Just Laying Out My Prejudices Here

I love you now; but not, till now, so much
But I might master it: in faith, I lie;
My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown
Too headstrong for their mother. See, we fools!
           – Troilus and Cressida

While there exists a Geek Code, there does not exist a Sherlock Holmes Fan Code, and I sometimes wonder if the fandom would be better off with one. Or perhaps not. When you have a fandom that’s been rolling around for over a century, you’re going to get enormous sprawl no matter what anyone does. Often there are turf wars, and sometimes there’s just jolly understanding and feeling that we are all part of one gigantic epic fandom… but in the end, many of us stand upon our own carefully constructed patches of privet, for there is nothing any Sherlockian or Holmesian would rather do than reinterpret the characters and timeline, since Doyle left so little Word of God with respect to the Canon.

And because there’s no official line to fall back on—for the Canon is as nebulous a canon as you can get in almost any fandom, and also Doyle didn’t care very much about keeping an official line in the first place—everyone’s personal Holmes and Watson is slightly different from the next fan’s. And sometimes quite wildly divergent. The fact that the Canon has been reinterpreted throughout official media itself multiple times over, in the form of movies, TV series, radio shows, and pastiches, has also done quite a lot to push Holmes and Watson into the same multiple-vision land that any mythology receives over millennia.

Over the years, my perspective on Holmes and Watson has changed, and will doubtless change more the older I get. Currently, this is where I stand on things—it’s quite a simple list, and if any of the items make you upset, remember to prepend each one with “I think”:

• Holmes and Watson have a friendship much, much closer than most friendships today, and even most friendships in the past. You might even call it co-dependency; for, in just about any variation of Holmes and Watson, Holmes is a conduit of adventure for Watson, and Watson is a conduit of humanity for Holmes. It’s too easy for the very odd, much less the very odd and arrogant, to become isolated, and I tend to agree with Bert Coules—if it weren’t for Watson, Holmes would have ended up killing himself, through misadventure or worse. And if it weren’t for Holmes, Watson would have bored himself to death.

• Whether Holmes and Watson had a romantic relationship as well—either interpretation, and indeed the various degrees between “yes” and “no”, is fine with me. I actually enjoy all of them—from the platonic interpretation, to the hot raging repressed love interpretation. This also includes the ones involving gender flips.¹ I tend to fall somewhere between when it comes to the Holmes and Watson in my head, but I admit to guiltily enjoying the rest.

• Irene Adler deserves more than to just be Holmes’ Catwoman Date. And this is often why I don’t like Holmes/Adler pastiches.

• The best Watson is an intelligent Watson. I would have liked Rathbone!Holmes more had the Bruce!Watson not been thoroughly castrated in body and mind. Give me Burke!Watson, Hardwicke!Watson, Williams!Watson, Serkis!Watson² or Law!Watson any day. Also, Doyle’s original!Watson got dumber and dumber as the canon was published, because Doyle thought Watson a rather stupid fellow.

• The best Holmes is a psychologically oddball Holmes. Rathbone!Holmes is too much of a Vulcan for me. I think anyone who reads the Canon and sees Holmes as a normal, happy human being might be a bit sheltered—but arguably, I myself might be too damaged to “see normal”, which is a fair accusation. At any rate, give me Brett!Holmes, Merrison!Holmes, or Downey!Holmes and I will be quite content. As for original!Holmes, I think some time after The Return, Doyle started whirling in Flanderization circles before he finally ended it all years later.

• There are several ways to enjoy the canon:

  • Through Leslie S. Klinger’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes (multiple volumes), because the commentary will keep you interested even during Doyle’s weakest moments³ as well as giving you some laughs about what the fandom’s been up to for the last hundred years. Some of it’s crazy, and Klinger is a delightful guide.
  • Finding any Sherlockian Top Ten Favorites list and reading those. Although I feel that this can be summed up as: “The best way to read ‘The Mazarin Stone’ is not to read it at all.”
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles, the end.
  • Give up on the text and just listen to the BBC Adaptation directed by Bert Coules, as they’re all as good or even better than the originals—and yet still highly faithful, or at least, agreed upon by the largest possible portion of the Holmes fandom to be faithful.
  • Jeremy Brett. Oh, very well, the Granada TV series adaptation. Extremely good first two seasons, some great third season episodes, although I warn you—the best way to watch “The Mazarin Stone” is not to watch it at all.
  • Multiple of the above.

  I haven’t included the New Movie here, because the New Movie is actually a play on the Canon itself, just about all the way. In other words, the New Movie is actually a meta-extension of the original Canon into a more 21st-century sensibility (I call this the inflation of dramatic excitement, e.g., it takes more to make an audience go “Wow!” then it did a century ago). It’s a reboot, essentially.

  I think having some relatively faithful interpretation of the Canon to hand thus increases amusement and enjoyment of the New Movie. And also knowing the Canon allows one to extrapolate material for New Movie fanfiction pastiches and such. I do want to write up a Sherlock Holmes sequel soothsaying, similar to the rather popular post for House Season 5 just after Season 4 had ended.

  On the other hand, note that I’ve never said you actually need to read the original Canon in order to enjoy its flavor and underpinnings. This is the kind of blasphemy that gets you run over by a lot of the older fandom.

• My favorite Sherlock Holmes story has been, for the last several years, “The Reigate (Puzzle) (Squire(s))”⁴. To me, the interaction between Holmes and Watson in this story is the quintessential one, and also has the advantage of being as interpretable as hell in all degrees of interpretation.

• My favorite Sherlock Holmes pastiche is My Dearest Holmes. That probably gives you a good bead on where my sympathies lie.

Over the years my enjoyment of Sherlock Holmes has morphed into a meta-enjoyment of the craziness of the Sherlock Holmes fandom. Especially during the last five years; you can see it when you read my Retyping the Speckled Band series of posts. I still analyze in all six posts, but my snark level is several notches higher in the end than it was at the very beginning.

My own writing has been influenced, strongly, by experiences with folks on the Internet. Much of my snarkiness can be directly traced to the day I started reading John Scalzi’s blog, and recently I’m pretty sure TVTropes and The Nostalgia Critic and friends have only made it worse. There are other influences as well; I don’t think I would have started down the road of snarkiness before John Scalzi, if I hadn’t read Warren Ellis.

So, fair warning: I will not be kind even to those I love in these re-reads/watches/listens. There will be snark. Mild snark, almost all of the time, but I swear to all the gods in the heavens and to all the demons in the hells, The Eligible Bachelor is going to get flayed open. Even though I love Brett and Hardwicke and generally love the Granada series. Woe.

But in the end, I love Holmes. I would date him if I could, even though I know it wouldn’t end well.⁵

1. Seriously, why has no one done Holmes-is-a-woman/Watson-is-a-woman yet? Must I do this myself? [↩]
2. Yes, for reals. And he was a very good Watson [↩]
3. Including the racism. Definitely including the racism. [↩]
4. About the title: long story. Klinger covers it. [↩]
5. Sekrit projekt mentioned in that post continues. Some would regard it as inherently evil. But it is of no concern to most Sherlockians or Holmesians, so you are all safe. For now. [↩]