Sherlock Jr.

I was going to write about "what constitutes a mystery" when I discovered that Buster Keaton's silent film "Sherlock Jr." was playing at the Castro Theater in San Francisco with The Club Foot Orchestra's original musical score as live accompaniment -- so instead I sprang off to view one of Sherlock's many offspring.  I have nothing brilliant to say about this movie except that it is brilliant. If you haven't seen it, do so, preferably in a beautiful old movie palace with a live orchestra. If you have seen it, see it again, in any form.

Keaton made the movie in 1924 while Conan Doyle was still alive. "Sherlock" by then had already become a byword for detective and Keaton had fun playing with the concept.  The Castro Theater was built in 1922 so "Sherlock Jr." undoubtedly played there when it first came out, probably with a live orchestra. I had fun thinking about that.

Buster Keaton performed all his own stunts in his movies and he actually broke his neck while filming this one. He didn't realize it and apparently continued to walk around for months as if nothing had happened. The film isn't really a mystery, but it's mysterious, with a movie inside a movie and a dream within a dream. Buster Keaton's long, lugubrious face is a mystery itself. Who is this man?

A Tale of Three Cities

"It was a chance encounter with Armistead Maupin (of Tales of the City fame) in San Francisco which inspired Alexander McCall Smith to write his daily novel about the residents of 44 Scotland Street, a fictitious building in a real street in the author's home town of Edinburgh. With its multiple-occupancy flats, Scotland Street is an interesting corner of the city, verging on the Bohemian, where haute bourgeoisie rub shoulders with students and the more colorful members of the intelligentsia.  The comings and goings at 44 Scotland Street first made their way into print in The Scotsman newspaper in the first half of 2004. Espresso Tales is vintage McCall Smith, tackling issues of trust and honesty, snobbery and hypocrisy, love and loss, but all with great lightness of touch. Clever, elegant and funny, this is a novel that provides huge entertainment but which is underpinned by the moral dilemmas of everyday life and the characters' struggles to resolve them."

I love it that McCall Smith was inspired by San Francisco's own Armistead Maupin to write something to celebrate his city.  And that it came out in serial form in The Scotsman.  I was living in San Francisco when Tales of the City was being published in the S.F. Chronicle and I remember what fun it was every time a new installment came out. It created such a cozy small-town atmosphere, kind of like the current "local food" movement, only with words instead of vegetables. Everyone gossiped about the characters and made comparisons to people they knew. A decade later, Sex and The City was conceived along those same lines. Of the three, Tales of the City is the funniest and the wickedest, as it satirizes political bigwigs and local celebrities plus introducing colorful gay and transsexual characters -- which in the late 70's and early 80's was quite a daring thing to do. I loved Sex and The City, but it does harp a bit too much on those annoying designer shoes. Espresso Tales is the mildest of the three. McCall Smith's satire is always gentle. I don't know if it's because he's essentially a gentle soul or because Edinburgh is a more repressed city than its American counterparts. I suspect both, but I love him for loving his city and honoring the form. Ahem, the form....  Though his books are shelved in the library's Mystery section, are they really mysteries?

Charming Quirks

I wandered into the library today where I checked out Alexander McCall Smith's newest novel, The Charming Quirks of Others.  He originally became famous for his Number One Ladies Detective Agency series. The books pretend to belong to the mystery genre, but are really light fiction. They are full of charming quirky characters, especially the irresistible heroine Precious Ramotswe, the larger-than-life lady detective who solves the mysteries of the human heart. Like the rest of the reading public, I fell in love with her. When I discovered that a television series had been made from the books, I ordered it from Netflix. I was thrilled to find that the producers had made an excellent job of the adaptation, but sad to learn that the program came to a premature end with the the pregnancy of its star, Jill Scott and the death of its executive producer, Anthony Minghella.  Never mind, we fans have more than enough books to compensate for the loss of the series. McCall Smith is amazingly prolific. He's written 12 Detective Agency books, 3 2-1/2 Pillars of Wisdom books, 7 Sunday Philosophy Club books, 6 44 Scotland Street books, 2 Corduroy Mansions, 3 collections of short stores, 20 children's books, various treatises on medical law and bio-ethics, and 1 other novel.  Plus a partridge in a pear tree. More next time about Alexander McCall Smith, but right now I'm too exhausted by the inventory to go on.

A Case of Identity

I watched another Sherlock Holmes program last night, a rerun of the popular Jeremy Brett series. To me, he's the perfect Holmes though I'm also fond of Basil Rathbone. But Brett looks and acts just like the Holmes of my imagination so what more can I say? There have been more TV and film versions of Conan Doyle's Holmes than any other character in literature plus countless spin-offs by other authors. Laurie King invented a mate for Holmes called Mary Russell. Her series takes place after World War I. Apparently, Conan Doyle continued to write stories about Holmes after the war, but he set them in the pre-war era because the cozy Victorian world Holmes inhabited had disappeared by the time the war ended. King continues where Conan Doyle left off, featuring Mary Russell as her main character rather than Holmes, or so she claims. Personally, I don't approve of borrowing another author's creation for your fiction, but there are some notable exceptions. One highly original and unconventional use of Holmes is in Michael Dibdin's book, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story. I can't tell you more about the story without revealing the plot, but I highly recommend it. Oh, and I did like the latest "Sherlock Holmes" flick starring Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock and Jude Law as Watson even though it was a terrible movie. It only works if you perceive the Holmes/Watson relationship purely as a buddy thing. Think Jackie Chan/Owen Wilson and you'll be all right.

London Eye

The Masterpiece Mystery series annoys me, but I watch it anyhow because I'm an Anglophile and a hopeless mystery addict.  Last night I tried to watch the new "Sherlock" but couldn't stomach more than a minute or two of Benedict Cumberbatch's sneering face. That's right, the actor who plays Sherlock is named Benedict Cumberbatch. His sidekick is Martin Freeman, whom I find much more likable. (I did watch an entire episode last week.) I know Sherlock is not SUPPOSED to be likable (at least in the current versions), but he should at least be intriguing, which he is not. He's just an annoying prat. Perhaps it's because I'm getting old, but I find his athletic racing from thing-to-thing exhausting. I did enjoy the camerawork, though.  I loved the shots of the modern London skyline gleaming in the sun, including my favorite landmark, the Eye. Those sweeping panoramic views made a nice contrast to the original Sherlock's world of foggy narrow streets.

49 Years Ago...

My grandmother played cards, sewed, gardened and read books.  She taught me solitaire and embroidery, let me pick her daffodils and gave me murder mysteries.  My first crime-busters were Perry Mason and James Bond.  Were they odd or perfect choices for a 12 year old girl? Both oddly perfect and perfectly odd, I think.  Though I loved the Perry Mason TV series, the books were excruciatingly boring, as was anything else written by Erle Stanley Gardner (and he wrote A LOT of things). On the other hand, I loved James Bond.  What 12 year old girl wouldn't? Fittingly, Erle Stanley Gardner's books have faded into obscurity though the TV series holds up well.  James Bond became a global franchise, but when I was 12 he was an entirely private and somewhat wicked pleasure...