Hopelessly Prosaic and Material

On the positive side, the stories chosen for the anthology are okay, though I'd have chosen Gentlemen and Players instead of A Costume Piece.

Like, genuinely. There is nothing remotely subtle about this- completely and proudly blatant, I don't even know.

I largely enjoy the stories themselves, though I don't think Hornung was at his best when writing the action sequences that the scenarios generally required- but their relationship just freaking sparkles in such a fun way and it's not even as though it's subtext, or if it is it's very near-the-surface subtext, it's just that every single goshdarned opportunity Hornung has to show how obsessed Bunny is with Raffles or how devoted Raffles is to Bunny or how annoyed either one is when the other shows any interest at all in a third party, he takes. And it's not just obsession or devotion or jealousy, they just clearly love each other and are proud of each other and want to be with each other. I'd say it's romance novelesque but so many romance novels don't even really bother with that bit.

I mean (spoiler warning) the whole saga literally ends with Bunny's ex-girlfriend writing him a letter saying "I get that you burgled my house because you followed Raffles because you were in love with him, he came by and told me so and I totally get it, he's super great, but now that he's dead and you're not with him anymore maybe we can get back together someday." Who DOES this.

So, this clip is great, and I see it come up all the time on the compilations that I watch when I'm in a Granada Holmes mood but don't have time for a full episode:

It's great, really sweet, and has the benefit of coming basically straight out of a bit of the source story, The Norwood Builder. The scene expands on it (Holmes is more openly depressed, Watson specifically encourages him to eat) a bit but the core ideas are all there.

So all that's great, but I was just watching The Norwood Builder (and incidentally, SPOILERS for this episode below!) and maybe it's the fact that I was also literally chopping a shitton of onions at the time but I completely had not contextualized this with the scene immediately before (about 32 min in):

The thing with the original Norwood Builder story is that it's one of ACD's stories that doesn't really have an actionable crime to prosecute at the end, unless either "wasting police resources" was criminalized back then or they had a REALLY strict definition of "attempted murder." This episode decides that, instead of having there be no real crime, there will instead be one of the darkest crimes in the series, and it's actually an improvement on a somewhat unconvincing detail in the story in addition to really changing the tone.

So this episode decides to include a particularly cruel and craven murder of an extremely vulnerable person, but doesn't only do that- it conveys that information to us in an extremely emotionally evocative and moving way. Again, I was literally chopping onions which probably didn't help, but it was devastating to see the scene in which we see Holmes disguised as a vagabond, talking to a man who clearly feels betrayed by this sailor who promised to share in (what he thought was) his good fortune but, as far as the man can tell, skipped off without keeping his promise, and we watch Holmes's face as his horrible theory is confirmed about what REALLY happened to the sailor while the other man has no clue.

The immediate next scene is Holmes frozen, his hair and room a mess, and the juxtaposition is stark. His hair isn't messy because he hasn't gotten around to fixing it in the morning, it's the same as it was the night before when he mussed it up for his disguise but the realization of the brutal crime- and what will clearly be tremendous difficulty in both proving it and preventing another innocent's death- has paralyzed him. He knows exactly what happened, he knows exactly how horrific this all is, and he believes that circumstances (including Lestrade's new clue) have lined up to not only allow Oldacre to get away with his crime but to allow Holmes's client to hang for it. Everything is fucked and Holmes can, he believes, do NOTHING to prove it. He can turn over his theories to McFarlane's attorney to use for reasonable doubt but he can't solve it.

He asks Watson for his support that day because, as Watson smugly tells Lestrade at the end after they emerge victorious, his work is its own reward, but there's not much reward when the work cannot produce what it needs to. Success may provide enough intrinsic motivation that Holmes doesn't need publicity, but conversely failure to accomplish his goal- not just to discover what happened but to prove it and thus solve a crime/save a life- is enervating. Watson has understood this throughout the case, taking his own initiative to help support Holmes's hunch that McFarlane is being set up, and Holmes knows he can count on him for this.

Sure, he has an overreliance on old fashioned ideas about physiognomy (but not even as often as people think), and his forensics can be pre-scientific (though I think a lot of people would be dismayed at what modern-day forensics is like), but not phrenology. That was a highly specific insane thing that was largely out of vogue before Holmes was ever (fictionally) born and which, while it slightly poked its head into early anthropology, was not really one of Holmes's vices. (MAYBE Dr Mortimer's, though?)

Incidentally: you want a book with weird phrenology? Jane Eyre.

