The 13 Clocks, James Thurber – 1951
If various references to Neil Gaiman haven't given the game away, I am a huge fan of his. As such, when he described The 13 Clocks as 'probably the best book in the world'1 it seemed to be worth a read, and discovering that my Mum had a copy I dived straight in. And although I have many favourite books, and there are many books that could be considered objectively better, I'm still finding it very difficult to disagree with Mr Gaiman's analysis!
The 13 Clocks is a story for children – the edition I have is only 80 pages long – an extraordinary mixture of darkness and silliness, set around the icy Coffin Castle, the villainous one-eyed Duke who rules the land, and his niece, the beautiful Princess Saralinda. 'He did not wish to give her hand in marriage, since her hand was the only warm hand in the castle'2 whilst he continually wears jewelled gloves because 'his hands were as cold as his smile, and almost as cold as his heart'3. He enjoys setting impossible tasks for the princes who come to win her hand, and to Zorn of Zorna, who arrives in the Duke's land disguised as a minstrel, he sets the task of finding a thousand gems in ninety-nine hours and placing them on the Duke's table when the Castle's thirteen clocks all chime five. Unfortunately for the prince, these clocks had 'all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle'4; indeed, 'the Duke decided he had murdered time, slain it with his sword, and wiped his bloody blade upon its beard and left it there, bleeding hours and seconds'5. Fortunately for the prince, however, there appears before him 'the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device'6, a strange little man in an indescribable hat, whose cunning, ingenuity and contortion of logic and language might just prevent the prince from being split 'from your guggle to your zatch'7 and fed to the geese.
As you may have noticed from the quotes, The 13 Clocks is a glorious, playful submersion into language, twisting sound and meaning alike. Almost all of the story has a constant internal rhyme scheme which means that phrases like 'the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets' are never far away. In a proto-Roald Dahl manner, Thurber gleefully makes up words – Golux, guggle, Todal – without ever veering into nonsense poetry. It is tremendous fun to read aloud and I recommend that you do so. Thanks to Thurber's skill, this, like the Golux himself, never becomes annoying or off-putting; instead it only builds the fantastical atmosphere. The Golux, a creature of near-total whimsy, gets many of the best lines; when he first appears he claims not to be 'a mere Device'8 - literally a device of the writer to get the prince out of trouble – and when the prince says he resembles one, he replies 'I resemble only half the things I say I don't...the other half resemble me.' Indeed, despite the cunning of the Golux and the Prince, the title problem of the book is solved through yet more clever wordplay: 'If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them. That's logic, as I know and use it'.
Much of what makes the story so effective is found in the symbolic clash between Duke and the Golux. There is a dark and eerie undertone to the story, and the Duke sits at the very centre of it. As well as being dark and cold – pretty standard villain specs – Thurber gives the Duke an added level of nastiness; this is the passage in which he lists the things that the Duke's gloves made difficult for him, 'to pick up pins or coins or the kernels of nuts, or tear the wings from nightingales'9. In what is a self-aware fairy-tale, the Duke is a self-aware villain and appears utterly at home within the role, joyously vicious and completely irredeemable. Most sinister of all, however, is what Thurber leaves almost entirely unsaid, as we learn 'about the children locked up in my tower'10 and a few pages later we learn 'the children are dead'11. When the Duke is finally caught by the monstrous Todal, all that is found is his sword, a 'small black ball stamped with scarlet owls'12 which is 'very like a ball the Golux and those children used to play with'13 and 'the sound of someone laughing'14. I have quoted all we ever hear about these children, and these veiled hints balance the exuberant wonder of the story with chilling insinuations.
There are also constant allusions to other works, most of which only an adult reading the book will understand. Most obviously there is the playfulness of language and form that makes Alice (both in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass) so head-spinning a read, but also nods to Gilbert and Sullivan, as the disguised prince is first described as 'a thing of shreds and patches'15 and later almost manages the entire quotation, except that he is too preoccupied with having his zatch split: 'A wandering minstrel, I,...a thing of shreds and zatches'16. As for the Duke, there is something of Richard III in his limping about the castle plotting evil deeds, but when he becomes rightly suspicious of his invisible spy, things become downright Shakespearian as he cries 'Let me have men about me that are visible'17. Most obvious are the allusions to Arthurian lore, as when someone tries to guess Zorn's parentage: 'You must be Tristram's son, or Lancelot's, or are you Tyne or Tora?'. The latter, as far as I can tell, have been made up by Thurber, while the former need no introduction. In this, along with references to Gwain, we see how Thurber borrows at will from established mythos, using them to add heroic flavour, without ever being constrained by them.
Within the silliness and darkness of the story, there is also the character of Hagga, whose cries jewels. However, her tears of laughter turn back to water in two weeks, while her tears of sorrow remain permanently jewels. In this we may, at first glance, find a mournful commentary on the transient nature of happiness and the constancy of sorrow. The 13 Clocks, however, is far too clever for this, and it is worth noting that although the jewels the Prince receives from Hagga ultimately dissolve, they have already served their purpose and freed Saralinda from the Duke's clutches. Taken with the Golux's final words to Zorn and Saralinda, 'Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After'18, we understand that although happiness does not last forever, it will last long enough, and that there is always more joy to be found.
I should also note that the edition I (my mum) own(s) is accompanied by the extraordinary illustrations of Ronald Searle, probably best known as the creator of St. Trinian's school for girls, which just reinforces the immeasurably strange atmosphere of the story.
The 13 Clocks is an extraordinarily entertaining, entirely self-aware fairy tale that is never allowed to slip into parody. Even this, however, does not do the book justice, and much as I have tried to describe it, it has to be experienced. So, if you've never read it, go on and do so! If you have read it, read it again out loud! And if you have already done so, do it again: its even better the third time!
1http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/536859/the-13-clocks-by-james-thurber-introduction-by-neil-gaiman-illustrated-by-marc-simont/9780143110149/
2 Thurber, James, The 13 Clocks & the Wonderful O, Puffin Books, 1962. pp. 8
3 pp. 7-8
4 pp. 8
5 pp. 9
6 pp. 19
7 pp. 18
8 pp. 19
9 pp. 8
10 pp. 64
11 pp. 70
12 pp. 87
13 pp. 65
14 pp. 87
15 pp. 12
16 pp. 18
17 pp. 65
18 pp. 83
Suicide Squad, dir. David Ayer – 2016
Massive spoilers throughout; also TRIGGER WARNING for discussion of abusive relationships/domestic violence.
For the purposes of this review, I am going to be talking almost entirely about narrative, characterisation and acting because, hey, that's what I know! For a better take down than I could write of the blatant misogyny at work through much of the film try Alison Willmore's post on Buzzfeed or the always stellar Emily Asher-Perrin's over at Tor.com . Also, yes, Katana is reduced to 'strange Asian lady who talks to her magic sword' and the first Native American to portray a named meta-human in a mainstream, live action Marvel or DC movie does not speak, punches a female soldier in the face in his first moment on screen, and is killed 5 minutes later to make a point………………...........................................
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…….............this is gonna be a long one, isn't it?
The Suicide Squad are a team of currently incarcerated super-criminals, assembled, coerced and intimidated by Amanda Waller (Viola Davies) to become a task-force, capable of dealing with meta-human threats. Among their number are master assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), fire-controlling El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), loutish Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney) and the insane Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), while leading this team of misfits is the tough-as-nails Special Forces officer Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman). However, unbeknownst to them, Waller's first attempt at controlling meta-humans was the Enchantress (Cara Delevinge), an amazingly powerful magic wielder who shares a body with archaeologist June Moore, Flag's girlfriend. Unfortunately, the Enchantress seizes an opportunity to escape, and begins to assemble a weapon in the city centre that is capable of destroying the world. The Squad are sent in, but all the while Harley's grinning, green-haired boyfriend is closing in on them.
The elements of Suicide Squad can be divided neatly into four categories: the excellent, the lazy, the problematic and the deeply uncomfortable.
To start with the excellent areas, and there are some, despite everything else that needs saying about the film: the style of the film is pretty damn nice, with some great cinematography and wonderful uses of colour and lighting. The set designs are also beautiful; Arkham looks as close to a Hammer Gothic mansion as it should, and what we see of Gotham has a nicely gritty, dirty feel to it. Praise also has to go to most of the cast. With steely eyes, face of stone and voice of iron, Viola Davies embodies every inch of the badass-as-all-hell Amanda Waller, even though the plot itself dramatically undermines her competency. Will Smith manages to tone down the normal Will Smith charm, and though it's debatable whether a character other than Will Smith emerges, it's also debatable whether one needs to. Joel Kinnaman plays the tough-guy soldier, secretly concerned for his girlfriend, with all the hard-edged stoicism it requires, while Jai Courtney is entertaining as the boorish Boomerang. Jay Hernandez, playing a pyrotechnic crime lord who killed his own family in a fit of temper, focuses on El Diablo's total regression into guilt and manages a very quiet, touching performance, despite the lazy racial stereotyping. And Margot Robbie, bless her, is trying SO hard against a script I will discuss later, to nail Harley, and in everything that an actor can contribute, pretty much does: she steers a perfect course between childlike and cynical, while keeping Harley's chirpy demeanour intact, and her delighted squeal of 'Puddin'!' is indistinguishable from the original Animated series. Meanwhile, Cara Delevingne once again proves she can hold her own as an actress, however...
Moving on to the lazy aspects, and having mentioning Delevingne, leads us straight into the unavoidable fact that our antagonist is beyond one-dimensional. Though initially the Enchantress is at least vaguely threatening, shadowy and savage, when she receives a power-up, she transforms into the utterly generic Enchantress who then reawakens her brother as her utterly generic CGI muscle. Does the film explore her trauma at having been once worshipped as a god and then reduced to being controlled by Waller, her humiliation at her enslavement and her feelings of violation at being turned into someone else's weapon? Do they, with this depth of character, create a sympathetic, complex antagonist, who we can empathise with, who has come from a similar place as our protagonists and whom they can relate to even while still needing to stop? Nope. Oh no, there's too much wearing a black bikini and headdress and 'building a weapon to destroy the world with' which is done by crotch-thrusting at a massive column of magic blue light (let's not go there on that one!) to be done for any of that. We are given zero information about the weapon (which of course would have been ludicrous, but come on, just throw some magical technobabble at us! At least pretend to care!) and the general feeling is that the sentiment of 'Ah, let's just stick Cara Delevingne in her underwear and have a crap-tonne of CGI and that'll do for the bad-guy' was prevalent among the producers.
And here we hit the really problematic aspect: the script. The weakness of Cara Delevingne's antagonist highlights one of the key flaws: all of these characters are horrible people. DC Warner were obviously hoping for an equivalent of Guardians of the Galaxy, a fun, action-packed adventure about a bunch of belligerent misfits and ne’er-do-wells banding together and accomplishing something good, all to a killer rock soundtrack. However, part of the problem is that in the classic movies of this kind (think GotG, Ocean's 11, etc.) the protagonists are thieves, con-men and tricksters, not killers. In Suicide Squad, we are supposed to laugh with, empathise with and root for people who have been shown as unrepentant killers, murderers for profit and sport. There is a great difference between making a film about bad people and a film about truly awful people. Making everyone, the government, the crime bosses and the loners all appear villainous doesn't make our protagonists likeable or more moral, it just creates a film of totally reprehensible characters. This is particularly the case with Will Smith's Deadshot, imbued with slightly subdued Will Smith charm and warmth. He has a daughter, who pleaded with him not to shoot Batman (yeah...Batfleck really is one of the better things here!) resulting in Deadshot's arrest and when, in the finale, Enchantress shows them all their heart's desire, we see that his is to have shot Batman. Not to have a life where he's not a killer and sees his daughter all the time, in the knowledge that she can't be affected, or frightened or disappointed by his work, no, he simply wants to have been able to get away with being an assassin. It sounds trite to suggest that they might have 'learnt' something from their adventure, but there is no character development for any of the villains, which leaves the entire débâcle feeling like a waste of time. Indeed, even when faced with the annihilation of the planet in the finale, they don't rally to fight the Enchantress in order to save the world, they do it because they have grown to tolerate the now desperate Flag, whose girlfriend she still shares a body with. You know something is up when the Joker himself feels no more unpleasant, dangerous or uncaring of other's lives than the 'heroes' and this robs him of his effectiveness and makes us wonder why we should care about any of our protagonists. It doesn't help that, despite the hype, Leto's performance gives us just another vaguely odd, creepy criminal, in a film full of them. (Also, he laughs three times and barely even smiles….)
And, having now mentioned him, let us address the green-haired, grinning elephant in the room, and his relationship with Harley, thereby turning our minds to the deeply uncomfortable elements of the film. In her initial appearances in Batman The Animated Series, and her subsequent introduction into the main DCU, Harley appeared as a costumed 'moll', almost hearkening back to the Batman '66 show where such figures were a regular occurrence. She was bubbly, cheery and fun and though somewhat unhinged, evidently neither as psychotic, nor as dangerous as the Joker himself. This was demonstrated particularly in episodes like Harlequinade1, Harley and Ivy2 and especially Harley's Holiday3, in which she is depicted as causing huge amounts of chaos even away from the Joker, but without any malicious intent whatsoever. In Mad Love, first a graphic novel penned by the main writers of BTAS and then adapted into an episode, her back story is finally revealed. She was a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum, assigned to treat the Joker, who so twisted her mind that she fell in love with him, helped him escape and became his sidekick, all for her devotion to him. What Mad Love also demonstrated was how deeply abusive the relationship was; while previously in the animated series, he had insulted and bullied her, as he did all of his henchmen, here he explodes into a violent assault on her, at the end of which, she blames herself because she 'didn't get the joke'4. It is one of the most sickening and heartbreaking scenes committed to paper or film. For post-Mad Love depictions of their relationship, do take a look here.
Which brings us back to Suicide Squad. In flashback, we see them meeting as psychiatrist and patient and events unfold as one would expect. However, at no point is it suggested that, beyond the initial twisting of Harley's mind, there is anything abusive at play between them. This may sound like a ridiculous thing to say, and of course his manipulation of her into submitting to him in the first place is abusive, but once they are together, they are played as genuinely loving one another. Far from barely noticing when she's gone, as he has done in comics (see the link above) Leto's Joker pines for her, until he begins chasing after the Squad, like a concerned boyfriend in a rom-com. In the flashbacks where we see them together, there is no sense that he is ever violent towards her, or that she is anything but constantly and uniformly happy whenever she is with him; she loves him and wants to be with him, he adores her, and wants to be with her. There is even a suggestion that in his initial manipulation of her, the Joker has unlocked her potential, rather than driven her mad, that she is, in Amanda Waller's words 'crazier than he is'.
Not only is this an inaccurate and offensively irresponsible depiction of the most famous abusive relationship in the comics medium, it also does not help the overall tone of the film. Obviously, for a female character to be portrayed entirely as a victim is highly problematic in itself, but in removing almost all of Harley’s victimhood, it transforms her from another unfortunate polluted by the Joker into a gleeful killer, with as little regard for human life as he has. While the animated series, and many incarnations in the comics, give her a naivete and innocence that counterbalances her criminal activities, Suicide Squad aims for the chirpy attitude, without the essential decency or tragedy of the character that other portrayals have had. When the film is counting heavily on her likeability as a key selling point, this really does not help. Even worse, is that no character development is offered, no suggestion of Harley questioning Mr J's world-view, and the overall effect, as I have said of the others, is to leave the viewer wondering why we should care about any of them.
Overall the film is a mess, with some gorgeous visuals, well-done hints as to the wider DCEU (Batflek plus a sudden, but rather entertaining moment of the Flash) and some excellent acting from actors struggling against the constraints of what feels like a rushed, first draft script. Once again, I single out Margot Robbie, for being genuinely entertaining and bringing so much to a film that overtly sexualises Harley, while it disregards the mixture of innocence and trauma that made the original character so compelling. It is in aspects like these that Suicide Squad, like Man of Steel and BvS, shows a depressing lack of thought, and, although I hope the Patty Jenkins helmed Wonder Woman restores some substance over style to the DCEU, I am beginning to dread every new film they announce.
