Sierra Prasada

In the third of Arthur Conan Doyle’s four classic detective novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles, that master of deduction Sherlock Holmes and his trustworthy companion, Dr. Watson, face a seemingly supernatural foe, a gigantic hound that stalks the heirs of the Baskerville fortune.

First serialized in The Strand Magazine, the story also played the role of white flag as Conan Doyle surrendered to the demands of the reading public and resurrected the beloved detective eight years after killing Holmes off in the short story, The Final Problem. The novel has been adapted for film more than 24 times – the Indian version became a “super hit” – and will be adapted yet again as part of the second season of the BBC’s Sherlock in 2012.

In the lead up to this excerpt, Holmes asks Watson what he can conclude from a walking stick left behind by a guest and Watson obliges him with some initial observations. Holmes then responds:

‘I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.’
‘Then I was right.’
‘To that extent.’
‘But that was all.’
‘No, no, my dear Watson, not all – by no means all.’

Notes on the writerly ‘voice’ of Arthur Conan Doyle, from the September/October issue of Intelligent Life magazine:

‘Dr Watson doesn’t write to you, he talks to you, with Edwardian courtesy, across a glowing fire.’ So said John le Carré, one of many writers in thrall to Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). His most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, provides the excitement. But his second most famous, John Watson, provides the voice.

The stories (1887-1927) are infinitely re-readable. Fans focus on Holmes himself, that perfect assemblage of cold calculation and eccentric tastes—the violin, the cocaine, the tobacco in the Persian slipper. ‘Every writer owes something to Holmes,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in 1929. But Holmes would be precious without Watson’s direct, manly presence. A late story narrated by Holmes was hopeless. The prose lost most of its energy and all of its suspense, and became smug.

Watson, the medic ever ready with a pistol and a flask of brandy, was a conduit for Doyle himself, who had been a GP. The doctor is decent, and, contrary to popular belief, not stupid. He shares the reader’s breathless bemusement at Holmes’s lightning deductions. ‘What can it all mean?’ Watson gasps in ‘The Speckled Band’, the most terrifying story of all. ‘It means that it’s all over,’ Holmes answered…

Keep reading.

Image: Screen shot from Intelligent Life

This exquisite paper ‘poetree’ appeared in March as an anonymous gift to the Scottish Poetry Library, followed in June by a gramophone and coffin carved from the pages of an Ian Rankin novel. More statues followed, including this gloves of bee’s fur, cap of wren’s wing and a Tyrannosaurus Rex emerging from the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Craving more? Who knows when the mysterious stranger will “strike” again, but in the meantime, visit artist Su Blackwell’s neck of the woods.

With only three weeks of 2011 remaining, it’s the season of ‘best’ lists. In that spirit, the twelve stories linked below are those Arthur Conan Doyle himself selected as his favorites in 1927 from the canon of 56 short stories (not to mention the four novels).

12. “The Reigate Puzzle”
11. “The Musgrave Ritual”
10. “The Adventure of the Priory School”
9. “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”
8. “The Adventure of the Second Stain”
7. “The Five Orange Pips”
6. “The Adventure of the Empty House”
5. “A Scandal in Bohemia”
4. “The Final Problem”
3. “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”
2. “The Red-headed League”
1. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”

Julian Barnes’s 2005 historical novel Arthur & George introduces Arthur Conan Doyle as a real life detective after the example of his own creation.

Conan Doyle and George Edalji (prounced Ay-dl-ji), a Birmingham solicitor, might easily never have met, but Conan Doyle’s intercession in Edalji’s case exonerated him and freed him from prison, exposing the need in Britain for the creation of a court of appeal. In Barnes’s hands, this Booker short-listed novel is both a turn-of-the-century adventure tale and a quintessentially 20th century work, one that skillfully draws the events of the past through the eye of the present, tracking two vastly different lives as their paths intersect and leave a mark.

In the following excerpt, Arthur meets the man who will inspire him to create Sheridan Hope – Sherringford Holmes? – ah, yes, Sherlock Holmes:

He liked to tell how he had been taught the importance of careful looking at the Edinburgh Infirmary. A surgeon there, Joseph Bell, had taken a shine to this large, enthusiastic youth and made Arthur his out-patient clerk. His job was to muster the patients, take preliminary notes, and then lead them to Mr. Bell’s room, where the surgeon would be sitting among his dressers. Bell would greet each patient, take preliminary notes, and then lead them to Mr. Bell’s room, where the surgeon would be sitting among his dressers. Bell would greet each patient, and from a silent yet intense scrutiny try to deduce as much as possible about their lives and proclivities. He would declare that this man was by trade a French polisher, that one a left-handed cobbler, to the amazement of those present, not least of the patient himself. Arthur remembered the following exchange:

“Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Not long discharged?”
“No, sir.”
“A Highland regiment?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Stationed at Barbados?”
“Aye, sir.”

It was a trick, yet it was a true trick; mysterious at first, simple when explained.

“You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he long been discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his constraint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

Image: Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company and Nottingham Playhouse co-production of David Edgar’s Arthur & George

From an interview with AbeBooks:

Why did the story of George Edjali and his court case fascinate you and end up as the focal point of Arthur and George?

Well, it seemed a) a very unusual story (the animal mutilation, the miscarriage of justice, the racial aspect); and b) something that could still happen today, with very few changes. I assumed, when I read about it, that someone must have done a book on the case in the 100 years since it happened. But no one had – so partly I wrote the book so as to have something to read about the case.

What interests you more – the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes, or his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle?

Oh, Doyle – though the truth is that the case itself is what fascinated me, and Doyle came attached to the case, so there was no avoiding him. If it had been another writer – Kipling, say – or a sportsman, or a dentist, I would probably have been just as happy. But that said, I came to admire Doyle during the writing of the book – although (or perhaps because) he is in many respects the opposite of what I am as a writer.

Why is there an enduring fascination for so many people with both Holmes and Conan Doyle?

Though Doyle was not a great writer (as he would have been the first to admit) he was a very skilled professional novelist who created in Holmes a fictional archetype who still feeds something readers need. It is a fantasy, of course, but a compelling one: that a highly intelligent man, by pure deductive thought, a little cocaine and violin-playing, can rationally solve the most fiendish crimes which baffle the police. Fantasy, as I say, but compelling.

As A.O. Scott points out in his (tepid) review of Hollywood’s latest Sherlock Holmes adaptation, “Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective, with his violin, his deerstalker and his steel-trap mind, has been one of the most resilient and adaptable figures in Anglophone popular culture.” The resilient appeal of Conan Doyle’s original stories and the detective himself, however, owes as much to the friendship between Holmes and Dr. Watson, his loyal companion/friend/sidekick/wingman/[pick your term] as to Holmes’s deductive powers and amusing eccentricities. The friendship itself so moved detective novelist June Thomson that she wrote a biography of it.

Neverthless, the two men’s close attachment to one another pricks the modern (American?) sensibility, fueling speculation that the friends, flatmates and work partners must also have been lovers – indeed, there’s nothing to stop them from becoming so in the incredibly fecund world of online fan fiction. About one year ago, a flip comment by Robert Downey Jr. inspired a torrent of speculation as to whether Guy Richie would pull Holmes out of the closet in the just-released sequel to his adaptation; Conan Doyle’s estate threatened to block the film’s release.

If Holmes is a “man for all seasons,” it’s because he’s so successfully slipped his original tether, but the original books and stories provide a window onto a time in which male friendship embraced an intimacy now mostly lost, at least to the Western World. (It’s still quite common and, to my mind, utterly charming to see male acquaintances and friends blow each other kisses in Lebanon or walk down the street with their arms thoroughly entangled in Cairo.)

Husband and wife team Brett and Kate McKay wrote, a few years ago, about the history of male friendships on their website The Art of Manliness:

Man friendships during the 19th century were marked by an intense bond and filled with deeply held feeling and sentimentality. Man friendships in many instances had a similar intensity as romantic relationships between men and women. Essentially, it was a continuation of the heroic friendship of the ancient world, coupled with the emphasis on emotion common to the Romantic Age. A fervent bond did not necessarily imply a sexual relationship; the idea that these ardent friendships in some way compromised a man’s heterosexuality is largely a modern conception.

As the McKays go on to describe, male friendships changed dramatically in the 20th century due to new anxiety following the emergency of homosexuality from the proverbial closet; increased competition for jobs leading men to see each other more as rivals than potential friends; and the rising mobility of the post-industrial working world, among other causes.

The men of the 21st century, in other words, may be even more in need of Holmes’s and Watson’s example than the their turn-of-the-century counterparts. Regardless, displays of emotion between male friends have apparently become so problematized today that The Art Of Manliness provides an entry instructing men on how to hug each other. Awkward.

Middle East politics alone, however, suggests that more men hugging men does not, by itself, generate progress in human relations, and, barring a psycho-social revolution yet to come, we may just have to reconcile ourselves to the rise of the fist bump.

It is commonly assumed that authors’ characters are, in one way or another, reflections of themselves, but Arthur Conan Doyle’s own worldview diverged strikingly from that held by his most beloved creation. In the report he makes to Holmes after arriving at Baskerville Hall, Dr. Watson imagines what type of people once inhabited the area, then observes:

All this, however, is foreign to the mission on which you sent me and will probably be very uninteresting to your severely practical mind. I can still remember your complete indifference as to whether the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun.

In many stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles among them, Holmes sets out to turn skepticism into certainty, to overthrow, as it were, even the possibility of a supernatural element intruding on the cases he’s been asked to solve. Doyle’s own mindset, however, drew less on his training as a physician and more on the metaphysical longings of his particular time; over the course of his life, he became increasingly devoted to spiritualism and one of its more famous champions in the aftermath of the First World War.

He shared this enthusiasm with no less eminent of figures than William James, the noted Harvard psychologist (and brother to novelist Henry James), sometimes called the father of American psychology, and his Swiss counterpart Carl Jung, who attended many a séance in the late 1890s. In his book, A Most Dangerous Method, psychologist John Kerr chronicles another compelling male friendship, that between Jung and Sigmund Freud, and, in the following passage, he sums up the challenge that such ideas posed to the modern worldview taking shape at the dawn of the 20th century:

…this was the age that first accepted scientific materialism as its dominant worldview. It was now commonly assumed that science had decisively triumphed over religion and metaphysics and that a complete materialistic account of the external world was nearly at hand. But then how was man to conceptualize that other pole of experience – the self? There seemed no place in the material world, with its endlessly antecedent causes, for the thinking, feeling, willing agency of the self. The paradox was apparent to all. There was as yet no agreed upon way of resolving it…It ought not to surprise us, therefore, to learn that medical men who occupied themselves with nervous patients also regularly tried their hand at philosophy. Nor that the phenomenology of nervous disorders was closely linked in the popular mind with all that seemed exceptional and marvelous, with séances, genius, telepathy, and the like – with all the places where there still seemed to be cracks in the materialist world order.

Image: Arthur Conan Doyle, his second wife and, between them, a “luminous manifestation,” circa 1920s.

When am I not?

In the newly released Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, contemporary authors including Philip Pullman, Claire Messud, Lev Grossman and Alison Bechdel talk shelving and the future of books.

Speaking of shelves, Brainpicker’s selections from December 2009 are worth a second look.

Books now provide the “dressing” and the inspiration for a noteworthy minority of fashion brands, according to The Paris Review. (Though I really can’t agree that “many of our libraries consist only of e-books” – maybe in 10 years.)

The Times Literary Supplement rounds up six new Sherlock-related books (and one movie) and declares that Sherlock Holmes Lives Again, not to mention returning to BBC1 this month.

And the Guardian looks ahead to the Literary Events of 2012, including new books by Ahdaf Soueif, Nadine Gordimer and Zadie Smith, among others.

Image: Target bookshelf by Turkish designer Mebrure Oral

If you think of Houdini as a man of art, you also have to think of him as a man of science. As most artists in the past, he is always working at the edge of technological development…That’s why I think when you see interesting magic today, you have to think about films, imagination. That’s the continuation of Houdini’s legacy.
                                                                                                    -Vik Muniz, Artist

The San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum‘s exhibit on Houdini: Art and Magic finished last week, but you can still view highlights.

During his abbreviated lifetime, Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz) gained international renown as a magician, performer and author, aided, no doubt, by his own considerable skill as a self-promoter and a time period that offered few alternatives to live performance.

Biographer Christopher Sandford writes that Houdini befriended author Arthur Conan Doyle during a brief period when they shared an enthusiasm for spiritualism; Houdini initially believed he might be able to speak with his deceased mother but his own gift for subterfuge made him naturally skeptical of séances.

He clashed with Conan Doyle and devoted himself to debunking spiritualism, most prominently with his 1924 book, A Magician Among the Spirits, and 1926 testimony before Congress.

Leave it to the magic of Hollywood to resurrect any friendship; media, after all, is just the plural of medium.