The Great and Inimitable Sherlock Holmes

Imagine for a moment that the world is lit by gaslight. The Victorian Era is in full swing. Gentlemen wear frock coats and top hats, women wear dresses and gloves. The world smells of horses and coal smoke and the unpleasant stench of the Thames River.  Mists waft down cobblestone streets and the livery of crime is not shown by the clothes but by the deep and sinister motivations of corrupt humanity. 

In this world of telegrams and horse-drawn carriages, a criminal is only as guilty as the police are adept. Nefarious deeds cause mayhem and the culprits get away more than not. Nothing so technical as forensics yet exists. There are no DNA databases, nor fingerprint records. There Is only the endless string of mysteries and a sullen city beset by an element ready to commit blackmail, theft, forgery, kidnapping and, most notoriously, murder.

Amid this crime-ridden city is a penetrating intellect of such incredible power, that his name has become synonymous with solving crimes and his skill in the art of detection—an art that he built almost entirely with his own masterful abilities--is world-renown. 

He has solved every kind of perplexing crime, from stolen Naval treaties to ghostly hounds haunting the Devonshire countryside and everything in between. When a mystery baffles the police, or an outré adventure that requires more than the police can manage, there is only one man to seek.

Modern audiences may not recognize the man waiting in the rooms of 221B Baker Street. This man is not wearing a cloak or deerstalker cap nor is he smoking a Meerschaum pipe. These images came much later when the great consulting detective appeared in film. Rather, the man is tall, rail-thin, with hawk-like features. He is fastidiously neat, with eyes sharp as any bird of prey. He prefers a black clay pipe and can play his Stradivarius violin extremely well.

Ask anyone and they will already know the man that I refer to. He is the world's greatest detective, a crime diagnostician with genius-level mental acuity and energy. Here is the man we have come to know as Sherlock Holmes.

We know of Holmes because of his sole friend and companion, the redoubtable John H. Watson. This magnificent biographer, without whom there would be no tales of Sherlock Holmes, is the composer of the many short stories and four novel-length tales of the great detective. He has been a firsthand observer of the many fantastic adventures where the magnificent Holmes solves cases that defy the average mind. 

Unlike our modern conception of Watson, who is often portrayed as a heavy-set, older man with greying hair and a perpetual look of dubious surprise on his face, the Watson we know from the books is much different. He describes himself as less than Holmes, but is forever ready for a fight, is himself an amateur practitioner of the Holmesian method of deduction, and is of an age with Holmes, so that, while he is probably physically larger, he is not old or obese.

Together, the detective and the biographer have solved 60 documented crimes, 56 short stories, and four novels, but with countless other mysteries mentioned in the background. These stories, usually published in a periodical, were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and became a sensation in his own time.

Holmes and Watson are, with few exceptions, known around the world. They have become part of our modern idiom. Anytime anyone solves a problem that baffles others, or when someone uses observation to make a deduction successfully, we are wittingly or unwittingly nodding at this great literary forebear. 

Sherlock Holmes, of course, was not real, but during his time in print, he was a superhero in his own right, and while his stories were still being published, people would write in or seek to find Conan Doyle to ask for the detective’s help. Imagine their distraught cries of agony when they discovered that Holmes and Watson were no more than the merest figment of the author’s imagination. 

Watson first meets Holmes in the novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887) while looking for a place to live. He is admittedly put off by Holmes’s somewhat rude and single-minded nature, but eventually, the two become friends, as Watson watches Holmes solve a mystery that began in the Utah desert, when a man, left by two Mormons with a little girl to die, comes to England and gets his revenge.

This book was so successful that Conan Doyle began writing a second novel with the duo called, The Sign of the Four (1890). Then, came a series of twelve short stories published in The Strand magazine, called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), followed by The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). The final twelve stories were punctuated with the tale of how Holmes died while defeating the “Napoleon of Crime”, James Moriarty by plummeting with him into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. 

