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

Bryant & May

Fancying something different to read last week, I sub-borrowed my mother-in-law's library book, the 2008 The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler, and very much enjoyed it. This is one is Fowler's "Bryant & May" series, which features two London detectives named after the London-based match company. Bryant is described as "a wrinkled tortoise sporting windowpane glasses and a frayed brown trilby, wrapped in a moss-green scarf like an unravelling knitted python"; May as "a ramrod-backed gentleman of debonair demeanour, dressed in a rather gaudy Savile Row suit and a scarlet silk tie". They work for the fictitious Peculiar Crimes Unit, a misfit department of the Metropolitan Police; their cases span a period from the London Blitz to the present day.

In The Victoria Vanishes, Bryant & May investigate a serial murderer who is killing middle-aged women in London pubs (somehow managing to achieve this without concealment); as clues build up to profile the motive, it becomes apparent that there is a deeper conspiracy behind the deaths. Bryant & May meanwhile have their own problems: apart from incipient closure of their department, May has a tumour on his heart; and Bryant, on the edge of retirement, fears his mind could be deteriorating, having a clear memory of seeing one of the victims leaving a pub - The Victoria of the title - that closed 80 years ago. (This is a homage, not one I'd have spotted, to the 1946 The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin).

I've clearly dipped into the mythos at the wrong point. The heroes are elderly and ailing, and the ending of this late book in the series could easily be taken as end of its heroes. I'm pleased to see it's not; however, it looks worth going back and reading the books in chronological order. Apart from being pleasantly quirky police procedural full of black humour and eccentric characters - the Peculiar Crimes Unit has no qualms about consulting witches, mediums and conspiracy theorists - The Victoria Vanishes has (I assume typically for the series) a rich feeling for archetypal London. In one sense it pastiches the mystical/psychogeographical Londons of authors such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair; in another, it celebrates such 'deeps' of the city through its public houses, whose names and continuity of location reflect ancient events and geography. Without being heavy, the writing is deeply erudite, very English, and steeped in a fascination with the history and curiosities of London. The public houses featured in the novels can be investigated via the annotated Bryant & May London Maps at the author's website.

For more background, see Christopher Fowler's main website and his interesting weblog. Fowler bills himself as "author of urban unease, dark comedy, mystery and horror", and his titles outside the Bryant & May mythos look equally worth investigating.
- Ray

Out-takes: copyright and crime

I've been getting into a daft habit of carefully making a note of news relevant to JSBlog, then forgetting to upload it. Purged from my organiser:

Men at Work plagiarised 'Down Under' riff ("Flute melody taken from 1935 'Kookaburra' children's song, Australian court rules", Kathy Marks, The Independent, 5 February 2010). This means Men at Work potentially owe millions to the copyright owners, Larrikin Music. See the previous Kookaburra fossil exposed for background. Personally I think the result stinks, and that the quotation in question, a tiny riff between verses, was nothing more than a nice homage to a tune that had become de facto public domain due to its obscure copyright status. Quoted in The Age, the founder of Larrikin Records and original owner of Larrikin Music, Warren Fahey, says exactly this:

He recommends the copyright owner, Larrikin Music, should "gift" the song to Australia, arguing that most Australians believe they already have public domain ownership of the song anyway.

"The past week has seen thousands of emails, letters to the editor, radio commentary and internet forums criticising the judgment," says Fahey, who sold Larrikin Music to Music Sales Corporation in 1988 and whose folk band is called the Larrikins.

"Many of these incorrectly criticise Larrikin Records and myself as the protagonist, asking, 'How could someone so dedicated to Australian music do such a thing?' The Larrikin brand has certainly been tarnished by what many see as opportunistic greed on behalf of Larrikin Music/Music Sales."

A "larrikin" is, incidentally, one who subscribes to Australia's folk tradition of anti-authoritarianism - see Larrikinism - and the opposite of a "wowser".

Harry Potter and the great Google onslaught ("The bunfight over Google's library project only serves to remind us that intellectual property battles are nothing new", Robert McCrum, The Observer, Sunday 14 February 2010): the always interesting McCrum writes about great intellectual property battles in history such as the first recognition of literary "piracy" in the 1660s, arguing in effect that these didn't kill literature in the past, so the disputed Google Library Project may have innovative effects we can't predict. See preview of Adrian John's book Piracy.

