Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #22 - Arthur Conan Doyle - Страница 8

THE SCREEN OF THE CRIME

by Kim Newman

Sherlok Kholms

In 2013, writer-director Andrey Kavan made a Sherlok Kholms series for Russian television, consisting of six feature-length episodes. It has turned up on youtube with fan-made sub-titles. Its approach to the Conan Doyle source material might once have been considered radical, though now it’s almost a default to throw away the deerstalker and the meticulous unflappability to present a stubbled, slovenly bipolar Holmes and a PST-suffering Watson pitted against a chaotic, corrupt world with much contemporary resonance. If you think the BBC’s current Sherlock is overshadowed by its Watson’s hard times in a more recent Afghan war than the one Doyle wrote about, imagine how Russians feel about that blood-soaked patch of the world map. Unlike Sherlock and Elementary, Sherlok Kholms doesn’t relocate the characters to a contemporary setting—but it goes further than Guy Ritchie’s films in finding Victorian parallels for the way things are today.

In 1979, then-Soviet television produced a fond (and fondly-remembered) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson with Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin as a genial sleuth and his intrepid sidekick. Sherlok Kholms positions itself as radically different from this show, but is structurally rather close to it—with miniseries-like overall arcs to do with the developing relationship of Holmes and Watson and the shadow of Moriarty, and key stories pulled out of canonical order and slotted in to highlight the lead characters. The older show presented its heroes in a nostalgic light—expressing a peculiarly Russian anglophilia—and stressed comradeship and noble endeavour, but the new take is complicated and sometimes uncomfortable. A sub-plot has Watson (Andrey Panin) struggling to become a writer, debating with a publisher about how to make his accounts of thorny real stories more saleable. This suggests that the versions we’re familiar with are removed from a truth we are only now being let in on. Throughout, characters say or do things this Watson could never put in print—Watson’s marriage proposal to Mrs Hudson (Ingeborna Dapkunaite) is astonishing enough without the throwaway revelation (unthinkable in any British or American Doyle adaptation) that much of the doctor’s struggling practice involves performing ‘underground abortions’. The approach has some textural precedent in that Doyle has Holmes complain about the way Watson dramatises their cases, but this goes further even than The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or Mr Holmes in making its takes on Doyle’s characters vastly different from the ones found on the page. There’s a sustained riff on the adverse reactions of the people involved when Watson’s stories see print: Mrs Hudson resents being represented as ‘am old granny’ and gives him till the end of the month to get out of 221B ….

The first episode, Beyker Strit, 221B (Baker Street 221B), opens with exactly the quotation about the Afghan War from A Study in Scarlet used in The Abominable Bride (‘the campaign brought honours and promotion to many but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster’) as Watson returns to London, ‘health irreparably damaged’, and is drawn into an alliance with Holmes. In an unusual selection, their first case is ‘Black Peter’, with Aleksandr Ilin as a suitably imposing, impaled dastard. In suitably dramatic fashion, Watson meets Holmes (Igor Petrenko) over a corpse lying in the street and wind up in separate quarters at 221B. This Watson is balding, moustached and more affected psychologically than physically by the war—and Panin, who narrates and frames each episode scratching away with his pen, is the lead actor here. Petrenko’s Holmes looks and acts more like a revolutionary poet than a detective: unshaven, fiddling with rimless glasses, getting drunk rather than taking drugs, treated pretty much as a criminal busybody by the police and flattened in his first ‘boxing lesson’ with Watson. A very Russian take on male bonding involves hard liquour, pugilism and tears. There’s a running joke as Watson assumes several fussy little old ladies in and around Baker Street are his new landlady … only for the slim, glamorous Dapkunaite to show up at the end (the biggest star in the show, the Lithuanian actress was in Burnt By the Sun and has English language credits in Mission: Impossible, Shadow of the Vampire, Prime Suspect and Wallander) and strike sparks with the retiring doctor.

