watson does, on occasion, remind us that he alone knows the full extent of the energy which slumbers beneath his companion's listless facade – but by the time they re-encounter one another in The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes has 'a dead-white tinge to his aquiline face which told me that his life recently had not been a healthy one' – a reference to the continuing hold of his cocaine habit. If Holmes did once possess the pugilistic skills of which his Boswell boasts in the first flush of admiration, they must surely have been in pretty poor shape by that time.
As I've mentioned before, twentieth-century depictions of Holmes on film (pre Jeremy Brett) did like to present him as fit, healthy, rugged and generally rather more masculine than he is in the original stories; no doubt Watson's list was instrumental in giving them licence to do so. But for myself, I'll always regard the more athletic side of Sherlock Holmes as an example of the 'romanticism' which he accuses his Boswell of indulging in his accounts of their adventures; a romanticism from which he himself was far from immune, if his description of what happened at the Reichenbach Falls is anything to go by ...
No, I'm not the sporty type; my energy supply is easily exhausted, and I'm all over the shop on anything less than nine hours' sleep. I'm with Sherlock Holmes – the original, decadent, pre-Rathbone version - who regularly spends days at a time in bed and likes to lounge on the couch in his dressing-gown in the middle of the afternoon. Mental rather than physical exercise is our forte …
… but hang on a minute; whilst proof-reading My Dearest Holmes - Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, I was struck for the first time by the discrepancy between Holmes' account – lifted straight from the Canon- of his struggle with Moriarty on the brink of the Reichenbach Falls, and his ennui-prone, cocaine-addicted lifestyle. He claims not only to have used a Japanese system of wrestling called 'baristu' (a mis-spelling of 'bartitsu'?) to defeat his opponent, but also to have run, on awaking from a spell of unconsciousness, ten miles over the mountains to safety. Did he do this under the influence of cocaine, or desperation? Was his defeat of Moriarty a stroke of luck?
In A Study in Scarlet, Watson famously makes a list entitled 'Sherlock Holmes – His Limits', in which he describes his new flatmate as being 'an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman'. (Singlestick, also known as cudgels, was yet another martial art). However as the stories develop, quite when he gets to practise and maintain these demanding skills remains something of a mystery. When does Sherlock Holmes ever visit a gymnasium? Could it be during the long walks which, according to Watson, take him into the 'lowest portions of the city'? Both Watson's description and Sydney Paget's original drawings show Holmes as tall, thin, pale and gaunt – hardly a muscle to be seen. Yes, he has a fierce energy when engaged upon a case – Watson does, on occasion, remind us that he alone knows the full extent of the energy which slumbers beneath his companion's listless facade – but by the time they re-encounter one another in The Adventure of the Empty House, Holmes has 'a dead-white tinge to his aquiline face which told me that his life recently had not been a healthy one' – a reference to the continuing hold of his cocaine habit. If Holmes did once possess the pugilistic skills of which his Boswell boasts in the first flush of admiration, they must surely have been in pretty poor shape by that time.
As I've mentioned before, twentieth-century depictions of Holmes on film (pre Jeremy Brett) did like to present him as fit, healthy, rugged and generally rather more masculine than he is in the original stories; no doubt Watson's list was instrumental in giving them licence to do so. But for myself, I'll always regard the more athletic side of Sherlock Holmes as an example of the 'romanticism' which he accuses his Boswell of indulging in his accounts of their adventures; a romanticism from which he himself was far from immune, if his description of what happened at the Reichenbach Falls is anything to go by ...
New Holmes for Sale!
A big thankyou to everyone who entered my Giveaway for My Dearest Holmes and congratulations to the fifteen lucky winners - shiny new signed copies should be arriving on your doorstep any day now and I wish you happy reading!
I do hope that readers who enjoyed MDH back in the day will buy and review this newly edited version, now available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. It kicks off with a few samples of the reaction it inspired back in 1988 from both mainstream and Gay press - I still have all the original clippings in a very tatty old scrapbook, beginning with Page Three of the Sun (carefully cropped so as not to feature the lady with the boobs; British readers will understand how amused I was to find myself on that particular page, and what fun I had persuading friends to buy a copy), and finishing with a much more sane and balanced piece from The Guardian. Non-explicit as it was, this story exploring the possibility of John Watson's love for Sherlock Holmes, set against the ramifications of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Section 11 of which outlawed all acts of a sexual nature between men and brought about the downfall of Conan Doyle's fellow author Oscar Wilde) caused quite an outcry thirty years ago!
