Happy St. Patrick's Day

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

Bouchercon VI

Tired, so today's post will be shorter than usual.

Nice chat at bar with




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More tomorrow.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Whiskey in the Jar: An Irish noir ballad

Two posts here this summer elicited scores of good crime songs, tunes that pack the punch of a good crime story. Your suggestions (and mine) included "Long Back Veil," "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," "Mack the Knife," Eminem's "Stan," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and many, many more.

My trip to Ireland turned up another classic: "Whiskey in the Jar." This humorous noir story tells of a highwayman who robs a captain, then brings the money to his (the highwayman's) girlfriend or wife. Here's where the noir comes in: This Jenny is in league with the captain. She disarms the protagonist while he sleeps, then calls in the captain "to be ready for the slaughter."

Where's the humor? In the song's rollicking, sing-along beat, in the protagonist's bluff attitude, and in the song's desperately hopeful ending, at least in the versions available today. (In one form or another, the song dates to the middle of the seventeenth century.)

Want to hear "Whiskey in the Jar"? Visit any pub in Ireland. By my reckoning, it's the most popular song in the country. Or listen to The Dubliners sing it here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008