Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #12
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Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATON
STAFF INFORMATION
CARTOON, by Marc Bilgrey
WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK, by Dr John H Watson, M.D.
SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
ASK MRS HUDSON, by Mrs Martha Hudson
A SCANDAL IN BO MEDIA, by Hal Charles
CHALLENGER’S TITANIC CHALLENGE, by Gary Lovisi
WE HATE THE TASTE OF JELLYFISH, by Jay Carey
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE VATICAN EMISSARY, by Jack Grochot
LAST MAN STANDING, by Dianne Ell
COLONEL WARBURTON’S MADNESS, by Sasscer Hill
COUNTRY COOKING, by John M. Floyd
FOOT PATROL, by Laird Long
THE KILLING OF GENERAL PATTON, by William E. Chambers
BBC’S SHERLOCK: A REVIEW, by Carole Buggė
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE, by Arthur Conan Doyle
COPYRIGHT INFORMATON
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #12 (Vol. 5, No. 2, March/April 2014) is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved. The Sherlock Holmes characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are used
by permission of Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., www.conandoyleestate.co.uk.
STAFF INFORMATION
Publisher: John Betancourt
Editor: Marvin Kaye
Assistant Editors: Steve Coupe, Sam Cooper
CARTOON, by Marc Bilgrey
WATSON’S SCRAPBOOK, by Dr John H Watson, M.D.
On several occasions, I have been asked for my opinion about the BBC TV series, Sherlock, and what Holmes thinks of it. The answer to the latter is simple: my friend has never troubled himself to watch it, nor is he likely to do so. For my part, I have found the show mostly quite entertaining. Its relationship to the actual cases and events that Holmes and I participated in is, shall we say, remote? However, I put that consideration aside and enjoy it for what it is: a mixture of comedy[1], suspense, and rather clever ratiocination. I should also note that our friend, Inspector (retired) Lestrade, is quite fond of the actor who portrays him, one Rupert Graves.
My editorial colleague Mr Kaye and I discussed Sherlock and agreed to invite our friend and contributor Carole Buggė (also known as C E Lawrence) to give us her thoughts about the programme.
This issue contains no few than five of Holmes’s adventures: my own “Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” which is sometimes called my only Christmas story; the singular tale of Colonel Warburton’s Madness, which I mentioned many years ago—a newcomer to our pages, Ms Sasscer Hill, successfully struggled with my scrawled notebook recounting of the case; Jack Grochot’s “Disappearance of the Vatican Emissary,” Martin Rosenstock’s “Fool’s Gold,” and Gary Lovisi’s “Challenger’s Titanic Challenge.”
A word about the later tale is in order. You are probably aware of the reputation of Professor George Edward Challenger, who went to a remote jungle and discovered prehistoric life in The Lost World, which my literary agent Conan Doyle shaped for publication. Two facts, however, are not well known concerning Challenger and Holmes: first, they are cousins, though the professor refuses to accept this as true, but Holmes assures me that it is so; this was first revealed by the scholar William S. Baring-Gould in his biographical study, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.
Secondly—and Challenger certainly was not aware of this!—during the “Lost World” expedition, the professor was accompanied by several individuals, including the renowned explorer Sir John Roxton. That worthy, however, yielded his place on the journey to Holmes, who disguised himself as Roxton. Details may be consulted in Mr Kaye’s study, The Histrionic Holmes, which was published in the anthology, The Game is Afoot.
Now before I turn this forum over to Mr Kaye, I am pleased to inform you that Mrs Hudson has at long last returned to Baker Street, having arranged for permanent care for her ailing aunt. Holmes and I are frankly relieved to welcome her back, and celebrated her first evening home with dinner at her favourite restaurant.
—John H Watson, M D
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I am pleased to welcome back two of our regular contributors: Hal Charles, with a new story about TV personality and detective Kelly Locke and her police inspector father Matthew; also, John Floyd’s utterly charming Sheriff Lucy Valentine and her detectival mom Fran. British author Jay Carey also returns with a new story about her distaff sleuth, Detective Eureka Kilburn.
Appearing for the first time are Laird Long, who has submitted several examples of “flash fiction” to appear in future issues as well, and my dear friend Dianne Ell, who, incidentally first introduced me to Hal Charles. I first met Dianne before her marriage, when, as Dianne Neral, she studied mystery writing with me at New York University, and as a result, sold an excellent “big caper” novel, The Exhibit, now available from Amazon.com. For many years, Dianne did not do any writing, but I am pleased to announce that she has returned to the genre and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine has bought two of her latest crime tales. Welcome back!!!!!
—Canonically Yours,
Marvin Kaye
[1] For instance, I find it quite amusing that they hired a decidedly slim, trim actor—Mark Gatiss, who is also a coproducer of the programme—to portray Holmes’s brother Mycroft, who, I am sure you are aware is not at all slim or trim!
SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
“The Scarlet Claw”: An Appreciation
“There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.”