Conan Doyle breathed a sigh of relief, believing that he had put an end to his great consulting detective, but public outcry at Holmes’s premature death was such that he published his third (and in this writer’s opinion, the best) novel featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Watson, called The Hound of the Baskervilles (in several parts in 1901 and 1902). I treat this book with its due reverence in another essay, but I will add here that there is no more powerfully written and engaging book of the crime and mystery genre. The book takes place before Holmes’s death, but the story only whetted the public’s appetite for more stories.

Eight years later, having experienced a great deal of fuss, including, allegedly, a bomb in his mailbox, Doyle gave in to public pressure and wrote another series of thirteen stories called (unironically) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). It is at the beginning of this series where Holmes, not dead, but in hiding from several of Moriarty's henchmen, has been plotting and planning to bring these men to justice and accidentally meets with Watson while in disguise. 

In 1914, Conan Doyle wrote the last Sherlock Holmes Novel, The Valley of Fear, which figures prominently in the coal regions just north of my home county in Pennsylvania and deals with (in other names) the Molly MacGuires and the coal strikes and is the second-best novel of the four.

Then, in 1917, Doyle published seven more tales in, His Last Bow. Finally, in 1927, he released thirteen more short stories in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes which culminated forty years, minus a brief hiatus, of Sherlock Holmes stories. 

Although considered outside the Sherlock Holmes Canon, Conan Doyle wrote several plays, ‘vignettes’, and essays in which Holmes is referred to or makes appearances. Beyond these, there are several other collections of short stories, written by other authors featuring Holmes and Watson that are available to those who may not claim themselves to be purists and many are worth reading, including one by Stephen King, called The Doctor’s Case in which Watson uses the methods he has been taught by Holmes to solve a murder.

Many others have keened the edge of their writing by trying to emulate Conan Doyle’s master consulting detective, but regardless of how good they appear to be, a real fan can (while being happy to read another Holmes and Watson tale) detect the counterfeit. Although he had a love/hate relationship with his most famous character and felt much of his life’s work fell by the wayside because of Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hit upon a stroke of genius when he first wrote about Holmes and Watson and the world is a better place for it.

On New Year’s Day, 2023, the entire canon of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories became public domain, which means that anyone can write a Sherlock Holmes movie or novel or book without the express permission of Conan Doyle's estate. There are at least 67 films about Holmes, and upwards of 29 TV shows featuring the duo. The best non canonical movie is the 1985 adventure film called Young Sherlock Holmes, depicting the consulting detective as a teenager solving crimes and meeting Watson as a fellow student. I would give the two Guy Ritchie films, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the adventurous Victorian partners, a nod as they are entertaining, but not quite accurate enough to feel genuine. 

For a true and honorable variant of the Holmes stories, one must turn to the Grenada series, made popular on PBS, which was faithful, both to the original tales and novels and to the descriptions of Holmes and Watson in those stories. Jeremy Brett beautifully captures the impulsive and sometimes manic and depressive Holmes, while first David Burke and then Nigel Hardwicke portrayed Watson. Of the original canon, 43 of Conan Doyle’s stories were adapted, and an admirable, if somewhat dated (now) full-length made-for-TV film of The Hound of the Baskervilles is worth a watch, now free on YouTube.

Sherlock Holmes has been represented in film and on television by countless actors, though in the middle of the 20th Century, he was probably most notably made into radio and cinematic reality by the portrayal of Basil Rathbone (as Holmes) and Nigel Bruce as Watson. This may be where the deerstalker cap, cloak, Meerschaum pipe and magnifying glass that now encapsulate our concept of Sherlock Holmes took the public imagination. This, too, is where we get the obese and older and somewhat perplexed Watson.

Regardless of how he is (or will be) represented, though, there is no doubt that there is only one real and true consulting detective and only one albeit fictional biographer. When there is a crime that no one else can solve and when you are at your last end of hope, simply send or go yourself to 221 B Baker Street, London and apply to the one man who can help you: Sherlock Holmes.

