Sunday, September 14, 2008

What's up, Doc?

No list of mystery/suspense fiction with any claim to awareness of history can ignore the contributions of that most reluctant of mystery writers, Arthur Conan Doyle. A doctor who was rare in the sense of not making much if any income from his practice, a writer who yearned to write of things more otherworldly, Doyle could serve as a poster boy for writing away from one's passions and for unsuccessfully trying to kill off one of mystery's most famous personages, Sherlock Holmes.

True enough, Holmes had his predecessors in Poe's Dupin and Wilkie Collins' Sgt. Cuff from The Moonstone. Indeed, for some years, the mystery books column of The New York Times was called Sgt. Cuff. But Holmes was not, for all his edgy reserve, to be denied. Readers loved him to the point where they clamored for more. Well, that is not exactly the case; readers loved to hear of his escapades, his methods of detection, his characteristic "Elementary, my dear Watson." Speaking of whom, writers as well as readers have cause to pay respect and heed.

If it were not for John Watson, M.D., Sherlock Holmes in all likelihood would not have survived The Red-Headed League. The simple truth, for there is always a simple truth if we look for it, is that were Sherlock Holmes to have been presented in third person or, Heaven forefend, first person, he would have emerged as insufferable, a boor, an insensitive, self-satisfied marginal man who happened to be able to fit together logical progressions, a thing many of us are not able to achieve with any consistency. Had Holmes appeared without Dr. Watson to admire him, we should have long since banished him to the cloak room. I use the school analogy because even in Los Angeles, where I grew forth, we had cloak rooms, although I once won a bet of a packet of Twinkies by challenging a classmate to correctly define what a cloak is. New York and Rhode Island and Florida youth knew more about cloaks and so there were no snagged Twinkies.

Sherlock Holmes is so abrasive that we can only root for him in the abstract, cheering his exploits through the bumbling Doctor Watson, who is to Holmes as Sarah Palin is to John McCain.

The simpler truth becomes the need the reader and writer has to like and identify with someone before a tale draws us into its maw. The someone need not be a paladin or a paradigm, merely someone we can take identity in or, as the case of Doctor Watson, be amused by or relieved that we are a few steps ahead of. This simple fact extends even to the scruffy, contentious Bobby DuPre as portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces of You want me to hold the chicken fame. If you think about it, Jack Nicholson in his Bobby DuPre edginess could not successfully take on the role of a Sherlock Holmes with, say, Albert Finney or even Sean Connery as Dr. Watson because we would like the Nicholson Holmes more than we ought, spoiling a subtle but necessary chemistry, the one of surface tension between character and audience.

Fun as it is to cast our own versions of Holmes, say an African American Sherlock Holmes with Dezell Washington as Holmes ad James Earl Jones as Watson, or to really reach over the top, Michael K. Williams, fresh from Omar of The Wire as a gay African American Sherlock Holmes, those castings, effective as they may be, are distractions from the thesis, which is that we need a way, any way, to like the principal character enough to allow him or her to stand before us without insulation. Doyle cleverly uses Watson as the narrator, a role for which he has at least a medical school background on which to prop himself.

Particularly if a character is to be larger than life, we need the point of view of another lens through which to see all that focus and energy in a way to make it palatable.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was Doyle aware of how he was using Watson? I mean, did Doyle say to himself--I need Watson to make Holmes more tolerable. Or did he say--I sure like how Watson sees things so I think I'll run with that.

lowenkopf said...

Marta, Doyle may not have known at first, particularly since Holmes was based on one of his med school lecturers, but with time, he had to hae known.

Kate Lord Brown said...

I'm just trying to think of more examples of this ... In the UK we had Inspector Morse recently, (cantankerous, opera listening, real ale drinking genius) with his semi-comic, down to earth sidekick Lewis. Sadly the actor John Thaw died, and Lewis now has his own show. What would Dr Watson have been without Holmes ..?

lowenkopf said...

Kate: Morse was a favorite, both in his edgy persona and his passion for ale (which tipped me away from wine to some lovely pales). Thanks to Thaw (RIP)Morse was able to hang onto the POV. I thought.

Anonymous said...

and now we have the Laurie R. King series, featuring Mary Russell as Sherlock Holme's partner/wife. Written from Mary Russell's perspective, we see Holmes humanized, and Mary Russell herself, a match for Holmes, is both self-deprecating about her many abilities and intensely believable. Strongly recommended...

Anonymous said...

Another excellent example of this technique can be found in Dorothy Dunnett's fantastic historical novels, collectively known as the Legendary Lymond Chronicles; the narrative shifts POVs continually, but never gets inside the head of the main character, who is fascinating but tolerable only at a safe distance, until the very end of the last book.

I love Doyle, and can recite long passages of the Canon (as the original Holmes stories are known) by heart. Which is one of the many reasons I know that he never actually said "Elementary, my dear Watson." (He sometimes referred to things as "elementary," and was habitually affectionate in his mode of address to Watson, but not both at the same time; the catch phrase is a movie script invention.)

For a good laugh, you can't get much better than Doyle's adventure novels starring the subtly-named Professor Challenger, who likes to refer to the brave boys being hardened on his missions as "young fellah-me-lad." Hilarious stuff.

Anonymous said...

Thanks David- always happy to find a new author. I looked up Dorothy Dunnett and ordered the first book in the series!

Anonymous said...

Sarah, you will either absolutely love them, or hate them so much that you'll never forgive me for mentioning it here; the style is such a bizarre mix of high camp, high scholarship, and unrepentant wordsmithery; some folks find it wearing, to say the least. The experience of reading the books is greatly enhanced if you have a working knowledge of Latin, French, Spanish, and German ... and a love of Renaissance history. The first book is the weakest of the series, I think, though necessary to get one's bearings ... the fourth in the series is one of the best books I've ever read in my life, and despite having read it six times, it never fails to bring me to a state of complete emotional dissolution at the climax.

lowenkopf said...

David,you've got me curious about this series and itches need scratching.