Books which are just begging to be adapted for TV

Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer

1970: 14yr old Tony becomes seduced by the neo-nazi movement and is sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It’s a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is potentially explosive.

2003: James, an aspiring screenwriter, begins to research the far right in Britain, and its secret gay membership

Two narrative threads follow Tony through the 70s, 80s and 90s and James through a year which he becomes dangerous immersed in his research.

Elevator pitch: ‘This is England’ meets ‘Queer as Folk’.

Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

Detective Elijah Baley investigates the murder of an offworlder in Spacetown. In the opinion of the Spacers, the murder is tied up with recent attempts to sabotage the Spacer-sponsored project of converting Earth to an integrated human/robot society on the model of the Outer Worlds.

To search for the killer in the City’s vast caves of steel, Elijah is assigned a Spacer partner named R. Daneel. That’s Robot Daneel. And notwithstanding the celebrated Three Laws of Robotics, which should make such a murder impossible, R. Daneel is soon Elijah’s prime suspect.

Elevator Pitch: Detective series with robots

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Hundreds of years in the future, after the Something that Happened, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is determined by your perception of colour.

Eddie Russett is an above average Red who dreams of moving up the ladder by marriage to Constance Oxblood. Until he is sent to the Outer Fringes where he meets Jane – a lowly Grey with an uncontrollable temper and a desire to see him killed.

For Eddie, it’s love at first sight. But his infatuation will lead him to discover that all is not as it seems in a world where everything that looks black and white is really shades of grey.

Elevator Pitch: ‘1984’ meets ‘Brave New World’ with colours.

14 by Peter Clines

There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much. At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment. And Tim’s. And Veek’s. Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends. Or the end of everything

Elevator Pitch: HP Lovecraft meets Nikola Tesla.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

My name is Peter Grant and until January I was just probationary constable in that mighty army for justice known to all right-thinking people as the Metropolitan Police Service (and as the Filth to everybody else). My only concerns in life were how to avoid a transfer to the Case Progression Unit – we do paperwork so real coppers don’t have to – and finding a way to climb into the panties of the outrageously perky WPC Leslie May. Then one night, in pursuance of a murder inquiry, I tried to take a witness statement from someone who was dead but disturbingly voluble, and that brought me to the attention of Inspector Nightingale, the last wizard in England.

Elevator Pitch: If Harry Potter was a police officer in London.

5 Films or Books Which Should Be on Stage

1. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe – just begging to be made into a musical.
2. The Breakfast Club – of all the 80s films they’re putting on stage, why has this one been ignored?!
3. Secretary – think of it done as a two hander play in an intimate space.
4. The Magic Far Away Tree – perfect for a summer family musical.
5. Deadliest Catch – think ‘Come from Away’ with sea shanties and crabs.

Forget cyber, we should be encouraging people to retrain in the creative arts

This is from a FutureLearn course called ‘Current Digital Workplace Trends’

Some thoughts on adaptation regarding Sherlock Holmes

In 2013, I attended a lecture series at the University of London called Sherlock Holmes – Between Past and Present. One of the standout lectures was from James Brown about ‘Holmes and the Moving Image’, which examined the idea that Sherlock Holmes is literally a timeless figure.

Early Holmes adaptations updated to the stories to present day but kept Holmes firmly in the 1890s creating the everlasting image of the great detective with his deerstalker, Inverness cape, and pipe. The first two Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films produced by Fox did attempt to place the stories in their original setting but when Universal took over they updated the stories to ‘present day’ but kept Holmes ‘ageless and locked in a time bubble’. It wasn’t really until the Granada series that they really tried to put Holmes back into the Victorian age, going to great lengths to pinpoint a date and stick as closely as possible to it. (Alastair Duncan pointed out that the Ronald Howard series also attempted to place Holmes in the Victorian age but I’m not very familiar with that adaptation so don’t know how much they stuck to their Victorian setting).

There is really nothing new in the idea of updating Sherlock Holmes, the majority of Sherlock Holmes have updated the stories – Basil Rathbone’s Holmes makes use of modern technology, as does Benedict Cumberbatch but these are not alien to the character of Holmes, the Sherlock Holmes of the original stories was a modern man and used up to date modern technology to aid him in his activities so there is nothing revolutionary about Sherlock Holmes searching the Internet or listening to the wireless because he is very much a man of his time, whatever time that may be.

Another panel I enjoyed was a discussion about Holmes as a social explorer in Luke Seaber’s paper on ‘Sherlock Holmes as a Social Explorer’ which linking in with Benjamin Poore’s paper on ‘Holmes as a Master of Disguise’ suggested that because Holmes is able to adopt different persona’s efficiently he does have a very good understanding of social cues and an understanding of how those social cues differ in the class of society he was moving in. Seaber suggested that Holmes’s understanding of people comes from his ability to categorise people, like Henry Mayhew in his classification of people in ‘London Labourer and the London Poor’ (1851) so essentially, Holmes takes part in ‘incognito social exploration’ through his use of effective disguise.

An idea also suggested during one of the panels was that Sherlock Holmes himself was a character and that he was always acting, so did Watson really know his friend? I was especially reminded of all this with regards to the most recent series of Sherlock. Sherlock is very much part of the long tradition of adapting the character of Sherlock Holmes, rather than the stories…although Sherlock is perhaps closer than most of the looser adaptations.

Holmesian Speculation: John *Heron* Watson?

At the Royal Society of Medicine, there is a small collection of items from the Royal College of Surgeons’s exhibition on ‘The Real Sherlock Holmes‘. It’s a fascinating collection, great to read more about ACD as a medical student and take a look at the people who inspired him.

An interesting thing I discovered whilst there was that the president of RCS from 1878 called Sir Patrick Heron Watson (1832 – 1907); his surgical career carries a certain resemblance to Watson’s. I tried finding an online resource, and all I could really find was this article (PDF) titled ‘An Edinburgh surgeon of the Crimean war–Patrick Heron Watson (1832-1907)’ by WB Watson, published in the Medical History journal v.10 (2) in April 1966.

Basically, after his training and whatnot, Sir Patrick Heron Watson decided to become an army surgeon and headed out to help in the Crimean War. Initially, he was posted to Koolalee Hospital in Turkey, where he caught typhus and after a short convalescence was posted to the Crimea with the Royal Artillery – where unfortunately he contracted dysentery. He was put back on a boat going to Scutari (ships doctor said he wouldn’t last the night) and spent the next four weeks in the hospital there, where he became ill with mercury poisoning before finally being sent back to England and spent further recovery in a hotel in London.

Given that ACD used so much from his own experiences and life as an influence for Holmes, it wouldn’t surprise me if Sir Patrick Heron Watson’s early army career was the inspiration for John Watson’s career and that the ‘H’ is for Heron.

Update: 

As with all things Holmesian, there are more resources out there talking about Sir Patrick Heron Watson being the source for both Watson’s middle name and surname.

An article in the Baker Street Journal titled ‘Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Bea (sic)‘ (PDF) by S. E. Dahlinger reveals that in 1949 Jay Finley Christ wrote an article called “John H. Watson Never Went to China” which challenged John Dickson Carr’s belief that John Watson was based on ACDs friend James Watson, as ACD didn’t meet him until after he wrote STUD. The case was then followed up in the 1980s by Jon L. Lellenberg and W. O. G. Lofts who published “John H(eron) Watson, M.D.” in vol. 30, No.2 of the Baker Street Journal (pages 83 – 85 if you want to look it up).

Thoughts on the Holmes brothers

WS Barring-Gould created a third brother to explain why Mycroft was working in London and not home minding the country estate. Barring-Gould assumes two positions regarding this mysterious third brother:

1) The Holmes family are upper-class
2) there is a country estate

Sherlock refers to his ancestors as being country squires who lived much as country squires did. It’s entirely possible this is suggesting like a lot of the upper-class landowners there were miss investments, money being squandered and a family line being beset with all sorts of financial and interpersonal issues. Anyone who watches Downton Abbey will be familiar with the story of a family where there were no immediate male heirs. There could have once been a country estate, but not one Mycroft inherited.

