J A N E T I L I T Y

In glancing back at January’s focus on a few screen renderings of Sherlock Holmes adventures, I see that half of my subjects – The Blue Carbuncle and The Hound of the Baskervilles – addressed films adapted from Conan Doyle stories, and half – Murder By Decree and A Case of Evil – were original material incorporating the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Rathbone

Sherlock Holmes, as the subject of adaptations – pastiches, sequels, mash-ups, modernizations and assorted character cadging – has only one rival: Jane Austen, generally; Pride and Prejudice, particularly and Mr. Darcy, specifically. If Jane Austen derivative works outnumber Conan Doyle’s, it is only because some of Doyle’s property is still protected by copyright (in the US) and Austen’s work and characters are in the public domain. To an eager aspirant, “public domain” translates as “open season”; or, as Conan Doyle rather snappishly replied to William Gillette, when Gillette wanted to know if he might marry off Holmes in a stage adaptation, “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”

Williamson

Yet, given license to marry or murder or convert to vampires or transport to the twenty-first century, the nagging consideration is not, “What can we do?”, but “What should we do?” What license or should you take with a work or a character that was not of your own invention?

Cushing, as Holmes

In Edgar W. Smith’s cogent essay on the character of Sherlock Holmes- “The Implicit Holmes” – he asks, “What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?” and I think it’s that “what is it we love” that ought to define the limits of license. After all, haven’t Conan Doyle and Jane Austen – or, more specifically, Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Darcy – been singled out because they represent qualities that have a timeless appeal? And if that is true, should not special care be taken to retain those fundamental qualities even when the superficial trappings change?

Cushing, as Darcy

The first part of Smith’s essay defends the requisite of keeping Holmes in his era and place. Some may disagree; however, there was a social canon that shaped Holmes’s character (and Darcy’s) that risks appearing quaint, or alien or artificial when he is taken out of his time. Holmes and Darcy were gentlemen when “gentleman” described caste as well as conduct; when they are transplanted, their conduct may become irrelevant in the context of a modern setting, or is coarsened to adapt to a modern age. Even the Canon suggests this. In its most cringeworthy tale – The Adventure of the Three Gables – Holmes’s language and conduct are frequently appalling. So much so, that some scholars reject Conan Doyle’s authorship. The truth is more to the point – more to Smith’s point: The Three Gables was published in the late 1920s, when detective fiction inclined toward snappy dialogue and conditional morality. (Holmes could subscribe to conditional justice, but never conditional morality). In succumbing to the influence of a more modern style, Doyle’s Three Gables Sherlock is barely recognizable as the gentleman who was once prepared to commit an act that is “morally justifiable though technically criminal” because “a gentleman should not lay much stress upon [personal risk] when a lady is in most desperate need of his help”. Likewise, Darcy’s revulsion at the prospect of acquiring relations whose “condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own”, loses its credibility if he is taken out of his era, as does the extent of his chivalry when he lowers himself to “meet, to frequently meet, reason with, persuade and finally bribe” Wickham.

D'Arcy, as Holmes

Cumberbatch, as Holmes

For both characters, a re-imagining that cannot retain the fundamental blend of “Galahad and Socrates” (Smith’s phrase) risks losing what we love, however entertaining the substitute may be.

Sherlock: A Case of Evil was a 2002 made-for-television film that pits a twentysomething Sherlock Holmes (James D’Arcy) against his nemesis, Moriarty and I will state from the outset that, of the few portrayals of a younger Sherlock Holmes, James D’Arcy’s is, by far, the best. Everything about his performance (including the “look” which I consider to be indispensable) is pitch-perfect.

James D'Arcy = Young Sherlock Holmes

A Case of Evil begins with the upshot of an investigation that has Holmes  pursuing Moriarty through London; there is a confrontation, Holmes shoots Moriarty and the body falls into the river. The effect of this – as Moriarty is known to be a master criminal – is to make an instant celebrity of the young detective and Holmes revels in fame, and it’s perks. Depicting Holmes as an attention-loving and arrogant young luminary (when a policeman asks for his surname, he replies. “Holmes.” [pause] “With an L”) is an interesting notion and, in its way, Canonical. Early in their Canonical relationship, Watson is irked by Holmes’s “bumptious style of conversation”, and looks upon the detective’s swift deductions as “brag and bounce”; when Holmes explains his chain of reasoning, he is “pleased at [Watson’s] evident surprise and admiration”.