That’s Holmes himself, in his first recorded outing, A Study in Scarlet. The Master made this observation to Tobias Gregson, remarking that the state of the corpse he was observing put him in mind of “the death of Van Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year ’34.” But the citation of Ecclesiastes could also apply to two of the hottest media adaptations of Holmes and Watson in decades—BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary. In very different ways, both series place the pair in modern times—in London and New York City, respectively.
In discussing the origins of Sherlock, with Al Jazeera America, co-creator Steven Moffat cited an unexpected inspiration for him and partner Mark Gatiss:
And we started talking about all the various films—and there are those films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce that are updated to the 1940s—and we sort of haltingly admitted to each other that somehow, in some strange magic way, mad and cheaply-made though they are, they somehow caught more of Sherlock Holmes than many of the more serious adaptations. And the very obvious step—that’s updated to the 1940’s, just a different period piece, as far as we’re concerned—we sort of started to speculate: ‘Is someone going to do that again for Sherlock Holmes? Update it to the modern day?’ And of course we just started thinking: ‘It should be us! We’ll be so cross if it’s not us!’
I, too, was first exposed to Holmes in other media via the Rathbone/Bruce films. The first two, 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, were set in period; the first, a straightforward and solid adaptation of the Canon’s best-known, and most-filmed tale, the second, a thrilling and credible duel with the Napoleon of Crime himself. But the studio that made those two, Twentieth Century Fox, stopped there.
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Fortunately for lovers of the actors in those roles, Universal Pictures signed them up for a further twelve films, released between 1942 and 1946. As Moffat noted, this Baker Street dozen was not set in a world of hansom cabs and telegrams, but in the World War II and post-World War II era. The rationale for the update (the term
reboot was decades away) was provided in a title card right after the opening credits of the first Universal Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror. Before plunging the viewer into a plot allegedly based on “His Last Bow,” and the series’s Holmes vs. the Nazis trilogy (which also included 1943’s Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and Sherlock Holmes in Washington), the filmmakers conveyed the following message:
“Sherlock Holmes, the immortal character of fiction created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the present day he remains—as ever—the supreme master of deductive reasoning.”
Despite this, action often trumped deduction in the first three modern Rathbone/Bruce Holmes films, and had the series continued in this vein, it would not have the place in as many Sherlockians’s hearts as it does. But the fourth film, 1943’s Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, which borrowed heavily from “The Musgrave Ritual,” changed direction. Solving multiple murders, not saving England from Germany, became the welcome focus.
Of the last Universal nine, there’s a wide consensus as to the best, an opinion I concur with. In fact, 1944’s The Scarlet Claw is one of my top ten Holmes movies of all time, richly-atmospheric, well-plotted, and suspenseful.
SPOILER ALERT—this column will discuss the plot and solution of The Scarlet Claw in some detail, so, if you haven’t seen it, stop reading, and spend 74 minutes watching it (it’s available online). I’ll still be here when you get back. And don’t look at the lurid film poster, which gives too much away after its promises of “New Thrills! New Terror!”
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Everybody here now? Good.
The film’s opening is one of the most effective in any Holmes film. A church-bell tolls as the camera pans over a bleak and fog-shrouded landscape. As the tocsin continues (it will sound ominously in the background for a few minutes), the scene shifts to the village of La Morte Rouge (literally, The Red Death), and the interior of Journet’s inn, whose silent occupants look around in fear. Mr. Potts, the local postman, enters, and a minute-plus into the movie, speaks the first line of dialogue; Potts asks what everyone at Journet’s is wondering—“Who could be ringing the church bell at this time?” Potts goes on to speculate that a “what” rather than a “who” might be responsible, prompting the inn’s owner, Emil Journet, to link the sound with a recent attack that left a farmer’s sheep dead, with their throats ripped out—but without leaving any tracks. Potts adds to the spookiness by reporting that another local saw a “weird glow moving across the marshes” on the previous night, and even more mangled livestock were discovered in its wake.
It’s hard not to be reminded of The Hound of The Baskervilles from the outset, with these intimations of a supernatural explanation for the goings-on, and a mysterious beast with a taste for ripped-out throats. And there are certainly worse templates for an original screenplay—while Hound remains the benchmark, some of the best novel pastiches have set Holmes against a mystery seemingly incapable of a rational explanation. (See my previous column on pastiches that deserve filming in SHMM 10.)
And paralleling the opening of the 1939 Rathbone Hound, which starts with Sir Charles running for his life while a hound bays in the background, a body is found in short order—the corpse of Lady Lillian Penrose, clutching the bell-rope, with her throat torn out as if by an animal’s claw. (Repeat viewings invariably reveal some loose ends—it’s unlikely that a woman with such wounds would have the strength to crawl to the church and pull the bell-rope for several minutes—but that’s almost churlish quibbling under the circumstances, as the plotting is generally very tight). Word of her death reaches her husband, who is presiding over a meeting of the Royal Canadian Occult Society in Quebec; fortuitously, if somewhat improbably, the society’s meeting is attended by Holmes and Watson (it’s hard to believe that they’d cross the pond just for the meeting, and there’s no basis for believing that this all happens right after Sherlock Holmes in Washington).
