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THE SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker

THE NON-SOLITARY CYCLISTS

Not many experts on Sherlock Holmes would rank “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” as one of the best stories in the Canon. Arthur Conan Doyle himself omitted it from his own ranking of the top nineteen short Holmes stories; and in his prologue to his account of the case, good old Watson frankly noted that, “It is true that the circumstance did not admit of any striking illustration of those powers for which my friend was famous,” before adding that “there were some points about the case which made it stand out.” My recent re-reading of the tale supports the Doctors’s two opinions. While the central puzzle—why does an unknown bearded man follow Violet Smith as she cycles between Charlington Hall and Farnham Station?—is an intriguing one, the resolution is much less so. After some atypical violence—the Master’s pub fight with the odious, over-the-top villain, Mr. Woodley, and some gun­play, Holmes foils the criminal’s schemes by being in the right place at the right time—and he is almost too late. And his deductions about the reason for Miss Smith’s shadow are less impressive than in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” another damsel-in-distress short story.

Despite these deficiencies, “The Solitary Cyclist” was one of the major inspirations for what I contend is one of the best Sherlock Holmes films of all time—although neither Holmes nor Watson appear in it. But the “curious incident of the Holmes” in the Murder Rooms is ­easily explainable. The 2001 BBC adaptation of David Pirie’s superior novel, The Patient’s Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, is one of a series constructed from Piries’s premise that the real-life model for the Master, Edin­burgh’s Dr. Joseph Bell, did actual detection, aided by a young Arthur Conan Doyle. Considering it a Holmes film is, for me, an easy call, especially after enduring, albeit with an occasional chortle, viewing the execrable 1962 German-French-Italian production, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, with its badly-dubbed dialogue and a jazzy musical score that has to be heard to be believed, in an ill-fated effort to craft a column examining screen adaptations of The Valley of Fear, for which the world is not yet prepared. Just because Christopher Lee plays a character called Holmes in the movie (with the addition of a very obvious prosthetic nose, and with someone else voicing his lines in English), doesn’t make it worthy of serious discussion as a Sherlock Holmes film, unless the subject is Screen Adaptations Of The Works Of Arthur Conan Doyle—Unintended Humor In. By contrast, in my opinion, the episode of Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sher­lock Holmes entitled “The Patient’s Eyes” has it all: intelligent writing, brilliant acting, especially from the three leads; outstanding production values; and a carefully-constructed plot. For those readers who have not yet seen it, I hope this column will convince you to buy, or at least rent it on DVD, as well as seek out the novel.

A fictional Bell/Doyle pairing had been attempted before in Howard Engel’s 1997s novel Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell, an inferior book in which the doctor and his protegé race the clock to save a man from the gallows. But there’s no comparison between Engel’s work and Pirie’s. The latter, a British screenwriter, film producer, film critic, and novelist, whose previous work included a 1997s adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Wo­man In White, made a careful study of Doyle’s early life in constructing his historical fictions.

Pirie had asked himself, “What is it with Holmes that he has such an uncanny reality about him? Reading the stories undoubtedly brings us closer to the truth, for they have an odd and unexpected intensity. There is a genuine emotion in Doyle’s portrayal of Holmes and Watson, which explains some of its impact, but makes the creative origins of this emotion even more mysterious.” He began to wonder whether “Holmes seems real because, in certain respects we are only just starting to appreciate, he was real?”

For Pirie, Sherlock Holmes was a product of Doyle’s difficult early life. He was well aware of Doyle’s letter to the charismatic teacher and physician Joseph Bell, who taught him at Edinburgh University, which stated, “It is certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.” But for Pirie, there was a psychological background to the Bell-Doyle connection. As he has written: “And so it was that Doyle started his early years at Edinburgh medical school with a father who was deranged and whose condition had to be kept secret and now, in the same house, an arrogant older rival for his mother’s affection, a man who had succeeded at the profession he was only just beginning. He seems at first to have been deeply alienated from the university. But at this critical time, when Doyle, by his own admission, was feeling wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, someone else appeared: a teacher opposite in every way to these other troublesome fathers. And his name was Joseph Bell.”