1 http://dcau.wikia.com/wiki/Harlequinade
2 http://dcau.wikia.com/wiki/Harley_and_Ivy
3 http://dcau.wikia.com/wiki/Harley's_Holiday
4 http://dcau.wikia.com/wiki/Mad_Love
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny – 1967
There is no one like Roger Zelazny.
As well as penning the Chronicles of Amber series, Roger Zelazny is perhaps best known for beginning with established mythologies and crafting wry, superlatively written epics from them. Before Lord of Light, I had read two others, Creatures of Light and Darkness, his highly experimental, mostly successful, re-shaping of the Egyptian pantheon, and A Night In The Lonesome October, in which he deals with a very different set of legends in a tongue-firmly-in-cheek manner, and which is, incidentally, one of my favourite books of all time. As for Lord of Light, it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1968, was the film that the false production company were planning to make in the Oscar winning thriller Argo and has been praised by such illustrious folk as Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin, the latter calling it 'one of the great works of our field'1.
'His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god… Therefore there was mystery about him'2
The enigma that Zelazny presents us with in these now famous opening words resonates throughout the novel, as we are presented with a world in which Zelazny extends the often repeated Arthur C Clarke quote that 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'3and explores instead the line between sufficiently advanced technology and divinity.
The novel tells of the above mentioned Sam's struggle against the gods of his world, of whom he was once one himself, allying himself with the Rakasha demons of Hellwell, as well as taking on many names and identities, including Siddhartha, Tathagatha, Great-Souled Sam and Buddha, all in order to free humanity from the gods' tyranny. However, as we soon learn, the population of this planet are all the descendants of human passengers from a crashed spaceship, and the gods are the crew and any they have chosen to elevate to godhood. These 'First', of which Sam is one, have lived so long due to a process of technological reincarnation, whereby they transfer their consciousness into a fresh body when their current one grows old, and have continued to further advance their technology to the point of gaining incredible powers, taking names from the Hindu religion, building themselves a city in the sky called Heaven and finally declaring themselves to be gods. All the technology of these human gods, however, is denied to the rest of the world, and even the gaining of a new body has a dark catch added to it: priests called the Masters of Karma, who mentally probe each applicant, and if the applicant is deemed not to have lived a 'good', or obedient, enough life, they are reincarnated into the body of an animal, or worse. This hoarding of fantastical technology, however, creates a political schism, between the Deicrats, the gods and their devotees, who seek to reinforce the gods' divinity and actively discourage scientific progress among the people, and the Accelerationists, who believe it is their duty to teach the people the knowledge they possess and remove the man/god divide.
Not that you will discover much of this initially, as Zelazny allows the reader to grow accustomed to this epic world where Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva's rule is absolute, before chipping away the grandeur, not to mention the divinity, of the gods. All but the first and last chapters are flashbacks, detailing Sam's struggles against Heaven, Brahma and Kali in particular, and the reader is able to experience many of the different ways Sam attempts to undermine the gods' rule, as well as showing the decadent stagnation that the gods' power has brought them. It is also important to note that far from merely not sharing their vast technology, the gods also refuse to allow humanity to make any advances of their own, as Sam notes to Brahma 'The printing press has been rediscovered on three occasions that I can remember, and suppressed each time'4. Brahma's response is a heady mixture of self-aggrandisement and mockery 'they are still children, and like children would play with our gifts and be burnt by them'5.
A frequent criticism of the book is that the characters are not likeable or relatable and I would counter very simply: they're not meant to be. One or two, particularly the weathered Jan Olvegg and Tak, the demi-god archivist reincarnated in an ape's body as punishment for assisting Sam, are appealing characters, but in a novel that explores the line between human and god, it should not be surprising that those who claim godhood are at best inscrutable, and often, having reached the point of genuinely believing their superiority, monstrous. This does not mean that they are not compelling however; we understand the demon chief Taraka's insatiable need to prove himself against the Death-God Yama's powers, even as he betrays Sam, and we experience the shift from quiet pride to solemn fury in Yama himself, when his bride Kali chooses power over his love. Most of all, in Sam, we find a man with phenomenal abilities, who has returned from seeming death several times, holding tight to his humanity to the point of renouncing Heaven to live among humans long before his campaign begins. However impassive and enigmatic he may be, it is not difficult to admire a character who states to the ruling god Brahma, 'I felt that we of the crew should be assisting them, granting them the benefits of the technology we had preserved, rather than building ourselves an impregnable paradise and treating the world as a combination game preserve and whorehouse'6. More impressive still is that when his war is finally won 'he did not remain with his people for a sufficient period of time to warrant much theological by-play'7. While he could have simply taken Brahma's place and ruled himself, Sam stays true to his beliefs and leaves humanity to govern themselves.
Importantly, Zelazny presents us with what thousands of years old humans can remember of Earth religion, and their attempts to replicate that mythology to further their own ends, not these religions themselves. Even so Zelazny examines the power that religion can have: the reader knows that the Englightened Buddha (Sam) is a fraud, yet when one of Kali's assassins, who has been sent to kill Sam, is taken ill before he can do so, he is then looked after by the Buddhists, healed and in time takes up their robes himself. Through listening to Sam's preaching he becomes, in Sam's words 'the only man I ever knew to really achieve enlightenment'8 and is, as such, 'the true Buddha'.
Mighty themes and colossal battles only take a novel so far, however, and what adds the final blast of magic to Lord of Light is Zelazny's writing. The descriptions are beautiful, the action breathtaking; indeed, Zelazny invokes the cadences of actual religious texts to invoke the splendour of his world. Even the arrival of guests for Yama and Kali's wedding has a grandeur and a weight to it: 'They came. Out of the sky, riding on the polar winds, across the seas and lands, over the burning snow, and under it and through it, they came'9. Even in simpler, quieter moments, Zelazny's prose is evocative, often invoking colour in a way that seems to make the ordinary world bright, and Heaven luscious. In this extract, he makes vivid use of primary colours: 'Birds sang in the high, green places of the garden. Fish, like old coins, lay at the bottom of the blue pool. The flowers in bloom were mainly red and big-petaled; but there were also occasional yellow wunlips about her jade bench'10. When pointed out this seems almost simplistic, but in the reading it subliminally conveys the richness of the world. It is also worth noting the humour that seems to confound some readers11, be it the now infamous pun, or quips like 'The Lord of Karma made an ancient and mystical sign behind his back'12 but it is moments like these that humanise the text and keep it from becoming overly dramatic.
There is considerable debate – indeed George R.R. Martin even devotes a section of his Afterward to it – over whether Lord of Light is Science Fiction or Fantasy; though all of the gods' powers are due to technological marvels, reverse-engineered from a crashed spaceship, rather than genuine mysticism, the world they inhabit is home to genuinely magical demons and witches. What this debate misses, however, is exactly the ingenuity of Zelazny in meshing the two – at the time quite distinct – genres into a breathtaking novel of titanic forces and epic battles, as a once-false-god becomes a false prophet in order to end the reign of false gods, and allow humanity's rise. Lord of Light is a stunning novel that deserves all the praise it receives and I can't wait to re-read it and return to the story of one who 'never claimed to be a god. But then he never claimed not to be a god'13.
1 Martin, George R.R. Afterward in Lord of Light, Orion Group, 2009 pp. 290
2 Zelazny, Roger, Lord of Light, Orion Group, 2009 pp. 1
3 Clarke, Arthur C, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination'" in the collection Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible, 1962 pp. 14, 21, 36.
