Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 7

by Marvin Kaye

  That sophisticated, layered plot does have Moriarty as a hands-on criminal, but what choice did Drake and Blum have? To dilute the power of the struggle by introducing an interesting wearer of criminal boots on the ground would lessen the impact of the conflict. Zucco is widely considered one of the best-ever Moriartys, capable of conveying menace with just a subtle facial expression or slight change in intonation, an appraisal that makes up for the ignominy of the actor’s being billed after the boy playing Billy the Page.

  The shift of the Rathbone/Bruce series to a contemporary setting put an extra burden on the writers of movies with Moriarty as the villain. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) has Moriarty working with the Nazis, and personally participating in the attempted abduction of an Allied scientist. Lionel Atwill, who was a nicely-creepy Dr. Mortimer in the 1939 Hound, has much less to work with than Zucco, and isn’t given an interesting crime to plan. If his character was renamed Lysander Starr, not much would be different. Substitute Atwill for Zucco in The Adventures, and his portrayal would be more highly regarded.

  Henry Daniell (Rathbone’s personal favorite Moriarty, by the way) fares somewhat better in The Woman In Green (1945). A desperate Scotland Yard turns to Holmes to solve the Finger murders, apparently-random atrocities that reawaken fears from the Ripper’s autumn of terror. In a variation of the pretext the Canonical professor used to get Watson out of the way in Meiringen, Daniell’s Moriarty has the doctor lured away with a bogus claim of a medical emergency.

  Once he’s done so, he and Holmes have a genteel verbal sparring match, with memorable dialogue lifted straight from “The Final Problem”—

  “All that I have to say has already crossed your mind.”

  “Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”

  This Moriarty uses more human pawns to achieve his ends than Atwill’s, but that fidelity to the organizational model of the Canon means that there are fewer scenes of Holmes and Moriarty together than would be ideal. He does expose his liberty and his life by not remaining at a safe remove at the climax even without the (apparent) necessity the Canonical Professor had because his organization is in tatters. As with Atwill, Daniell is hampered by the script.

  A discussion of the next big-screen Moriarty—Hans Sonker’s Professor in 1962’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace—must wait a future column on Worst Sherlock Holmes Films Ever, one which, as editor Marvin Kaye has convinced me, the world is not yet prepared for.4 And while Laurence Olivier, from 1976’s The Seven Percent Solution, is the most noteworthy actor to play Moriarty on screen, Nicholas Meyer’s revisionist take on the character makes discussion of the character’s criminality moot.

  So, we’ll jump ahead to 1988, the next time the Professor was in a movie—the unsuccessful farce, Without A Clue. The usually-excellent Paul Freeman, still best-known for his René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is in the same boat as Olivier to some extent. His character is merely a plot device in a movie where murder is played for laughs. In contrast to Zucco’s Moriarty, who’s present from the get-go, Freeman’s Moriarty doesn’t appear until a quarter of the movie has passed. His character gets his hands bloody, and delegates only the most menial chores to his unprepossessing henchmen. This places him in the vulnerable center of the action when the authorities close in on a counterfeiting operation. And it’s hard to imagine the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid ending up in the same fix as does Freeman’s character at the end.

  The short-lived, promising, if flawed, Ian Richardson series of television films fell victim to the popularity of Jeremy Brett, but at the outset, Ian McKellen was mentioned as a possible Moriarty. The original concept for an incorporation of the Napoleon of Crime into the series led to one of the most offbeat, ostensibly, straight portrayals—that of Anthony Andrews in 1990’s TV film, Hand of a Murderer (also released as The Napoleon of Crime), written by Charles Edward Pogue, screenwriter for Richardson’s Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. The movie opens in 1900, with Edward “The Equalizer” Woodward’s Holmes outdoing Rathbone’s. He’s not only gotten Moriarty convicted of murder, but has helped the Professor end up on the gallows (while apparently leaving the Professor’s organization unscathed.) But Holmes isn’t seen before Moriarty, which is what I believe to be a first. Of course, for the story to continue, the execution doesn’t come off, as the result of several contrivances, including Holmes’s absence, and Scotland Yard’s understaffing. Lestrade shuts the barn door after the Professor has fled, setting 300 officers on his trail, though they would have been better-deployed at the gallows.

  The script’s failings need not all be enumerated here, but Andrews, whose character is given a love-interest, plays the Professor as a smug, mugging-for-the-camera Victorian Joker as interpreted by Jack Nicholson a year earlier, rolling his eyes and chewing the scenery at every opportunity. Pogue does play at least unconscious homage to The Woman In Green twice, including a scene where Moriarty’s attractive henchwoman mesmerizes someone, and using the same there’s-an-ill-patient-in-need-of-help ploy to get Watson out of the way for a recreation of the Baker Street confrontation, here, alas, devoid of any impact or power. Although “The Final Problem” and The Valley of Fear do not speak to Moriarty’s displays of emotion, there is every reason to believe that in this area, too, he was Holmes’s counterpart.

  Thus, Andrews’s Moriarty’s loss of temper during an interrogation is out of character for the Canonical figure; Pogue has his Professor state that “sometimes, rage overwhelms me.” Having Moriarty also be a user of cocaine could have been a nice touch if the plot emphasized the ways in which he mirrors Holmes, but in the absence of such emphasis, it’s just a throwaway detail, as is the Professor’s use of disguise. The ending is as reliant on contrivances as the opening, with the Professor conveniently failing to post guards at his headquarters, an unintended parallel to the unwise police manpower allocation at the gallows.

  (DVD-viewing is not this movie’s friend, as the ability to freeze an image reveals that a newspaper report of Holmes’s death is buried in the middle of an article on Venezuela!)

  It is always good to end on an upbeat note, and fortunately, one is provided by the Granada TV series adaptation of “The Final Problem.” The script adheres closely to the Canon, and benefits from an addition to the previous aired episode, “The Red-Headed League.” That story ends with the revelation that Moriarty was behind John Clay’s scheme, providing a nice set-up for what was then considered the series’ finale. And the insertion of the Professor into other Canonical stories has a solid basis in the originals. One of the all-time best scholarly essays on the Canon, Robert Pattrick’s Moriarty Was There (fortunately reprinted in 2011’s The Grand Game Volume I), ingeniously picks up on the curious incident of a missing letter s to deduce Moriarty’s hand behind “The Red-Headed League,” and “The Five Orange Pips,” among others.

  The John Hawkesworth script also utilizes the idea first advanced by Edward F. Clark, Jr. in 1963’s “Study of an Untold Tale,” that Moriarty’s attempt to steal the Mona Lisa constituted one of the areas where Holmes foiled Moriarty.

  And that script was well-served by the standout cast, including the most-faithful-to-the-Canon Professor in the person of Eric Porter, who mastered the reptilian oscillation Holmes chillingly described to Watson. Visually, Porter is the closest fit yet to Sidney Paget’s rendition of the character. And his Baker Street battle of words with Holmes sets a standard that will be hard for future adaptations to match. None of the other five Napoleons of Crime covered here come close to Porter’s ability to convincingly portray a criminal mastermind whose wedding of sophisticated organization to villainy made him the adversary for the Great Detective.

  The Ritchie films follow the Granada series in one respect: having Moriarty as a shadowy, behind-the-scenes figure in the first film, before putting him front-and-center in Game of Shadows, adds menace and significance to the character. The way the Professor is portrayed there will renew
the debate about where this series adheres to and departs from the spirit, and the details, of the original.

  _____________

  Lenny Picker, who also reviews and writes for Publishers Weekly, founded the Queens scion society, the Napoleons of Crime. Of his work for that society, it can be accurately said that he did little himself. He still hopes to someday read the great Holmes-Moriarty novel that fleshes out their pre-Final Problem duel. He can be reached via his wife’s email, .

  1 Squaring Watson’s reaction to Holmes’ account of Moriarty in “The Final Problem,” with his familiarity with the criminal in The Valley of Fear, has challenged Sherlockians for almost a century.

