A little over a decade ago I had what I called my Trojan Year. I’m an amateur enthusiast of the Trojan War. That year I read a number of books that revolve around it. A few years ago I had my Quixote Year, in which I read and watched a number of works concerning Don Quixote. This year ended up being my Sherlock Year, in which I ended up experiencing a number of works featuring Sherlock Holmes.
The first was the complete stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I had bought a two-volume box set some years back and it took time to reach it in my reading adventures. Years ago this was because I would set up a reading list, but eventually it was because of how books fell on my bookshelves. I’ve got a lot of books, folks, and am always adding to them.
My only previous experience with Doyle’s material was the best-known Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which I read for a class in high school. That was, at this point, a relative long time ago, and by 2022 I had only vague memories of it, as I discovered when I reached it.
Holmes casts a large shadow in modern fiction, not the least because he’s one of the most frequently adapted characters in film and television. The most recent high profile films featuring Holmes are the ones directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey, Jr. I had never seen the second one. By coincidence I ended up buying the set of them and of course watching them this year. The second, Game of Shadows, depicts Doyle’s famous attempt to kill off his own creation in the hopes of being able to move on to other material. Reading Doyle’s work, it is very evident how Holmes, and Doyle’s relationship to writing him, evolves, where it’s not merely the case of a brilliant detective solving mysteries, but Doyle constantly struggling to keep things interesting for himself. In the beginning he clearly was using Holmes as an excuse to tell stories, so that Holmes was basically a featured element rather than the sole purpose of the stories, and later it’s clearly very much Doyle trying to prove he definitely has plenty of material to fill out a career worthy of Holmes, even though most of it is clearly being made up on the spot (you can see the exact point he realizes a character’s name can be adopted for Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, who shows up in fact and practice soon after).
I had picked up a volume of the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series at a library sale, and put it aside very much in the manner of my reading habits, but of course now was as good a time as any to finally get around to it. This was of course the role that thrust Cumberbatch to prominence (previously he’d been laboring at a career of no distinction; after he was always a featured if not star actor), so I had always meant to watch at least some of it.
Created by a producer of the modern Doctor Who, upon seeing this Holmes it was no surprise, since creatively it was approached in the very same manner. Like Game of Shadows the material I reviewed features the showdown with Moriarty, whom Doyle and apparently everyone else since (Shadows seems to be an exception) failed to identify basically as a precursor to the modern gangster, to finally put him in some proper context, rather than simply as Holmes’ natural rival.
I also revisited some vintage screen material, including a lucky find I had previously experienced where an actor playing Watson sounds like Darth Vader, decades before Vader, for one brief expository moment. It took some doing to identify the exact material where this happens, as I had no intention to watch all of the material (although I did try and cover the adapting work), but the results are spelled out in a post elsewhere concerning much of the stuff George Lucas likely drew on to come up with Star Wars in its final form that seems to have eluded visible fan notice (somehow!!!).
Anyway, none of this is ever planned. That’s three theme years now. I have no plans to write detective fiction of my own, although I’ve touched on it now and then, more in the manner of Roberto Bolaño than Doyle.