In her thoughtful and interesting Foreword, Charlie Raven looks back on the heady days when she and I, at that time a same-sex couple ourselves, first fell under the spell of the man, the myth and the magic that is Sherlock Holmes on the back of a few chance remarks made to her by a work colleague. It's shocking to remember how hostile a decade the 1980s was for gay people, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act outlawing anything that could be seen as a 'promotion' of homosexuality in Britain, the U.S. Court of Appeal ruling that no-one had a 'fundamental right' to be gay, and Pope John Paul II ordering the Catholic Church to withdraw support for gay and lesbian Christian organisations. It's a sobering fact that even today, with equal marriage available in twenty-six countries, homosexuality remains illegal, and in some cases punishable by death, in seventy two others – several of them members of the Commonwealth, as Olympian Tom Daley bravely highlighted at the recent Commonwealth Games.
So can My Dearest Holmes claim a modest place in LGBTQ history? Charlie kindly concludes that it can, pointing out that 'the prominence of its heroes in popular mythology instantly caused readers to think a little harder about the implications of being a same-sex couple living under legal and social restrictions' and asking 'how many of the spin-off novels, fanfics and homoerotically-charged movie or TV interpretations of the Holmes/Watson dynamic would now exist in their current form if it were not for the first step represented by this little book?'
Do give it a read (or a re-read) and let me know what you think - I'm very happy to answer questions, and will reply to any politely-worded comments - and please don't forget to leave a review, however brief, both here and on Amazon!
I do hope that readers who enjoyed MDH back in the day will buy and review this newly edited version, now available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle. It kicks off with a few samples of the reaction it inspired back in 1988 from both mainstream and Gay press - I still have all the original clippings in a very tatty old scrapbook, beginning with Page Three of the Sun (carefully cropped so as not to feature the lady with the boobs; British readers will understand how amused I was to find myself on that particular page, and what fun I had persuading friends to buy a copy), and finishing with a much more sane and balanced piece from The Guardian. Non-explicit as it was, this story exploring the possibility of John Watson's love for Sherlock Holmes, set against the ramifications of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Section 11 of which outlawed all acts of a sexual nature between men and brought about the downfall of Conan Doyle's fellow author Oscar Wilde) caused quite an outcry thirty years ago!
In her thoughtful and interesting Foreword, Charlie Raven looks back on the heady days when she and I, at that time a same-sex couple ourselves, first fell under the spell of the man, the myth and the magic that is Sherlock Holmes on the back of a few chance remarks made to her by a work colleague. It's shocking to remember how hostile a decade the 1980s was for gay people, with Section 28 of the Local Government Act outlawing anything that could be seen as a 'promotion' of homosexuality in Britain, the U.S. Court of Appeal ruling that no-one had a 'fundamental right' to be gay, and Pope John Paul II ordering the Catholic Church to withdraw support for gay and lesbian Christian organisations. It's a sobering fact that even today, with equal marriage available in twenty-six countries, homosexuality remains illegal, and in some cases punishable by death, in seventy two others – several of them members of the Commonwealth, as Olympian Tom Daley bravely highlighted at the recent Commonwealth Games.
So can My Dearest Holmes claim a modest place in LGBTQ history? Charlie kindly concludes that it can, pointing out that 'the prominence of its heroes in popular mythology instantly caused readers to think a little harder about the implications of being a same-sex couple living under legal and social restrictions' and asking 'how many of the spin-off novels, fanfics and homoerotically-charged movie or TV interpretations of the Holmes/Watson dynamic would now exist in their current form if it were not for the first step represented by this little book?'
Do give it a read (or a re-read) and let me know what you think - I'm very happy to answer questions, and will reply to any politely-worded comments - and please don't forget to leave a review, however brief, both here and on Amazon!
