Rozovsky Meets Holmes: The Adventure of the Occasionally Attentive Listener, Part I

The most venerable of detective protagonists is relatively new to me. Now, thanks to the superb delivery of Stephen Frye and the desultory attention that audiobooks allow, I am drifting in and out of the complete Sherlock Holmes canon and quite enjoying what I come up with.

First, a few out-of-context gems:

"I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumbnails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot lace."
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Case of Identity"

"Forgive this weakness, Mr. Holmes. I have been a little overwrought. Thank you. If I might have a glass of milk and a biscuit, I have no doubt that I should be better."
-- "The Adventure of the Priory School"

"... ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca—an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope—down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East-End of London."
-- "The Adventure of Black Peter"

"I read death on his face as plain as I can read that text over the fire."
-- "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (This one works better if one recalls the sense in which text seems most often to be used these days. It would not shock me if some people think text means only text message.)

"Ah, I have no data. I cannot tell."

"'Data, data, data!' he cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay!'"
-- "The Adventure of the Copper Beaches"

I've realized during my listening that Doyle dangled participles and modifiers all the time, and that this doesn't matter much. So, if you can write as popular and enduring a character as Sherlock Holmes, and if you can read as well as Stephen Frye, you can go ahead and dangle all you like.

(More on Holmes to come)

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

The mystery of Sherlock Holmes

This Arthur Conan Doyle guy has a future in crime writing. Sherlock Holmes' deductive powers are, of course, tosh, and it is to laugh to think that they may in the past have been mistaken for a model of scientific reasoning. But his dark side, and the atmosphere with Doyle endowed certain scenes, make him a plausible forerunner of noir.

I may know less about Holmes and his creator than anyone else alive, but it seems to me significant that Doyle was interested throughout his life in mystical subjects, because that's where Holmes, the unparalleled observer, belongs.  In today's terms, his props should be mask, cape, and colored tights, or maybe long beard and magic wand, rather than deerstalker and pipe.

But if Holmes was half machine ("He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen," Watson tells us in "A Scandal in Bohemia."), he was angst-ridden enough to serve as a precursor of noir fiction, and it's no shock that Hard Case Crime has reprinted a Doyle novel.

"To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. " "He had risen out of his drug-created dreams ... " "Holmes ... remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature."  Each of these is from the opening paragraphs of "A Scandal in Bohemia," first story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and each suggests Gothic horror more than it does rational crime solving.  Maybe the stories are really about their era's nervousness about the progress of science and what this might do the emotional side of humanity.

Like I said, I know little about Holmes and his creator, but the gulf between the place the Holmes stories occupy in the public imagination on the one hand, and what is most interesting about the stories today on the other is ... a mystery.  

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

New Guy Ritchie movie honors Irish crime writer

Well, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, but the Doyles were an Irish Catholic family, and Doyle's mother was Mary Foley.

OK, I admit that that was just a hook. I mentioned it because several minor characters in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law movie, Sherlock Holmes, speak with what sound to me like Irish accents. I eagerly anticipate a critique from the blogosphere's leading critic of Irish accents in movies.

More notable is a scene of Holmes fighting a bare-knuckles boxing match to the accompaniment of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners singing "Rocky Road to Dublin," even though the band members did not write the song, as the movie's credits say they did.

The film also makes interesting use of the vaunted Holmes logical method, alluding to it at the very beginning, and then having Holmes do so just a time or two later on. This lets Guy Ritchie do his action/special effects thing without getting bogged down in old-fashioned mannerisms.

What other contemporary touches does Ritchie bring? In the aforementioned fight scene, he turns Holmes' famed logical method into a kind of Zen-like meditation that will be familiar to a generation raised on latter-day, glossy martial-arts-influenced movies. And the central plot strand, more thriller than detective tale, has a steam-punk overtone.

Robert Downey's Sherlock Holmes is more dissipated than the typical Holmes, falling into a depressed funk and letting his room fall into an alarming state of disorder. (The emphasis on the dark side goes only so far, though. Holmes used cocaine, but probably could not be shown doing so in today's moral environment. See Smithsonian.com for interesting speculation on a possible literary source for the darker side of Sherlock Holmes. That source, too, is Irish.)