4 pp. 64
5 pp. 64
6 pp.63-64
7 pp. 282
8 pp. 113
9 pp. 190
10 pp. 259
11 http://www.tor.com/2009/11/09/science-fiction-disguised-as-hindu-fantasy-roger-zelaznys-lemglord-of-lightlemg/
12 pp. 194
13 pp. 282
Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, ed. David Thomas Moore – 2014
The first adult book that I read to myself was The Hound of the Baskervilles. When I was 6 my mum had a little Inverness Cape made for me as a Christmas present. One of my favourite games to play with my grandparents as a child was myself as Holmes, my grandfather as Watson and my grandmother as Mrs Hudson, and, when I was fourteen, I made a half-hour film of Hound with my friends and family.
So it's safe to say that Sherlock Holmes is a pretty huge part of my life.
I am also hardly a purist. Much though Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing and Jeremy Brett are my favourite performers (though a loud shout out to the phenomenal Clive Merrison in the BBC Radio productions of the 90's!) I adored the revolutionary BBC Sherlock, enjoyed the steampunk romp of Guy Ritchie's two films and revel in non-canon writing, such as Neil Gaiman's superlative A Study in Emerald.So when my friends got me a copy of David Thomas Moore's anthology Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets, I leapt in, and continued to swim around in it for some time.
(For ease, I am grouping the stories together by trope, rather than by order in the book)
The largest group features the classic male Holmes and Watson pairing, simply set in a different time or place, such as Kelly Hale's Black Alice, in which a 17th Century Holmes investigates a case of murder by witchcraft. It is a well written, Holmesian tale, and it's biggest flaw may well be how close it stays to the original, to the point that it feels like only a few key period details have changed at all. The Adventure of the Speckled Bandanna, by JE Cohen, again feels exactly like one of the more outlandish Doyle tales, featuring a case of stolen waxworks, but set in the 1970s, with the obligatory period conspiracy theory added in. In The Rich Man's Hand, Joan de la Haye provides us with a very creepy tale set in a South African town, involving 'an actual case of transmogrification'1. It is genuinely unsettling, but has quite a tonal issue in that we are presented with a realistic, if horrific murder, and discover that, unlike in Black Alice, the killer had employed real witchcraft, at which Holmes states that he 'had my suspicions'2. The reader, meanwhile, has been unprepared by anything in the story that such an outcome is possible within the world of the narrative, and wonders why no one in the story seems particularly stunned to learn that magic is real. Less bloody, but far more chilling is Kaaron Warren's sparsely written The Lantern Men; eerie and haunting, the only issue I have with it is that it could have done with being longer, so that the reader can spend more time in the mournful setting and allow the tension to build. However, the most original of these more orthodox tales is The Innocent Icarus by James Lovegrove, who gives us a world in which most humans are born with a class of superpower, such as being an Icarus, who can fly, or a Cassandra who can see into the future. Watson is an indestructible Achilles, and Holmes is a Typical, without any special ability, which has led him to train himself all the more deliberately to 'inhabit a unique category...Elementary'3. It features some of the best detective work of the collection and is an interesting inversion of Holmes’ usual near-superhuman status.
Gini Koch, meanwhile, gives us one of the few female Holmes' in the book in All the Single Ladies, which is set on a college campus, where a reality TV show is being filmed and murders committed. College physician John Watson is under suspicion and the witty, flippant Sherlock Holmes arrives to uncover the real culprit. While the culprit is slightly obvious, the sheer charm of Koch's Holmes, and the role reversal that leaves John the more angst ridden of the two, makes this one of the most engaging stories in the collection. Perhaps the best aspect of this story is that the dynamic between them, and by the end their plan to live together, remains entirely platonic, despite John's observation that Sherlock is an attractive woman.
Moving on to a different trope, we come to what I like to call 'The Actual Holmes(TM) of Conan Doyle's original somehow transported into a different setting'. The Patchwork Killer by Kasey Lansdale, features a clone of Holmes created from the ashes of the original by Watson the dentist, a great grandson of the good doctor. This rather grisly tale is, unfortunately, one of the weaker stories in the book; it takes itself too seriously for the clone conceit to work, while the actual mystery is so convoluted that it takes two pages of solid explanation from clone-Holmes to explain it. In Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Conjuration, however, we find all of the fun lacking in the previous story. It is a glorious epic fantasy in which a servant wizard occasionally summons a demon, in order to solve problems for his master, the mighty Green Wizard. This demon is Holmes, who views the imaginative world before him as a 'phantasy of my idling mind'4. Tchaikovsky carefully weaves in references to the Canon, enriching the tale, and making it one of the most delightful in the book.
There are also the meta-fictional stories, in which Sherlock Holmes exists as a fictional character. In The Small World of 221b, Holmes and Watson, after encountering Lizzie Darcy, nee Bennett, and having a near-miss with HG Well's time-traveller, discover that they are the fictional creations of Arthur Conan Doyle, preserved in a matrix by academic aliens after the fall of the human race. It sounds somewhat silly, and perhaps it is, but what saves Ian Edginton's piece is Watson’s admiration at meeting in Lizzie Bennett a mind almost as sharp as Holmes'. Jenni Hill's Parallels, on the other hand, presents us with a schoolgirl, Jane, who writes Sherlock/John fanfic online, while her best friend and fellow pupil Charlotte solves mysteries and smokes. The key to this charming tale, is that it is far more about their evolving relationship than about solving a particular mystery, though it does give a wonderful nod to the fire-alarm trick in A Scandal In Bohemia, by suggesting that some tricks only work once.
Likewise, more concerned with the relationship, and again, of a romantic nature, is Half There/All There by Glen Mehen, which features the only openly gay pairing in the book; John 'Doc' Watson, a drug dealer at Andy Warhol's Factory, meets Sherlock Holmes, drug taker, and they become lovers, getting involved in an investigation as time goes on. The writing is lovely, and again the relationship is key, but the mystery here feels quite forced. Indeed, despite the mournful ending of Holmes growing colder, as he blames himself for not stopping the assassination that ends the story, it is not entirely clear how he could have done so.
Despite transdimensional aliens and colour-coded wizards, Guy Adams' A Study in Scarborough is probably the most entirely different story within the collection. I'll be honest, for this one, it really helps if you have a fondness – or are even aware of – BBC radio comedies of the 40/50s such as the Goons, and the careers of comedic double acts such as the Two Ronnies, or Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, because here, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were Radio/TV actors and now, many years later, a keen fan arrives at John's house to discuss their careers. It is a pitch black, deeply bitter tale and, uniquely in this book, there is no observation and deduction or mystery solving, though, as we learn, a crime has certainly been committed.
In contrast, A Woman's Place by Emma Newman, is a very simple idea, but superbly executed. As well as giving us a 'rosy cheeked and cheerful'5 female Watson, Newman elevates Mrs Hudson to an entirely new role, as well as explaining her consistently patient and understanding responses to Holmes' actions as a tenant. Newman won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for the piece, but to say any more would be to spoil it!
And finally we come to Jamie Wyman's A Scandal In Hobohemia, the best story of the collection. It features the first meeting between Jim Walker, ex-serviceman and now Pinkerton agent, and Sanford 'Crash' Haus, owner of a travelling American carnival. Both are different enough to be characters in their own right, while staying perfectly true to the original Holmes/Watson dynamic. The writing is beautiful, with an exotic, evocative atmosphere that you want to cling on to when you reach the last page. I am delighted to hear that Abbadon books are now producing a collection of three novellas based on this anthology, and that Jamie Wyman's Crash will be featured, as the best I can say for A Scandal In Hobohemia, its world and its characters, it is that of all of these tales, it is the one that I want more of!
Overall, the stories in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets range from enjoyable to engaging, with only a couple of near-misses and one or two direct bullseyes. Occasionally the stories see, but do not observe, but when an author judges it perfectly, as several do, the result is quite simply... elementary!
1 De la Hayle, Joan. 'The Rich Man's Hand' in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014, p. 84
2 De la Hayle, p. 85
3 Lovegrove, James. 'The Innocent Icarus' in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014, pp. 215-6
4 Tchaikovsky , Adrian, The Final Conjuration, n Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014,pp. 186
5 Newman, Emma, A Woman's Place, in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets ed. Moore, David Thomas, Abaddon Books, 2014, pp. 118
