Various myths and legends concerning Dartmoor

To Dartmoor, the greatest expanse of wilderness in Southern England, and one of 15 National Parks in the UK (England has 10, Wales 3 and Scotland 2). 

A bleak but beautiful expanse of high ground in the middle of Devon, Dartmoor consists of some 368 square miles of bogs, granite outcrops (tors) and heather-grown moorland as well as lots of isolated farmsteads, a prison, various disused tin mines and granite quarries, a strong military presence (the north-eastern part of it has been an Army firing range for over 200 years), the sources of several Devon rivers (not just the Dart) and a few fine examples of clapper bridges which date back to Medieval times. 

Animals on the moor are mainly cows, sheep and ponies – those last being the descendants of the pit-ponies which were used when the moor was a centre for tin-mining.

And, of course, it is the source of many local legends.  Dartmoor is said to be haunted by (among others) pixies, a headless horseman, a few monks who got lost crossing the moor in the Middle Ages and several large black dogs – some of whom are said to go hunting with the ghost of an evil squire. The Devil crops up a few times, having visited a village in the middle of the moor during a storm in the seventeenth century and having also had at least one soul sold to him. In the twentieth century, several road accidents on the moor were attributed to the ‘hairy hands’, a pair of disembodied hands that apparently grabbed the steering-wheels of cars (or the handle-bars of motorbikes) and forced vehicles off the road; one suspects that quite a few of those accidents occurred at night, probably not long after the pubs had closed.

Quite a few of the tors are subject to various myths and legends. Hound Tor, not far from the road between Bovey Tracy and Widecombe-in-the-Moor, is said to have been created as a result of a pack of hunting-hounds being turned to stone by some witches who were upset that the dogs had knocked their cauldron over while they were chasing a hare; the huntsman accompanying them was also turned to stone – the granite stack that is Bowerman’s Nose, about a mile from Hound Tor, to be precise.

Tales of ghostly dogs are not unique to Dartmoor. Such stories abound across England (most counties have at least one), and as far as Dartmoor is concerned there’s the yeth or yell hound – a spectral dog which is supposed to be the spirit of an unbaptised child which roams the moor at night, making wailing noises. This is said to have been one of the inspirations for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles which is set mainly on Dartmoor.

Conan Doyle stayed at a hotel in Princetown (the Royal Duchy Hotel, now one of three National Park Visitor Centres on Dartmoor) while he was working on The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was published in 1902 (after being serialised in The Strand Magazine); this marked Sherlock Holmes’s first re-appearance since being apparently killed off at the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ back in 1893 (the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles prompted Conan Doyle to revive Holmes on a permanent basis, with the story usually hailed as Holmes’s ‘return’, ‘The Adventure  of the Empty House’, appearing in The Strand Magazine in 1903).

As well as the yeth hound, Conan Doyle also drew inspiration from the story of Richard Cabell, a seventeenth-century squire who lived in Buckfastleigh on the south-eastern edge of Dartmoor. He loved hunting and is said to have murdered his wife and sold his soul to the Devil. When he died in 1677 and was laid to rest in the churchyard at Buckfastleigh, a pack of phantom hounds is supposed to have raced across the moor to howl at the graveside, and Cabell’s ghost has (so it is said) been seen hunting on the moor with the ghostly hounds on the anniversary of his death. In an attempt to lay his soul to rest, a heavy stone was placed over his grave and a mausoleum (known locally as ‘The Sepulchre’) was built over it. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Cabell became the dastardly Hugo Baskerville – the ancestor of the Baskervilles and the source of the family curse (the story, as told to Holmes and Doctor Watson at the start of the novel, is that Hugo sold his soul to the devil in order to abduct a young lady, only to meet his end by way of an encounter with a giant hound).

But the purchase of the soul of a member of the local gentry was not the only piece of Devil’s work on seventeenth-century Dartmoor. Over at Widecombe-in-the-Moor there’s a fine fourteenth-century granite church dedicated to St Pancras; it is somewhat on the big side for the small village it serves, which has led to it being known as the ‘cathedral of the moor’. On 21^st October 1638 it was struck by lightning. During a service. The north-eastern pinnacle of the tower was dislodged and fell through the roof, killing four and injuring many others (some of whom later died of their wounds). An eyewitness report of sorts exists in the form of a poem written by the local schoolmaster, although the highly informative guide to the church (a booklet which can be purchased in the church for £1) adds to this by including an account, apparently from a pamphlet published in London a couple of weeks later, which states that the vicar tried to continue with the service, only to find that the surviving members of his flock “durst not proceed in their publick devotions, but went forth of the Church”.

According to local legend, the storm was the work of the Devil, who had come to take one of the parishoners; various reasons are given depending on where you hear or read of the story – the man in question has been described as an adulterer or a gambler (who had lost to the Devil at cards but failed to pay up), although the afore-mentioned church guide states that he was merely guilty of having “fallen asleep during the afternoon service”. The church is most definitely worth a look around, but then you tell me the English country church that is not!

Widecombe-in-the-Moor is best known for the song about a group of yokels, including Uncle Tom Cobley, all riding to that village’s fair on a grey mare (the fair still takes place, in a field just outside the village, in September). Their somewhat improbable ride is depicted on signs throughout the village. 

Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for the horse, and according to the song it too is said to haunt the moor…

Endeavour (the fourth series)

What with the excitement over the new series of Sherlock earlier this year, I criminally managed to overlook the latest series of Endeavour. Both shows had their fourth series on the telly back in January, and for what it’s worth some of the episodes of said series were broadcast on the same nights, and while the BBC’s modern-day reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes is the one that’s been getting all the attention (as well as more viewers) it has to be said that ITV’s depiction of a young Endeavour Morse as a junior police officer in Sixties Oxford is one of the best things on television.

[At this point, a spoiler alert is probably in order; if for some reason you’ve not yet seen the fourth series of Endeavour, please be advised that this blog-post contains information that you might not want to look at just yet. You have been warned.]

As well as making use of the central characters’ first names (even though Morse’s one in particular is hardly ever used, to the point where most of his colleagues don’t even know what it is), both shows take a format consisting of short series of long episodes (ninety-minute ones in both cases). In terms of British crime drama, this was a format pioneered, back in the late Eighties, by Inspector Morse and subsequently followed by the likes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Jonathan Creek and many others. Sherlock started back in 2010 and now has thirteen episodes under its belt, while Endeavour began in 2012 with a one-off pilot and is now seventeen episodes old. Sherlock is full of references to the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and subsequent adaptations, while Endeavour’s focus of reference is the enormously popular original series, Inspector Morse, which was based on the novels by Colin Dexter and ran from 1987 to 2000. Both centre around gentleman-detectives, socially awkward but very clever individuals who can infuriate others as well as catch the criminals. Both are very well-acted – in terms of the support cast as well as the leads. Yet, for all the fuss about Sherlock, I’m finding myself preferring the more understated Endeavour. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this. When I was a teenager I read and greatly enjoyed Conan Doyle before I discovered Colin Dexter, but when I read the latter I found Morse – the beer-drinking opera buff who was allowed to get it wrong and have romantic feelings about the women he encountered while investigating his cases (however unrequited they may have been) to be a much more rounded, human and in his own way likeable individual than the emotionally cold, cocaine-taking Holmes.

A recap of Endeavour is perhaps in order. The third series, which aired last year, skipped over an immediate follow-up to the second series which ended with Morse’s mentor Fred Thursday getting shot and Morse himself getting arrested; it was instead briefly explained that the former survived, the latter spent a month or so in prison before being released without charge and the institutional corruption they’d uncovered got brushed under the carpet. Instead, writer Russell Lewis used the third series to experiment with pastiches of The Great Gatsby (with a disillusioned Morse in the Nick Carraway role), Dirty Harry (all that running around between phone-boxes) and Jaws (although, what with Oxfordshire being landlocked, the man-eating animal at large was a tiger rather than a shark) which were much more enjoyable than they had any right to be. A minor character in the tiger episode happened to be the father of James Hathaway, the sergeant in that other Inspector Morse spin-off, Lewis. The last episode was dominated by a bank robbery which went wrong; Morse and Thursday’s daughter Joan were among those taken hostage in the bank. On borrowed time in all sorts of ways, Thursday literally coughed up the bullet that had been in his lung since the end of the second series (in the plausibility stakes, that’s right up there with a man-eating tiger on the loose in the Thames Valley, but it didn’t seem to matter as much as it should’ve done) before tooling up and storming the building, leading to a tense denouement in which he opted to arrest rather than kill the villain (whose eventual funeral is depicted at the start of the Inspector Morse episode where Morse and Lewis go to Australia). Traumatised by those events, Joan, who’d been making eyes at an oblivious Morse even though she clearly had a thing for bad boys, left Oxford.

In a departure from the previously-established format, the fourth series was set mere weeks after the third rather than the following year, so in the Endeavour universe it’s still 1967. This allowed Endeavour to fully explore the impact of Joan’s disappearance on her family (young women leaving home without telling their parents where they were going was a common enough feature of the time to inspire one of the songs on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, released in 1967); being of the stoical, buttoned-up generation that came of age in the Second World War, Fred and Win don’t handle things well as their once-happy family falls apart. Morse, having belatedly realised his own feelings for Joan, is badly affected too but he’s also not the type to go in for heart-to-heart discussions about said feelings, and Joan’s eventual return doesn’t really resolve this by any means. We viewers know, though, that for Morse and Joan there won’t be a happy-ever-after, for like many a great literary detective Morse is fated to be unlucky in love (and besides, she doesn’t even know his first name while he can’t bring himself to address her by hers even when he’s proposing to her).

Another story arc is the ongoing development of Morse’s simmering resentment against the powers-that-be, be it via his ongoing alienation from the conformist careerist Jim Strange (his future boss) or his anger over his missing sergeant’s exam paper (he, and everyone else, was convinced that he’d aced it, but his paper mysteriously got lost in circumstances that one assumes have a lot to do with his having got on the wrong side of those in high places) which resulted in a will-he-leave-Oxford sub-plot in which he was offered (via Strange, interestingly) a guaranteed promotion and pay-rise in return for transferring to a police unit in London. We viewers know that Morse will stay in Oxford (and not marry Joan Thursday or anyone else); although Shaun Evans could never be accused of merely impersonation John Thaw, it is however important for there to be markers for the viewer to see how this intellectual junior officer becomes the gruff, curmudgeonly DCI we all know and remember from the old show. But, what with that show having run its course some seventeen years ago, there may well be viewers of Endeavour who have no knowledge of what the young Morse will become (although I doubt that; as Inspector Morse gets regularly repeated on ITV3 it wouldn’t be hard for viewers who’ve been drawn to Endeavour with no prior knowledge of the original series to watch the late, great John Thaw as the older Morse).

Did I say the acting was first-rate? Shaun Evans as the young Morse and Roger Allam as Fred Thursday are both superb in their respective roles and deserve all the praise they can get. The support cast does a thoroughly good job too, notably Abigail Thaw as the journalist (who deserves better than to be referred to as John Thaw’s daughter every time her being in Endeavour is mentioned), James Bradshaw as the pathologist (getting the best lines and clearly enjoying himself more than he ever did in The Grimleys) and Dakota Blue Richards as WPC Trewlove. Some minor characters have developed a lot as the show has progressed, not just Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers is brilliant in her scenes with Shaun Evans) but also the straight-laced, old-colonial Chief Superintendent Bright who has become a more rounded character than the usual bewildered police chief trying to keep his detectives in order (which is what he was, more or less, in the first two series). He’s played by Anton Lesser, a solid character actor who’s been in a lot of good stuff in recent years – he was also the boss in that sadly short-lived BBC series The Hour, Sir Thomas More in Wolf Hall and Fagin in Dickensian, and he’s really good in Endeavour (in which he shot the man-eating tiger, and how many actors can say they’ve played a character who’s done that?).

The fourth series saw an emphasis on aspects of the Sixties which moved more towards the popular perceptions of the decade than has hitherto been the case in Endeavour. The ‘white heat of technology’ (previously glimpsed at in the first-series episode set in the armaments factory) was represented by a very big computer designed by some Oxford boffins to beat a visiting professor from the Soviet Union at chess (although Morse also used it to find someone’s address) and a nuclear power-station (the focus of the climax in the last episode). At a local hospital, some Carry On-style goings-on between a doctor and a student nurse soon gave way to something much more sinister. The Cold War put in an appearance, what with the Russian professor and references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of nuclear fall-out in the episode with the power-station. Morse, we learned, can speak Russian which I don’t think ever came up in the original series. 

Then, of course, there was the culture clash of the second episode as pop music interrupted the classical music which Morse prefers. A caricature of Mary Whitehouse locked horns with the Wildwood, a rock band which was a fictional composite of various real-life outfits (there were nods to, among others, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and early Pink Floyd). Both were of interest to the Oxford City Police’s finest – the former had been receiving death threats while the latter popped up on the police radar when some dope was found in a dressing-room they’d used, but they were later connected to a dead builder who’d become more involved with them and their groupies than anyone was prepared to admit to. The uptight Morse – seen as an oddity by the band members, what with his being a young man in a suit – was shocked by a gem of a revelation from Thursday about smoking dope during the North African campaign. The Mary Whitehouse character’s daughter – a smoker and a vodka-drinker behind her mother’s back – declared her love for Morse (he, being pre-occupied with Joan, didn’t reciprocate) and then fell out with her bigoted, domineering mother. The band’s manager’s alibi fell apart when it was revealed that the Kinks were banned from playing in the USA, so he couldn’t have been on the phone to someone in New York discussing their forthcoming tour (nice try, thinking the police wouldn’t know that; good thing WPC Trewlove’s got her finger on the cultural pulse). Bright and Thursday, their status as men from a bygone age emphasised more than ever in this episode, got to discuss the changing times and the nature of hatred. The pop music, brilliantly, was all done specially for the show by the people normally responsible for the classical music in Endeavour. The highlight of that episode, though, had to be the bit when Morse was forced to face his inner demons when he got drugged and started hallucinating (no Sherlock-style mind-palace for him, alas, although in Morse’s case it would probably be more of a mind-pub). 

The series concluded with an investigation into the disappearance of an academic in a rural village which seemed at first glance to be going the way of The Wicker Man (not a good setting for an earnest and determined copper) although in the event the villagers’ neo-paganism was a red herring; it was actually good old-fashioned jealousy that did for the academic, and in any case the nearby nuclear power-station was where the action really was. It was as a result of the finale in the power-station that Morse finally got his promotion – Hornblower-style, on the basis of action above and beyond the normal call of duty rather than by way of the exam – and he and Thursday both got medals, leading to a fine cine-footage-style shot of Fred and Win smiling outside Buckingham Palace. Does a well-deserved retirement now beckon for the character who’s been played so well by Roger Allam? With Morse now a Detective Sergeant, maybe it’s time for DI McNutt, named as Morse’s old boss in the original TV series, to enter the stage – although maybe not, as it’s already been announced that Roger Allam will be in the fifth series which is in the pipeline. There were a few questions that viewers might raise (the Thursdays’ son not being mentioned at all amid the furore of Joan’s disappearance, the Wildwood’s sleazy manager not being arrested for perverting the course of justice, Bright’s wife not visiting him in hospital, the lack of follow-up regarding the discovery of a dead Scottish hit-man in the boot of a car, how the GPO was able to replace or repair Morse’s phone so quickly after he threw it against the wall), but all in all I found the fourth series of Endeavour to be thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable viewing (once I finally got round to viewing it) and I am now looking forward to the next series. In the meantime, I might as well work my way through some old Inspector Morse episodes via the ITV Hub.