We see a hint of the self-conceit in the earliest – chronologically, speaking – case, The Gloria Scott, when the college-age Holmes forms a friendship with fellow student who is “the very opposite to me in most respects”, and pays a visit to the young man and his father. Urged to demonstrate his deductive powers, Holmes leads with the observation that is guaranteed to shock and impress. In A Case of Evil, we have the same hint of swagger, and the same readiness to perform his deductive parlor tricks.

What Piers Ashworth’s screenplay posits (some odd casting and plotting choices notwithstanding*) is that, as a young man, Sherlock Holmes was engaging, vain, energetic, and emotionally susceptible. As the story plays out, we learn that Moriarty’s “death” and the case that precipitated it had been a ruse. In flashbacks, we see that Holmes has a personal grudge against Moriarty’s, and the resolution of the case costs a young woman, of whom Holmes has become quite fond, her life. The screenplay endorses the theory that the Sherlockian self-control, aloofness, detachment toward women are not fundamental traits, but the assumed, an armor against suffering. Even in the later cases, we often witness emotion and reason at odds; more than once, Watson comments on his friend’s vanity and reserve,  thoughtlessness and chivalry, his impatience and generosity. Like Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet, Holmes is “so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice.”

 While the script does a very credible job in formulating a young Sherlock Holmes, it does tend to stray in other areas. Watson, here, is a rather unsophisticated police surgeon (and there seems to be a confusion about the era’s distinction between surgeon and doctor), to whom Holmes is introduced in the course of an investigation; yet, it has Holmes already living at Baker Street. (Sherlockians will recognize the inaccuracy). There is no sense that Watson is a man of worldly experience; there are, however, the glimpses of “pawky humor”, as when Holmes observed that there is “something abnormal about [a corpse’s] windpipe”, and Watson replies, “Yes. Normally, he’d be using it to breathe.”

Roger Morlidge as Watson

The humor extends to the script’s wry social jabs that offer “a distinct touch”. Holmes is hired by a wealthy opium importer whose clients are being killed off. Holmes – whose drugs of choice here are alcohol, including absinthe, and, of course, tobacco – despises both the client and drug use, an abhorrence that is explained in flashbacks. The gentleman rationalizes his occupation: opiates, he claims, are a “social necessity” for war veterans who have been introduced to morphine at battlefield hospitals and who continue to have “a taste for the drug” when they return.

Moriarty, who is at the root of the murders, scorns the importer for “building a criminal empire on a product that isn’t even illegal”, predicting that the real profits will come when drugs are prohibited, and that “They’re going to love it over there” (i.e., in America). Conversely, Watson, disparages Holmes’s use of tobacco, predicting that cigarettes will soon be banned by the government, while opium and cocaine, having medicinal uses, will always be legal.

Added to the interesting social landscape is the pulp reporter who dogs Holmes for headlines with all the tenacity of a paparazzo, shrugging off Lestrade’s challenge to his accuracy with, “We can always print a retraction next week.” Young Holmes is an assiduous collector of his own press clippings until the account assembled in his scrapbook becomes too personal and painful a record. Then, he decides, “I’d rather trust posterity to that diary of yours, Watson.”

*Re: the odd casting choices. Vincent D’Onofrio is Moriarty. Richard E. Grant (who was always on my Sherlock shortlist) is Mycroft. Perhaps they should have considered reversing the roles?

Vincent D'Onofrio as Moriarty

Richard E. Grant as Mycroft

And which Austen character would have enjoyed A Case of Evil? It is hard to believe that any of the young ladies of high sensibility – Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood, Emma Woodhouse, Maria and Julia Bertram, the Musgrove sisters or even the frivolous Charlotte Palmer – could resist this handsome, dashing version of Sherlock Holmes, and perhaps Jane herself who, in one of her letters, writes of having “the dignity of dropping out my mother’s Laudanum” would have wondered at Moriarty’s notion that the such a common remedy would ever be made illegal.

 And three degrees of Austen? James D’Arcy had the starring role in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001) with Tom Hollander, who was Mr. Collins in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice.