New Year's resolutions, part II: copycat, not copyright

 As a fellow writer and I chatted about our work, he said dolefully that he'd love to write stories featuring Sherlock Holmes -- except for the copyright issue. 

And I was like, what? Way more than 100 years since publication of the first Sherlock Holmes story (1887's A Study in Scarlet) and the character was still under copyright? So, why has there been a plethora of Sherlock Holmes movies and TV shows? Not to mention Netflix? Were they all copyright pirates?

Turns out, most of those Holmes vehicles simply bowed to the fiats of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate and paid licensing fees. But the case of the copyrighted Holmes didn't end there, with enough twists to make the master detective proud.

The estate's tenacity matched those of Holmes' greatest villains, claiming that because the final Conan Doyle-penned Holmes stories were published as late as 1927, Sherlock Holmes as a "character" -- apart from the stories themselves -- continued to evolve long after the usual copyright period. Specifically, the estate claimed ownership of any work in which the detective "could express emotion."

Image: Sam Williams at Pixabay

However, court cases and law changes later, Holmes is now "free to smile," in the words of IGN writer Roy Schwartz to whom I'm indebted for a discussion of the new, freer, and possibly sexier Holmes.

And perhaps that writer I chatted with earlier can now flex his Holmes story muscles.

To some degree, I can understand the estate's viewpoint. Aside from the monetary benefits of licensing, Doyle's heirs probably wanted to avoid subjecting Holmes to bizarre parodies of other out-of-copyright works as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or the upcoming slasher version of a childhood favorite, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. (Warning -- it's not the Disney version, which still holds the copyright on Pooh's red shirt.)

But why should we writers limit ourselves to sequels or parodies? A more satisfying option would be using famous characters as supporting actors for completely different protagonists, with new plots and settings.

Think of the lively Enola Holmes take. (Did I mention a sexier Sherlock?) Or Holmesian characters in modern settings, even those out the British Isles, as in TV's Sherlock and Elementary. Or pick up a secondary character, even a villain, as the main character. Ever wonder what Dr Moriarty's been doing lately? 

And for another writer's suggestion of an unlikely villain hidden in The Hound of the Baskervilles, check out my post, "Look to the femme, not the chien."

Even if you'd had enough about Sherlock Holmes, Emily Temple at LitHub suggests other interesting, newly out of copyright works as jumping off points. It's a new year! Get inspired and write!

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Still to come: Is it too early to talk about spring literary events? Not at all!

Review: How Holmes did it – and we can too!

Review of: Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Author: Maria Konnikova

Publisher: Viking Penguin

Source: Dallas Public Library

Grade: A

If your literary heroes include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterly creation, Sherlock Holmes, or even if you just drool over Holmes’s latest incarnation as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, you’ll love psychologist Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes.  

Brilliant thinking, she assures us, is not a talent we’re born with, but one we can cultivate – “improving our faculty of mindful thought . . . in order to accomplish more, think better, and decide more optimally.” 

 

Sounds daunting, but Konnikova lays out the steps as clearly as Holmes explained his in elucidating to Dr. Watson how he surmised at first glance that the good doctor had recently arrived from Afghanistan, from observation to imagination, to deduction, to making sure our minds remain youthful and resilient for life.

Along the way she provides illustrations from the Holmes canon, particularly lesser known stories such as “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” and “The Adventure of the Priory School,” that sent me in search of the master detective’s complete works. As enticingly as an accomplished fiction writer – after all, she learned from one of the best – Konnikova withholds any story spoilers. 

She traces her own fascination with Sherlock Holmes to childhood, when her father read the stories to his children before bedtime. Through her own book, she drops small clues to a personal mystery she will reveal at the end – unless we’ve paid enough attention to the Holmesian method to winkle it out for ourselves.

What is that Holmesian method? Perhaps we remember (but she’s kind enough to remind us) that Holmes early own described his mind as an attic, which he was careful to stock with only the best materials. 

The concept of the brain as an attic may sound outdated, but Konnikova notes, “Subsequent research on memory formation, retention, and retrieval has . . . proven itself to be highly amenable to the attic analogy,” as she explores “how its structure and content work at every point – and what we can do to improve that working on a regular basis.”

But while singing the praises of mindful, purposeful thought, Konnikova doesn’t forget that the brain behind both Holmes and his lovably doofus sidekick, Dr. Watson, was Doyle himself. As she reminds us in her late chapter, “We’re Only Human,” if Holmes sometimes went astray, how much more likely it was for Doyle to do so also? Hence, his flip in later life from stories about the rationalist detective to obsessions with such paranormal phenomena as ghosts and fairies. She puts Doyle’s fascinations with the irrational in the context of his time, reminding readers of our own fallibility as well. 

I can’t resist adding an additional discussion of Holmesian (and Doylesian) fallibility, in recommending literary professor Pierre Bayard’s reexamination of a classic Holmes tale. In Sherlock Holmes Got it Wrong, Bayard reexamines the great detective’s reasoning in The Hound of the Baskervilles. And I add my deductions about the reasons behind Doyle’s possible blunder in “Look to the femme, not the chien,” at this site. It could be quite a three-pipe problem. 

Adventure classics -- Look to the femme, not the chien

The Hound of the Baskervilles

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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“From the chamber where she has been locked for hours, the young woman hears shouts and laughter rising from the great dining hall below. . . Her anxiety mounts at the thought of the fate intended for her,” Pierre Bayard writes in his retelling of the legend underlying Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 gothic detective tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

In desperation, the woman climbs out the window of her prison and flees across the moor. Her attacker, Hugo Baskerville, sets his hounds on her track. As she lies dying of fear and exhaustion, her attacker reaches her. Now he becomes the prey, his throat torn out by “a great black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.”

“The thoughts of characters in literature are not forever locked up inside their creators. More alive than many living people, these characters spread themselves through those who read their authors’ work,” Bayard writes.

image: Wikimedia commons

So, with moxie worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself, University of Paris literature professor and psychoanalyst Bayard undertakes to reconstruct the dying woman’s thoughts and trace their influence through Doyle’s book. “There is every reason to suppose that the generally acknowledged solution of the atrocious crimes that bloodied the Devonshire moors simply does not hold up, and that the real murderer escaped justice,” he writes in Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong.

Every Holmes fan knows Doyle killed Holmes in 1893, plunging him over the Reichenbach Falls. But when a friend of Doyle’s told him a corking good story about the legendary Devonshire hound, he realized Holmes was the perfect vehicle for the story. Except that he was dead. Doyle’s solution: set the story in 1888, before Holmes’ death. The idea worked so well Doyle resurrected his legendary detective for real in 1903, when Holmes explained away his supposed suicidal plunge to old pal Dr. Watson.

In the canonical version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the heir to the Baskerville
estate and baronetcy has died under mysterious circumstances. A friend enlists Sherlock Holmes to prevent a similar fate from befalling the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville. Claiming a previous engagement, Holmes sends Watson, who hits on resident lepidopterist, i.e. butterfly chaser, Jack Stapleton--or rather, Stapleton’s mysterious dog--as the murderer. Along the way, Watson notes Stapleton’s alleged sister, the luscious Beryl “a very fascinating and beautiful woman,” but never considers her a suspect. Of course, Holmes fans also know that as a detective, Dr. Watson is a pretty darned good ophthalmologist.

To our surprise as well as professor Bayard’s, when Holmes reappears in the story, he swallows Watson’s theory whole. Like Hercule Poirot to Caroline Sheppard in last week’s post, the usually misogynistic Holmes accords Beryl Stapleton every courtesy. He never checks her alibis, taking all her statements at face value. What gives?