That's how Guy Ritchie updates Sherlock Holmes. How do other directors update old stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Did Watson like Holmes' music?

I've long enjoyed this observation about the composer Edward Elgar in Ethan Mordden's witty and comprehensive A Guide to Orchestral Music:

"[Elgar's] fame began with the `Enigma' Variations, a turning point for English music, for Elgar grew up in a country that had lost touch with a venerable musical tradition. Before the Engima Variations arrived, the national sound consisted of gentlemen amateurs imitating Mendelssohn; it is amazing that Elgar matured in so unstimulating an environment."

One of those amateurs, albeit a fictional one, was Sherlock Holmes. The Enigma Variations' publication in 1899 places them smack in the middle of Holmes' own career as consulting detective and amateur violinist. So, for all you musicians and crime fiction readers: What role does music play in the Sherlock Holmes stories? Was Conan Doyle a stodgy conservative when it came to music? Was Holmes? Did Conan Doyle throw his hero into Reichenbach Falls out of despair that advances in English music were about to pass him by?

(For more on Sherlock Holmes and music, see Ted Friedman's article "Music of Sherlock Holmes." Incidentally, I discovered as I prepared this post that Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson," at least not in any of Conan Doyle's stories.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Was Voltaire Sherlock Holmes' grandfather?

I posted last week about François-Marie Arouet, detective, suggesting that Voltaire would make a good fictional sleuth. I'd forgotten at the time that he wrote a vignette often cited as a forerunner of the classic tale of detection. Here’s part of that vignette, from Zadig:

“As regards the king of kings’ horse, you may know that as I walked along the road in this wood I saw the marks of horseshoes, all equal distances apart. That horse, said I, gallops perfectly. The dust on the trees in this narrow road only seven feet wide brushed off a little right and left three and a half feet from the middle of the road. This horse, said I, has a tail three and half feet long, and its movement left and right has swept away this dust. I saw beneath the trees, which made a cradle five feet high, some leaves newly fallen from the branches, and I recognized that this horse had touched there and was hence fifteen hands high. As regards his bit, it must be of twenty-three carat gold, for he rubbed the studs against a stone which I knew to be a touchstone and tested. From the marks his hoofs made on certain pebbles I knew the horse was shod with eleven scruple silver.”

That’s pretty Holmesian, and it was published in 1747 – 112 years before Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Dead protagonists and other clever ways to end a series

A few months ago I read a novel that ended when its protagonist died. Needless to say, it was the final book in its series.

With the subject of series’ conclusions much on people’s minds these days thanks to Ian Rankin, John Rebus, and that courageous gay activist J.K. Rowling, I now turn my thoughts to last things as well. To avoid plot spoilers for anyone who might be reading the book in question, I won’t name my dead protagonist. But can you name any? You get half-credit for Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle killed off in “The Adventure of the Final Problem” but was forced by public outcry to revive later. You get similar partial credit for coming up with Michael Dibdin’s Blood Rain, which ended with Aurelio Zen being blown up by a Mafia bomb … only to begin a slow recovery from his injuries when Dibdin decided to revive the series three years later.

If you can’t think of protagonists who died, what other clever or satisfying ways have authors chosen to end series?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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100 Must-Read Crime Novels

There may not be precisely a hundred, and not all are novels (the list includes story collections by G.K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle), but Richard Shephard and Nick Rennison's 100 Must-Read Crime Novels makes a nice, compact guide. It will fit easily into your pocket to replace the 5 pounds, 99 pence you take out to pay for it.

The occasionally flat prose in the capsule descriptions (Novels are "unbelievably powerful" or "atmospheric, entertaining") is offset by interesting choices from authors I had not read (John Franklin Bardin, Nicholas Blake) or knew only through movie adaptations (Vera Caspary's Laura). I was pleased to see Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint on the list and tantalized by the description of Eric Ambler's writing as "poles apart from the run-of-the-mill, imperialist yarns favoured by such writers as John Buchan and Sapper."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007