Aged Holmes stories

"Mr. Holmes"

My current reading ran into a couple of Sherlockian topics. In UK newspapers, it's been hard to miss the story of the discovery of a lost Sherlock Holmes story in a 1903 fundraising booklet, The Book o' the Brig, compiled in aid of a bazaar to raise money for the reconstruction of a Selkirk footbridge destroyed by flooding in 1902. I also just started Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, which has been filmed as Mr. Holmes.

The Hound of the D’Urbervilles

This has been a busy couple of months, and - partly due to a vow not to read it until finishing my tax return - I only just got around to reading Kim Newman's new novel Moriarty - The Hound of the D’Urbervilles (Titan Books, 2011, ISBN 9780857682833) that I bought mid-November.

The novel is essentially a dark mirror of the Sherlock Holmes mythos, with Holmes and Watson replaced as protagonists by a pairing of Professor Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian 'Basher' Moran (who is employed as a hit man for Moriarty's organisation). Newman isn't the first writer to tackle Moriarty (John Gardner's Moriarty novels, Michael Kurland's Professor Moriarty series and, especially, Neil Gaiman's Cthulhu mythos story A Study in Emerald spring to mind). However, this book brings to the mix Kim Newman's characteristic brand of highly literate intertextual pastiche populated with historical and fictional characters.

The novel consists of a cycle of seven linked stories - in part a paste-up of stories that have appeared elsewhere - told by Moran through the vehicle of their alleged discovery in a despatch box in a London "criminal bank". A Volume in Vermilion sets the scene - the first meeting of Moran and Moriarty is excerpted on the Titan books website here - then tells of Moran's first assignment involving the Mormon-linked feud from Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. A Shambles in Belgravia is a pastiche of A Scandal in Bohemia involving Irene Adler (Moran writes: "To Professor Moriarty, she is always that bitch") and a blackmail plot involving the royal family of Ruritania (i.e. from Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda). The Red Planet League tells of Moriarty's convoluted plot, involving Martians, to discredit an egotistical Astronomer Royal who has dissed his Dynamics of an Asteroid monograph. The title story, The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, retells The Hound of the Baskervilles in Thomas Hardy's Wessex, in which Moriarty is hired by an emigree American robber baron to dispel myths of the giant hound that are interfering with his plans to squeeze profits from the D'Urberville estate. The Adventure of the Six Maledictions uses as starting point J Milton Hayes's music hall monologue The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God (concerning "Mad Carew", who steals a cursed gem) and follows the mayhew that arises when Moriarty, for reasons of his own, decides to start collecting cursed objects. The Greek Invertebrate is a steampunk thriller that takes Moriarty and Moran, along with a cast of characters from Arnold Ridley's The Ghost Train, to "Fal Vale" in Cornwall to investigate sightings of a sinister "white worm". The Problem of the Final Adventure goes to Europe and, inevitably, the Reichenbach Falls, interweaving the events of Conan Doyle's The Final Problem with Moriarty's final encounter with his own nemesis (perhaps surprisingly, not Sherlock Holmes).

For the most part, this is extremely well done. Colonel Moran, as a narrator, strongly resembles a nastier version of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman - a debt acknowledged by Newman - and proves similarly sympathetic; he has a vestige of honour (he admires courage), is aware of his own failings, and is far too interested in people and their motives to be the complete cynic he professes to be. Likewise the relationship between Moran, the adrenalin junkie ex-soldier, and Moriarty, the unfathomable intellectual, is well-developed as a parallel to that of Watson and Holmes (where Holmes keeps bees, Moriarty keeps wasps; and his "methods" are contrary to Holmes' deduction; Moriarty does the Victorian equivalent of Googling it).

If I have a criticism, it's of Newman's handling of the intertextualism. He can do it seamlessly, subtly and pertinently; and he can go into an "everything but the kitchen sink" mode, throwing in large numbers of out-of-mythos characters and allusions that make you lose suspension of disbelief. The best story of the collection in my view is The Red Planet League, and that does it exactly right; it's a tightly-done skit on alien invasion literature and film - chiefly HG Wells's The Crystal Egg and The War of the Worlds ...

Yet across the gulf of the lecture hall, a mind that was to Stent's as his was to the beasts that perish, an intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded the podium with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew his plans against him.

... but also with hat-tips to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, and even briefly to Alien. But in the otherwise excellent The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, Newman starts bringing in out-of-mythos characters, such as Desperate Dan and a character who is clearly Klaus Kinski. And The Adventure of the Six Maledictions is in full-on kitchen sink mode, complete with the Hoxton Creeper (as played by Rondo Hatton in The Pearl of Death), the Maltese Falcon, and a whole cast of criminal masterminds from book and film, who appear again in The Problem of the Final Adventure. They're still good stories, but you can see the wheels working.

