What we love in Sherlock Holmes ... and John H. Watson

In 1946, a Sherlockian Edgar Smith asked a very important question: "What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes?"

Smith touched on the nostalgia for a bygone age. He referenced Holmes's ability to right wrongs. He saw that the deep psychological basis for our love of Holmes was possibly too complex to completely fathom. But in the end, he theorized that what we saw and loved in Sherlock Holmes was ourselves, sitting in our comfortable Baker Street rooms . . . looking forward to adventures to stimulate us? Smith doesn't go that far, but Holmes was definitely no Nero Wolfe or brother Mycroft.

Smith wrote of a "tremendous capacity for wisdom" as one aspect of the Holmes we saw in ourselves, and he was right. Sherlock Holmes is our potential, a version of ourselves that doesn't seem all that far away from who we are, yet always just past arm's reach. That last part, for some, is easy to miss. We never become Sherlock Holmes, with that infallible confidence that we have deduced exactly what the situation is, and that we understand all sides of the picture.

But what we can emulate in Sherlock Holmes as much as possible, is the attempt to observe as much as we can. And to understand how another person might think. And to keep learning: "Life is a series of lessons with the greatest for last."

Sherlock Holmes challenges us to be observant. To point out facts. Not our opinions. Not our theories. Facts. Sometimes, pointing out something that seems fairly obvious to us, however, is something someone might be purposefully turning a blind eye to. And then, we do sometimes get the Grimesby Roylotts: "Holmes, the meddler! Holmes, the busybody! Holmes the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!"

Boy, how do you not suspect someone's guilty when they raise that much of a fuss? Sometimes, our Grimesby Roylotts are even fellow Sherlockians . . . not the ones who are the first to welcome you, but the sheltered Stoke Moran weirdo who is used to being tolerated by the local villagers. But what did Sherlock Holmes do about Grimesby Roylott?

He just kept being Sherlock Holmes. He listened the Helen Stoner. He looked at the situation for himself. We don't want to say he exposed Roylott's snake, lest we be misinterpreted, but he did give that thing a whap or three. (Man, does "Speckled Band" have subtext!)

But even Sherlock Holmes had a friend who could whisper "Norbury" to him when needed, and a friend who definitely wasn't just a yes-man. It was fun to revisit "Charles Augustus Milverton" last week and again see Watson laying down the law with Holmes about his criminal venture.

"You are not coming," said Holmes.

"Then you are not going," Watson replied. "I give you my word of honour -- and I never broke it in my life -- that I will take a cab straight to the police-station and give you away, unless you let me share this adventure with you."

Holmes tries to shut it down with "You can't help me," but John H. Watson isn't taking any of Holmes's shit on this one, shooting back a "How do you know that?"

It is perhaps Watson's most glorious moment, the one where he shows us that he isn't just the tagalong. He's the partner.

In a time when the Victorian age is just another fantasy world to us, so distant from our own reality that its everyday is nigh impossible to ever know, there is still something for us to love in Sherlock Holmes, just as Edgar Smith found in 1946. Without the distraction of nostalgia for the 1940s equivalent of our 1950s or 1960s, however, I think we can dig a little deeper into the love or Sherlock Holmes and John Watson outside of their old-time trappings. (BBC Sherlock will forever be the proof-of-concept that drove that point home.)

Because there is just so much there to love, especially when the unlovable parts of life might be getting us down.

Elementary, Season Seven, Episode Ten: Devil's foot models!

"Three Students" reference at square one this week! And a VR solving of it at that.

And here's Odin Reichenbach at Holmes and Watson's front door, so -- SPOILERS! -- it's Elementary time! And a podcaster is involved with a true crime movie called "The Devil's Foot," so they're going all in on this one. And a murder walking tour thrown in for the pre-titles corpse discovery

Wait, "The Devil's Foot" happened in 1910 in Elementary world, Tregennises and all? And it wasn't solved by Sherlock Holmes? This is certainly the weirdest means of Canonical tie-in Elementary has done. And Sherlock is helping the guy whose theory solved it sue Hollywood? It's original!

Joan Watson and Marcus Bell are out solving the main case of the week, the corpse found by the murder tour. No, wait, Sherlock is out in the alley. But once Joan and Marcus discover an apartment packed with fashion models, Sherlock magically appears. I don't think anyone has ever questioned Jonny Lee Miller Sherlock's heterosexuality. (No, wait . . . if it's conceivable, someone in fic world has gone there.) But, secret passage to apartment of models is our first commercial break stinger.