From this foundation, Pirie crafted a fictionalized Bell and Doyle, spinning engaging narratives taking off from the evidence that the real Bell did assist the official authorities in solving crimes, much as Holmes did. He further imagined that “Bell may have supplied Doyle with some of the actual details of criminal investigation he later put to such good use,” in stories like “The Solitary Cyclist.”

The first fruit of Pirie’s efforts was the 2000 BBC telefilm, Murder Rooms, which showed how Bell and Doyle met at the University of Edinburgh, and teamed up to track down a serial killer whose methods anticipated those of Jack the Ripper. Ian Richardson, who had played Holmes in middling 1980s television film adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of the Four, was perfectly cast as Bell, managing to imbue the character with humor and passion to accompany his for­midable intellect. Robin Laing, a relative unknown, played Doyle. (While Murder Rooms is available on DVD, some significant footage, aired when it was first shown on PBS, has been cut.)

The novel of “The Patient’s Eyes” alluded to those events; and it expanded on the telefilm’s account of the beginning of the Bell-Doyle team. It cleverly uses elements from “The Solitary Cyclist,” “The Speckled Band,” and “Wisteria Lodge,” as Doyle, some years removed from the trauma that marked the ending of his first investigation as Bell’s assistant, attempts to start a new life on the South Coast. He soon finds himself at odds with his employer, Dr. Cullingworth, who values profits over his patients’ health. (This character’s name, derived from Doyle’s “The Stark-Munro Letters,” was changed to Turnavine in the screenplay, one of the real names of the man who exploited Doyle in his early days as a doctor.) Despite himself, Doyle falls for one of his patients, Heather Grace, who consults him about an eye problem, and then confides that she has been shadowed by a cloaked figure on a bike. Doyle lies in wait for her pursuer, almost exactly as Watson did in “The Solitary Cyclist,” but when, on his second attempt, he spots the person, the man inexplicably vanishes from view. Bell, who has learned of Grace’s problem via a letter from Doyle, arrives on the scene and takes command of the case. As the situation escalates to murder, the roster of suspects expands to include not only Cullingworth, Grace’s former physician, whose advances were repulsed by her, but Grace’s uncle and guardian, Charles Blythe, and her would-be fiancée, Guy Greenwell. The plot is so carefully constructed that it would do a great disservice to those who have neither read the novel nor seen the film to say much more about it. (Those who have who are interested in engaging me on the ending are welcome to email me—my address is at the end of the column.)

Pirie’s adaptation of his own work is excellent; it manages to capture the creepy essence of the book in a fast-paced 90 minutes that never lags. The translation of prose into visuals helps accentuate the subtle variations the writer has wrought upon Doyle’s original. For example, where Violet Smith’s scary journey is on a path bordered by woods on one side and an open field on the other, Pirie has substituted more woods for the field, creating, from the outset, a more oppressive atmosphere that parallels the tormented inner life of Heather Grace, whose parents were brutally murdered years earlier.

And in the opening scene, Grace’s cycling is initially unaccompanied by background music, creating a feeling of isolation and loneliness just from the sounds of nature, added to by a momentary glimpse of an abandoned gibbet on the side of her path. Her pursuer appears suddenly close on her heels, before the series’s haunting theme music is introduced. And rather than merely a man “clad in a dark suit,” with “a black beard,” the second cyclist is a dark, cloaked figure, with no visible human features. From the opening, with its successful creation of terror in broad daylight, the viewer is hooked. (For contrast, watch the opening of the Jeremy Brett version of “The Solitary Cyclist,” which may leave you intrigued, but not spooked.)