This year being thirty years since Inspector Morse first aired, there were nods a-plenty to the original show and it was fun trying to spot those in addition to trying to work out who the murderer was. I once again managed to miss Colin Dexter’s background appearances, but then I’ve always had as much success at spotting those as I have had solving cryptic crossword clues (in any case, author-spotting has been much harder this time around as the old boy’s now 86 and doesn’t appear in person any more). What with getting kidnapped by one of Oxford’s many serial killers and sneaking Morse into the power-station, Abigail Thaw’s character had more to do this time (I’d like to think that that was because Russell Lewis realised he was under-using such a good actress), and her father’s second wife Sheila Hancock made a much-publicised appearance as the Tarot-reading old lady in the last episode. There was a reference to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (the first film that John Thaw starred in), while I presume that the unnamed London unit which offered Morse a job was a nod to The Sweeney. I took a reference to what someone was ‘last seen wearing’ as evidence that they were attempting to do something silly like crow-barring all of the Morse novel titles into the dialogue in some way, although this turned out not to be the case (Thursday did mention Cain but not any daughters he many have had, and no-one spoke about a jewel that had been theirs or death having recently become their neighbour). That said, when Bright was hospitalised it was with a bleeding stomach ulcer, the same as what Morse had in The Wench Is Dead (both the novel and the TV adaptation). Actors who’d previous been in either Inspector Morse, Lewis or both were in evidence (the obvious one – Roger Allam – aside, there was among others James Laurenson, who’d been in the first-ever episode of Inspector Morse and who now played the wheelchair-bound professor in the computer episode). As with Sherlock, even the most trivial things are deliberately placed, such as lines and sub-plots which refer to minor characters from Inspector Morse (including Susan, the woman who Morse fell in love with as a student), music (always an important aspect of anything Morse-related), the made-up yet very plausible Oxford college names and all sorts of little puzzles; my favourite (now that it has been pointed out to me) is the name of the Abigail Thaw character, Dorothea Frazil – the word ‘frazil’ means ice crystals, so ‘D. Frazil’ means de-ice or, of course, thaw.

The latest series of Sherlock was good, after a mediocre start. But Endeavour is better.

Sherlocked: going through the motions, or being too clever by half

(Note: contains spoilers. You probably wouldn’t want to read this if you have yet to see the first episode of the fourth series of Sherlock. You have been warned.)

Sherlock returned to our screens last Sunday, some seven years after Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman first appeared as the modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and three years after the third series (although there was that rather disappointing one-off one last year which purported to be a reimagining of the original, late-Victorian setting of the Sherlock Holmes adventures but which turned out to be an extended dream-sequence). I watched it, because it’s Sherlock, and even though I will be watching the rest of the series I must say that it hasn’t been the most auspicious of starts.

Yes, there was an updating of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ – the one in which a criminal is going around smashing up plaster busts of Napoleon Bonaparte because he hid a stolen jewel in one of them, but he doesn’t know which one – became ‘The Six Thatchers’, the twist being that although Sherlock thought that the missing item was a jewel (with the same name as the one in the original story) it was in fact a memory-stick which led onto a bringing-up of Mary’s back-story which in turn set up the episode’s denouement.

 And yes, there were references to various other Holmes stories, such as The Sign of Four (Agra/A.G.R.A., the use of Toby the dog), ‘The Adventure of the Yellow Face’ (when Holmes got it wrong and asked Watson to mention the word ‘Norbury’ to him “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers”, although in the original he was referring to the place in South London and not a disgruntled ex-MI6 secretary), ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’ (the client who doesn’t think so much of Sherlock’s deduction after it’s been explained to him) and of course the never-written one about Sumatra (“a story for which the world is not yet prepared”), among others. The writers even managed to cram in a reference to John’s blog, just like Conan Doyle himself managed to have Holmes occasionally refer to Dr Watson’s write-ups of his cases (the conceit here being that although they put a lot of business his way, he didn’t care much for them).  

However, I cannot help but think that Sherlock has lost its way, and that the many references were there because they had to be, just like the bits where Sherlock acts like an arse because not only is he cleverer than everyone else, he knows he is. But these things which identify an episode of Sherlock as being an episode of Sherlock were mere window-dressing, for ‘The Six Thatchers’ seemed for the most part to be less Sherlock Holmes than some sort of James Bond pastiche. The solving of a mystery took second place to a tale of secret agents for hire, a fight in a swimming-pool, shady governmental goings-on, betrayal, a few overseas locations, much running around (including in the vicinity of the MI6 building, no less) and characters pointing guns at each other. By the time it got to Mary the former assassin being shot in the aquarium (I did warn you that this post contained spoilers) I was frankly past caring, aside from wondering how this compares with Tracy getting shot just after becoming Mrs Bond at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and considering that this might not be the last we’ve seen of Amanda Abbington, given how reluctant writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are when it comes to moving on from main characters after they’ve been killed off (witness the fact that Jim ‘Miss Me?’ Moriarty is still a major talking-point).