If we go by promos, Elementary's place on CBS is being taken this fall by Luke Cage, demon-possession investigator. Guess "No ghosts need apply!" wasn't working out for the network.

I hope Joan does something worth a mention on The Watsonian Weekly's news segment. She's our major media Watson flagship, and we need news!

Wow, Sherlock Holmes can deduce a man is wearing thong underwear by the way he sits down. We're not in Victorian London anymore, Dorothy!

Well, Joan Watson can identify corpse-flies on sight.

I get kinda bored and start playing until MC Autocat comes on, doing his knock-off Daft Punk thing (or maybe Deadmau5 -- cat, mouse, natural parody switch).  Elementary could have an entire dictionary of its "things that are named like generic versions of real world things," which happens in most film and TV, but here it always seems to jump out.

Ooops, everybody is ganging up on someone behind a desk -- that means they're the killer and the show is about done. Elementary has certain "tells" that a familiar viewer gets very used to. And since the criminal has been found, it's time for the over-arching plot thread if it's going to happen . . . and now it's Odin Reichenbach time!

Reichenbach's killer-predicting software predicted a killer that Sherlock and Joan didn't let him stop, so . . . they're supposed to feel guilty for not letting him kill potential killers?

But Sherlock's pappy Morland Holmes is showing up in the preview of next week's show to help Sherlock with his problem, but is it his Reichenbach problem? One starts to envision Sherlock Holmes's dad appearing at Reichenbach Falls when Moriarty is about to fight him. Ah, well, next week is the third-to-last episode, so Morland is due to show up. Going to be a real shame if we don't get Moriarty as well, but, alas, probably too much to hope for.

The fun topic of authorial intent

I do enjoy the thinkers among us. Coming upon a thread by @vulgarweed on Twitter this morning I found some new insights on Conan Doyle and the whole issue of authorial intent, a topic which has bothered me since high school lit class.

I mean, do you remember the first time a teacher tried to tell you that the author wove in this whole under-the-surface theme based on single color or image? The whole "this is what the author was really saying" when it sure seemed like the author was just telling a story of what happened in the story?

Lately I've heard a few folks adamantly asserting that Conan Doyle was obviously a one-man Pride parade of the Victorian era and was pretty plainly bi. It can get a little extreme sometimes, and having spent my own life looking at Doyle sympathetically as a fellow romantic hetero, I will admit that occasionally I start seeing flashes of my old English teacher during those moments and doing a bit of a side-eye. But are they wrong?

@vulgarweed's recent Twiter-thread thoughts on authorial intent gave me some new angles that were much appreciated on the subject. Writing as a writer, @vulgarweed came up with the concept of "authorial surprise," when the writer themselves might not have been completely aware of what they were doing at the time they were doing it, but can see it later on.

That idea really struck a chord with my own Nanowrimo experiences, where jamming a novel out in a single month has you writing without thinking, just letting characters do what they'll do, and occasionally making sharp, veering turns for no reason. (One of my most odd Nanowrimo novels was a romantic comedy where the main character ditched the intended object of his affection for a different minor character midway through the novel -- a complete surprise to me!)  At the end of the month, I usually found that all of the rambling plotting all started to make a certain sense from a sort of aerial view, and that it was easy to bring that plane in for a landing after all.

But did I subconsciously intend for that to happen, or was it just my pattern-recognition skills kicking in once the mass of data was presented to me? We humans are excellent at making patterns out of random elements, as evidenced by the fact I can't stare into the dark without seeing something impossible lurking there every time. (I don't stare into the dark any more than I have to.)

Subconscious planning versus pattern-recognition is practically "nature versus nurture," the sort of debate that it's near-impossible to work out with complete certainty. Even a living, breathing, talking author, whose own brain a work came from, won't claim to understand everything about their own psyche. Surprises come out of our brains all the time. Every night, in fact, unless you're one of those poor souls who can't dream. The only difference between literary analysis and dream analysis is probably that authors have an editing phase to control what goes into the final work, where conscious decisions are definitely made.

Every person gets something different from any given work of art, including the creator. Trying to state what was going on in another person's brain during normal life is hard enough. (Anyone want to theorize about someone else's Starbuck's order?) Trying to do it around a creative moment is nigh impossible. But the attempt must be made, as it teaches us something about ourselves as much as the author.

