Where are we going to now?

 "Where are we going to now?' I asked, as we left the office.

 The Paget illustration and the quote above are from "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty." I was poking around in that Sherlock Holmes case this morning trying to sort out when the events of the case likely occurred. Oh, do not take that the wrong way. I was not attempting to discern Watson's chronology. I was simply rereading the opening of the story followed by the notes of several Sherlockian chronologists as to their thoughts upon the matter. A comparison of sources indicates the major chronologists do not agree as to the dates but that is hardly surprising. Of the ones I generally consult, they mostly agree the events occurred in July, but vary between 1887, 1888 and 1889. Why am I spending time on this? Because, like Watson, I need to know "Where are we going to now?"

I'm at the beginning of writing a Sherlock Holmes story, my first new one in six months. The first part of my (possibly unnecessarily laborious) process is to sort out the "where" of my story: where are we in the Holmes/Watson relationship, where are we in the natural aging of two men, where are we in relation to other cases just finished and those soon to come up? The Holmes and Watson of A Study in Scarlet certainly are not the Holmes and Watson of The Hound of the Baskervilles or of "His Last Bow." Where we are matters.

I don't want Holmes and Watson to be caricatures. I want their actions and words to make sense in relation to what we know about them. I want them to behave in keeping with their ages and changes in circumstances. As Watson said in HOUN, "I have not lived for years with Sherlock Holmes for nothing." And that is it exactly. Watson does not think and behave in HOUN like he did in STUD. I believe if a writer wants to create a Holmes and Watson story that has the breath of life about it, that feels real, the writer must know clearly where we are going to now.

The brief I'm working to requires my story to be inspired by the events of Doyle's "The Leather Funnel." FUNN (as I'm dubbing it for now with thanks to Jay Finley Christ for the training) requires a look at psychometry, and what happens when we dream. How does this fit with a Sherlock Holmes who said "No ghosts need apply"? Well, the same Sherlock Holmes said:

I shall sit in that room and see if its atmosphere brings me inspiration. I'm a believer in the genius loci.  You smile, friend Watson. Well, we shall see.

Are those opposing statements? Perhaps not. The ghost statement comes from "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire." He said the other, the belief in the  genius loci, during the events of The Valley of Fear.  Understanding where Holmes was in time when he made each of those statements will help me to write a better story. And it will help me to make a decision of where to place Holmes and Watson for the new work. 

For some reason unknown to my conscious mind, I have a habit of starting Holmes and Watson stories right after the events of REDH, or right after the events of EMPT.  Will this new story fit in one of those places? I don't know yet.

I know many writers will think me foolish for all this contemplating and will write a half dozen tales while I dither. I can't seem to work any other way. I can't write until I know where we are going now.

Go ahead and smile, friend. I'm smiling, too. We shall see how well it works out.

 

 

 

 

 

Get out the cherry wood: it is time to be disputatious

 

"You have erred, perhaps,' he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs, and lighting with it the long cherry wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood - "you have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing."

I always feel a lot of empathy for Watson when Sherlock Holmes decides to be "disputatious" mostly by being critical of Watson's writings. I can imagine Holmes's tone and diction. As one who struggles to write stories with "colour and life," I can also imagine Watson's chagrin. He had not erred, of course, and, as we know, Holmes came to appreciate Watson's words, going so far as to admit Watson had "some power of selection" and that we must look upon him  "as a man of letters" who, as a chronicler, was "always of use."

Holmes's words have been on my mind of late as I do some of the first editing work for the new anthology. It is not always easy to know where to draw the lines. How does one know how much is too much "colour and life" and how much is too little "severe reasoning?" A good Sherlockian tale must have a balance.  Defining the balance is subjective as hell. 

It was quite easy this week for me to feel disputatious when I read a Sherlock Holmes story within the covers of a major magazine that included something I would heartily discourage in any story I edited: Sherlock Holmes was in an Inverness coat and deerstalker while on a case in the heart of London. Now, I hear the people who will say "And what is wrong with that?" and I'm sure they are correct; it is a vision a modern reader likely accepts without question. 

But this disputatious editor can't see including those words in a traditional Sherlock Holmes adventure. In fact this narrow-minded editor doesn't like to include words that Doyle never used in the Canon. I read a pastiche recently wherein Watson said something about "Holmesian reasoning." There is nothing inherently wrong with those words but I would have recommended removing them from the text. I can't imagine Watson saying "Holmesian" anymore than I can imagine him referring (as I read recently in a supposedly traditional story collection) to Mycroft Holmes as "Sherlock's brother." Canon Watson does not call Holmes by his first name. A search at the Arthur Conan Doyle encyclopaedia tells me that "Sherlock's" does not appear anywhere in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction. It tells me Inverness, Holmesian and deerstalker are not found either. (And don't get me started on Irene Adler being around all the time.)

I realize, however, that a good writer can use those words and still write an excellent story. My task becomes how to be like Watson. I need "some power of selection" as I attempt shape a book readers will enjoy. Sometimes it as Watson answered another one of Holmes's criticisms: "But the romance was there" and "I could not tamper with the facts."

I must not, disputatiously or otherwise, tamper too much.