"Criticise me: does my forehead not please you?” He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen. “Now, ma’am, am I a fool?” “Far from it, sir. You would, perhaps, think me rude if I inquired in return whether you are a philanthropist?” “There again! Another stick of the penknife, when she pretended to pat my head: and that is because I said I did not like the society of children and old women (low be it spoken!). No, young lady, I am not a general philanthropist; but I bear a conscience;” and he pointed to the prominences which are said to indicate that faculty, and which, fortunately for him, were sufficiently conspicuous; giving, indeed, a marked breadth to the upper part of his head: “and, besides, I once had a kind of rude tenderness of heart."

And then of course I realized I was reinventing freaking RAFFLES.

Which was literally written by ACD's brother in law, 125 years ago, basically to be that exact thing. A series of stories that literally includes Hornung's own version of the Reichenbach Fall and subsequent return.

What else would one expect, after all, from an irreverent* yet devoted Sherlockian and Baker Street Irregular like Rex Stout?

*I defy anyone to apply another term to the writer and deliverer of the 1941 BSI dinner keynote, Watson was a Woman, in which Stout claimed that Watson was a woman, that she was married to Holmes, that this female Watson was also Irene Adler, and that they, improbably, were the parents of, for some reason, Lord Peter Wimsey of all people.

That said... and spoilers for the book itself below the cut...

It was a pretty jam packed trip that, yes, included plenty of the standard touristy things, but I also took a second to take a photo here.

So where am I?

See if you can guess- I'll give you a minute.

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I'm actually only a few doors down from the Sherlock Holmes Museum (which I will admit I did not visit- time was tight and tickets were not cheap- but I did get a photo there too). I am, instead/in addition, at Abbey House, the former home of the Abbey National Bank- an institution with a storied Sherlock Holmes history.

Now, when I thought I'd have more time for the Sherlockian part of my sojourn (I also needed, among other more typical touristy activities, to get to Poirot's and Lord Peter Wimsey's respective apartment buildings at various points, not to mention my Gaudy Night Oxford walking tour), I had serious plans to walk the area and stop at every address that has been pointed out, by different Sherlockian scholars, to possibly have been the location of 221B Baker Street.

But why are there multiple places where 221B might be? I didn't have the same question, after all, when I went to the vague general location of 112A Piccadilly to visit Lord Peter Wimsey (now a Sheraton hotel, but ah well). For a different reason, nor did I when I visited Poirot's residence, because Whitehaven Mansions doesn't exist and so I went to the TV show exterior location (Florin Court, near the Barbican). But with 221B Baker Street it is a very real problem (and not least because the Granada exterior was a set in Manchester and I can live without a photo in front of the BBC Sherlock one).

It's also a problem that's been written about extensively in a variety of books and articles. I won't go through all of them here, partly because I don't have all the material in front of me and partly because it would take QUITE a while, but the gist is that 221B Baker Street did not exist when the stories were written. The highest house number on the street was 84, and the part that now has the 200s was called Upper Baker Street. In between Baker Street and Upper Baker Street was York Place, and if you ask Sherlockian scholars, 221B could have been at several different houses on any three of these streets, meaning all the way up and down the modern-day Baker Street. In fact, for those interested in interrogating where 221B must have been based on landmarks, the location of the current 221B (the Sherlock Holmes museum) is actually blocks away from where Holmes himself must have lived- partly because ACD could never have known that the three streets would merge, and partly because of the kinds of landmarks that ACD gives in stories like The Empty House.

And so, in essence, the fact that a 221B (more or less) Baker Street exists today is basically a coincidence.

A separate post would go more into the various different addresses that have been posited by a variety of commentators based on London geography and Sherlockian canon over the last hundred or so years- such as 49 Baker Street by TS Blakeney, 61 Baker Street by Gavin Brend, 111 Baker Street (formerly on York Place) by Dr Gray Chandler Briggs (with the approval of Vincent Starrett), and 31 Baker Street by Bernard Davies (with the approval of William S Baring-Gould). I am still a bit mad I didn't get to visit and pace out their accuracy for myself, though I know London has changed a lot since many of them made their determinations. But all this to say that 221B is still clouded in fog, but that for all practical purposes Abbey House, for several decades, was a lighthouse within it.