@vulgarweed concludes with "And very often when an author says 'multiple interpretations are valid' that's not a cop-out, it is the literal truth." Some may have a strong desire to see their own views validated by a creator, but that need for validation is a completely different issue. (Even a creator might be seeking validation for thoughts they put out there.) But art, by its very nature, is something we all approach from our own angle. Accepting that Conan Doyle might have meant a whole lot of things, or maybe even nothing at all, in his creation of Sherlock Holmes, is a part of our Sherlockian journey that's up to each of us to figure out.

Just like whatever your interpretation of this blog post winds up being.

Milverton gives up his secrets

As usual, our monthly meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Story Society at Peoria's North Branch Library was full of lively conversation tonight, ranging from why the St. Louis library-meeting society can only handle a story every two months to the cursed "glass-strewn" versus "grass-strewn" variants of "Charles Augustus Milverton."

Along the way, however, I was struck by two little details that never crossed my path before, and very important details they were.

For one, we all know this is a very different case for Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Not a mystery, but a problem to solve. And we never see just how his client first comes to him as we normally do. We assume it's just consulting detective business as usual. We assume a lot of things.

But two words triggered something in me that changed my entire view of this case. Lady Eva Brackwell, "the most beautiful debutante of last season" in Sherlock Holmes's own words (Let me say that again with emphasis: Sherlock Holmes's own words.)has come to Sherlock Holmes with her darkest secret laid bare to ask his help with Milverton. And Sherlock Holmes goes after Milverton with all he has, and quite emotionally, at that. Milverton raises Holmes's hackles like no other criminal. But just because of the crime of "blackmail" in general? Or something more specific?

Holmes tells Watson of just what Milverton is blackmailing Lady Eva with: "several imprudent letters --  imprudent, Watson, nothing worse -- which were written to an impecunious young squire in the country."  And where are we told in another tale that Holmes's people come from? Country squires.

Was this poor country squire who is so aware of what was in those letters Mr. Sherlock Holmes?

Ah, you might protest, debutante Lady Eva is too young to have been sending letters to a young country Sherlock! But a.) The letters could have been written by a crushing-on-Sherlock tweener Eva Brackwell, and b.) The Milverton case is never dated, and could be a very early Baker Street matter.

Which brings me to point number two about this case: Watson runs two miles after he is nearly caught as one of the two burglars who murdered Milverton. In A Study in Scarlet, John H. Watson is wounded in the shoulder. In The Sign of the Four, Watson is wounded in the leg. What happened in between those two cases? The Milverton matter.

Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is looking for a guy who can run two miles who had something to do with killing Charles Augustus Milverton. Sherlock Holmes jokes, "Why, it might be a description of Watson!" and Lestrade repeats those very words. Not so funny to the guy who might go to prison for a murder he didn't commit, right? How best to quickly cover up his fitting the description of that suspected killer?

"... a six-mile limp for a half-pay officer with a damaged tendo Achilles." Oh, Watson's aching leg! No way was he that escaping Milverton murderer with that leg! No way at all!

Did Lady Eva come to her "impecunious young squire" to remedy the fallout from her youthful crush? And did Watson fake one of his wounds to avert Lestrade's lawful gaze?

Charles Augustus Milverton wasn't the only one who could draw out the secrets. And another evening with Peoria's Sherlock Holmes Story Society can do that as well.

Elementary-sized chunks

During last week's episode of Elementary, I was struck once again by the TV procedural format itself. Each act much come between commercial breaks, with a stinger of a tease to get you to stay through the random ads instead of changing the channel. How many TV viewers are that non-committal about what they're watching? I don't know, but we have a whole art form based on the premise.

So I started to wonder: What if Conan Doyle had been forced to work in a TV writer's room to get his stories on the air? How might our existing Canon have changed?

And so, the idea for this morning's experiment began. Could I take one of the sixty and give it commercial breaks? What extra material would that take? What were the commercial cliffhanger moments? Would a "Yellow Face" or a "Gloria Scott" even work? One of the novels might go easily into it, due to all that material. But one of the shorties? Let's try "A Case of Identity."

As the episode starts, Holmes and Watson are sitting in front of the fireplace at Baker Street having their little debate about how whether truth is stranger than fiction. Watson cites how crude the crimes of the police reports are, hitting upon the Dundas separation case, whereupon Holmes does a conversational riposte and scores one on Watson. Then he shows off his golden snuffbox.

