How Sherlock Holmes Restarted My Writing : Holmesian Derivations

How Sherlock Holmes Restarted My Writing

Arachne Jericho on Dec 30th 2007

I started writing fiction again because I wanted to save Sherlock Holmes.

It turned out that he was the one who saved me.

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For the better part of a decade, I stopped writing fiction. I had never really wrote it to begin with anyways; just a couple of stories. Since then I wrote non-fiction for hobbies and technical specifications for work, and that was about it.

Then one day, I came across in my local video store the Granada adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with Jeremy Brett. I smiled, because I remembered watching a couple episodes of the show back in my childhood, when escapes were hard to come by. I rented some of the DVDs.

Now that I was all grown up, I could appreciate Brett’s Holmes interpretation more, because he brought to life the neurotic aspects of the character, that nervous liveliness that too many other actors ignore. Now I could see the eccentric darkness of the character, and the show script writers, directors, prop artists, and actors filled in the rest of his world–from the visuals to the interplay between Holmes and his very patient friend, Dr. Watson.

I identified with Holmes strongly, because all three of us (Brett, Holmes, myself) shared the same disorder: a mild bi-polarism that drives by turns art and self-destruction. (Holmes’ turn to cocaine, in fact, was probably an attempt at self-medication, rather than a desire to get high.)

I ended up watching almost all the episodes, even the ones where things were obviously starting to break down towards the end. I even watched “The Mazarin Stone”, which is quite awful even in the original written form.

But there were two episodes I never watched.

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The bane of my admiration of the stories has always been “The Final Problem”, and, by necessity of chronological order, “The Empty House”. It’s not so much that they represent the beginning and end of The Hiatus, as it is known, but because as a writer I could not forgive Doyle’s shenanigans.

It was bad enough that he killed a character simply because he couldn’t stand him any more, rather than out of any real story motive.

But it was even worse when he brought the man back, changed, yes, but not to my thoughts necessarily for the better. In some ways the new Holmes was a tamed version of the old one, and to my mind that just didn’t work.

So I thought of ways to save him, that wonderful wild Holmes, who was so unsettled and troubled and dark.

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I am a writer who does not like rehashing the old. The pastiche, which is basically a serious name for fan fiction, was out. I could probably recapture Doyle’s unadorned style, so unusual for the Victorian age, but it wasn’t something I really wanted to do.

How to pay homage to Holmes, then? Without getting too absurd; I wanted to write something serious as well.

My first idea was to saddle someone in the future with a Sherlock Holmes A.I. He’d be in that person’s head, a permanent hallucination that the main character initially thought was a better alternative than whatever binding conscience program he was to be punished with. He’d offer up the character as a man of justice, and the A.I. as an interesting and free experiment to various researchers; what he didn’t mention was that Holmes was also crafty and had serious problems with authority. And the two would annoy each other all to hell. Meanwhile, bad things would happen.

(I have always been a character-driven writer, I suppose; it’s showing up in the writing I’m doing now, and plot is just an excuse to explore character: jumble people together and see how they react to each other, and how they may change each other. The Holmes stories are really character first, and plot as an afterthought, which is why “civilians” remember Holmes the character, and not as much the stories themselves.)

I discovered that this was terribly difficult to do well credibly, because there are very deep waters in Holmes’ character, which even I had not anticipated; plus as well the interaction would be very different from Watson’s near-infinite patience. In a way, the situation in the story is the blind leading the blind. Some day I will figure out how, but now is not the time. The proper catalyst eludes me.

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After this discovery, I took several steps back. I created Sebastian Arcady, who may be the first fictional detective who has a truly feverish and arguably compulsive admiration of Sherlock Holmes. He wants to be Sherlock Holmes (but better; he’s as egotistic as his hero), and surrounds himself with tokens of the man, from the erudite collections of Sherlockian essays (all of which he has read and made comments in the margins of) to gaudy little action figures from Japan. Young and inexperienced, with unfortunate interactions with the modern equivalent of a country squire father, he needed a partner, and lacks the ability to tell if someone will be an appropriate Watson.

Which is for the better, actually, because I pair him up with Phineas Zene, who can’t bloody stand the man, and will knock him down several notches when he deems it necessary. He’s assertive like the more recent interpretations of Watson, although more towards the aggressive end. He acts as a moderating factor for Arcady, who never grew up with a proper father figure, which partly explains his decided oddness in some situations. Both of them are isolated men, similar to Watson and Holmes at their first meeting in A Study in Scarlet. Zene is far more bitter than Watson, and Arcady is far more optimistic than Holmes; in a way, they’re Holmes and Watson distorted in a fun house mirror.

I tossed in music to the mix, so it’s probably the first detective series where both characters make seriously demented references to classical music, as any normal person might use traditional metaphors and slang. Zene, for instance, counts up to B rather than 10 when Arcady is being particularly dense (the ascendancy of the sharp notes in the corresponding signature: F C G D A E B). Instead of “raining cats and dogs”, to them it rains flats and sharps like a William Orbit suite. They live and breathe classical music (with something of an alcoholic breath, in the case of Zene).

They are much easier and quite fun for me to deal with, as well as a homage in so many ways.

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Yet at the same time I still wanted to study the original Holmes, yet in an unusual way.

So I tossed him into our times (perfect since he’s now technically 120 years old, so there’s quite a bit of interesting separation of cultures). To put a sort of glass between his deep waters and my writing, I added more empty spaces for interpretation, rather like Doyle does in his stories (so many of them have moments of summary that modern adaptations fill out, much to the delight of a large number of Sherlockians).

If you want to follow Anachronistic Holmes’ adventures, look no farther than his Twitter stream. Each update is a mere 140 characters, which encourages both creative brevity on my part and an easy, quick reading on the part of his followers.

This I also enjoy very much.

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Doubtless when I figure him out I’ll return to his darker self. That is too good a tale for me to not do. (And it’s hard enough that anybody who wants to steal the idea is going to have a hell of a time doing it.)

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I didn’t realize it for a while, but Holmes saved me, not the other way around. No matter what I do, he will always have been whacked by Doyle. But he has served as my muse, my stepping stone back into fiction. I have other, very different worlds to explore apart from what I mention here, but I would not have thought of them at all, much less write them, if it weren’t for his touchstone.

He probably would really hate my stories. That’s okay, he hated his best friend’s stories; I’m in good company.

So the next best thing is to amuse readers. And perhaps my work will serve as a gateway to the original work for our non-Sherlockian friends.

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Over at the Baker Street Blog, there’s a contest for 5 pairs of tickets to Sherlock Solo, a one-man play running from January 10th to February 3rd in New York. Leave a comment there about how you’ve been personally affected by Sherlock Holmes for a chance in the raffle.

I have no plans for visiting New York, but I did want to say something about how Sherlock Holmes has inspired me, since he has done so quite a bit in 2007. And as we’re winding up the year, I thought that now was a good time to put these thoughts into a little more order.

Thank you very much for reading. I got a lot off my chest here.

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