Forget 'serious' novels, I've turned to a life of crime ("Murder mysteries, once looked down on, are now fit for the literary elite", Stephanie Merritt, The Observer, 14 February 2010). Merritt argues the ... er ... merit of the crime genre as historical fiction. I thoroughly agree; one of the best historical novels I know is Peter Lovesey's murder mystery Wobble to Death, with its fascinating background in Victorian endurance races and their attendant corruption and strychnine-doping (see Strychnine - a lesser-known past).

This artwork was made by a killer. It is no less valid for that (Deborah Orr, The Independent, 11 April 2009): concerning the difficult issue of what we should feel about art made by murderers. In the literary field, she mentions the well-known case of William Chester Minor, a schizophrenic murderer who made thousands of contributions to the OED from his cell in Broadmoor. The excellent and prolific historical crime novelist Anne Perry, creator of the William Monk series, also springs to mind.

- Ray

Shamanic shamuses

Bill Poser at Language Log - see One shaman, two shamuses? - just commented on a typographical (probably spellchecker) slip here that mistakenly renders the plural of "shaman" as "shamuses" (= private detectives).

Angered by her reluctance, the rich shaman called upon other equally strong shamuses to punish her.

There doesn't appear to be an etymological connection between the words, and the origin of "shamus" itself is uncertain: it originally referred to police, and is likely some cross-fertilisation of Yiddish shammes (a beadle or sexton in a synagogue) and the Irish personal name Séamus (historically, many New York police were of Irish stock). But idly Googling led me to a different connection via Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television (Lee Siegel, Westview Press, 2007, ISBN 0465078109) - a scholarly analysis of US television whose chapter on Monk finds close analogies:

Adrian Monk is the ancient shaman as modern shamus.

Monk, for those who haven't seen the programme, is a deeply neurotic detective who, following a psychological crisis after the murder of his wife, suffers from a variety of phobias and compulsions. These, paradoxically, aid him in his work ("It’s a gift ... and a curse"). Siegel's analysis notes the similarity to the psychology of shamans, who typically suffer "shamanic illness" of a recognisably psychological flavour, and begin their career after a particular initiatory crisis: see Is the Shaman Sane? in Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, M.E. Sharpe, 1997, ISBN 1563249731).

It wouldn't be hard to extend this analogy to other fictional detectives: for instance, Sherlock Holmes, with his intense concentration, mood swings and ragged nerves (not to mention drug use, another common feature of shamanic ritual). In this vein, Dysthymic Dicks (On the Melancholic Shamus, from Dupin to Cracker) by Harvey Roy Greenberg, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, offers a tour of the many psychologically troubled fictional detectives. While he doesn't mention shamans directly, his description of such detectives as "wounded healer" is a phrase classically applied to shamans. Greenberg's site The Movies on Your Mind is well worth exploring for its interesting takes on media critique from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Addendum: 16th February 2009. Having slept on the idea, a few other examples of shamanic fictional detectives surfaced. In Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Randall achieves his results by, like shamans, communicating with a guiding spirit. There's Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, in which Morse gains some of his powers by contemplation in a drug-altered mental state (he believes beer is an aid to thought) and has a distinctly shamanic motif of a hidden true name that relates to his spiritual origins ("Endeavour", a name from the same Quaker roots that gave him his sense of duty). And there's the reinvented Inspector Abberline in the film version of From Hell, who gains insights from clairvoyance under the influence of absinthe and opium.

Addendum: 23rd February 2009. I just ran into a further example, the Sonny Baca series of novels by the acclaimed Mexican-American author Rudolfo Anaya (Zia Summer (1995), Rio Grande Fall (1996), Shaman Winter (1999), and Jemez Spring) in which the New Mexico private detective hero literally becomes a shaman.

Addendum 2: March 6 2009. Detail promoted from Comments: Dr C just drew my attention to another example of the crossover, Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee novels. See Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn Mysteries.
- Ray

Strychnine - a lesser-known past

Today at the bookshop I found a little book behind the counter, Principal Drugs and Their Uses, a 1934 Faber & Faber pocket guide for nurses by A.L. Morton (a tutor from the Royal College of Nursing, not the Marxist historian Arthur Leslie Morton.

There a quite a few surprises; the book reveals the 1930s to be an era when morphine and opium derivatives were still commonly prescribed as sedatives, diamorphine (i.e. heroin) for bronchitis and various coughs, and mercury compounds (under picturesque names like blue pill and grey powder) as laxatives. Probably the scariest example, though, is strychnine: "General tonic. Prescribed in various nervous disorders. It is among the most valuable and widely prescribed drugs".

