Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #5. Gary Lovisi
display of emotion for him, to be sure, but often the surest way to a man’s stomach … well, dear reader, you know the rest.
Ingredients
1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
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1 (7 bone) rack of lamb, trimmed and Frenched
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon Dijon style mustard
DIRECTIONS
1 Preheat oven to 230 degrees C (if you live in America, that would be 450 degrees F). Move oven rack to the center position.
2 In a large bowl, combine bread crumbs, garlic, rosemary, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Toss in 2 tablespoons olive oil to moisten mixture. Set aside.
3 Season the rack all over with salt and pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large heavy oven proof skillet over high heat. Sear rack of lamb for 1 to 2 minutes on all sides. Set aside for a few minutes. Brush rack of lamb with the mustard. Roll in the bread crumb mixture until evenly coated. Cover the ends of the bones with brown wrapping paper to prevent charring. (Be sure you don’t light the paper on fire!)
4 Arrange the rack bone side down in the skillet. Roast the lamb in preheated oven for 12 to 18 minutes, depending on the degree of doneness you want. With a meat thermometer, take a reading in the center of the meat after 10 to 12 minutes and remove the meat, or let it cook longer, to your taste. Let it rest for 5 to 7 minutes, loosely covered, before carving between the ribs.
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Editor’s note: The letter from Mr Wilde was submitted to SHMM as “221 C Baker Street” and was written by Alan McCright. — MK
SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
2.0 Baker Street, or How Sherlock Holmes Came To Be Alive & Well, and Living in 21st Century London
Just a few minutes into A Study in Pink, the first episode of the new BBC TV series, Sherlock, a throwaway reference that will elude non-Holmesians makes clear that the creative forces behind the latest — and by far —most successful chronological reboot of the world’s most famous detective, take their Canon very seriously. After introducing a modern wounded and recuperating ex-military doctor named John Watson, haunted by memories of his service in the current Afghan War and at loose ends upon his return to London, the writer Steven Moffat, draws viewers further into a remarkable and convincing alternate universe, with staccato depictions of a terrifying series of suicides carried out by victims with no apparent reason to take their own lives.
Following the death of an affluent man, seen arriving at the airport, and then swallowing a capsule before collapsing on an empty floor of an office building, we are shown two teenagers caught in a heavy downpour. One of them tells his mate that he needs to go back to fetch his umbrella … before he, too, is shown downing a capsule, and turning up dead.
At the subsequent Scotland Yard press conference led by Detective Inspector Lestrade, that second victim is identified as James Phillimore, a name shared with the subject of one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous unresolved cases, alluded to in the tantalizing opening section of The Problem of Thor Bridge. There, Watson (that is, the 19th-century injured Afghan War veteran) refers to the puzzle “of Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.” Moffat’s present-day Phillimore was also “never more seen in this world” after his fateful decision to retrieve his umbrella — save, perhaps, by the person who somehow managed to convince him to end his life.
Not one viewer in a hundred will find this choice of name noteworthy, but it’s clearly a shout-out to those watchers who read Doyle’s original tales devotedly. Moffat’s and cocreator Mark Gatiss’s love for their source material is evident in every scene of the three episodes that comprised the first of what deserves to be many seasons. By seriously and intelligently dissecting what made Doyle’s stories — and their leads — so enduring, and almost-universally appealing, Moffat and Gatiss have already staked a claim at being among the most faithful and creative interpreters of the iconic figures of Holmes and Watson.
It’s not that they are the first, not by a long chalk, to place the detective and the doctor in a time period later than that of the original sixty stories. (As Holmes himself quoted from Ecclesiastes in A Study in Scarlet, “there is nothing new under the sun.”) Almost from the beginning of the depiction of those characters on film, writers and producers transported them from Victorian England to times contemporaneous with the movie’s filming. In 1932’s Sherlock Holmes, based on the Gillette play, screenwriter Bertram Millhauser had Clive Brook’s sleuth tooling about in London of the 1930s. Even the well-respected Arthur Wontner series of the same vintage set its adaptations of The Valley of Fear and The Final Problem, among others, decades after they occurred in the originals. Most famously, when Universal took over the film series that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce had begun at 20th Century Fox with two period pieces, they unapologetically set their plots in the 1940s. In the first, 1942’s Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror followed the opening credits with this explanation for the shift: “The character of Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible, and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the present day, he remains, as ever, the supreme master of deductive reasoning.”
The shift, by the way, was done with the explicit approval of Rathbone himself. But while the Universal films occupy a warm place in the hearts of many, with few exceptions (such as The Scarlet Claw), they are not viewed as being in the spirit of the originals. They actually feature relatively little by way of deductive reasoning, and their continuation of the Fox films’s reduction of Watson to a buffoon still raises hackles.
Starting in the 1970s, versions of Holmes on screen began appearing in modern-day America. In They Might Be Giants, George C. Scott portrayed a character who deluded himself into believing that he was Holmes himself. A 1976 TV movie, The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, featured Larry Hagman, of all people, as a policeman who comes to think that he’s really Holmes after being struck on the head. In 1987, Michael Pennington (who was a brilliant Moriarty in the BBC radio Canon starring Clive Merrison and Michael Williams) was a Holmes revived from a cryogenic chamber into the modern world in the TV movie, The Return of Sherlock Holmes. A very similar plotline was at the heart of the 1993 TV film Sherlock Holmes Returns with another one-time Napoleon of Crime, Anthony Higgins, as the reanimated Great Detective. These efforts, along with the early graphic novel Son of Holmes: The Woman In Red (1977), the 1999-2001 cartoon series, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (in which Watson has become a robot!), and Barry Grant’s modern-day pastiches, The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter, have not left much of an impression either on Holmesians or the public at large.
Given these failures, and the seemingly-obvious notion that to faithfully present Holmes, one must start by keeping him in his own time, skepticism that BBC’s Sherlock, planting the character in 2010 England, would have any redeeming value was certainly rational. But with Gatiss and Moffat’s passion for the characters, stemming from a life-long fascination with them (and an affection for the dozen much-derided Universal films manifested in the person of one villain modeled after a creepy killer from The Pearl of Death), and intelligent tweaking of characteristics of their leads and plot elements from Doyle’s sixty tales, they have managed to produce not only television films that are remarkably true to the spirit of the original (in countless ways that the 2009 Guy Ritchie film was not), but ones with broad appeal beyond would-be Baker Street Irregulars everywhere.
In a blog entry on the BBC website, Gatiss has written about the origin of Sherlock, which, fittingly, came about during rail journeys he and Moffat shared during their work on Dr.