Читать книгу Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #5 - Gary Lovisi - Страница 5

“Sherlock Holmes, the immortal character of fiction created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is ageless, invincible and unchanging. In solving significant problems of the day he remains — as ever — the supreme master of deductive reasoning.”

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These words preceded the early entries in the Universal series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, by way of explaining the presence of Holmes and Watson in the then-modern world of 1942. In a way, it’s peculiar that the makers felt the need to go to such trouble, since none of the many earlier films took place in Victorian England. It’s a testament to the effect Rathbone’s first two movies — The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — must have had on the film-going population at the time. Since then, the detective’s cinematic adventures have remained firmly in period, with the exception of a couple of TV movies, both of which see him awakened from cryogenic suspension in the America of the late ’80s/early ’90s.

It was not until that other iconic character Doctor Who enjoyed his recent revival that the notion of updating the stories became a real possibility. Who scriptwriters Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss shared a love of those Universal films, and would often discuss their mutual enthusiasm. “We thought they were actually rather more fun,” says Moffat, “and in certain ways truer to the originals than many grander and more important film versions. And what we kept saying to each other was, ‘Someday, someone is going to do Sherlock Holmes in the modern day, and we’ll feel so cross because we should have done it.’” In fact, a US TV pilot, Elementary by Josh Friedman, did just that, but the production never saw the light of day. Moffat and Gatiss, however, were more fortunate. A sixty-minute pilot proved so satisfying that the BBC commissioned three film-length episodes, which meant that the pilot had to be scrapped and remounted (thankfully, the abandoned show can be seen as an extra on the DVD).

Young actor Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as the 21st Century Sherlock Holmes, opposite the rather better known Martin Freeman (Tim in the original series The Office and Arthur Dent in the film version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) as John Watson. The two share an undeniable chemistry which, along with the superb scripts and high production values, ensured Sherlock’s massive success, this despite the fact that the series arrived on British screens with little or no fanfare and with only two of the three episodes really hitting the mark.

The first story, A Study in Pink, scripted by Moffat, is of course based quite closely upon Conan Doyle’s original novel, A Study in Scarlet. Watson arrives back in England after being wounded in Afghanistan (how far we’ve come in 120 years!), and after a chance meeting with old pal Stamford at the Criterion coffee bar, he’s introduced to Sherlock Holmes in the laboratory at St Bartholemew’s Hospital. They move into 221b Baker Street and are almost instantly drawn into a poisoning case by Inspector Lestrade (played by the George Clooney-esque Rupert Graves).

Episode Two, The Blind Banker, is less successful, regrettably. Steve Thompson’s script, which has Holmes and Watson investigating a series of assassinations in London’s financial district, has little to do with Conan Doyle, save that a plot element concerning coded graffiti suggests The Dancing Men. An original story is no bad thing, of course, but the plot could serve another series — say, Midsomer Murders or Inspector Lewis — just as well. The Blind Banker may be a perfectly adequate 90 minutes of television, but it isn’t quite Sherlock Holmes.

The final episode, Mark Gatiss’ The Great Game, not only incorporates elements of The Five Orange Pips, The Naval Treaty, and The Bruce-Partington Plans, it also owes a good deal to the 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. As in Rathbone’s second movie, Moriarty — whose existence is mentioned in A Study in Pink — sets a series of puzzles for Holmes to solve in order to prevent the detective from focusing on his true intent, a crime of international significance. This isn’t the first Rathbone reference in the series — episode one features an exchange of dialogue lifted directly from Universal’s Dressed to Kill. The Great Game ends with a confrontation between the two enemies, and a cliffhanger which, thanks to Sherlock’s huge ratings, will be resolved in the second series, once Steven Moffat has concluded his work on Doctor Who and Freeman has dealt with any scheduling conflicts regarding his starring role as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s forthcoming movie The Hobbit.

The modernisation of certain elements in Sherlock is well thought out — Watson keeps a blog rather than writes memoirs; the famous sequence where Holmes deduces the sad history of his friend’s brother by the examination of a pocket watch now revolves around a cell-phone, and the detective has been forced to abandon his famous smoking habit for nicotine patches — Holmes refers to their first case together as “a three-patch problem.” For some, myself included, it jars when the main characters address one another as “Sherlock” and “John,” but there is no escaping the fact that in our informal age that is precisely what they would do, and any attempt to have them do otherwise would come across as phoney. And while it was never even considered in the original tales, some fun is had at Watson’s expense as he must constantly convince people that he and Holmes are not romantically involved. “Don’t worry, there’s all sorts round here,” he’s assured by Mrs Hudson (Una Stubbs). “Mrs Turner next door’s got married ones.”

It has been hinted that the next series of three adventures will concern Irene Adler, The Hound of the Baskervilles and the encounter at Reichenbach Falls — all, of course, with a 21st-Century twist. “It allows you to see the original stories the way the original reader would have read them,” Moffat explains. “As exciting, cutting-edge, contemporary stories, as opposed to these relics that they’ve become.” If the second series matches or even surpasses the quality of the first, the present-day Sherlock definitely has a future.