The setup pits Holmes against the believers in the irrational from the very beginning; in a nicely-Canonical line, Holmes observes, “Facts are always convincing, Lord Penrose. It is the conclusions drawn from the facts that are frequently in error.” Lord Penrose counters with what he considers “facts”—an account of attacks a century earlier in Le Morte Rouge which parallel the current depredations (as with the Hugo Baskerville legend, there’s a considerable gap between the appearances of the beast) that left three people dead, with their throats torn out, following reports of an apparition on the marshes. Holmes is not close-minded, but he notes that there are alternate explanations for the deaths, and thus the occurrences cannot be regarded as conclusive proofs of the existence of the supernatural, “without further data.”
Before the debate can continue, word reaches Penrose of his wife’s death. He rushes home, to be followed a day later by the Baker Street duo. Tragically, a letter from Lady Penrose seeking Holmes’s help arrives after her death; she wrote him, “I have every reason to believe that my life is in danger. Yet, if you were to ask me how I know, I couldn’t give you a logical answer. There’s nothing tangible, just a terrible premonition. It is all so frightfully real.”
Holmes accepts the commission from the dead woman to find her murderer, telling Watson that “for the first time, we’ve been retained by a corpse.” This added wrinkle—a lesser writer would simply have Holmes choose to investigate on his own—lends another layer of creepiness to what is one of the darkest Holmes movies—a later murder is genuinely heart-breaking. And the message from beyond the grave, with its fear of something intangible, is also a good fit for a storyline where there is ostensibly a supernatural evil force at work. Holmes speculates that Lady Penrose was in fear of the consequences of a dark secret from her past, but that guess (yes, Holmes does guess—“And now tell me the result of your visit to Mrs. Laura Lyons—it was not difficult for me to guess that it was to see her that you had gone”) seems off; had she believed that a past sin was coming home to roost, why characterize her fear as intangible?
Over the new widower’s objections, Holmes and Watson examine the corpse, getting vital, first-hand insights into the wounds, which allow Holmes to theorize that a human could have inflicted them. (And the tool he suspects is responsible, a five-prong garden weeder, is similar to the weapon in one of the best pastiches pitting Holmes against a werewolf.) In a line which would have made spiritualist Conan Doyle happy, Holmes tells Penrose, who does not welcome his presence or his intentions, that he “neither believes nor disbelieves in anything, including psychic phenomena.”
Holmes realizes that in a prior life Lady Penrose was a famous actress, Lillian Gentry, and uses that fact to begin an earth-bound investigation into those who had a motive to kill her. He has an encounter with the local monster himself; having convinced Watson he was elsewhere (asleep in bed), in another Hound parallel, he goes on the marshes, and in a very effective scene, enhanced by ominous background music, is stalked by a glowing figure of a man, as the church-bell again tolls at an odd hour, freaking out the regulars at Journet.
(RENEWED SPOILER ALERT—thus far, I’ve covered the first half-hour or so of the film, so if you haven’t watched it, please do yourself a favor and do so.)
Against viewer expectations, the script has the monster explained halfway through; it is a human wearing clothing coated with Stapleton’s favorite chemical, phosphorus—and Holmes even identifies the man in the costume, a local named Tanner. But with so much of the running time left, it’s no surprise that Tanner’s apparent death doesn’t wrap everything up; Holmes deduces that Tanner, like the monster, is merely a cover identity for a clever murderer, one who strikes successfully two more times, despite Holmes’s best efforts to foil him. The climax again copies Hound—Holmes gets word out that he and Watson are leaving town, and sets up the killer’s expected next victim as bait.
The solution—th
e murderer, an insane actor who had an unrequited passion for Lillian Gentry, was also posing as Potts the postman—is brilliant; Watson had earlier cited a classic short mystery in which the postman was the killer, “invisible” by virtue of his pedestrian routine—a nice bit of misdirection. Potts has been a likeable eccentric, but he is also, in retrospect, someone without an alibi—he enters the tavern at the outset after the bell began tolling; and he’s also one of those who talks up the monster. Pretty much everything works here—the creepy storyline, the rural Canadian setting, the false ending, the depiction of Holmes’s fallibility, and his ultimate success in unmasking a particularly vicious and crafty killer. If there is one major drawback, it is the continued scripting of Watson as a bumbling, if endearing, idiot—he blithers, is preoccupied with his stomach, mutters semi-coherently under his breath, and falls into a bog twice. Rathbone makes Holmes’s affection for Watson convincing, but as noted by others, it’s a stretch to think that such a boob would not have driven the Canonical Holmes to a 14% solution, or stronger.
Of all the Rathbone films, this is one that most, in my opinion, calls out for a remake, one where improved special effects can make the monster of Le Morte Rouge even scarier, and where a more effective Watson can reinforce the tragic nature of the murders, rather than serving as cheap comic relief.
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Lenny Picker, who has not yet fallen into a bog, can be reached at lpicker613@gmail.com.
ASK MRS HUDSON, by Mrs Martha Hudson
Dear Mrs Hudson,
You have been kind enough to share your experiences with Mr Sherlock Holmes, but I am curious about the good Doctor. Is Dr Watson one of those very neat and tidy ex-military men?