By the show’s own high standards, this wasn’t a good return. It’s not been well received and I cannot help but think that Gatiss put more thought into the poem he wrote as a repost to the critics; the writers have always been clever in the way they’ve adapted the old stories but it’s got to the point where they’re either going through the motions or being too clever by half. But hey, I’ll still be watching the rest of the series, which I hope will return to the old format of concentrating on solving crimes (I for one cannot wait to see what Toby Jones can do as a villain after his superlative performance in The Witness for the Prosecution, of which more perhaps in a future post), although there are hints at some more Holmes family business – as if Mycroft wasn’t being over-used already – with references to ‘Sherrinford’, the non-Canonical third brother. They do like to keep us guessing, don’t they?

Watching and reading at Christmas

‘Tis the season – for watching Christmas movies. Some are good, some are pretty ropey and a few manage to divide opinion, in some cases on the topic of whether or not they can even be classified as Christmas movies. My own view on this is that if there’s a way in which a given film can be linked to Christmas, however tenuously, then why not? I take a similar view with literature – if a novel or short story has a Christmas link, then it can be a Christmas story.

Maybe I’m getting set in my ways in my late thirties, but over the past few years things have evolved to the point where there are four films, a TV show and three (short) works of literature that have to be seen or read at Christmas time.

Let’s do the films first. We start with two old-school black-and-white classics from the 1940s: Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I tend to prefer the original version of the former which has a lot of charm with the New York department-store Santa called Kris Kringle who seems to be the ‘real’ thing – a role for which Edmund Gwynn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, while Maureen O’Hara (who died earlier this year, aged 95) is on top form playing a career-oriented, divorced single mother which must’ve been very ahead of its time in the 1940s. The court scene at the end, with the judge worried about re-election and the posties using it as an excuse to get rid of all the letters to Father Christmas that they’ve accumulated, is hilarious every time. On doing some background reading for this film, I was surprised to learn that it was originally released in the summer, with the Christmas element being downplayed in the advertising (20^th Century Fox’s logic being that they’d make more money with a summer release).

Less overtly Christmassy is that Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, set in charming small-town America with Jimmy Stewart’s selfless everyman standing up to the bad guy who comes in the form of the Scrooge-esque Mr Potter. George Bailey may get the girl but the rest of his life gets put on hold in a never-ending struggle on behalf of the less fortunate, and it takes a heavenly intervention when he’s at his lowest to show him how much of a positive impact he’s made on many lives. Yes, there’s a lot of ‘life’ before you get to the ‘wonderful’ bit (it’s actually fairly depressing in parts until the last ten minutes), but it really is a lovely film that shows just how much of a difference one person can make.

Moving swiftly to the late twentieth century and changing the tempo somewhat (although the notion of how much of a difference one person can make remains), it’s time for an action movie and, working on the principle that any movie with a link to Christmas can be a Christmas movie, there is indeed such a thing as a Christmas action movie: Die Hard (1988). Like many a Christmas movie protagonist, New York cop John McClane just wants to spend the festive season with his family (which is why he flies out to LA on Christmas Eve), but first of all there’s the small matter of meeting up with his estranged wife at the Nakatomi Corporation’s office party. If you’ve ever been to a work Christmas do that doesn’t quite go according to plan, be thankful that you’ve not had it interrupted by a bunch of heavily armed terrorists and then sit back and enjoy the mayhem as McClane takes them on without wearing any shoes. This film was so big it spawned four sequels, many imitations and redefined Bruce Willis’s career (before this, he was apparently considered more of a comedy actor) as well as marking out Alan Rickman as an actor who plays the baddies very well.

Finally, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and there are many options here with stand-out performances as Ebenezer Scrooge over the years coming from the likes of Alastair Sim and Patrick Stewart. My favourite, though, is the Muppets’ musical version from 1992 which is incredibly faithful to the original source material to the extent of providing much of the narrative word-for-word thanks to having Gonzo as Charles Dickens – a truly inspired piece of casting. Elsewhere, Kermit is Bob Cratchett to Michael Caine’s Scrooge – a rare example of a human character in a Muppet-based film not being overshadowed by the Muppets themselves. I guess I had to have Michael Caine make an appearance somewhere.

While we’re on the subject of A Christmas Carol, the TV show that is required viewing by yours truly is of course Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) which inverts Dickens’s plot; in this, Ebenezer Blackadder is a nice and generous man who gets taken advantage of by everyone except Baldrick. A night-time visit from the Spirit of Christmas inadvertently prompts him to change his ways. This one’s got quite a good cast; as well as Blackadder regulars – Rowan Atkinson et al – do look out for Robbie Coltraine and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles, as the Spirit and Prince Albert respectively.