We cut to Hosmer Angel rolling up to his fiancee and her mother in a hansom cab, a bit addle-headedly not realizing they wouldn't all fit in it, then putting the two women in the cab and getting in a four-wheeler to follow. (Never mind, they could have all gotten in that four-wheeler.) The cabs make their way to the church, and when the door to the second cab is opened, Hosmer Angel is GONE! Shocked look on the fiancee's face, roll right into the opening credits and theme music.

So far, so good. Following the story, got the pre-credit *zing!* in, and a nice moment with Holmes and Watson. Doyle did good work.

In the fifteen minutes that follow, Mary Sutherland is immediately present at Baker Street, telling her tale: "I came to you, sir, because I hear of you from Mrs. Etherege, whose husband you found so easy when the police and everyone had given him up for dead."

We could probably get ten minutes out of Mary Sutherland's telling of her tale, with Holmes's questions along the way. Another five minutes of Holmes and Watson discussing her case after she left and the ad describing Hosmer Angel. At this point, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson he should be able to settle the whole case by only writing two letters, because it's so obvious.

Our Canonical tale is about two-thirds done. An episode for CBS is only one-third done. What do we do? Well, in Elementary fashion, that last scene doesn't end with Holmes having the solution practically in hand. It ends with the screeching hard turn.

Inspector Lestrade shows up with news that the French vineyard Mary's step-father worked with had just been caught smuggling rare extra-virgin olive oil from a medieval Italian monastery in its wine bottles. Watson goes with Lestrade to the wine warehouse on the docks where the olive oil was discovered and talks to dock workers there, while Holmes goes to the local monastery of the order of medieval monks to find out what, if anything, they knew about Hosmer Angel. The monks are doing some really kinky stuff with that olive oil, and Holmes eventually gets the chance to tell Watson, "There were no angels at that monastery, Hosmer or otherwise."

James Windibank sends a note that says he's coming by Baker Street to find out if Watson has discovered who is doing the smuggling, and Holmes announces, based on that letter, that he has solved the case. Windibank shows up, Holmes asks Windibank pointedly if he only dates family members, and the true identity of Hosmer Angel is revealed . . . immediately before we go to the last bunch of commercials.

After the commercial break, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson take turns explaining everything that they figured out and scare Windibank straight with the thought that they're going to beat him soundly.

That doesn't seem to have nearly the number of twists and turns as the average Elementary episode, and I don't think the show would spend nearly so long talking to Mary Sutherland as Doyle did. But at it's core, the tale needs a good extra twenty minutes of red herring to fill a prime-time television hour. The basic elements still work, though, with some extra mystery added in. (And possibly a touch of the season's overarching plot . . . "Hey, Odin Reichenbach called. He said he still wants to talk to us.")  And that, after over a century, is kind of nice to see.

JHW -- just a friend or a mainlining murderino?

What drove John H. Watson?

We sometimes see his relationship with Sherlock Holmes as a key, Watson as that friend who is always willing to come along for the ride. We also sometimes see him as a man looking for adventures or whatever it was he got or didn't get in Afghanistan. But after having spent a few days reading about and listening to true crime podcasters Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, I started to wonder if Watson wasn't just a little bit of a "murderino."

"Murderino" is the term the My Favorite Murder podcasters came up with for those whose interest in true crime becomes the past-time of choice. Lately, more than one of my friends or family has become hooked on Netflix documentaries or podcasts on the criminal side of things. And we know Sherlock Holmes was definitely a murderino, as evidenced by that three months of just reading about true crime he once seems to have done.

Yes, yes, all of Sherlocks investigations were notably not murders. But Scotland Yard notably didn't come to him for anything less than the crime of murder, and, after all, removing the murderers from society the most important of investigatory purposes?

We don't get to see a whole lot of John Watson's life when he is completely without Sherlock Holmes. There's just two bits, really -- with Stamford before he meets Sherlock, and in the first half of "The Empty House," when he thinks Holmes has been dead for years. And what is John Watson doing, in that later part of his life, when there's no Sherlock Holmes and he's left to his own devices?

He's visiting a murder scene.

"It can be imagined that my close intimacy with Sherlock Holmes had interested me deeply in crime, and that after his disappearance I never failed to read with care the various problems which came before the public." ("Disappearance" instead of "death" is a bit of a spoiler there from Watson.)

Watson practically uses the words "my favorite murder" when describing his attraction to the killing of Ronald Adair. He spends a whole day reading and considering it, then uses his evening stroll to take a walk to the house where the murder occurred. Does he hope that one of the Scotland Yarders he was familiar with might let him in for a look? One has to wonder.