  2 And in a more restrained manner than the movie ads—“The Struggle of Super-Minds in the Crime of the Century!”

  3 Along the same lines, the script has Moriarty deduce from the presence of a spider’s web on a watering can that his servant has lied to him.

  4 I don’t remember discouraging Lenny from writing such a column, but I have a poor memory. At any rate, I will certainly welcome such a column, should Lenny decide to write it for us.—MK

  INTERVIEW WiTH C. E. LAWRENCE

  The Darker Half of Carole Buggé

  Conducted by (Mrs) Martha Hudson

  I regret that for the past two issues, I have been unavailable to write my customary contributions to Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, but thanks to the wonders of modern communications, I have managed to interview another of this magazine’s frequent contributors, Miss Carole Buggé. (Forgive me for eschewing the use of ‘Ms,” which strikes me as an unharmonious neologism.)

  Dr Watson, I may say, is quite taken with Carole. After reading her shorter fiction, as well as what I understand are called her three “cosy” Berkley Books mystery novels, Who Killed Blanche Dubois?, Who Killed Dorian Gray?, and Who Killed Mona Lisa?, the good doctor permitted her access to his notebooks; as a result she has given us two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The Star of India and The Haunting of Torre Abbey, as well as quite a few shorter Holmesian adventures.

  It is rather an open secret, however, that for the past several years, she has taken to writing much darker mysteries, the “Silent” series y clept, under the pen name of C E Lawrence: Silent Screams, Silent Victim, and the most recent, Silent Kills. All of them feature a deeply troubled New York City forensic profiler named Lee Campbell, and in each he must track down truly frightening serial killers.

  Below is a transcript of our conversation about her new persona. For convenience, my questions are prefaced by H for Hudson, whereas Carole’s replies are designated CE.

  * * * *

  H: What does the C. E. stand for, may I ask?

  CE: Carole Elizabeth. Lawrence is a family name.

  H: What prompted you to begin a series of books about serial killers?

  CE: I’ve always been interested in hidden behavior, in people’s dark sides, perhaps in part because in my family no one was supposed to have a dark side; these things were never talked about, so that made me even more curious about it. Also, I think most writers have a natural interest in psychology, in human behavior, and what can be more intriguing to a writer than extreme behavior? And it seems to me that serial killers are about as extreme as it gets.

  H: Is that why you write chapters from the killer’s perspective?

  CE: Yes. I think it would be very challenging but almost impossible to write a book in which the killer is the protagonist. It was done in American Psycho, of course, but not entirely successfully, I think. So I knew the killer couldn’t be the hero, but I wanted to explore his mind in some way, so I came up with idea of having very short chapters from his point of view. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I wanted to try to get inside the murderer, in Chesterton’s famous phrase.

  H: Why create a protagonist who suffers from depression? Weren’t you afraid that might turn some readers away?

  CE: I was actually given advice early on that I should stay away from having a damaged hero, that readers would want a kind of super-hero detective, but in reality I believe that damaged heroes are the only interesting kind (a lot of so-called super-heroes are damaged, after all: Superman is an orphan and an alien on a strange planet, and Batman is a weirdo with a bat fetish). Also, we’re all damaged by the time we reach adulthood, some more than others, of course, but I feel that suffering and loss are two of life’s constants, and that depression is a very real and understandable reaction to the shock of living, what Shakespeare so memorably called life’s slings and arrows. And I think a lot more people suffer or have suffered from various degrees of depression than we probably realize. And, of course, when I wrote the book I had recently been through my own bout of clinical depression.

  H: What kind of research did you do for this book?

  CE: I have a huge library of forensic books of all kinds, from Dead Men Do Tell Tales by Michael Baden to Forensics of Fingerprints Analysis. I spent a lot of nights reading and taking notes and, of course, there are some wonderful shows on television, especially Forensic Files, which I watch religiously. You can get all kinds of plot ideas from those shows, which are about real crimes and real people. I’ve been studying forensic psychology for some time through books, and I also took a graduate course at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, taught by Dr. Lewis Schlesinger. He was kind enough to let me audit the class, which was excellent, and also gave me his very informative and scholarly textbook, Sexual Homicide, which was one of the textbooks for that class. Interestingly, most of the students were women and I found it interesting that they often sat there calmly eating their lunch as we passed around horrific crime scene photographs. The men in the class seemed more disturbed by it than the women did. The research I did for this book was nowhere near as challenging as the research I did for my physics play Strings (for about a year I read physics books nonstop. It was really fun, but after a while, my head was spinning with quarks and muons and neutrinos)!