On the reading front, I have three perennial favourites which I (try to) read each year. Obviously, there’s A Christmas Carol which blends comedy and horror to perform two roles – celebrating Christmas while highlighting the condition of the poor. 172 years after it was written, the name of the main character is still used to refer to anyone who feels a bit cynical or jaded about Christmas. Dickens, who defined how we think of Christmas to the point where most cinematic depiction of London at this time of year tend to involve snow (despite actual white Christmases in London being few and far between) is one of those authors who seems to have a timeless feel, with quite a few of his books feeling surprisingly undated when compared to some of his contemporaries; Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a reading of the first and best of his Christmas stories.

The other two are – not surprising given my literary tastes – detective stories. Both happen to feature a seasonal plot based on finding out who nicked a precious stone which has been found hidden in a festive food item. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on the hunt for whoever stole the eponymous diamond which has been hidden in a Christmas goose which somehow finds its way into Holmes’s possession; after some hat-based deduction, their quest takes them from Baker Street to Covent Garden Market (which I always thought used to be a fruit and veg market, but according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it had traders selling poultry as well). I rather like this one because of the seemingly improbable hat deduction sequence and the confrontation at Covent Garden in which Holmes tricks the trader into revealing where he got the goose from. This story first appeared in 1892 and can be found in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Several decades later, Hercule Poirot – the little Belgian chap with the little grey cells – finds himself staying at an English country house during the festive season in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. He’s there to recover another stolen precious stone – a ruby this time – which turns up in some seasonal food (no prizes for guessing what). Needless to say, Poirot is dealing with a criminal who, rather like Hans Gruber, hasn’t bargained for having a detective on the scene. This is one of Agatha Christie’s later works (it first appeared in 1960 in the short story compilation of the same name) and while the identity of the thief is a bit obvious there’s entertainment to be had with talk of pudding-making (with reference being made to the ‘stir up’ collect which was and presumably still is said at church services on the Sunday before Advent, serving as a signal that that was the day on which the pudding should be made) and a fun sub-plot about a fake murder alongside Christie’s extolling of a traditional Christmas at the sort of venue where a lot of her murders took place.

Ah, Christmas stories. Now, where’s that Blackadder DVD?

More studies in Sherlock

Although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four Sherlock Holmes novels and 56 short stories, the adventures of this great fictional detective in print do not end there. Since the demise of his creator, many authors have taken up the pen (or the typewriter, or even the laptop) to continue the great detective’s career. Strictly speaking, these are regarded as ‘non-Canonical’ adventures (the ‘Canon’ in a Holmesian context being the works of Conan Doyle and no-one else).

This even happened during Conan Doyle’s lifetime. When his friend William Gillette asked him for permission to write a Sherlock Holmes stage play in 1899, in which he wanted to take a few liberties with the character, Conan Doyle famously replied: "You may marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him"; incidentally, that play, which was called Sherlock Holmes, was the first time that the phrase "elementary, my dear Watson", later popularised by the Basil Rathbone filmes, was used.

Of the various Holmes pastiches over the years, two have really stood out for me – a short story and a novel. The former is Colin Dexter’s ‘A Case of Mis-Identity’, not a stab at telling one of the many ‘untold’ tales that Conan Doyle alluded to in Dr Watson’s narratives but never wrote (which is what most would-be Holmes authors do, most notably June Thomson who has written a very good series of books) but a clever retelling of ‘A Case of Identity’ which is buried in the short story collection Morse’s Greatest Mystery. The novel is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, which purports to have been written by Watson in old age and tells the ‘real’ story behind the Great Hiatus (the gap in the adventures between Holme’s ‘death’ in ‘The Final Problem’ and his return in ‘The Empty House’); in Meyer’s version, Watson becomes so concerned about Holmes’s drug problem that he and brother Mycroft trick the great detective into travelling to Vienna, where he becomes a patient of Sigmund Freud.

Other stories have him involved in various crossovers with other works of late nineteenth-century fiction, getting involved in the hunt for Jack the Ripper (a particularly popular subject-area), going to America for a whole series of adventures, fathering a child with Irene Adler (it’s a boy, who grows up to become Nero Wolfe) and continuing to solve crimes after retiring to do some beekeeping in a cottage on the Sussex Downs. A recent fictional biography – a work of fiction written in the style of a biography of a famous fictional character, taking the conceit of said character being a real person to the extreme – by Nick Rennison has him playing a key role in the early development of MI5 and MI6 (in this interpretation, Professor Moriarty becomes an Irish nationalist whose importance is overstated by the Holmes brothers). Many well-known people from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make guest appearances, and in turn Holmes and Watson have themselves made a cameo appearance in one of the Flashman books. Recently, and rather timely given the impending centenary of the First World War, there’s even one in which Watson rejoins the Army in 1914 and ends up investigating a series of murders committed on the Western Front.

This brings me to the main subject of this post, which is a review of two Holmes pastiches, namely The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz and The Holmes Affair by Graham Moore.

As with the novels mentioned above, The House of Silk is presented as having been written by Watson in old age (and subsequently consigned, as these things are, to his tin dispatch box in the vaults of Cox & Company at Charing Cross), when he looks back on a case that he couldn’t write about in the 1890s because of the sensitive nature of the case, although there are no Victorian celebrity appearances here. Moriarty plays a cameo role, but he’s not central to the plot.

