Sherlock vs. Downton Abbey

While everyone else has been engrossed in Downton Abbey, a new version of Upstairs, Downstairs, I've been absorbed with the 21^st century reinvention of Sherlock Holmes as Sherlock, easily one of the most fun, well-written series in a decade.

I watched season one of Downton Abbey because of Maggie Smith, always a joy, and cast here as the formidable Dowager Countess trying to ensure that her granddaughter marry a "suitable" husband. I loved Smith and enjoyed the series, but not enough to return.

My reluctance comes from a suspicion of soap operas, that strange hybrid that is neither drama nor opera. I want things to build, explode and resolve in one episode, rather than have to return week after week to discover what Annie, Fanny and Manny were up to since I last saw them. If I want long, drawn-out sagas, I simply ask my friends what's been going on in their love lives and drink tea while pretending to listen.

Sherlock was created by writer/producer Steven Moffat, and writer/actor Mark Gatiss, who plays Sherlock's troublesome brother, Mycroft. The pair worked together on the revised Doctor Who series. (Nothing like the old one. If you haven't seen the recent version with Matt Smith--a comic genius--don’t write it off.)

The BBC has long been known for pairing actors, especially in comedic roles. Think ofJennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous, Aidan Gillen and Craig Kelly in Queer As Folk (before it got turned into a soap opera-with-an-agenda in the US version), David Walliams and Matt Lucas in Little Britain. And now here are Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Sherlock and his sidekick John Watson. The pairing doesn't get much better, either as actors or characters.

While reinventing nearly everything wholesale, it's to the producers' credit that they've remained charmingly true to Conan Doyle's books, beginning with A Study In Pink, a sly retelling of Holmes's first case, A Study In Scarlet. The result is a delirious rewriting of the original stories, as when The Hound of the Baskervilles comes back as The Hounds of Baskerville, an experiment in genetic modification and then some.

For serious fun, this is as good as it gets. Here is Holmes in A Scandal in Belgravia, going off to Buckingham Palace draped in a bed sheet, as angry and imperious as a queen at being forced to do something he doesn't want to do. Elsewhere, he informs two young girls asking him to investigate their grandfather's disappearance that, contrary to what their parents may have said, "People don’t go to Heaven; they’re put in a special box and burned," while John Watson looks on, appalled by his friend's social ineptness.

Of course, it's the twenty-first century, so no one believes two men living together are not gay. And who is to say they’re not? The oddball pairing of Holmes with Watson in the 19^th century may simply have been a case of arrested sexual development. Here, the gay subtext, which is more often ubertext, gets some of the best play in the series, as the two are constantly mistaken for a couple. In fact they are a couple, whatever may or may not go on after the lights go out. In any case, the love between the two men is palpable, if unspoken, from show one.

(Initially, A Study in Pink was shot as a one-off rather than a series pilot, but was later re-made. While it's been decried in some quarters as being low budget, it's still quite good. In fact, the original ending is far more moving than in the remake, with Watson standing pensively in the shadows after having rescued his new friend, Sherlock.)

As with the Hardys, Frank and Joe, and my Fairfax series, featuring Brad and his blue-haired amour Zachary, the series really is about the pairing of the two men. The crime and the criminals come second. But make no mistake, these crimes and their solutions are dead clever. They have to be, for that is the essence of Sherlock Holmes.

Still, it's the interplay of Holmes, all reason, and Watson, the long-suffering that makes everything work. The pairing propels us along with them, envious and yearning to share in their adventures for real, while wishing we had friends as true as these. That’s the secret of Sherlock.

Jeffrey Round is a Toronto writer and filmmaker. His most recent book is the mystery-thriller Lake On The Mountain, from Dundurn Books. Visit: www.jeffreyround.com.

Cable Me Fabulous

It was my week to be a star on cable TV, thanks to the exposure generated by my book, Lake On The Mountain. There it was, the first day of spring, and I found myself a guest on daytime Toronto, Rogers' morning talk show. Host Val Cole was gracious and very comfortable to chat with, which was fortunate as this was a live seven-minute segment with no rehearsal! I managed to be both conscious and alert the entire time as we chatted up the book, so good for me.