By the way, while it is sometimes easier to build upon or improve another’s storyline (for example, the film adaptation of Death On The Nile, with Peter Ustinov as Poirot, is an improvement on the book, conflating certain minor characters and streamlining the plot while maintaining the central gimmick of misdirection), that is not always the case; and Pirie deserves credit for his picking and choosing elements from the Canon that serve the story he wants to tell.

The idea of an attractive woman stalked by a disguised man is used as a starting point by Pirie, but the various suitors of Heather Grace are not cartoonish buffoons like Woodley, who practically wears a sign announcing that he is connected to whatever plot is aimed against Violet Smith; and Grace herself is not as straightforward as the simple Violet Smith character, or, indeed, most Doyle heroines or women not named Irene Adler; she has, like Doyle, a trauma in her past and still bears the scars from it. And the simple addition of a scene in which Doyle unsuccessfully stakes out the path, seeing no one but Grace riding past, elevates the tension, and allows the viewer to entertain the possibility, despite the opening scene, that her follower is a figment of her imagination.

But while “The Solitary Cyclist” is the most obvious ­Canonical inspiration for major plot elements, it was not the crucial one for Pirie. Although that story contained the “arresting images in Doyle’s canon,” he sought to provide a framework; and “The Speckled Band” was the emotional starting point. “The Patient’s Eyes” borrows some superficial aspects from “The Speckled Band,” by modeling Grace’s guardian Blythe, with his curious menagerie, on Dr. Grimesby Roy­lott, (the novel even includes a poker-bending scene omitted from the screenplay); the parallels run deeper. Both feature a woman in danger, a cruel guardian, and a perplexing mystery. In keeping with Pirie’s aim to do more than create a faithful pastiche, those plot points are only the springboard for a much more complex look into the human capacity for cruelty, violence, and evil.

The writing is bolstered by the acting. Richardson does his best work as Bell in “The Patient’s Eyes,” aided by a script that gives him a wide range of emotions to utilize. While many Holmesians (although not I, as will be argued in a future column) did not find the emotional reaction of Christopher Plum­mer’s Holmes in Murder By Decree to be in character, few, if any, would take issue with a similar outburst from Bell when he confronts one of the many characters in the story whose actions have harmed others. The other episodes in the series—“The Photographer’s Chair,” “The Kingdom of Bones,” and “The White Knight Stratagem”—were not written by Pirie; although they are not at the level of “The Patient’s Eyes”, they are still superior efforts, well worth watching and its a shame that more episodes were not made.

The film also benefits from Charles Edwards as Doyle; while Laing did a decent job in the first film, Edwards is a better fit for the rôle of a slightly-older Doyle, who was withdrawn emotionally from the world after the horrors he has experienced, and who finds, in Grace, a possible soul-mate. And Katie Blake is perfect as Heather Grace, conveying with subtle facial expressions so much of the inner torment that has plagued her for years, and which is exacerbated by her hooded tormentor.

“The Patient’s Eyes” is that rare Holmes film that demands repeated viewing; once the solution to the mystery is known, you can go back and see how fairly, albeit subtly, the clues have been planted, and without resorting to cheap tricks. The challenge of having clues fairly before the viewer has vexed even otherwise excellent TV-whodunit shows; the first seasons of both Murder One and Veronica Mars had their capable and bright detectives learn who the killer was by stumbling upon a convenient inculpatory videotape. And if memory serves, the TV adaptation of P. D. James’s The Murder Room changed the story to have a visual clue, rather than an auditory one, helping Dalgleish reach a solution. By contrast, Pirie cleverly plays on viewers’ expectations to fool them, and in so doing, along with a natural injection of psychological depth into all the main characters, he has managed to create one of the best Sherlock Holmes films ever.

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Lenny Picker, who reviews mystery and crime fiction regularly for Publishers Weekly, lives in New York City with his wife, two sons, three daughters, and several thousand books. He can be reached at CHTHOMPSON@ITSA.EDU.