Additionally, Barring-Gould is keen on the idea of the Holmes brothers being upper-class. It’s possible they were not. Mycroft would have joined the civil service following the results of the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report. This report criticised the civil service for being a dumping ground of the sons of the upper-class who did not demonstrate the kind of pioneering attitude Britain needed to oversee its colonial interests, the report recommended an end to nepotism and suggested the Chinese method of recruitment where potential candidates took an exam to secure their appointment. It wasn’t until the 1870s that the recommendations of the report were being put into place, by this time Mycroft would have been done with university and very likely would have found himself taking further exams to secure his employment as Ronald Knox* suggests as clerk in an unmentioned branched of government, before rising to his position as the British Government by the time Holmes and Watson meet. Oxbridge would not have been a barrier to the middle-class Holmes brothers who could have benefited from patronage, something the Anglican church often did. Sherlock is quite enthusiastic about the board schools, “Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.” As he’s a man who sees education for all as the future perhaps because this suggests own education was paid for by charitable or philanthropic means. Fittingly, this quote comes from ‘The Naval Treaty‘ which could be read as Conan Doyle’s commentary on the civil service – Percy Phelps, through his uncle Lord Holdhurst secured a position in the foreign office, loses an important document and has an epic breakdown as a result.

Of course, there’s also nothing to say Mycroft was managing the country estate and spent his weekends there checking up on things.

(*’The Mystery of Mycroft’ by Ronald A Knox, possibly published in 1934 – not sure but it’s definitely in HW Bell’s 1934 collection of essays ‘Baker Street Studies‘)

Does Irene lose?

The ending of A Scandal in Belgravia by Steven Moffat could be said to be polarising but opinions seem largely uniform within fandom and those opinions are overwhelmingly negative. One of the main criticisms is that in the canon, Irene wins whereas in the BBC version she does not but this is something I want to examine as I don’t believe this is as clear cut.

At the end of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, the King of Bohemia is impressed with the lengths Irene took to keep the photograph, exclaiming: “What a woman – oh, what a woman! … Would she not have made an admirable queen?” but her assurance that he “may rest in peace” regarding the photo is no guarantee of safety. Remember, this photograph could end what is no doubt a politically sensitive engagement and could have a strong impact on the future relationship between two countries so the mere existence of the photograph and the threat still remain. Simply telling him that he has no need to worry doesn’t mean that the King would let the matter go or that Holmes would accept that he had failed. The King could easily engage people who are far more ruthless and dangerous than Sherlock Holmes to track her down, perhaps that’s why Watson names her as the “late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” as after all, two years is a very long time, especially politically. (“Then I must begin by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years, at the end of that time the matter will be of no importance.”)

So does she win? Not really. Her safety is reliant on too many unknown factors.

With this in mind, let’s look at the BBC Irene.

Rather than the former American opera singer, this Irene is a dominatrix who caters for a variety of highly connected clients. It’s perhaps a state of modern affairs a member of the royal family having an affair with an opera singer is unlikely to cause a scandal, but if a young female member of the royal family is exposed as being the client of a notorious lesbian dominatrix, it would be front page of The Sun and discussed at length in the Daily Mail.

This is an Irene people trust. She knows and understands what people like and offers them a safe place to explore their sexuality. This trust puts her in a very, very dangerous position so naturally, she takes precautions. People can’t risk going after her without exposing more and this is where Mycroft makes a colossal misstep.

Someone very powerful is threatening her so she is going to play them at their own game. Somewhere along the way she has become known to Jim Moriarty or knows of him through one of her clients. This is no different from the canonical Irene who “had been warned…that if the King employed an agent, it would certainly be you…I followed you to your door and so made sure that I was really an object of interest to the celebrated Mr Sherlock Holmes.” there’s no reason to suppose that canonical Irene’s unmentioned source of information wasn’t Moriarty (after all, he is the “organiser of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected…he sits motionless like a spider in the centre of its web.”)

Moriarty and Irene now have a common enemy in Mycroft Holmes. Moriarty can furnish her with information on how to “play the Holmes boys”, both understand that to get to Mycroft you first need to get to Sherlock, which she does by presenting herself as an enigma knowing that this would deeply intrigue him.

By the end of the episode, Irene has put Mycroft into a position where he very nearly had to give her everything she wanted, presumably to disappear or as a demonstration that if you threaten her, she will take you down (in other words, if you fuck with her she will fuck with you). In the end, though, it is her ego that gets the better of her – she is not ‘Sherlocked’ because she loves him, she is captivated and fascinated by him in the same way John is, she is ‘Sherlocked’ because she thinks she has won. As with canon Irene’s keeping of the photograph, this is a mistake but unlike canon Irene, this mistake has consequences.

Mycroft is still in a dangerous position. Placing Irene into protective custody would force him to reveal her full role in the failure of ‘Bond Air’ and expose Sherlock’s actions, it would also make her a target for those who fear their secrets revealed. Mycroft and Irene are now in an extremely impossible situation, but fortunately, Mycroft’s job is dealing with impossible situations. It is my belief that Irene’s ‘death’ was arranged by Mycroft as a mutually beneficial solution to both their problems – he needed her to disappear and she needed to disappear.

So does Irene lose? Not really. She forces Mycroft into a corner and is able to vanish but as with canon Irene, that is no guarantee of her safety.

‘Sherlock Holmes: Past and Present’ – some reflections

On the 21st & 22nd June, I attended the ‘Sherlock Holmes – Past and Presence’ conference held at Senate House, University of London. Of all the panels I attended my favourite one was easily the discussion on ‘Holmes and the Moving Image’, especially the paper presented by James Brown on ‘Sherlock Holmes: Between Past and Present’ which examined the idea that Sherlock Holmes is literally a timeless figure.

Early Holmes adaptations updated to the stories to present day but kept Holmes firmly in the 1890s creating the everlasting image of the great detective with his deerstalker, Inverness cape and pipe. The first two Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films produced by Fox did attempt to place the stories in their original setting but when Universal took over they updated the stories to ‘present day’ but kept Holmes ‘ageless and locked in a time bubble’. It wasn’t really until the Granada series that they really tried to put Holmes back into the Victorian age, going at great lengths to pinpoint a date and stick as closely as possible to it. (Alastair Duncan pointed out that the Ronald Howard series also attempted to place Holmes in the Victorian age but I’m not very familiar with that adaptation so don’t know how much they stuck to their Victorian setting).

What distinctly struck me about this is that there is really nothing new in the idea of updating Sherlock Holmes, the majority of Sherlock Holmes have updated the stories – Basil Rathbone’s Holmes makes use of modern technology, as does Benedict Cumberbatch but these are not alien to the character of Holmes, the Sherlock Holmes of the original stories was a modern man and used up to date modern technology to aid him in his activities so there is nothing revolutionary about Sherlock Holmes searching the Internet or listening to the wireless because he is very much a man of his time, whatever time that may be.

Another panel I enjoyed was a discussion about Holmes as a social explorer in Luke Seaber’s paper on ‘Sherlock Holmes as a Social Explorer’ which linking in with Benjamin Poore’s paper on ‘Holmes as a Master of Disguise’ suggested that because Holmes is able to adopt different persona’s efficiently he does have a very good understanding of social cues and an understanding about how those social cues differ in the class of society he was moving in. Seaber suggested that Holmes’s understanding of people comes from his ability to categorise people, like Henry Mayhew in his classification of people in ‘London Labourer and the London Poor’ (1851) so essentially, Holmes takes part in ‘incognito social exploration’ through his use of effective disguise.

An idea also suggested during one of the panels was that Sherlock Holmes himself was a character and that he was always acting, so did Watson really know his friend?