Kamen, Nozhnitsy, Bumaga (Rock, Paper, Scissors) is a loose adaptation of The Sign of Four, which quickly manages to introduce Irene Adler (a lively, lissom Lyanka Gryu), Mycroft (whose face isn’t shown—setting up a payoff we have to wait six episodes for) and the malign influence of Moriarty. Here, Watson is involved in the backstory of the Agra treasure as a comrade of the guilty officers—who have returned to London and become a criminal gang, working as cabdrivers to expedite burglaries. Holmes is drawn into the case when Peter Small (Mikhail Evlanov), an old comrade of Watson’s, shows up in Baker St badly wounded, taking advantage of the special rates Watson offers for veterans. In the finale, the detective is shut out of a duel at an officers’ club between a grim Watson and virulent racist Thad Sholto (Igor Skylar). Your assumptions about the politics of Russian popular entertainment might well be challenged by the way the villain of the piece spouts anti-immigrant/refugee sentiments which sound horribly familiar in the 21st century … and is roundly condemned for it. The scene has added bite in that several of the extras are visibly and genuinely scarred—are they real veterans of the USSR’s Afghan campaign? In a later episode, Watson’s publisher tells him to drop the ‘chauvinist officer’ and the politics and invent a romance to dress up the story. Here, Mary (Elizaveta Alekseeva) is Small’s orphan daughter and it’s Holmes who sends her an annual pearl (for her board and education) from the otherwise lost treasure; we’re to infer that Watson spins this into the love story of The Sign of Four, and that the imaginary romance is another thing that irritates Mrs Hudson about Watson’s writing.

Only in Payatsy (Clowns) does the focus start to shift from Watson to Holmes. A key clue in the previous episode is a photograph of the guilty officers taken in Afghanistan, with a shadowy physics professor nearly cropped out. A great deal of time is spent trying to get a full version of the photo as Holmes begins to perceive a single hand behind most of the evil in London. It is personal for the detective in that Irene, who keeps showing up briefly to overturn his composure, is ensnared in the coils of Moriarty. This episode has a magnificently gruesome opening as a wedding photographer is murdered when his flash powder is replaced with TNT, spattering the bride (Natalya Turkina) with gore. The story then revolves around farcical diplomatic business about a fake affair between the American ambassador’s naïve wife and a French diplomat which might foment a war between France and America. In a splendid bit of new Holmesianism, the bride is too shocked to describe Moriarty, whom she has seen, and the detective seizes on her profession (fishmonger) to cajole her to think in piscine terms and liken the villain to a pike (long face), crab (eyestalk-like blue spectacles) and an octopus (tentacular arms). This Holmes is anything but immune to emotion—he slaps Watson for calling Irene a whore, and rolls around on the floor in agony when betrayed yet again.

Lyubovnitsy Lord Maulbreya (The Mistress of Lord Maulbrey), a case made from whole cloth, features an apparent serial murderer who is eliminating the women who might be mentioned in the will of a wealthy, just-dead aristocrat. It offers a solid, formidable villain in Gilbert Roy (Leonid Timtsunik), who is shockingly violent and ingenious (he favours a poison-dart-firing airgun disguised as a rolled newspaper), and an intriguing femme fatale in scheming innocent Ellen (Aleksandra Ursulyak), a gifted artist who presents Holmes with a sketch of the Professor he is looking for. We also learn that Moriarty (Aleksandr Adabashyan), aka Bernard Buckley, smokes distinctive Royal Caribbean cigars. Though Doyle set many stories in London and in rural areas, he oddly neglected to have Holmes work in any of the UK’s other cities … here, the case takes him and Lestrade (Mikhail Boyarskiy) to Bristol, where there’s an impressive shoot-out in a hotel and on the street.

It’s back to Doyle for the bones of a story in Obrad Doma Meysgreyvov (The Musgrave Ritual), a detour into the gothic which offers a snowbound Scots castle, a Baskerville-like naïve American Musgrave heir (Aleksandr Golubev), a dour bastard brother (Sergey Yushkevich) who insists even Holmes and Watson wear kilts in freezing weather, a centuries-old family feud, a black-robed ghostly monk (who might evoke Chekhov or Edgar Wallace), the sword of Charles I, Watson delirious with flu and the arrival of the horseless carriage. The most traditional, standalone episode of the series, it might make a useful sampler for folks who just want to give the show a try—getting away from London for a spell means that Holmes and Watson are also away from their ongoing storylines. Suggesting that the makers have a familiarity with previous film and TV takes on the canon, the heir has the character name Reginald Owen, after one of the few actors to have played both Holmes and Watson.

