The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892/1984/1991)

"Remarkable, Holmes!", "Meretricious, Watson." "And a Happy New Year."

In which finally reach the climax of two seasons, our Holmes Movies season on adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and of the Christmas season, which we are celebrating with the best present of all: the Granada Sherlock Holmes TV series, starring Jeremy Brett. As is usual with our Seasons, we’re putting this summary outside of the paywall as a little Christmas gift to all readers. And we begin, as all the best stories do, in the sitting room at 221b Baker Street:

I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places…

“I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some crime.”

“No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles.”

So begins Conan Doyle’s 1892 Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892). It opens with this apparently trivial mystery: who owns this hat, recovered in the aftermath of a street brawl. But this apparently meaningless thread turns out to be one end of a tangled skein which leads, finally, to the solution of a crime that has stunned all of London: the theft of the Duchess of Morcar’s ‘Blue Carbuncle’, a giant gemstone.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle is the only Sherlock Holmes story that is properly Christmassy. (As well as being set at Christmas, the story leads us through the guts of at least two geese, both of whom end up as seasonal dinners.) This is the last essay in our Sherlock Holmes season, and it’s nearly Christmas, so focusing on The Blue Carbuncle struck me as being a neat solution. But, like Holmes with his apparently innocuous hat, this choice has led me to solve a far greater mystery: the mystery of what makes a truly great Holmes adaptation.

Sherlock Holmes is, as we saw at the outset of this season, roughly coeval with cinema. This is not at all a coincidence; both were the products of a technological revolution, and the cultural and social revolutions that ensued from it. The Industrial Revolution led to massive demographic changes in Britain. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, over 50% of the population lived in cities. As this increasingly urbanised populace became more literate, it created a new mass market for print, as well as for new forms of media: the telegraph, radio, photography and cinema.

Sherlock Holmes was a creation of and for this new mass media: fundamentally democratic, available and comprehensible to all. And he was the perfect hero for the times: an urban bourgeois professional, distinguished by talent and training rather than birth. Such figures stand for the rule of law, not rule by aristocrats. They are fundamentally democratic, binding together and equalising the diversity of urban life.

And Conan Doyle positioned his characters perfectly for this new Imperial city. Part of his genius was to take the neurasthenic aesthetes of Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories -- shut up in their dim, smoky boudoirs languidly turning the leaves of abstruse philosophies -- and turn them into approachable, bourgeois, British figures. Watson is a square-shouldered, rugby-playing ex-army doctor, bluff and approachable; Holmes is an egalitarian autodidact, so patriotic that he shoots the Queen’s initials into the wall of his sitting room. This makes Holmes the perfect detective for the newly mobile, ambitious and fervid Victorian London.

The detective story was structurally well suited to the new mass media, being easily comprehensible and endlessly reusable. The inherent touchpoints -- set up, development, resolution -- lend themselves to almost any theme, and can take all kinds of shapes. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, for example, gives us a series of strange vignettes: first the hat (which proves inconsequential), then the gemstone, then a goose, then a chance encounter, and finally a confession. At the end Holmes, in a fit of seasonal charity, lets the villain run free -- apart, that is, from his burden of guilt.

This episodic structure echoes Conan Doyle’s approach to the Holmes universe. The original stories are, for the most part, episodic; each is a self-contained story, and aside from recurring characters each is largely unrelated to the others. This makes them highly suited to adaptation into single, coherent movies, items of mass entertainment that can be picked up and put down as the audience requires, easily disposable and always on hand.

For the same reasons, the stories are well suited to television. There are three basic forms of fiction on television: the single play or TV movie; the endlessly evolving serialised drama; and the episodic show. As we have seen, Holmes can be fitted into all of these structures. Sherlock (2010) attempted to make Holmes the hero of a serialised drama; the 2002 TV movie Hound of the Baskervilles featured an excellent Watson from Ian Hart. Episodic drama, however, is Holmes’s natural home, partly because of its urban setting. It mimics the experience of everyday life in the city, relying as it does on encounters with a stream of starkly drawn strangers; unpredictable little stories that we come into long after they’ve begun, and leave long before they’re finished.

So as well as choosing Holmes’s most Christmassy story, I’m ending this series of essays with a look at my favourite Holmes adaptations: Granada TV’s ‘80s series, and the BBC Radio Four adaptations of the ‘90s. The Granada series was a serious undertaking. Not only did the producers build a whole Victorian street set in Manchester; they also adapted over forty of the original stories before the untimely death of the star, Jeremy Brett. The Radio Four series, meanwhile, is the only adaptation to have covered all of the stories using the same actors as Holmes and Watson (Clive Merrison and Michael Williams), and is a masterpiece of audio drama.

Both are faithful period adaptations, but both have to do a little work to squeeze Blue Carbuncle into the episodic structure. Conan Doyle could get away with his strange shaggy dog construction in print, using Watson’s narration to paper over the gaps, but broadcast drama needs something more predictable. Both adaptations have to rearrange it into a more conventional mystery shape: crime first, then detection. In the unerring hands of lead writer Bert Coules the Radio 4 version deftly introduces the core mystery and the main characters without giving away anything that might spoil the rest of the story.

Where the Granada TV version succeeds, however, is in casting. Jeremy Brett twinkles and dances, as befits a complicated piece of Christmas decoration. His Holmes manages to combine cerebral asperity with a larky sense of drama that perfectly matches the detective of the stories, as well as perfectly fitting the Christmas atmosphere; japes and jollity in the midwinter darkness.

But it’s in the cameo casting that the Granada version really shines. Rosalind Knight might overplay it as the Duchess of Morcar, but she is set off by that great Discordian of British theatre, Ken Campbell, who is utterly delightful as the capering, quavering villain Ryder.

The best performance, though, is a tiny little appearance by Frank Middlemass as the pitiful Henry Baker, the down-at-heel owner of the mysterious hat with which the story opens. Sat in the firelight of 221b Baker Street, trying to understand what’s happening to him, he delivers a perfect depiction of an educated but impecunious man who has, as Holmes puts it, ‘fallen on evil days’. He captures not just the spirit of the character but the spirit of the story, the way it manages to be both tragic and comic, criminal and trivial. He is, personified, ‘one of those whimsical little incidents’.

And this, it seems to me, is truly key to the successful adaptation of the Holmes stories. In themselves they are decent little plots: murder mysteries, cunning heists, locked-room puzzles. But the plots are not the true delight of the stories, and nor are the characters of Holmes and Watson. Indeed, you could argue that a great deal of the success of the stories is down to how sparingly Conan Doyle draws them, keeping them as iconic as possible.

Instead, what distinguishes Conan Doyle is his use of odd little details on which Holmes fixates. Sometimes these are key to the plot: the smearing of the Hound of the Baskervilles with phosphorous, the strange little drawings in The Adventure of the Dancing Men. Sometimes they’re frankly peculiar, and in the man who is forced to copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica by hand in The Red-Headed League. And sometimes they’re intriguing, like finding an abandoned hat and a goose on Tottenham Court Road.

Any adaptation of Sherlock Holmes must find a way to maintain this weird, sinister, slightly comic note; the odd behaviour and unexpected actions that one discovers among ‘four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles’. The life of a city, in all its venality, comedy and strangeness.

That, and Jeremy Brett in the lead role.

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You can catch up with our all our pieces on Sherlock Holmes in our Seasons strand, starting here, right at the beginning. The beginning of the century, the beginning of cinema and the beginning of the Holmes myth entirely: