I have always been a fan of "The Great Detective". As a teenager or young adult I gobbled Conan Doyle's stories as well as the films mostly those starring the late Basil Rathbone. I saw Crucible of Blood on Broadway. The Seven Percent Solution with Nicole Williamson and every half-baked expansion of his character on celluloid. I always have particularly loved the modern day effort to sculpt the personality of the somewhat one dimensional character of the 19th century. That brilliant mind, that cocaine addiction, the inability to love all came from somewhere I imagined along with many a screenwriter and stage writer. I was not content that he be a sociopath, or victim of Asperger's. There was too much dynamism and charisma on paper and on stage and on film and television. Jeremy Brett played him fuller and not so quietly tormented. I enjoy the variations of a 21st century Holmes, either on American Television or interpreted by the dreamy Benedict Cumberbatch for the BBC. The only version I have hated, positively hated, was the Robert Downey, Jude Law abomination conceived in an era of CGI, unrealistic action and an iconoclasm that renders interesting characters banal.
I had seen Holmes young and middle aged, and I had never considered that he could be an old man, with a long passed past and an increasingly diminishing capacity. And I never hoped that something of his very soul would be revealed. No one, if he or she lives long enough, is spared the confrontation with death and loss, of our family, and friends, and of course, ourselves.
I forgot as I watched Brian Condon's movie about this previously unconsidered version of Holmes that he was in fact a fiction interpreted by an actor, Ian McKellan.
So much food for thought.
It is 1947. Holmes is 93 and living in the country as a gentleman bee farmer., with mysteriously dying bees. He is attended to by a housekeeper and shadowed by her precocious and admiring son, Roger, to whom Holmes teaches the particulars of bees. There are sparks of the genius remaining. He can still size up people and their whereabouts, a technique he applies to his housekeeper, who is not much fond of him because her son's hero-worship that makes her less in the boy's eyes. But Holmes' body, and worse, his mind, is failing. He has key signs of dementia. He cannot remember most names, a condition that is worsening, such that he has to write them on his shirt cuff. He loses concentration and in trying to retrieve memories, especially of his last case, in 1917, he is given to long stares into space, another hallmark of the shrinking brain. That last case was chronicled by his friend and assistant, Dr. John Watson, but its particulars were changed and exaggerated as Holmes notes was done in all of the stories. After all, they were penny dreadful, stories for the people, like our own movies and their stars, and Watson took liberties, especially in the creation of some of the hallmarks of the Holmesian persona, the deer-stalker cap and the pipe.
That non-fictionalized turn of the last case is what drove Holmes to retirement, but he cannot remember the truth of it any longer. It involved a married woman, who had two miscarriages, and seems to be descending into a madness both natural and induced. In order both to stave off the deterioration and to generate memory, Holmes has tried all sorts of natural remedies, the last of which is something called "prickly ash" that can only be found, apparently, in the Japan post Hiroshima, in Hiroshima. A young man there seems to be Holmes' facilitator and host, but that young man has an ulterior motive--he blames Holmes for the abandonment by his father to England during the war. Holmes, of course, does not remember the man; he can barely remember the family's surname without prompting.
Three mysteries of the ordinary kind, the dying bees, the case of the sad wife, and the man who left his wife and child in Japan suddenly and without any further contact, occupy the Holmes sliding into life's sunset. And, worse, his burgeoning relationship with the boy, Roger, may well be interrupted because his housekeeper intends to leave for another position far away. This Holmes can no longer hold in abeyance his emotions. This housekeeper, however much she is at odds with him, and the boy, they are all that he has left. Watson and Mrs. Hudson are long dead; his brother Mycroft has recently died. The solitary is alone.
But there are moments in which he finds clarity, prompted by Roger's questions, and words and an artifact, a single glove belonging to the woman Holmes had followed at the behest of her husband during that last case. Relationship, albeit somewhat rocky, is the potion more effective than bitter tasting jellies in tea.
I don't want to deprive the reader of how these stories--which I disagree with some critics are slight plot points--resolve. Most mysteries in life turn out to be simple as to their facts, but complicated as to their contexts. Holmes has both succeeded, and failed, in his life, just like all of us.
There is, sort of, a happy ending. His life goes on, and, from my sense of it, he is not alone any more.
As for me, I can't wait for the DVD.
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