Three Titles for One Sherlock Holmes Movie

            

Ann and I recently watched the Basil Rathbone – Nigel Bruce film Sherlock Holmes: Prelude to Murder. What – you’ve never heard of that one? Neither had I! 

That’s the title under which Amazon Prime serves up Dressed to Kill, the last of the 14 Rathbone-Bruce film outings as the immortal duo. And it’s colourized! Purists may hate the tampering with the original black and white, but I enjoyed it. It was a different experience, and a good one for me. The costumes and sets really popped out because of the color contrast. 

Once we started watching the movie, the Dressed to Kill title came up. Apparently, that refers to Mrs. Hilda Courtney (what was Mr. Courtney like?), who has some great wardrobe changes and what Roger Johnson calls “the most bizarre hat in the entire series.” The lovely Patricia Morison, who played the part, died in 2018 at the age of 103. 

Roger’s 48-page review of the 12 Universal Studios Holmes films, “Ready When You Are, Mr. Rathbone,” was published by the Northern Musgraves Sherlock Holmes Society as Musgrave Monograph Number Three in 1992. In it, Roger notes that “Dressed to Kill was released in Britain under the rather banal title of Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Code.” 

Banal it may be, but that title strikes me as the most fitting of the three in terms of the plot. To refresh your memory, this is the one with the musical boxes. 

Roger sums up the movie rather nicely when he says, “Dressed to Kill is by no means top rank Sherlock Holmes, but (adaptor) Frank Gruber and (screenwriter) Leonard Lee have devised a clever plot which really stretches Holmes’s capabilities.” 

The number of dedicated Sherlockians worldwide whose first exposure to Holmes came from the Rathbone-Bruce series must number in the hundreds or thousands. My experience was different. I’d already read much of the Canon and may have even owned my first Complete Sherlock Holmes before I saw any of these movies. It took me a long time to get over the buffoonish Watson, the uncanonical plots, and the 1940s setting. 

But I thought from the first time I saw him in the part, as I think now, that Basil Rathbone is a marvelous Sherlock Holmes.

ACD's Holmes Beyond the Canon

The 1981 Castle Books edition (left) and the 1995 Barnes & Noble 

Even if your Sherlock Holmes library is less than a shelf, it should include a book of the apocrypha, Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings about Holmes that are not part of the Canon. That includes, at minimum, two plays, two sketches, and two short stories (in which Holmes is unmistakably referenced but not named).

Such a book is The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited by Peter Haining. I already a Barnes & Noble copy of this 1995 book and recently acquired the earlier Castle Books edition from the library of the late R. Joel Senter, Sr., published in August 1981. Although I’m not a collector, I sometimes keep different editions of a book that happen to come my way.

(The Haining anthology is not to be confused with the Heritage Press book of the same name, edited and with an epilogue by Edgar W. Smith, which brings together His Last Bow, The Valley of Fear, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. It was published in 1952, the year I was born. I inherited one of those from Joel, too.)

The Haining collection is a good one, but I don’t think it’s the best. For my thoughts on the superior version of the apocryphal Holmes, please click here to read my earlier blog post on Leslie S. Klinger’s The Apocrypha of Sherlock Holmes.

"The Joy of Sherlock Holmes"

I just read A Study in Sherlock, but not the new book edited by Laurie King and Les Klinger. (I'll get to that one eventually.)

This Study is a 24-page guide to the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection at Portsmouth, England, a marvelous assemblage of books, posters, photos, and other materials collected by the late Richard Lancelyn Green. He chose Portsmouth to house the collection because it was there, at No. 1 Bush Villas in Southsea, that young Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle -- lacking patients -- wrote A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.

Although brief, the booklet is a nice introduction to ACD and Sherlock Holmes. I particularly liked the foreword by British actor Stephen Fry, which ends with these insightful paragraphs:

Conan Doyle created a modern hero in the sense that Holmes is someone who uses modern society, who is involved in it, implicated in it, and who is like a spider in a web who reads every twitch of the filament of the web. He understands it, he knows the soils in the ground, he knows the cigar ash. All of the modern things that people have he can trace.

The whole point of Holmes is the way he works within a world that was chaotic, but fundamentally knowable, in the way that disease is knowable and the body is a mechanism that gives away its secrets to those that can read them. The joy of Shelrock Holmes
is that it is the last gasp of a readable world, and we love reading a world like that. The idea that you can read with such precision is now seen as more or less old fashioned, but it is so comforting.

Reading A Study in Sherlock made me want to see the exhibit and a special film called "The Case of the Portsmouth Doctor," a Sherlock Holmes adventure built around specific items in the collection. Perhaps I will be able to visit on my trip to England next spring.

The booklet was part of an amazing packet of Sherlockian goodies sent to me by Mr. Dennis Moore, a proud resident of Portsmouth who is a friend of a friend. I hope that he is now my friend as well. One of the other items he sent me was a marvelous poster of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which I will frame and hang in the room in which I write.

What is your favorite Sherlock Holmes collection or museum?

The Very Irish Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

On Friday I have the honor of talking about “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes: The Irish Connections” to a luncheon group in Cincinnati called The Irish Salon. I’m going to begin by establishing my own Irish credentials. My mother’s maiden name – which she always used as a middle name – was Patterson. Although I am told that is the third largest clan in Scotland, my first Patterson ancestor in America came from Ireland in the 18th Century.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Scottish by birth, Irish by descent, British by imperialist conviction. Sherlock Holmes was English by birth, Irish-American by disguise in “His Last Bow.”

Although he spoke with a soft Scottish burr until the end of his life and once referred to himself in a letter as “half-Irish,” Conan Doyle was actually 100 percent Irish except by accident of birth in Scotland. His father, the artist Charles Altamont Doyle, had been born in England of Irish parents. His uncle, Henry Doyle, founded the National Gallery of Ireland. His mother, the former Mary Foley, was also Irish. Upon graduation from medical school in 1881, Conan Doyle visited his Foley cousins in Linsmore, County Waterford, where he seems to have had a marvelous time.

Conan Doyle was educated at Jesuit schools, but by the time he left Stonyhurst College (where he met two boys named Moriarty) and went on to medical school he was no longer a Catholic. In fact, he was mildly anti-Catholic. “I never thought I could have found a friend in a Roman Catholic priest,” he wrote to his mother in 1918. But he did. The cleric in question was his much younger cousin, Father Richard Barry-Doyle, founder of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association.

It seems to me that even after shedding forever one kind of Irish religion, the Roman Catholic, Conan Doyle retained – or perhaps eventually regained – a very Irish belief in the supernatural. He became an ardent and courageous missionary for spiritualism in his later years. Embarrassingly, at least to his friends, he also wrote a book in 1922 stating his belief in fairies. What could be more Irish than that?