Bizarre Holmesian Scholarship

In Ms Holmes of Baker Street: The Truth about Sherlock C. Alan Bradley & William A.S Sarjeant argued that Sherlock Holmes was actually a woman and that her mood swings could be attributed to her periods. In their book, they attempt to show

“evidences of Holmes’s feminity which might equally well be regarded as indications of homosexual proclivities. That alternative can, we feel, be disregarded in view of the evidence presented, not only that Holmes suffered from the physical vicissitudes to which all women are subject until released from them by menopause, but also twice became pregnant.”

Samuel Rosenberg theorised in his book Naked is the Best Disguise that ‘The Red Headed League’ was actually about the prevention of homosexual rape. Christopher Redmond discussed this in his book In Bed with Sherlock Holmes in the chapter ‘A World Without Women’:

“…one must consider the opinions of Samuel Rosenberg, the frequently reviled pioneer of Doylean criticism to whom nothing is scared and all is Freudian…He finds great significance in the scene that has Fleet Street clogged with men all bent on a single object, and he uses the first name of pawnbroker Wilsen (Jabez is the town where lived the scribes – I Chronicles 2:55) to connect the encyclopaedia-copying redhead with a scene in the Old Testament (Genesis 19:4-11) in which men converge not to apply for a job but to attempt homosexual rape on two exquisite creatures who are in fact angels. Rosenberg goes on to stress the ‘womanly’ character of John Clay: Watson actually uses that word, and there is mention of pierced ears and other effeminate characteristics. Finally, he identifies the pawnbroker’s ship and its three hanging balls as ‘a symbolic area of unhappy homosexuality‘ and the bank’s vault as a ‘cloacal cellar filled with fecal gold‘. The result: the planned robbery is symbolically a homosexual rape, and Holmes thwarts the perversion as well as preventing theft.”

Redmond goes on to say

“This analysis, though it may sound both far-fetched and distasteful, is supported by many details in the story, from Holmes’s affectionate reference to Watson early in the story as ‘my partner and helper’ to the gratuitous reference to the sexual ambiguousness George Sand at its very end. And, as already mentioned, there is the absence of women even in supporting roles, to which Holmes draws particular attention: ‘Had there been women in the house, I should have suspected a mere vulgar intrigue. That, however, was out of the question.’ It will certainly appear far-fetched to use it as the basis for an allegation that Holmes is drawn as homosexual, or that Doyle deliberately wrote a story with homosexual motifs.”

You could probably write an entire thesis on Christopher Redmond’s often problematic attitudes towards homosexuality and women in his books on the canon but I’m not clever enough to do that, but I thought people might interested in seeing some of the stranger scholarship out there.

Speculation on Mycroft’s Occupation

This morning, I randomly followed a link to a job advert on the Mi5 website. I have no intention of ever working for Mi5 or any branch of the security services, I’m quite content as a lighting technician and it probably isn’t as exciting as ‘Spooks’ makes out… anyway – the job advert was for a ‘Senior Internal Auditor’.

My first thought was “oh, cool – Mi5/Mi6 has an internal audit department.” then “wait… Mycroft audits the books for a government department…I wonder…”

Is it possible that (on paper, at least) Mycroft is an internal auditor for Mi5/Mi6?

Sherlock and Watson don’t really tell us too much about Mycroft. There’s also a good possibility that Watson completely invented everything in GREE & BRU about Mycroft as a cover but let’s just assume Sherlock and Watson are telling us the truth (and that Mi5/Mi6 existed in some form or another back in 1895 :P)

“He has an extraordinary faculty for figures, and audits the books in some of the government departments.” (GREE)

“Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.” (BRU)

“…his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has decided the national policy.” (BRU)

So, according to Sherlock/Watson, Mycroft is a relatively minor official who audits government departments, who has become a sort of consulting political strategist/problem solver and there really is an Internal Audit Department within Mi5 and Mi6.

Worthy of a bit of fun speculation, don’t you think?