After all, once 221B DID exist, who would be getting Holmes's mail? The answer- the Abbey National Bank, which built as its headquarters Abbey House at 219-229 Baker Street, where it resided from 1932-2002 (the building is now residential as I understand it- Abbey National Bank is now part of Santander and HQ is elsewhere). As of 1932, this block had only been part of Baker Street for two years, and while 221 was technically not its own address, it was clearly within the area designated for Abbey House. Some businesses, placed in one of the most famous addresses in the world, would see this as a burden- Abbey National Bank, for over fifty years, took the exact opposite approach, including:

In 1951, they hosted an exhibit in cooperation with the Conan Doyle family celebrating the world of Sherlock Holmes, which can now be seen (but sadly not by me due to an unfortunate wrong-tube-related incident) at the Sherlock Holmes pub in Charing Cross

They put up a plaque, unfortunately now lost, at their building to commemorate Holmes's, well, home

They employed a secretary to answer mail sent to Holmes at 221B Baker Street (and there was plenty of it)

They published or were part of publishing multiple Holmes-related books, including one edited by Richard Lancelyn Green featuring letters written to 221B

They helped fund a statue of Holmes that still stands today at Baker Street

They also objected when, in 1990, the Westminster City Council put up a blue plaque (a London staple commemorating the heritage of local buildings) at the new Sherlock Holmes Museum, farther down the street, calling it 221B. This made the street numbering out of whack and angered Abbey National, which by all accounts had the actual location where 221B WOULD be re street numbering and had spent years investing in its Sherlock Holmes connection. The museum spent nearly a decade trying to get the rights to the 221B street number so that it would receive all of Holmes's mail, only winning the rights to the out-of-sync street number when Abbey vacated the premises in 2002, ending its seventy year long relationship with Sherlock Holmes.

By which of course I mean this one:

All genius, but of course, even more specifically, the bit starting at about 5:52. You know the scene I mean, and if you don't by all means watch it!

Honestly, it's an in-a-nutshell demonstration of the greatness of both canon and the Granada adaptation.

Here's the scene from the book:

“Well,” said Lestrade, “I’ve seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don’t know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that. We’re not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand.” “Thank you!” said Holmes. “Thank you!” and as he turned away it seemed to me that he was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was the cold and practical thinker once more. “Put the pearl in the safe, Watson,” said he, “and get out the papers of the Conk-Singleton forgery case. Goodbye, Lestrade. If any little problem comes your way I shall be happy, if I can, to give you a hint or two as to its solution.”

And here's the dialogue from the show:

Lestrade: I’ve seen you handle a good many cases in my time, but I don’t know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than this. We’re not jealous of you, you know, at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow there’s not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn’t be glad to shake you by the hand. Holmes: Thank you! Thank you! Would you get down the Conk-Singleton forgery case please, Watson? Goodbye, Lestrade. If any little problem comes your way I shall be happy, if I can, to give you a hint or two as to its solution.

Not many differences! ACD knew what he was doing- he knew how to write a good yarn, he knew how to write good characters, and he knew how to write a good interaction. Granada wasn't filmed in canon order, so we don't get to see the progression of Holmes's relationship with Lestrade per se, but after a number of excellent, more "foiled again!" type Holmes-Lestrade interactions since A Study in Scarlet, ACD decided to do something cool and different here and pulled it off beautifully.

And when the director and writer of this Granada episode put this one together, they decided that the relationship between Holmes and Lestrade should be a focal point in this episode, and not only did they barely need to change a dang thing in the ending to do it, what small things they did change were all beautifully in the service of the tone of the original ending, taking advantage of the brilliant material they had to work with. I was just relistening to the excellent episode of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast discussing The Six Napoleons, and one of them points out that one of the few text changes is removing the word "very"- going from "we are very proud of you" to "we are proud of you." And it works so well- it accentuates the contrast with the previous suggested notion that they would otherwise be jealous, between what Holmes might have expected to hear (and, indeed, perhaps expected to WANT to hear) and the actuality, and how much more meaningful it turns out that is to Holmes.

The creators here- and I of course include the actors, as both Colin Jeavons and Jeremy Brett act the fuck out of this- are so smart with how they pull this off. They know that what they have on the page is gold, but they also know how they can buff it up for a stronger shine. They know that Brett will absolutely eat up all of ACD's stage directions about his response, he knows the character inside and out at this stage, so let's keep the scene the way it is and, instead, build the rest of the episode around setting up this scene in such a way that it will have maximum impact as written.

Image source

If you can, and a) you're a man and b) you can go back in time more than 90 years to May 1934, then you're eligible to be among the founding members of the Baker Street Irregulars, a brand-new Sherlock Holmes fan club!

How it worked- be a reader of the Saturday Literary Review, a magazine cofounded by Christopher Morley; notice that in the May issue, a crossword had been printed (created by Morley's brother Frank) testing Sherlock Holmes knowledge; attempt to solve it, and submit results to the SRL; and, not long after, be invited by Morley to the first ever Baker Street Irregulars Dinner.

But, again, only if you're a man (yes, some women did submit correct answers and were passed over). Morley was a perennial club-founder, some of which were for both men and women, others of which were solely "stag" (as he put it)- he decided that the first BSI dinner would be stag and they stayed that way for sixty years, even though that first dinner was one of only two which Morley himself ran, before the event was taken over by Edgar Smith.

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!