Instead, the sensitivity concerns the nature of the mysterious establishment of the title – which I will not divulge here for fear of spoiling what is a pretty good plot, but safe to say that it’s a dark secret that is as offensive to our own time as it would have been to the Victorians.

When it comes to crime writing, Horowitz has a good pedigree, having worked on the screenplays for TV shows like Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Foyle’s War in addition to his fiction which is mostly aimed at the teenage market.

Conan Doyle’s style was well-mimicked, although some modern-day sensitivities did creep in. For example, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes’s gang of cheeky street-urchins, are portrayed in a way that shows the harshness of their lives, living rough on the mean streets of late-Victorian London.  Indeed, this version of Watson makes much of the social issues of the day which adds a new dimension to the story.

My quibbles are minor. Horowitz says in the notes at the end that he wanted to portray Holmes going into an opium den because Conan Doyle had never done this, although I seem to recall Watson discovering Holmes undercover in one in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (which in turn formed the basis for the crack-house scene in the most recent series of Sherlock). He also presents a list of rules for anyone else wishing to have a go at writing their own Holmes adventure, although he does spoil the effect of these by admitting that he didn’t entirely keep to them himself.

All in all, a good effort that is certainly superior to most Holmes pastiches that have been published over the years.

Moore takes a different approach, balancing two parallel plots – the first is set in 1900 and involves Conan Doyle himself, while the second is set in the present day (well, 2010) and concerns members of a Sherlock Holmes appreciation society (itself quite the contemporary topic, what with the increase in interest in the stories thanks to the TV series). In 1900, Arthur Conan Doyle (he didn’t get knighted until 1902) investigates a series of murders in London after receiving a letter-bomb in the post; meanwhile, in 2010 avid Holmes fan Harold White attends a prestigious ‘Sherlockian’ gathering in a New York hotel, which is marred when one of the society’s leading members is found dead in his room; this leads onto a hunt for a missing part of Conan Doyle’s diary which covers the part of his life which is being played out in the 1900 plot.

Now I’m not a fan of this split-plot device – I’d much rather just have one thread to concentrate on. That said, it can make for a very good story if it’s done well.

This, alas, isn’t. Of the two plots, I personally preferred the 1900 adventure with Holmes’s creator. Still trying to move away from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes seven years after killing him off, Arthur (as he is referred to throughout the proceedings) finds himself having to use the detection skills he bestowed upon his fictional creation, with his friend Bram Stoker acting as a sort-of ‘Watson’. Throughout his adventure, during which he visits Whitechapel, dresses up as a woman to infiltrate a women’s suffrage meeting and is temporarily incarcerated in Newgate Prison, he meets people who tell him how much they enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, much to his own irritation.

By contrast, the 2010 plot stutters and I for one found it to be less interesting; like Arthur back in 1900, Harold is forced by circumstances to have a go at being a detective, and uses his knowledge of the afore-mentioned Canon to make his deductions while dealing with a freelance journalist (who, naturally, may not be all that she seems) and a (fictional) descendant of Conan Doyle himself.

Stories centring on Conan Doyle are not unknown – these are usually about how he came to write The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first Holmes adventure he wrote since he’d given the detective the Reichenbach Falls treatment. Moore’s story touches on this, as the events that take place do indeed prompt Conan Doyle to resurrect his famous detective.

There are also a few things Moore gets wrong; American words and spelling abound, and while I don’t find this as distracting as I used to there are a couple of howlers which jar the 1900 plot; Moore manages to have a London policeman in 1900 addressed as ‘officer’ rather than ‘constable’, and there’s a laboured joke at the expense of women’s suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett that centres on the assumption that Londoners in 1900 would have used the word ‘faucet’ instead of ‘tap’. More seriously, in the present-day story Moore somehow manages to have the body of a man found dead in suspicious circumstances in New York repatriated to Britain and buried within two days. This is obviously impossible, and it’s the sort of detail that a crime novelist needs to iron out before their books are sent to the publisher.

In conclusion, I’d be interested if Horowitz writes another Holmes adventure. Not sure I’ll be on the look-out for any of Moore’s other works, though.

A study in Sherlock

So after a wait of two years, it was over before we got half-way through January. I refer, of course, to the third series of Sherlock, which I had been keenly anticipating for several months.

(Before I go any further, I should warn you that this blog post contains various plot-spoilers, and if you haven’t seen the third series of Sherlock yet you may wish to stop reading at this point. You have been warned.)

On the whole, and I speak as a bit of a fan, I was pleased with what I saw. The first hurdle for this new series was always going to be the explanation of how he faked his own death (“short version: not dead”) and this part was well done, I thought, with plenty of nods to various online conspiracy theories (can you even have a conspiracy theory about a fictional TV drama? You can, apparently, if it’s Sherlock) before coming up with an explanation that referred, as the writers had promised, to events that had taken place earlier in the final episode of the second series. The clues were always there, apparently.

