Holmes is the perfect enigma. Betwixt the tweed deer-stalking/crime-stalking hat and the briar pipe (two theatrical props that scream ‘Holmes’ like a man looking into the eyes of a skull screams ‘Hamlet’) exists a mind that glints with precision and science and technique as much as it effervesces with creativity and imagination and beauty; it is a mind up with which it is impossible to keep. Show me the reader who solves the mystery before Holmes does and I will show you a bally liar. Or is that a Keith Waterhouse novel? Anyhow, the point is that Holmes reveals or conceals information as he wishes in order to manipulate those around him, whether they are criminals, or friends, or both, or all three. However, whilst we are thrilled by the theatre of his refusal to let us into his head before the climax of the plot, we are, as if by a magician who explains his tricks after he has performed them, rewarded with the reveal in the dénouement.
Of course, many is the time we see him on the back foot and he works himself almost to death on more than one occasion, but this is of immense reassurance since I think at the moment we like to see our heroes bleed occasionally. Furthermore, there is always a logical explanation and in a world where many have great difficulty understanding the mindset of those that do them harm, I think Holmes is of some.
Whatever his function within the zeitgeist may be, much of his entertainment value lies in the adoption of a personality, which partly explains his position as a cult figure. Holmes is a master of disguise and nearly gives Watson (his Horatio if we are to continue the Hamlet allegory, though any double-act with homoerotic undertones would do) apoplexy when he arrives at Watson’s residence some two or three years after apparently toppling to his death with Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls. One moment he is an old man with a crooked back who Watson has never seen before; Watson then turns round to look at something and when he has turned back Holmes stands before him. Watson faints ‘for the first and last time in his life’. This coup de théâtre is the perfect example of Holmes taking a great deal of joy in his work; he has had to fake his own death to defeat the henchmen of Professor Moriarty, but also acknowledges his arrival at Watson’s to be an ‘unnecessarily dramatic appearance’. His theatricality, like all the best actors, is both a modus operandi and a pleasure.
J
CastingBroadly 