The Dark Origins of Sherlock Holmes
BY RON MILLER
It's now part of the Holmesian legend that writer Arthur Conan
Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in the
history of mystery fiction, by modeling him on his former teacher
at medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell.
Conan Doyle Biographer Daniel Stashower, in his Edgar and Agatha award-winning "Teller of Tales" (Henry Holt, $32.50), tells us what the young medical student saw when he first met Dr. Bell: "He was a tall man with piercing gray eyes, sharp features, and an eagle-beak nose."
Sound a bit like Sherlock Holmes? Well, that's only
where the similarity began. Dr. Bell, who was then just 39 years
old, also had a nervous manner of moving about, much like Holmes
would have when pondering a seriously frustrating puzzle in his
flat at 221b Baker St.
Best of all, though, is the fact that Dr. Bell specialized in deductions based on close observation. Like Holmes, he could tell you exactly where a man lived, worked and how he got along with his wife, just by looking him over in his consulting room without a single word of interrogation.
Conan Doyle not only left copious notes suggesting Dr. Bell, his professor at medical school in Edinburgh, was the model for Sherlock Holmes, but also openly stated it to the press and public on several public occasions.
Dr. Bell was flattered by the attention paid him by Conan Doyle, although some historians suggest the flattery wore a little thin over the years, especially when too many Holmes addicts turned up at his door to get his autograph.
But what if Dr. Bell had a secret life that the creator of Sherlock Holmes never told us about in all his stories and articles? What if Scotland Yard was even more impressed by the brilliant surgeon's analytical skills than Conan Doyle was?
That's the key premise behind "Murder Rooms: The Dark Origins of Sherlock Holmes," the two-part season finale for PBS' "Mystery!" that premieres this week. David Pirie's original teleplay tells us that Dr. Bell didn't just walk and talk like Sherlock, but also solved cases like him.
In this rather charming Victorian set of thrillers, Dr. Bell is played by one of England's all-time great stars of stage, screen and television, Ian Richardson. He's a masterful actor who has even been one of the screen's best Sherlocks on a couple of occasions during the final quarter of the 20th century. You may best remember him for his commanding performance in TV's "House of Cards" trilogy, playing a corrupt British politician who rises to become a wicked prime minister with the help of his own modern Lady Macbeth.
But Richardson is all hero in "Murder Rooms," playing Dr. Bell as a sort of 1890s Batman, working by day as a brilliant doctor and teacher, but going to work at night as a special consulting detective for Scotland Yard, tackling the really tough cases that stump the real detectives.
Adding to the fun is the fact that "Murder Rooms" makes us believe Dr. Bell couldn't get the job done without a little help from his eager admirer and student disciple, young Arthur Conan Doyle (Robin Laing), who becomes, in effect, Bell's Dr. Watson.
Sherlockians will, of course, become apoplectic when they see that actor Laing is a boyishly slim and unimposing Conan Doyle. Don't we all know by now that Conan Doyle, even in his college days, was a great bear of a man with a ruddy complexion, hands like hams and a thick Scottish accent. Laing has none of the above. So much for realism.
Still, "Murder Rooms" is a mostly engaging fiction, sending Dr. Bell and young Conan Doyle out to catch serial killers while fighting other issues of the day, such as the university's rather blatant discrimination against females. Women get the short end quite a lot in this two-parter, which takes place in un-liberated England during Victorian times. You'll no doubt gape with astonishment, for instance, when you see the negative public attitude toward wives who contract venereal disease, even if they innocently catch it from their whoring husbands.
There's even what PBS calls "a cameo appearance" by Jack the Ripper, who never became the quarry of Sherlock Holmes, though he was busy killing London hookers right when Conan Doyle was writing his early Sherlock stories. (However, Holmes has pursued Jack in a few pastiches about Holmes that were written by others after Conan Doyle's death in 1930.)
Lots of imagination has been used to bring Dr. Bell to life for the first time as a detective in his own right. In one scene, we see he has built his own "black museum" of famous crimes in his home. In another, Bell astonishes young Conan Doyle by whipping a dead body, then firing bullets into the cadaver, all for the sake of learning how to tell post-mortem trauma from injuries inflicted while the victim was still alive.
The script also weaves in some killer lines, like the time Dr. Bell tells his students that today's classroom demonstration is "an elementary procedure." We can almost imagine his favorite student taking notes and saying to himself, "Elementary! Now that's a word Holmes might use!"
Even more clever is the moment where Dr. Bell tells Conan Doyle, "I could have you thrown out of my class for impertinence!" He doesn't, of course, and makes him his clerk instead.
One has to wonder what might have happened if the real Dr. Bell really had thrown Conan Doyle out of his class for something. If he had, maybe a vengeful student might have used him for the model for the evil Professor Moriarty instead of Sherlock Holmes and I wouldn't be writing this column after all.
© 2000 by Ron Miller
RON MILLER WILL AUTOGRAPH COPIES OF HIS BOOK "MYSTERY!
A CELEBRATION," OFFICIAL COMPANION BOOK TO TV'S "MYSTERY!"
SERIES, FOR READERS WHO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SPECIAL DISCOUNT
OFFER OF
$20 PER COPY, PLUS $4 POSTAGE. SEND YOUR CHECKS OR MONEY ORDERS
TO "MILLER BOOK," c/o THECOLUMNISTS.COM, P.O. BOX 3429,
LOS ALTOS, CA 94024.
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |
Want to sponsor this page? Call 650-949-5573 about the sponsorship program for TheColumnists.com.