The only jarring note for me as far as Sherlock’s return went was not Martin Freeeman’s dodgy ’tache but he question of Tube trains – a pivotal plot point as the great detective raced to stop a North Korean sleeper-agent from blowing up Parliament on, of all days, 5^th November. Now I know that viewers who don’t live and commute in London may not be interested, but the use of the wrong rolling-stock for a District Line train did not go unnoticed by viewers who do, and left me anticipating a completely different twist than that which did occur. A rare slip by the writers, especially given their attention to detail and the fact that they’d just added a trainspotter to the plot; if information about Tube rolling-stock wasn’t in Sherlock’s mind-palace, surely he’d know?

For me at least, the second episode dragged a bit, with a couple of interesting-looking mysteries playing second fiddle to Sherlock’s best man’s speech and a couple of funny interactions between the self-confessed high-functioning sociopath and other guests, with things not changing gear until the last half-hour. Even though they all tied together in the end for a pretty interesting murder plot (after all, everything in Sherlock happens for a reason, even if you have to remember seemingly minor points from previous episodes as became apparent in episode three), it seemed to me as though the writers were paying more attention to character development than having Sherlock go and solve some mysteries.

Ah, character development. Mary Morstan gets more attention here than she did in the books (in which, with the obvious exception of The Sign of Four, she plays a surprisingly minor role as the narrator’s wife), being in this instance a fully-fledged character in her own right whose shady past provides a key plot point in the third episode. I’ll admit I didn’t see the ex-CIA assassin thing coming, although this being Sherlock there had been plenty of clues to indicate that she was not what she seemed, for example her code-cracking abilities. We got to see Sherlock’s parents, which may be a Sherlock Holmes first (they were played, funnily enough, by Benedict Cumberbatch’s real-life parents), and even Mrs Hudson got a bit of a back-story with the revelations about her involvement in a drug cartel (“I did the typing!”).

The final episode of this was, in my opinion, the best, probably due to the reptilian way in which Lars Mikkelsen played the villain. Did he really lick his victim? Yes, he did. Now, having a newspaper proprietor as the villain of the piece may be topical in the light of the phone-hacking scandal but it is not exactly an original idea (the baddie in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies ran a newspaper empire, and had the same rimless glasses as Charles Augustus Magnussen for that matter, although he merely attempted to start a war between Britain and China to boost circulation figures rather than use his power-without-responsibility to have a go at blackmailing people). Similarly, Sherlock’s use of a pretend-relationship to gain access to the baddie’s office may have drawn comparisons with some of the more questionable things that have been done by undercover policemen in recent years, but readers of the books will note that this underhand tactic is there in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” (which first appeared in 1904), the short story on which it is based.

A surprising amount of the material in Sherlock is from the original stories – while watching it, I always find myself thinking of which of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventures this character or that reference came from. The ‘east wind’ speech at the end of the third episode is taken from “His Last Bow” (chronologically, although not in the order in which the stories were written, the last Holmes adventure), the ‘John or James’ text-message in the first episode is a reference to Conan Doyle’s occasional habit of (probably inadvertently) changing Dr Watson’s Christian name, while the hat deduction scene is a take on “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”. In the third episode, the scene where John (it seems almost impossible to refer to the main characters in this series by their surnames, as one instinctively would when discussing the books or other TV and film adaptations) finds Sherlock in the crack-house is taken from “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, the Victorian-era opium den having been updated for modern sensibilities. Even Mary’s real initials, as shown on the memory-stick that she gives John, refer to the novel The Sign of Four, the one in which Dr Watson’s wife first appears. Moving away from Conan Doyle, there are even a couple of nods to The Day of the Jackal (how Mary obtained her new identity) and Casablanca (the scene at the airfield).

What I’m trying to say is that the plot devices used by the writers of Sherlock are not in themselves original ideas; they may have taken Sherlock Holmes out of the nineteenth century but they are being surprisingly faithful to the books. Even moving Holmes and Watson to a modern setting isn’t entirely a new idea – back in the 1940s, the Basil Rathbone version of the great detective was taking on the Nazis – but I do like the way this new, modern version of Holmes is so instinctively at home in the twenty-first century.

And why not? After all, there was also more to Sherlock Holmes than hansom cabs, fog and gaslights. Twenty-first century London has email and text-messages (which take the place of the near-ubiquitous telegrams that kept arriving at 221B Baker Street), and in the books Holmes was always keen to use the latest that modern technology and forensic science had to offer to help solve crimes. And, of course the twenty-first century Dr Watson is a wounded veteran from the war in Afghanistan, just like the original. Instead of chronicling his adventures with his somewhat unconventional flatmate for a magazine, he writes a blog (and there really is a blog to go with the show, created by the writers; for sheer detail, they’ll stop at nothing). There’s even some real-life London lore, such as the fake houses on Leinster Gardens, thrown in for good measure.

Sherlock Holmes has undergone quite the revival in recent years; as well as the BBC series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, there have been two Guy Ritchie films with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the original dynamic duo in a pseudo-late-Victorian setting, and an American TV series with Cumberbatch’s fellow-Frankenstein Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock who moves to New York and is assisted by a Dr Joan Watson. Thanks to all of this, sales of the original books have apparently shot up.

Here, it seems, is one literary character you just can’t seem to get rid of. Heck, even his creator had to bring him back after killing him off, and every new generation would appear to desire their own version of the great detective. We currently have three; I don’t know what that says about us, but it says a lot for the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes.