JOIN USIf attempting to write a Sherlock Holmes story, as a critic once noted, is for the modern writer the equivalent to playing Hamlet for actors, for the modern actor the challenge has become to play Sherlock Holmes.
I’m referring to Ian McKellen’s splendid and moving 93-year-old Sherlock in the movie Mr. Holmes, the latest Conan Doyle pastiche to show up in theatres.
It’s a mystery that probes Holmes’s heart, his emotions and his inner life. “There are a lot of blank pages in the biography,” noted Leslie Klinger, the Doyle expert. “We know little about the detective’s family life,” he added. He also wondered if we “should take Holmes at his word that he abhors romance?”
Mr. Holmes is based on the book A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullins. Sherlock Holmes, at 93, is frail and forgetful, but still brilliant. He reminisces about a recent trip to Japan. Both Watson and Mycroft are dead, and Holmes spends his time bee-keeping and writing letters. With the help of his housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her boy, the ageing Holmes has to solve an old puzzle.
The Holmes stories in contemporary fiction have seen plenty of pastiche making: one of the earliest, of course, was Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, where Holmes is treated for his drug addiction by Sigmund Freud!
Klinger speculated that such fervent pastiche making could be because Doyle told us so little about the detective, leaving it to us to fill in the blanks.
Gilbert Adair, though, is the most entertaining, clever and wittily erudite post-postmodern maker of pastiches. As he himself said once, if he likes a book, he will simply rewrite it. It’s his way of parodying, celebrating and critiquing it. (Death in Venice becomes Love and Death on Long Island).
In The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and The Mysterious Affair of Style, he takes on Agatha Christie. His last pastiche, And Then There Was No One, brings Christie, Conan Doyle and Adair together to a face-off! (Adair is the narrator of the book and a character in it). When the book begins, Adair has just finished his latest postmodern riff: The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of apocryphal Holmes stories (such as The Giant Rat of Sumatra).
On the strength of this he’s invited to a Sherlock Holmes festival taking place in Switzerland. On the list of guests he notices Umberto Eco is an invitee; next to his name it says: (unconfirmed), and disappointingly enough Eco U doesn’t turn up because of an illness in the family.
After he reads from his book to the audience gathered there, he fields many questions (“What is the difference between bookshops in Switzerland and bookshops in Britain? Adair: Your bookshops sell fifty types of books and one type of coffee, while ours sell fifty types of coffee and one type of book.”). It is at this point that one of his characters from the earlier Christie pastiches — his heroine, the crime novelist Evadne Mount — turns up at the book reading and demands to know why he would waste his time on pastiches.
Sherlock Holmes pastiches are cheap and commonplace, she reminds her creator. The bookshops are swarming in them, linking Holmes to Jack the Ripper, Sigmund Freud, and every type of modern-day villain. Eventually, there’s a murder and Adair and his heroine will have to solve it. But not before Adair finishes answering his heroine on why he persists in making pastiches.
At the end of the story, Watson, as usual, sits down to record the case, but Sherlock asks him to desist for personal reasons. Watson replies that he will write the case but with the stipulation that it be opened and read only a 100 years from now. Holmes laughs. “A hundred years? 2011? Oh, how you do exaggerate, Watson! I can assure you that in 2011 the name of Sherlock Holmes will have been consigned to the most complete and utter oblivion.”
Watson tells us that his friend is usually right but notes down as the last entry in his casebook: “In this instance, however, I fancy he might be mistaken.”
Underscoring that understatement, we have seen just how ‘mistaken’... Cumberbatch revitalises Holmes for a new generation in BBC’s Sherlock, and McKellen performs his elegy to Holmes in retirement.
Mr. Holmes is not the first imitation about the detective in retirement. In Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution, Sherlock Holmes is not named — throughout the novel he is simply referred to as ‘the old man’.
After retirement, Holmes has moved from London to Sussex, where he spends his days keeping bees. Holmes is now 89 and lives in a house run by the wife of a Malayali pastor! He is Reverend K T Panicker of the Church of England. Rev Kumbhampoika Thomas Panicker is a high-church Anglican vicar who has lost his faith and is riddled with doubts. He looks to this old lodger for clarity.
And Sherlock Holmes, even in retirement, obliges as he picks up his magnifying glass once again and goes to work. Chabon observes that Holmes is compelled “by the finding of a solution at once — dogged, elegant, and wild; this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings — the discovery of the sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life.”