When Sherlock Holmes disappeared from his life in 1891, John Watson almost immediately began publishing his records of their investigations. He took a break from publishing after December of 1893, but we'll never know just how long that break might have gone on, for three months later, Sherlock Holmes was back and Watson was again too busy for working out his prose.

His pipeline to London's true crime had returned.

Elementary, Season Seven, Episode Nine: The dog welder.

Looks like another Odin Reichenbach episode, if the "previously on" recounting is an omen. Get ready for the spoilers, and maybe a few cries of "Where's Clyde the turtle?"

Since Joan Watson is playing with toy cars on a city layout on the floor as the show opens, it's the kind of scene that once had Clyde in it, and I miss him for a moment. Then the welder-on-welder violence starts, with a little Steely Dan in the background. Awfully mellow music for a murder, eh wot?

KFC is selling Cheeto-coated chicken sandwiches? Are they just targeting the natural curiosity of Elementary-watchers who are now going, "What must that taste like?"

Hearing Sherlock Holmes say "Occupied!" when Watson enters the bathroom without knocking is surely new among Sherlockian quotes. He was working with a safe submerged in the bathtub, however, and not doing the usual bathroom business. But that's a side issue to "the ghost of Brooklyn," a killer who seems to have returned, from DNA at the site.

The suspects in the murder of Caroline the welder start to roll in, and Joan Watson is on it. But Sherlock has found "the ghost of Brooklyn" who was not a killer at all, just a DNA assembly line worker who does lousy work. End of Act One.

Colon cancer tests? And dog food, make-up wipes, wireless network, a women's razor, pain reliever, other CBS shows. An astute Sherlockian might try to profile the average Elementary viewer from the list. My personal deduction is an older woman who is concerned about her safety at home. Except if said Elementary viewer owns that dog for household protection, this episode of Elementary murdered a nice lady with a whole lot of barking dogs right off, so maybe they'd better run home security commercials next.

But Sherlock and Marcus Bell go talk to every dog bit victim in the area to see if Caroline the welder's dog tried to help them identify the killer. And then Sherlock and Joan talk about the whole Odin Reichenbach thing for a minute and the parts Sherlock was keeping to himself. Seems awfully paltry for using the whole "previously on" for it, but we shall see.

Wait . . . "On the Scent" is the name of this episode. Maybe those dogs can still do something in the night-time, or the day-time. If we can get past accusing pink-haired ladies who take thyroid pills. Oh, wait, Ollie the German shepherd seems to be missing. Dogs! End of Act Two.

Home software. More wireless network. Moisturizer. Aussie steakhouse. Hmm. That last one is curious, eh?

Marcus Bell and Captain Gregson get a solo scene, revealing that Ollie was a drug-sniffing dog. We've gone from a ghostly serial killer to random killer bit by a dog to dog-nappers involved in the marijuana industry.

Meanwhile, Sherlock and Joan discuss Odin Reichenbach some more and Sherlock's contacts with "agents of the Crown" who may have something by the time this episode is over.

But meanwhile, Marcus, Joan, and Sherlock have to got to a marijuana gang's off-track betting to follow up on the dog. The ganglord keeps his lawyer behind a wall he can bang on, which is pretty cool for a ganglord. But Joan's snapped a lot of secret phone pics of the screens in the room, and just as Joan and Sherlock deduce it has something to do with trains, Ollie the dog turns up in a trainyard.

Someone stole a million dollars worth of marijuana using Ollie. End of Act Three.

Smartphone on same wireless network. Same pain reliever. Almond milk. Anti-perspirant. Department store. Diabetes medicine. Hmm.

Not much time left to solve the case and hear something about Odin Reichenbach. But this is Elementary, they can do it. Sherlock, Joan, and Marcus confront the killer with all the evidence they have, including things they found out during the commercial break. And just as Ollie the dog backs up their play by finding the stolen pot, our local station breaks in accidentally to promote the 10 PM news. Ollie returns, and . . .

ODIN REICHENBACH!!! In his limo with his own personal Anthea, filling him in on things. And I swear to Godfrey Staunton, she says "John Watson" is getting too close. Really. I'm sure she said "John." But Odin says he's going to handle Joan Watson personally, which is our cliffhanger for next week. And speaking of cliffs, there are only three episodes left and the Wikipedia episode guide says that last episode is "Reichenbach Falls."

Was Odin Reichenbach's main function just to make that title possible? We shall see.