Holmes and Moriarty, 1893 illustration by Harry C. Edwards in McClure’s
I’ve been enjoying Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem.” That’s the one, you’ll recall, based on the famous story where Holmes is tossed over Switzerland’s Reichanbach Falls by Moriarty, his arch-nemesis. Watson is left to re-trace his steps and mourn his friend.
The television episode appears at the end of Season 1 in the Granada television adaptation from the 1980s, and Brett is, of course, the perfect Holmes. But the timing of the episode in the series is intriguing. Several seasons follow, so this is clearly not the end of Holmes, which is what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had initially envisioned, hoping to rid himself of his most famous creation, who had become an albatross.
As celebrity historian Lucy Worsley notes, in a piece cited at length by The Guardian (the original article seems to have disappeared from the Radio Times website),
“‘Arthur Conan Doyle secretly hated his creation Sherlock Holmes and blamed the cerebral detective character for denying him recognition as the author of highbrow historical fiction . . . ‘
Conan Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his Sherlock stories after initially approaching the intellectual Cornhill magazine. ‘Only after they, and two others, rejected Mr Holmes, was he finally accepted by a fourth, much trashier, publisher. They said the work was exactly what they were looking for: ‘cheap fiction’.
Holmes was lucrative for Conan Doyle, but the author decided to kill him off once he had earned him enough money, sending him over a Swiss waterfall in 1893.
‘A decade later, though, Arthur was lured to resurrect him when an American publisher offered him the equivalent of $1.6m…’
‘Arthur must have hated himself. And he would have hated the fact that today, 93 years after his death, his historical novels lie unread, while his ‘cheap’ – but beloved – detective lives forever on our screens.’”
Worsley makes an intriguing (albeit oft-made point) with panache: some writers feel haunted by their celebrity characters long after they would prefer to move on to different topic, settings, and fictional protagonists.
The reading public gets very attached to their favourites: Sir Ian Fleming’s Bond, say, (a role that Brett declined, for fear of being stuck with a single type of role); or Christie’s own Miss Marple; or Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta.
Series are irresistible for publishers. An agent is shopping around my stand-alone novel and two publishers have asked if I couldn’t, instead, produce an opening series novel. It’s possible this is just a nice way to turn down aspiring authors, but it’s given me pause. I read a lot of series but I don’t have a clue how to start one. And I’ve encountered some aspirational first-in-a-new-series-novels, with no second book to follow; this is a very sad thing.
But the apparently unhappy alternative, available to just a small number of writers, is being locked into a series, trapped for all time with a character one longs to dispense with by any means possible.
I just finished re-reading Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead (1952), and it features Ariadne Oliver as a mystery writer who has grown very weary of her best-known creation, a Finnish detective with some personal foibles:
“How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something — and people seem to like it — and then you go on — and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like the maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life.”
Right up to 1972’s Elephants Can Remember, which is next in my Christie TBRR (to-be-re-read) pile), Ariadne Oliver–who is increasingly central in the late Poirot novels–keeps mentioning her finicky Finn. She would like to move on, artistically; her legions of fans, and her publisher, won’t allow it.
And Scandinavian television even gave Ariadne Oliver’s creation, a fictional writer’s fictional protagonist, his own series:
““Agatha Christie’s Hjerson” follows retired, famous detective Sven Hjerson, who has solved some of Sweden’s biggest crimes. When a television producer wants to make a series with him, she doesn’t quite realize what she’s getting into. The series is a whodunnit with a meta-perspective, and set across contemporary Sweden and Finland.”
Well, I’d like to see that, please!
In Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, there is also a meta element.
A rather distressed Ariadne Oliver is working with an ambitious young playwright who is seeking to adapt her character to the stage. Along the way, however, this involves turning him into a decades-younger Norwegian freedom-fighter during World War II, and that is anathema not just to the writer but to her legions of fans: they will never accept a version of the famous Finn in which he is not, in fact, Finnish.
Hercule Poirot is, of course, the main investigator here. Ariadne uses her “feminine intuition” to try to solve the crime and instead [SPOILERS] later learns, to her horror, that she provided an alibi, of sorts, for the killer.
Poirot is called to a small town when an old friend, a police investigator, is dissatisfied with the results of the inquiry into an elderly charwoman’s death.
The investigator is particularly unhappy that a young and rather diffident fellow will be hanged for the crime in a few weeks. This man is protesting–weakly–that he didn’t do it.
And now the police investigator is wondering if the clues left strewn about weren’t a bit too convenient.
I like this book a lot: I’d forgotten how much fun it is.
But by 1952, Agatha Christie had long since tired of her Belgian detective and his careful moustaches.
She wished she could chuck him and write something else (which she did, of course, in her Marple novels, and the Tommy and Tuppence books, and various one-offs).
But the fans just kept clamouring for more Poirot, who had made his original appearance in the 1920/21 (U.S. vs. UK publication dates) The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
With this novel, Christie is into her fourth decade of writing about Poirot, having begun drafting Styles in 1916.
She’s ditched one undeserving husband and acquired a second, younger but far more satisfactory one, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who takes her along on his adventures (which, to be fair, she’s largely financing).
She’s raised her daughter; she’s written long-running West End plays.
Christie has lived a whole life.
But she’s still stuck with fans who want more Poirot stories. He is aging but still spry.
A friend is doing a theatrical production of Murder on the Orient Express. (Wouldn’t this be fun to stage in a railway museum, with the audience, which would have to be tiny, following the actors from car to car?)
And he’s playing the murder victim, because he is much too tall to play Poirot, more’s the pity.
Poirot, as we all know (excepting Monsieur Branagh), is meant to be short and squat, an egg-shaped man with an egg-shaped skull, mostly bald with a tonsure, and those luxurious moustaches.
Poirot is an icon.
But he’s also a set of peccadilloes and fussy manners, easier to play as farcical.
So it’s entirely to David Suchet’s credit that he gave us such an earnest, searching, intelligent television Poirot. The religiosity in the final seasons is wearing, but tant pis.
When Suchet’s Poirot fusses about his two eggs not being precisely the same size, we smile at his idiosyncrasies but we also understand them as part of his broader hyper-focus on details that makes him such a keen investigator.
Then there’s Holmes, of the violin and the opium. Rather more serious character traits than a preference for evenly-sized eggs.
In my lifetime there have been an array of more-than-acceptable Jeremy Brett successors.
I’m partial to Greg House, the irascible but brilliant American M.D. played by Hugh Laurie.
I’m also perfectly pleased with Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC revival/update, and with Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, a contemporary updating set in New York.
Can’t stand Robert Downey, Jr., but I’m in the minority on this: everything about that travesty of a Sherlock Holmes production, right down to the glorious Jude Law as Watson, bothers me.
Catherine Shoard of The Guardian agrees:
“Holmes is played with boggle-eyed haminess by Robert Downey Jr while Jude Law is Watson – inspired casting at first glance: his weirdly boring aura superficially lending itself to the role. But they’re both a pain: the former a cartoon with darting eyes rather than a brain, the latter just a blank.”
And this is a crucial relationship, much more significant than Poirot and Hastings, for instance. (Does Hastings die, at some point in the series? In Mrs. McGinty, Poirot is referring to him in the past tense.)
My point–and I do have one–is that readers/viewers as well as authors can tire of a character if the portrayal is not spot on. So it’s Jeremy Brett for me, forever.
But one does feel a tiny bit sorry (oh-so-very-small violin) for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and company for being saddled with their brilliant, timeless creations.
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