The useful property was that strychnine, in small doses, is a stimulant. This, however, led to its misuse, before amphetamines came on the scene, as a performance-enhancing drug in athletes (this use was apparently known to the ancient Greeks, but lost until its rediscovery in the 1800s). The book Doping in Sports (page 233, Detlef Thieme & Peter Hemmersbach, Springer, 2010) mentions its use by 19th century cyclists, and its possible implication in the death of the Welsh champion cyclist Arthur Linton in 1896. It was also one of the drugs used in the now-defunct Victorian sport of pedestrianism.

Pedestrianism took various forms, sometimes cross-country, but its classic version was a gruelling track-based race called a Six-Day Go As You Please or a "Wobble". Competitors walked around a track for six days, the winner being the one who covered the greatest mileage. Entrants came from a broad social spectrum, from elite gentleman athletes to the lowest working classes (for instance, men who had developed superhuman stamina working as navvies), and the races attracted big money, both in prizes and the associated betting.

The record distance was set in 1888 by George Littlewood, who covered 623.75 miles (an average pace of 4.33 miles per hour) despite bad burns from a saboteur setting fire to his alcohol footbath. Littlewood's achievement was finally bettered by a modern ultramarathon runner, but even before that, the physiologist BB Lloyd wasn't far wrong in his 1966 description of this as "probably the maximum sustained output of which the human frame is capable". See Athletics: Littlewood's giant strides ("The Anniversary: 110 years ago an Englishman defied sabotage and fatigue to run 623 miles" - Simon Turnbull, The Independent, 29th November 1998). 

Running Through the Ages by Edward S Sears has a detailed history, "The Struggle for the Astley Belt" (previewed at Google Books) surrounding the most famous promoter of these races, the sports enthusiast and politican Sir John Astley. This contemporary account by J. Ewing Ritchie, quoted at Lee Jackson's The Victorian Dictionary - Chapter VIII, Pedestrianism - gives something of the flavour of the races, as does this 1888 New York Times piece about an American race at Madison Square Gardens, Started by the Marquis.; the Go-As-You-Please pedestrians all hard at work.

As to the point: strychnine and pedestrianism form the backdrop to an excellent crime novel by Peter Lovesey, Wobble to Death. His debut novel, the first in his Sergeant Cribb series, it won the Panther/Macmillan First Crime Novel Competition and is a fine example of building a story around bizarre-but-authentic historical detail. I won't spoil the plot for you, except to say that it involves the mystery surrounding the sudden death of a competitor in mid-race, under circumstances where possession of strychnine doesn't necessarily prove murderous intent.
- Ray

Update,  February 7, 2013
Ptak Science Books has a piece - Strychnine for Weak Women, 1920 - mentioning a patent medicine called Nuxated Iron, which undoubtedly relied on the stimulant effect of strychnine.

The Fielding Brothers

There's a rather enjoyable series on Channel 4 at the moment: City of Vice, set in the early days of London's first official police force, the Bow Street Runners. While it's obviously fictionalised, it is accurate in spirit in highlighting the talents of the Fielding brothers.
      The work as a magistrate of Henry Fielding is less known than his career as dramatist, satirist and author (notably of Tom Jones). The career of his half-brother, John Fielding, was equally remarkable; despite being blinded in a naval accident at 19, he went in business and studied law, eventually taking up his brother's post as Chief Magistrate on the latter's death in 1754, and continuing for 26 years as the "Blind Beak of Bow Street" (see also Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 1754–1780). He's the subject of a series of crime novels, starting with Blind Justice, by Bruce Alexander.
      Not to forget a third talented member of the Fielding family: the critic and novelist Sarah Fielding, whose works included The Adventures of David Simple and The Governess, of The Little Female Academy, the first full-length novel written for children.

Addendum: City of Vice portrays John Fielding as constantly wearing a black headband, and this is a slight puzzle. This is how he's depicted in portraits (see the National Portrait Gallery Nathaniel Hone portrait and this engraving). But I rather wonder if he normally wore it covering his eyes, and pushed it up to give the portraits a more personal touch. A contemporary description by Samuel Curwen described him as "having a black fillet over his eyes". But does "over" mean "above" or "covering"? Go figure. - Ray