Later that week, my house was taken over by funny gal Liz Stembridge and crew (of one, but what the heck!) from the show foQus with Deb Pearce. (Those Rogers folks have got to get it together with their upper and lower case issues.) Liz was a one-woman riot in a very small space (my living room.) While discussing the book and the recent interest from SONY Pictures, we also managed to come up with a small but telling cameo for Liz, should I by any chance get to write, direct and cast the film. (Hey, you never know! If you're curious, it involves Liz wearing an old housedress and swinging a couple of cats by the tail. Animal rights people, back down. They'll be rubber cats!)

And finally (or maybe not), I got to spout my stuff at Sleuth of Baker Street, Toronto's renowned mystery specialty bookstore, newly located at 907 Millwood Ave. There, amid the works of every great mystery author, not to mention several of Sherlock Holmes's deerstalker caps, I got to chat with Justine Lewkowicz, the intrepid host of Bookends. Fortunately, this is an edited show, as I blew my very first question: How do you know when to reveal the clues in a mystery? For me, it's a purely intuitive process, so I didn't have an answer. Turns out that was my answer. Things loosened up and got a bit easier after that. I'm a writer, after all, so I like to think about what I'm saying before I say it, but once I start I can just keep rolling along.

Jeffrey Round is a Toronto novelist and filmmaker. His most recent book is the mystery-thriller Lake On The Mountain, from Dundurn Books. Visit: www.jeffreyround.com.

When SONY Pictures Comes Calling...

Recently I got a bit of exciting news. One morning, early, I found a nondescript email sitting in my in-box. It was so nondescript that I almost overlooked it. It turned out to be from a producer's assistant at SONY Pictures. He was inquiring about the film rights to my new novel, Lake On The Mountain, published last month by Dundurn Press.

My first inclination was to think it a joke. It was too soon after publication for anyone even to have heard of it, I thought, but on re-reading the note it seemed genuine enough. Besides, it's a good book with a solid storyline. Why should it be so hard to believe that someone might want to turn it into a film?

At that point, unlike others who might have jumped up and down, then shouted from the rafters and quickly Facebooked all three-thousand of their closest friends, I did what any good WASP would do: I went into Shut Down Mode.

First things first, I told myself. I began to fold all the clothes lying scattered around my bedroom. (If you've seen my bedroom -- not that many of you have -- you'll know that entails a lot of work.) Then, once I'd obsessively folded and refolded everything, I went downstairs and washed my dishes till they squeaked. All that in order not to think about what I’d just read.

For me, Shut Down Mode occurs when emotions threaten to overwhelm. It "doesn’t do" to get too happy, too sad, too overjoyed, too…well, too anything. Think of the Queen of England. Have you ever heard her let out a really good belly laugh? Not bloody likely, though I’m sure she's dying to. It's not that I don't feel things. Or that Liz doesn't either, but we both find it necessary not to be seen to be Out of Control. Disaster could strike. And besides, we might look ridiculous.

I have a friend who once told me I needed to learn to celebrate my victories, small and large. "Because frankly," said he, with a tone that was all gloom and doom, "as a writer you probably won’t see too many of them." A good pessimist, he knew whereof he spoke.

I just shrugged. I didn't understand this "celebrate" mentality.

"You just go right on to the next thing as though nothing happened," he said. "Why not stop and enjoy it?"

"But what's the point of celebrating something that's already over?" said I, a good realist.

Of course, the truth is that stopping to celebrate would mean admitting I had an emotional attachment to the outcome, something both Sherlock Holmes and I won't easily admit to, if we admit to it at all. "Cry at the birth, Rejoice at the death," A.J.M. Smith advises with poetic whimsy in The Wisdom of Old Jellyroll. When it's over, it's over; let it go.

It would also be an admission that maybe nothing will come of this email inquiry from SONY. And I would have no control over that, either. Somewhere in my subconscious, I must have decided it's better not to get excited, lest that excitement later prove to have been misguided, like a beauty queen stripped of her crown for louche behaviour. If you don't care about the potential outcome, you can't be robbed of it when it turns out to be nothing.

I admit it's a pretty grim outlook, but it feels safe. And, as a result, my laundry gets done really well, when I bother to do it. Just in case, however, I've made one small concession, one celebratory gesture to acknowledge this episode. I have allowed myself, if only in my mind, to start casting the film. "Build it and they will come," right? Or in this case, the film corollary: "Cast it and they will shoot."

In the meantime, now that my clothes are folded into a reasonable semblance of order, I can get back to my writing -- the one place where I really am in control.

Jeffrey Round is a Toronto novelist and filmmaker. His most recent book, Lake On The Mountain, was published by Dundurn Books in January. Visit: www.jeffreyround.com.