Breaking Walt

Upon receiving a terminal lung cancer diagnosis, high school chemistry teacher Walter White spirals into a crisis of mortality. He soon finds that his treatments will not only not save him, but that the cost will leave his family bankrupt after he dies. The Whites are a lower-middle-class family living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His wife, Skyler is pregnant and their teenage son, Walt Jr., has cerebral palsy. After going on a ride-along with his DEA agent brother-in-law to take down a meth lab, Walt discovers two life-changing facts. He realizes that he has the chemistry skill and know-how to “cook” meth. He then clicks on the fact that selling brings in a lot of money.

And so, in a jangled and sometimes hilariously inept way, Walt embarks on a criminal career, using his chemical skill to create the most potent and pure methamphetamine that the southwest drug culture has ever known. With the help of a hapless former student, Jesse Pinkman, Walt is confident they can make enough money to pay for his treatments and care for his family after he is gone. To cover his duplicity, though, Walt devises an alternate persona which he aptly names Heisenberg, after the German theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg who developed the “uncertainty principle”. In this brilliant bit of logic, the real Heisenberg suggested that the more we know about one property of the physical world (say momentum) the less we can know about another property. The sobriquet is appropriate because as one side of Walt’s life becomes more chaotic, the man he was before he learned that he had terminal lung cancer becomes less known.

Things go from bad to worse, though, as careless dealers, underworld kingpins, addiction to power, family troubles and his DEA agent brother-in-law hamper and hassle Walt's plans from the outset. This goes on for almost three seasons before Walter White finds himself in the employ of a notoriously dangerous and yet unassuming drug lord who brilliantly uses his fast-food fried chicken franchises as fronts for an illicit meth empire. Suddenly the Everyman chemistry teacher and the ne’er-do-well Pinkman are faced with the brutal and heartless realities of cartel assassins, drug deals gone wrong and their deeply messed up personal lives.

Breaking Bad premiered on AMC in 2008 and ran for five fraught seasons (representing only one year of Walt's life), gaining a cult following and enjoying incredible success. I missed all of it. Even when we did have cable and access to AMC, I didn't watch the show. It had zero appeal for me and I only knew about it peripherally for much of its five-year run. The basic premise was understood; a high school chemistry teacher gets cancer and sells meth to pay his bills. I didn't understand how this premise kept people locked in, but it did.

Fast-forward to 2024. I spent much of the first half of this year re-watching the True Detective series on Mondays when everyone was at work and I had the den to myself. This batch of amazingly well-written and well-performed crime dramas captured and kept my attention, so that, as spring warmed to summer, I developed a slight taste for the genre. But again, I was behind the times. The latest True Detective season aired on Sundays while I played catch-up. By the time it was over and I was up-to-date on the drama series, I needed a break from crime TV shows. Having watched other shows like Dexter and The Sopranos, I understood that, in order to truly appreciate the style, one has to see oneself in some of the characters. The gritty, dark atmosphere, the tough personal consequences of being a hard-bitten criminal trying to balance a life of crime with the challenges of protecting and nurturing a family that is one of the motifs of these shows is wearing.

Then, in the early Autumn, Breaking Bad arrived on Netflix. For years, I had said that I would eventually watch the show that had become such a cultural phenomenon and at about that time, my hankering for more crime drama was getting stronger, so I dug in.

All I can say is that I truly have mixed feelings for it. The premise, the writing, the acting, the set design and the breadth of the storyline are all top-tier. The show is a deeply layered masterpiece of American criminality. Walt’s swing out into the crime underbelly is often shocking and regularly depressing. The other characters, too, all seem to have the same inability to get things right. At every step, their relationships, their intentions and plans all go awry, often in ways that are heartwrenching and abhorrent.

There is also the sense of the power and ubiquity of crime combined with the ever-present threat of the law. Everywhere Walt turns, he finds those who have their hands out for his ill-gotten gains or his talent for cooking meth. Every step of the way, too, is his brother-in-law, Hank, the DEA agent who is always one step behind, always almost figuring out who Heisenberg really is. The tension for viewers is sometimes unbearable.

Breaking Bad is about mortality and how we decide to live our lives when faced with death. And yet, Walt’s story poses a more painful question about morality, the answer of which, takes us on a wild ride of absurdism and low-level horror. Almost from the moment he decides to sell methamphetamine, Walt begins a metamorphosis that is more comically tragic than gritty or seedy. Although the show is most assuredly a crime drama, there is an element of black comedy to it that brings appeal, if not pure amusement. Walt's bumbling misadventures eventually set him on a path of evil, where he finds himself experiencing the gamut of drug crime, from overdose to murder. The explicit philosophical argument is that a man who sells his morality for illegal monetary gain eventually becomes irredeemably corrupt, regardless of how noble his motivations were in the beginning.

Implicitly, though, the show is about downfall. The downfall of the American family unit, the powerlessness of the law, the disintegration of loyalty, and, sadly, the illusion of financial stability. Almost everyone in the show is deeply irredeemable, each spiraling out of the orbit of an ideal life. Walt’s downfall is the most poignant and prominent, but each of the characters (except one) devolves into something else, bringing into sharp contrast the cost of protecting one’s family. But even this seemingly noble motivation breaks down, as Walt in the last season admits to his estranged wife that he did all this because he liked it and was good at it.

As he plummets, Walt's relationships are eviscerated. The conflict with his wife, Skyler, sets the viewer's teeth on edge with unending marital anxiety. Eventually, even Skyler is corrupted as she learns of her husband's lurch into manufacturing drugs for a cartel. She has her own problems and experiences a series of mishaps and moral quandaries that change her, too. None of the other characters, no matter how sympathetic we find them, ever become more than a tragic figure, doomed by Walt’s original sin.

Breaking Bad is, if you can handle it, a Shakespearian tragedy writ large upon the modern consciousness. In Elizabethan times, the best way to convey tragedy (based on ancient Greek traditions) was to have everyone die at the end. In the modern era, though, the best way to convey tragedy is to have people face inescapable consequences without being rescued by heroes or finding sudden redemption. Though there are serious differences, Walt’s struggle is similar to that of Macbeth. At each stage of his story arc, he looks to a point where he can have the money and be done with the crime. Each life taken, each relationship ruined, each loss of humanity or morality is ostensibly the last hurdle before Walt can get back to the brief final months of his life with his family. This is the case with Walt. Although, to an extent, he is redeemed at least for his role in Jesse Pinkman's own traumas, his actions throughout the show condemn almost everyone else around him to catastrophe and death, too.

I say “almost” because there is one incorruptible character in the show. He is an anti-hero, a man motivated to do what he does for his family, but he is unconflicted about it. I’m referring, of course to Mike Ehrmantraut, the ‘heavy’ for Gus Fring. Mike manages to be the most morally complex character, despite his strong code. He balances Walt’s bumbling and halting attempts to become masterful by being true to himself and his goals and being good at being a bad guy. The reason that Mike is so liked by fans of the show (and why his character resurfaced in the spin-off of Breaking Bad called “Better Call Saul”) is that he provides a durable moral island in a chaotic sea of decline, moral relativism and self-loathing. That is perhaps why I find Mike to be the one character who, although destroyed by Walt, is nevertheless, untainted by Walt's moral descent.

While I would certainly recommend Breaking Bad to veterans of crime drama, I would also warn that the show has a strong gravity, pulling viewers into the gloom of its mythos and I felt this personally. The show is grim at times and I found myself feeling grim (more than usual) as a result. Unlike other crime drama subgenres, Breaking Bad managed to capture distinctly American criminality, blending corruption and greed with the metastasis of cancerous morality. The Sopranos is about a mob boss. Dexter is about a serial killer who kills serial killers. Breaking Bad is about regular people caught in the crushing gravity of regular life and looking desperately for a way out and hoping that money, however obtained, will solve their problems, no matter the cost to their humanity.

If you’ve never watched it I recommend it, but I do so with a caveat: be prepared to be depressed.

Back At It

After October and my hard leftward jaunt into outré fiction for the Spooky Season, I have decided to swing back to center and continue my regular weekly essays. 

With that in mind, especially in light of some of the recent national events, I will be writing less often (for now) about politics and religion. Not because these no longer bother me (they do) but because I am unable to find it within myself to adequately state how disappointed and frustrated I am with my fellow mammals. I may at some point be able to strike a solid note on these topics, but for right now, my anger is such that it would be the jangled, unhinged, desperate cacophony of a madman let loose on a grand piano. That helps no one.

Rather, I would like to try to keep my readers (you few, dedicated, wonderful ones) engaged with upbeat, thoughtful and hopefully interesting topics. So much of our reading and scrolling is doom and gloom. A light here and there might help to keep our eyes fixed on the benefits of free thought, free inquiry, free speech and find hope for the future.

So What Now?

This blog began as a way to catalog hikes, travels, books read, recipes tried, opinions spawned. I think it still works like this, for right now. Some things have changed. Hiking has morphed into running. Our travels have been decidedly narrow since we returned (almost 8 years ago) from the UK. I still read and will review books, but I'd like to add TV shows and movies to the list. I want to add the odd recipe here, or at least, speak about food more and my opinions will be, as usually is the case, decidedly my own. 

I also want to write more about music. It is one of the center foundations of my life and yet, I rarely express my feelings about music in this format.

Growing Past Anger

In 2017, I took my last drink of alcohol and joined AA after a long and desperate battle with substance abuse disorder. In the last seven (and a half) years, my recovery journey has helped me deal with my deep-seated anger and pain from my youth and given me back a sense of mental and physical health that I once believed was gone forever.

In those several years, I learned to see myself as I am warts and all. Although I do not want to use this particular platform to talk about sobriety, I do want to talk a bit about some of the challenges faced and tools gained in that time that have helped me deal with life when it feels overwhelming.

I know how fortunate I have been, both with the support of family and friends. I hope to pass on what I have learned, hoping that it will aid in the stress of the times and maybe help someone feel that when life gets unmanageable, as mine had become, there is a way out.

Finally, The Academy or the Street

For years, as the world’s cultural tides have ebbed and flowed, I have taken part in discussions, arguments and written position pieces designed to open or broaden the public's mind. As I have taken up my trusty laptop to do this, I have tried to model myself after great writers and thinkers like Kant, Orwell, Thomas Paine, Socrates and Christopher Hitchens.

I believe in the intellectual powers and the critical faculties and though I do not have their reach or their scope, to me there are few activities more rewarding than trying to make a case for free thought and breaking out of the addictive and poisonous delusions that corrupt the human mind so easily, as those great writers also did.

From time to time, I am asked by one of the handful of people who read my essays if I would ever consider writing a book. Admittedly, though I write almost all the time, I find the idea both tempting and also well beyond my ability. The shorter “column” or “article” seems to—like with my fiction stories—fit my brand, such as it is. 

It has been something that I intend to do, however, and it seems to me that a book of essays might gain me a slightly farther reach than this blog has managed. Either way, until we are picking up stones and fighting in the street against the powers of authoritarianism and hate, the best way, and the way I am most comfortable fighting is with the incendiary bombs on the page and in the essay. The martial skills learned in the academy are, for me, the ones now needed more than ever before.

A book might be in the future for both styles (fiction and nonfiction) even if either winds up being something more like an anthology. For right now, though, I am deeply grateful for your support and hope you will keep reading.