  H: What was the most difficult thing about writing this book?

  CE: Plot. Plot, plot, plot . . . did I mention plotting? Or, as Robert McKee would say, story. It was for this book and every other book I’ve ever written. I think any writer who claims that plots come easily to him/her is either a liar or a fool. It’s a bitch and a struggle and that saying about characters writing their own stories is pure nonsense. Oh, you can get away with that in a short story, sure, where you have only one event and one through line. But in a novel, where there are plots and subplots and multiple characters and 400 plus pages to fill with twists and surprises, you bloody well better put your plotting hat on and keep it on until your forehead bleeds, or you’re not doing your job. You have to keep coming up with ways to thicken the plot and twist it and turn the story and make it unexpected without making it feel contrived . . . that is never pretty and it’s never, ever easy. You know the genre of movie where the hero has cornered the villain in a warehouse, and there are all these barrels around and the bad guy picks one up and throws it at the hero, and he ducks, and the villain throws another one and he jumps over it, and so on? Well, you have to keep throwing barrels at your hero. And then you have to find new ways for him to jump out of the way. Your arms get really tired, and your brain starts to hurt, and you really want to stop, but you have to keep throwing those barrels. You have to make choices that seem original and surprising and yet entirely in keeping with the logic of the story. I care a lot about writing style, and graceful prose, but all the pretty writing in the world won’t hide a soft spot in your story.

  H: Did you have any “Aha!” moments while working on this particular plot?

  CE: Funny you should ask. I did, as a matter of fact. I had two such moments. The first one was after my agent had received a few rejections of the book, and I was getting a sense that though people liked the characters, they weren’t sucked in enough by the story. I didn’t know how to make it work, but I wasn’t ready to give up. At the time I was a summer resident of Byrdcliffe Arts Colony
at the time, which is a lovely, idyllic spread of cabins in the woods on a mountainside overlooking Woodstock, New York. They have a kick ass library system in Ulster and Dutchess County, and so I took out The DaVinci Code on tape from the Woodstock Library. I had no television, no cable, no VCR, only my tinny little radio and my books on tape. It was, in many ways, the perfect life. I would listen to The DaVinci Code while I worked out every night in my cabin. I’m not sure the exact moment it hit me, but it gradually became clear to me there was a powerful lesson to be learned from that book: one thing Dan Brown does so well in it is to keep the pressure up at all times. There is a constant sense of danger and peril to the protagonist, from the first page to the end. I realized that’s what was missing from my book, and that there were flaccid scenes and chapters where people sat around comfortably talking philosophy or psychology or whatever. So I took out my cutting knife and whole chapters flew out the window. And I added a stabbing, a shooting, a car chase, a hanging, a beating, and in general just ratcheted up the tension more. And then we sold the book.

  H: You said you had two such moments. What was the other one?

  CE: That was a real classic “Aha!” moment. It was that same summer at Byrdcliffe, and I had just started out on a jog from my cabin on a beautiful evening in mid-July. I was jogging down Byrdcliffe Road when it hit me all of a sudden: I realized what the book needed was a major twist at the end, and I knew at that moment what the twist had to be. I had been working on this book for two years now, and I hadn’t seen it until that very moment. I remember the exact spot on Byrdcliffe Road where I was when it came to me, literally like a bolt out of the blue. But at the same time I realized that it was as though I had set the twist up all along; I really didn’t have to change anything in the rest of the book. It was as if my unconscious mind had been setting it up the whole time; once I saw it, it seemed not only logical but actually inevitable. And yet it was invisible to me until that moment. As Geoffrey Rush says in Shakespeare in Love, “It’s a mystery.”