By the time of Galifaks (Halifax), Watson is a published author—and his work puts him on the outs with an offended Holmes and Mrs Hudson, while the resentful Lestrade is envious of how much the doctor is paid for his stories. With Holmes made famous, Baker Street is thronged with curiosity-seekers and Holmes worries he’ll no longer be able to work anonymously. When a corrupt official is glimpsed in a deerstalker and checked cape, smoking a curved pipe, Holmes asks Watson to describe him as looking like that, to get back his ability to work undercover. This begins with a reasonably straight version of ‘The Red-Headed League’, but the tunnel-to-the-bank business is just Act One of an insanely complex Moriarty plot to heist a printing press from the Royal Mint. The ruthlessness of all parties is stressed—Moriarty poisons the stooges he sends into the bank so they all die during a chase and policemen gun down suspects Wild West fashion. As in Kamen, Nozhnitsy, Bumaga, there’s a theme about the pride of men in uniform. Lestrade (here, fully named as Fitzpatrick Lestrade) is coldly furious at the members of the police fraternity who have let down the side. Knowing that the constables who have muddy trousers have sold out to Moriarty, he lines his whole force up for inspection and walks past, calmly shooting the traitors. The eponymous Halifax (Andrey Merzlikin), a forger forced to work with the Moriarty gang, specialises in trompe l’oeuil tricks—painting a convincing escape tunnel entrance in a cell to alarm a warden—and seems to be making a philosophical point about how trapped and doomed everyone is.

Poslednee delo Kholmsa (Holmes’ Last Case) opens with Irene in blackface singing ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’ at a Christmas entertainment at Brasher Castle, which is part of a jewel heist. The script takes a while to get to ‘The Final Problem’, as it fills in the backstory of Holmes’ relationship with Irene in a full-on Paris flashback which involves a meet cute at the base of the unfinished Eiffel Tower, a trip to the Moulin Rouge, absinthe-fuelled sex, impressionist art and a mime. In the present, Watson and Martha Hudson finally stop bickering and he proposes; later, it seems they’ve become a couple, but not actually got married. The plot goes into full-on bizarre mode with an embassy robbery that exposes a mad science plan involving electrified steel needles which can turn ordinary men into zombie super-soldiers. The face-off in Switzerland features a frozen Reichenbach, much cheating as Moriarty brings a gun and a knife to a (brutal) martial arts fight, Holmes being canny enough to wear spiked shoes while his opponent slides around on the ice and a noise-triggered avalanche which seems to do for both men—prompting Watson to write up a supposed last adventure even though there’s one episode to go.

The finale is titled Sobaka Baskervil (Baskerville Hound), a canny piece of misdirection since the dog only turns up (in a new context) in the final scene, which features a visit to Baker Street by Queen Victoria (Svetlana Kryuchkova). It’s three years since Watson wrote of Holmes’ death, Professor Challenger is in London lecturing about evolution and young war office clerk Arthur Cadogan West turns up dead in a fish tank in a market (with secret papers on his person) after falling from a train. On the assumption that he knows Holmes’ methods, Watson is called in to investigate the crime (derived from ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’) in partnership with a nattily-dressed, bearded Mycroft, who turns out to be Sherlock’s twin … with the not-dead detective at some point stepping in to impersonate his stuffier sibling to get back in the game. Panin enjoys the chance to play several takes on Sherlock and Mycroft, and the inevitable you’re-not-dead shock reunions with the rest of the cast. Moriarty also survived the Reichenbach and—in a development rather like Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows—a key player is cruelly sacrificed to remind us how evil he is. The mcguffin is an ingenious murder contraption wired to the clock of Big Ben (which is either great location work or very good CGI, for a finale reminiscent of the climax of the 1978 version of The Thirty Nine Steps). In a Scenes We’d Like to See moment, Holmes launches a furious tirade at the ingenious craftsman who’s made the thing for the Professor without caring what he uses it for—remember Doyle’s Holmes admiring the workmanship of Colonel Moran’s airgun, which has been used in attempts to murder him.

Briefly, in this episode, Holmes puts on a deerstalker and a cape—only to complain that it’s uncomfortable. But, by now, he’s reconciled to being eclipsed by Watson’s version of himself and touched at the title Watson chooses for his book of reminiscences, My Friend Sherlock Holmes. So, at the end, after all the reimagining, we come back to what is for this version—as for almost all other versions—the heart of the story, the comradeship of two admirable, difficult men in a world of crime, betrayal, love, honour, diabolic cunning and basic decency.

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Kim Newman is a prolific, award-winning English writer and editor, who also acts, is a film critic, and a London broadcaster. Of his many novels and stories, one of the most famous is Anno Dracula.