This really is a book where you need to read it once, read the footnotes and Google a bit, then read again, then Google again. There are any number of interesting-looking works referenced that I'd never heard of, such as William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories. And it's often very difficult - a sign of good pastiche - to distinguish fact from invention on first reading. For example, Newman's learned footnote about "quap", "a form of pitchblende used in turn-of-the-century patent medicines", looked thoroughly plausible until I found it come from HG Wells's now little-read semi-autobiographical satire Tono-Bungay. I enjoyed Moriarty - The Hound of the D'Urbervilles a lot, and will no doubt be pursuing the threads for a while to come.

- Ray

Sherlock: first series ends

Further to my Sherlock recommendation, the BBC three-part introductory series ended today. This episode, The Great Game, is now on BBC iPlayer, and I repeat the recommendation.

The middle episode, The Blind Banker, I thought was somewhat lame - a rather hackneyed chase-capture-fight-escape story - but The Great Game was well back on form. It pitted Holmes and Watson against a series of lethal puzzles set by a criminal mastermind (a structure reminiscent of Die Hard With a Vengeance) but got back to its Conan Doyle roots with close allusion to The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans; Holmes's classic exposition in A Study in Scarlet of how he keeps his mind free of clutter; his wall-shooting practice as mentioned at the beginning of The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual; a reference to The Five Orange Pips; and even a homage to Rondo Hatton and the Basil Rathbone film The Pearl of Death.

There's a brief review (mild spoilers) at the Guardian TV & Radio blog: Sherlock finale: your verdict on The Great Game.

- Ray

Sherlock

If you didn't see it, the first episode of the new BBC1 series Sherlock is now available on BBC iPlayer. I rather expected this modern reworking of the Sherlock Holmes mythos to be good, given the writers behind it (Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss), but it was well up to expectations.

Today's episode, A Study in Pink, was loosely based on Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, in which Holmes and Watson (played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman) first meet. It managed to faithfully retain many aspects of the original - for example, London still has cabs, and Watson is still an Afghanistan veteran - while using up-to-the-minute phone and Internet technology, and modern perceptions of the characters. Holmes naturally has a website and Watson blogs: the personalities of both are shown as damaged, Watson with PTSD and Holmes described as "a high-functioning sociopath". It's not, however, plain grim but full of witty touches, such as when Holmes (updated to a modern non-smoking ethos) refers to "a three-patch problem". It was nicely filmed - Gatiss says in the Guardian feature that they tried to make modern London "just as exciting as a London full of fog and hackney carriages" - using presentational innovations such as on-screen text and graphics to show phone messages, Holmes's deductions on looking at a corpse, and the route of a chase; these didn't jar in the least. Moffat and Gatiss know their mythos intimately, finding interesting ways to spin some trivia (for instancem, Conan Doyle's inconsistent detail of where Watson was shot) and brought in some pleasant allusions to other works such as The Princess Bride and The Vanishing.

Altogether recommended.

PS Further reading. See Wikipedia: A Study in Scarlet This is the kind of topic that Wikipedia does well. As I just said to Felix in the comments, I know A Study in Scarlet but have completely blanked the middle section with its excursion to Utah and its lurid Mormon plot (a point of controversy in its time).

This is also a good excuse to recommend again Neil Gaiman's rather excellent A Study in Emerald, in which an ex-soldier who has been injured in Afghanistan teams up with a brilliant detective to solve a murder.

- Ray

A mitey excursion

I've just been reading the concordance to Lovelace and Babbage Vs The Client Pt 3, the latest episode of Sydney Padua's Babbage and Lovelace cartoon adventure (see To the Difference Engine! previously). Sydney's description of Babbage's 1864 Passages from the life of a philosopher as a "comic masterpiece of an autobiography" is well confirmed in this strange chapter, A Vision, which tells an anecdote whose punchline is a chart of figures. Babbage's story tells how he falls asleep in Salisbury Cathedral and channels the spirit of a cheese mite, learning about cheese mite cosmology.

Spending a few days at Salisbury, I had wandered into the cathedral, and being much fatigued, had selected the luxurious pew of the Dean as a place of temporary rest. Reposing on elastic cushions, with my head resting on an eider-down pillow, the vision I have related had taken place.

On removing the pillow I observed a small piece of matter beneath it. This, upon examination, turned out to be a morsel of decayed Gloucester cheese. The whole vision was now very clearly explained. The verger had evidently retired to the most commodious pew to eat his dinner, and had inadvertently left the small bit of cheese upon the very spot I had selected for my temporary repose. It was clear that my Spirit had been put en rapport with the soul of a mite, one of the most cultivated of his race.

With modern aseptic packaging of most cheese, along with refrigeration, cheese mites have been more or less relegated to specialist cheeses such as Mimolette and Milbenkäse (see the cheese mite memorial, Würchwitz, left). However, prior to maybe 50 years ago, they were a pretty well universal sight to anyone who ate cheese, so it's not surprising that references to them should turn up in culture and literature. They were the subject of the first public science documentary film, shown at London's Alhambra Music Hall in 1903 - see Cheese mites and other wonders - and, as a long-standing metaphor, in the title of earlier film Cheese Mites or, Lilliputians in a London Restaurant (1901).

I first ran into them via this poem.

A parable

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,
And warmly debated the matter;
The Orthodox said that it came from the air,
And the Heretics said from the platter.
They argued it long and they argued it strong,
And I hear they are arguing now;
But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,
Not one of them thought of a cow.

- Arthur Conan Doyle, Songs of Action, 1898

The first four lines of the above poem have had wide circulation on the comic and curious verse circuit, often credited as "Anon" - I first saw it in Arnold Silcock's Verse and Worse - but I was surprised to find the full version to be by Conan Doyle. It first turns up in prose form in his epistolary novel The Stark Munro Letters:

Cullingworth has written a parable which makes a paragraph for our wonderful new weekly paper.

"The little cheese mites held debate," he says, "as to who made the cheese. Some thought that they had no data to go upon, and some that it had come together by a solidification of vapour, or by the centrifugal attraction of atoms. A few surmised that the platter might have something to do with it; but the wisest of them could not deduce the existence of a cow."

We are at one, he and I, in thinking that the infinite is beyond our perception.

Conan Doyle must have had cheese mites on his mind a lot, as they turn up in another poem in Songs of Action.

And the doctor says the reason why I sit an' cough an wheeze
Is all along o' varmint, like the cheese-mites in the cheese;
The smallest kind o' varmint, but varmint all the same,
Microscopes or somethin'--I forget the varmints' name.

- from "The Dying Whip", Songs of Action

Many writers seem to have been similarly taken with cheese mites; Verse and Worse also has this one, which tracks to Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (the poem's not necessarily by Franklin):

Jack, eating rotten cheese, did say,
Like Samson I my thousands slay;
I vow, quoth Roger, so you do,
And with the self-same weapon, too

As a microcosm of the world and metaphor for the human condition, cheese-mites have rich literary connections. Their cosmology and philosophy was even the subject of a whole verse treatise, The chronicle of mites: a satire politico-philosophico-theological and other pieces (James Aitchison, 1887). Aitchison was Minister of Erskine Church, Falkirk, and otherwise wrote predictably dour theological expositions. A pity I can't find his mites poem online, but Wilde's lukewarm review suggests it wasn't up to much.

The Chronicle of Mites is a mock-heroic poem about the inhabitants of a decaying cheese who speculate about the origin of their species and hold learned discussions upon the meaning of evolution and the Gospel according to Darwin. This cheese-epic is a rather unsavoury production and the style is at times so monstrous and so realistic that the author should be called the Gorgon-Zola of literature.
- Oscar Wilde, Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1888

I like to think the whole idea - expressed both by Conan Doyle and Aitchison - tracks back to Babbage.

Just for a taster, cheese-mite metaphors and similes turn up variously: in literary criticism, as in Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic, by James Douglas; in political writings such as James Fitzjames Stephen's 1882 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and John Stuart Mill's response to it in his On Liberty; in Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well; in Daniel Defoe's A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain; in Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall; in Tennant's Anster Fair; in the essays of Schopenhauer; in William Cowper's derogatory description of Margate; in Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts; in Le Fanu's Ghost Stories of Chapelizod; in an epigram in Eden Philpotts' 1921 sword & sandal novel Eudocia; in Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga; in Herman Knickerbocker Viele's On the Lightship; in Wilfred Owen's A Terre; in ER Eddison's 1922 fantasy The Worm Ouroboros; and as an instructional analogy in science texts.

If we could place humanity under a microscope we should see, I think, very much what we do actually see when we place a particle of ripe cheese beneath its lenses, namely, a substance alive with millions of animated specks of matter engaged in restless and apparently purposeless activity.
- The Geographical Journal, volume 64, 1924

Probably the strangest of the batch is Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification Into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds (Charles Webster Leadbeater, Annie Wood Besant): an attempt to use clairvoyance as a kind of particle physics tool. Leadbeater gives a flaky explanation of how vaccination works, in terms of it activating some cheese-mite-like universal antibody, "a kind of etheric amoeba in the atmosphere".

Also on the weird science front, cheese mites crop up in the story of Andrew Crosse ("The Electrician", "Wizard of the Quantocks", and quite probably the prototype for Frankenstein) who controversially in 1836 reported having created insects, Acarus crossii, by slow electrolysis of water with mineral electrodes (see pages 310-314, Journal of the Franklin Institute, Volume 19, 1837). This wasn't dismissed out of hand; several researchers attempted to reproduce the results, and failed, The ultimate view, then and now, was that his apparatus had been contaminated by cheese mites or dust mites. Crosse was, by the way, a friend of Charles Babbage, which brings us full circle.

- Ray