A Three-pipe problem

I have to write this here, because no one in real life is interested enough to listen to it. Ha. Ha.

The Sherlockian , written by Graham Moore, came in 2010 to a world recently reminded of the existence of the Great Detective of Baker Street. There was the Hollywood film starring Robert Downey Jr., and that other unremarkable British film that piggybacked on its success, and then the BBC SHERLOCK series. In a way even the most staid Sherlockian purist should be grateful for the influx of new blood brought in by these adaptations. I mean, if the old school fandom could survive “Detective Conan” and “The Great Mouse Detective” and “Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century,” then what can’t we survive? The Baker Street Irregulars and other scion societies live on.

The adaptations also stirred activity by way of more online communities interested in discussing the canon as well as the newly-created fanon. I appreciate this because, being one of the first—if not the very first—fandom, Sherlock Holmes shouldn’t be lagging behind in the consciousness of geeks everywhere, while more and more fandoms crop up with every new book written, every new series filmed, every new movie made. Long before either the internet or Star Trek was born, fanfiction (pastiches) of Sherlock Holmes was being written and published and enjoyed worldwide. Authors now famous for a variety of things—GK Chesterton, Christopher Morley, Ronald Knox, and so forth—participated in the Game.

The Game, as stated in the second Morley principle, consists of pretending that “The characters in the stories are not fictitious creatures of some author's imagination. They are real people.” Arthur Conan Doyle, if he is mentioned at all, is mentioned as the Literary Agent of a real John Watson.

The Game began, with Ronald Knox and Christopher Morley, a new kind of literary criticism. For example, a biography of Sherlock Holmes—again, an entirely fictional character to a sane mind—was pieced together by WS Baring-Gould from tiny clues in the ACD’s narrative. The existence of a son by Irene Adler was even posited (and that son eventually turned out to be Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe—a fact still tenaciously believed by many). After all, Holmes himself said: “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” The application of Holmes’s own methods to the text spawned a game that is still being played more than a century later.

Which brings me to The Sherlockian , a book focusing heavily on the first and most exclusive Sherlockian society: The Baker Street Irregulars. To call them fans might be correct but inaccurate. These are scholars who have gained prestige in the study of Sherlock Holmes. Whether they’re doing it for fun, as Ronald Knox and Christopher Morley appear to have done, or for altogether different reasons, is immaterial. The point is this: in The Sherlockian , Alex Cane—an Irregular who claims to have found the lost volume of Arthur Conan Doyle’s diaries—is found dead in his hotel room, garroted with his own shoelaces and with the word ELEMENTARY written in blood on the wall.

The chilling part is: in 2004, Richard Lancelyn Green, a Baker Street Irregular and an authority on Arthur Conan Doyle, was found dead in his luxury flat, garroted by a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. No, he hadn’t found the missing volume of ACD’s diary, but the event did come after the sale of a collection of “lost material”—letters, drafts, notes—at Christie’s. He believed that these materials belonged in the British Public Library, where the public could access them, rather than being dispersed among private bidders, most of them American. He publicly opposed the sale. After some time, he began to believe that his life was in danger. Whether these concerns were unfounded is unknown. The coroner gave the case an open verdict—it was quite possibly suicide but nobody could rule out murder. The case remains unsolved even today, despite the best efforts of Sherlockians everywhere.

And that is probably the most interesting thing about Graham Moore’s novel, The Sherlockian —that it’s based on a real case. On the one hand, it does offer a Sherlockian the opportunity to read something (relatively) mainstream and enjoy being smug about something he already knows, but which has to be explained to the uninformed reader. There is hardly a page without a reference to a Sherlock Holmes story or to a known event or fact of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and times. And, I have to be honest, seeing this line from a well-known and much beloved poem about Sherlock Holmes--“Only those things the heart believes are true”—gave me goosebumps and made me want to put the book down to hold some tears back. (I posted the poem in this blog some time back; it’s found here.)

The Sherlockian captures some of the most frustrating and wonderful things about growing up obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. Harold, the main character and the only one who does manage to solve the mystery, is the socially awkward and youngest Irregular whose highest aspiration has always been to be inducted into the BSI. He likes Sherlock Holmes conventions because they are the only place that he can wear his deerstalker hat and people wouldn’t laugh at him. (He has what might be an eidetic memory and he probably has Asperger’s.) However, his lifelong obsession with Sherlock Holmes doesn’t stop him from seeing the flaws of either the creator or the creation, and he’s aware that he probably looks ridiculous to Sarah, the (Non-Sherlockian) journalist who accompanies him as he flies across the pond to solve the mystery. I suppose it’s the best perspective with which to view the fandom: a gut-wrenching obsession coupled with awareness of its inherent ridiculousness.

None of this squee-making fannishness, however, can disguise the fact that The Sherlockian is really two very flimsy whodunits combined into one mystery that is only slightly more substantial.

In the present day, Harold and Sarah track down the location of the diary and Alex Cane’s killer; in 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, brought to life by Graham Moore, are on the trail of the murderer of three young women. (As an additional layer of complexity, the mystery is also obliquely related to the "death" of Sherlock Holmes when ACD decided to push him off the Reichenbach.) Little impressive detection is actually done in either mystery. Most things that the author was at pains to conceal are actually very apparent from the first pages (e. g. Sarah’s true identity). And I know that real life doesn’t work like mystery novels do, but I wish that, in writing the Arthur-Bram mystery, Graham Moore had stuck to the first of Ronald Knox’s (50% tongue-in-cheek, 50% entirely serious) Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction: The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

Criticism on the nature of mysteries aside, The Sherlockian also offered little by way of narrative richness and style. I’m not Laurie R. King’s biggest fan—her characters, even if they aren’t Mary Sues or Gary Stus, still tend to be one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs—but I wonder what she could have done with the book, with her skill for weaving narratives with sumptuous detail, if the premise of The Sherlockian had fallen into her lap. I can think of a handful of Sherlock Holmes pasticheurs who might have handled the text more deftly. Even Neil Gaiman, whose work I don’t like but who apparently was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2005, might have written it better… no, wait—he couldn’t.

Still, The Sherlockian seems to fall apart if you take away the fun and interesting facts rooted in ACD’s canon. Mystery novelists have fought for so long to get the genre recognized as “legitimate” literature, and writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and PD James have gone to great lengths to ensure that their books are actually novels—concerned with the human experience and condition, not just telling a corking story. I don’t mean that Graham Moore’s novel is less legitimate or less clever; only that I found the sparse style unsuited for a novel which might have held so much potential. A novel that might have explored more thoroughly the nature of awkwardness and obsession and death among people who like murder so much in theory.

I would still recommend the book. After all, it isn’t everyday that a mainstream introduction to Sherlockian culture (of the BSI kind) comes along. And because I have a soft spot for the way the author brought to the fore one of the biggest Holmesian mysteries of all--why Sherlock Holmes was killed off, and why he came to live again in 1901. The book made me want to hunt for a black arm-band to wear in honor of Holmes's (temporary) death.

I just wouldn’t recommend the novel as a three-pipe problem.

And wow, I really hate that nobody reading this blog is going to get that last reference.

Links:
The Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction: http://www.mysterylist.com/declog.htm
Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes (Ronald Knox):
http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/books/knox_essays_in_satire/essays_in_satire_knox.pdf
In the Beginning was Ronald Knox: http://members.cox.net/sherlock1/grand.htm
An article in The Guardian on Richard Lancelyn Green:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/may/23/books.booksnews