In last week’s post, Bayard offered a reason for Poirot’s atypical behavior. He offers no concrete reason for Holmes’ refusal to consider Beryl, who is actually Stapleton’s wife, as a suspect. But every fan of Doyle
’s can suggest an answer. Since 1897 at the latest, Doyle had been romantically, if not physically, involved with family friend Jean Leckie.

Doyle’s wife Louise was dying of tuberculosis. He was too sensitive to his wife’s
feelings--and to Victorian morality--to parade Leckie openly, his hidden relationship haunted him. Did he realize that Leckie, who became the second Mrs. Doyle, had as much of an agenda as Beryl Stapleton (who we, as well as Bayard, know has designs on Sir Henry)? Was it possible Doyle didn’t want to admit either woman’s agenda, even to himself?

In the end, Bayard ingeniously ties his solution the hope for justice that must have passed through the mind of the dying young woman who started the whole business. But I won’t spoil your enjoyment, either of the original Hound or Bayard’s revisionist version. Get to a library, bookstore or Amazon and weigh the evidence for yourself.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a May of historical fiction with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And argue about what constitutes historical fiction.)

Adventure classics -- Nominal rose, universal library

The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

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When an Italian professor of philosophy specializing in the (to most of us) obscure discipline of semiotics writes a mystery, it’s safe to bet it won’t be like any other mystery you’ve ever read. For anybody who hasn’t read The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s 1980 homage to Sherlock Holmes, Jorge Luis Borges, and libraries -- among many other themes -- I’ll provide a brief plot summary. It doesn’t give away one iota of the real fun of this medieval mystery.

Fourteenth-century English monk William of Baskerville arrives at an Italian abbey intending to deliver a message to the abbot from one of the era’s major political players. Instead, after suitably mystifying the monks with the acuteness of his deductions in the matter of a strayed horse, he finds himself plunged into a deeper mystery.

A young monk has plunged to his death from the high window of the abbey’s library -- a library the dead man should not have able to enter in the first place, and one as hard to escape from as the universe we live in. A library whose guardian, the old, dour and blind monk, Jorge of Burgos, seems incapable of overpowering a younger and stronger man. More strange deaths follow.

The possibility of suicides is bad enough, but the abbot, no slouch at deduction himself, suspects murder. Can William solve the mystery? You bet your deerstalker -- make that habit -- he can. But the real truth is worse even than the abbot feared.

Along the way there’s a love story, arson, an inquisition, and a host of in-jokes. How many references to Sherlock Holmes can you spot? How many to the Argentinean savant Borges? (Who also lost his sight.)

And then there’s the evocative title, although I searched in vain for references to roses when first reading the book. It was the last on a list of possible titles Eco presented to some friends. (His first choice was Delitti all’ abbazia -- Murders at the Abbey (“a clear
quotation of Murder at the Vicarage,”) he later wrote, no doubt chuckling all the while.

In fact, as he stated in On Literature, a collection of essays, “One could carry out a psychoanalysis of influences. . . (including) the historical novels of Dmitri Merezkovskij, and I had to admit that I had read them when I was twelve even though I never thought of them while I was writing the novel.”

Still, for most of us, the biggest lure is that of total immersion in another place and time.

As Eco notes, “I take a reader from Texas, who has never seen Europe, into a medieval abbey . . . and make him feel at ease.”

From this reader from Texas, that’s saying something.

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics continues a month of historical fiction with another total immersion sage, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The only mystery there -- will Scarlett O’Hara ever figure out what she really wants?)

Adventure classics -- Sherlock's first return

The Sign of the Four

by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Considering the uncountable number of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs in the one hundred and twenty-five years since Arthur Conan Doyle published his first story about the “unofficial consulting detective,” it seems wildly improbable that the character almost died stillborn.

But we know what Holmes would say about truth. And the truth is, the first story about him, A Study in Scarlet, was rejected three times before a fourth publisher accepted it in late October 1886. But as mystery writer Daniel Stashower reports in his biography, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, even then, they declined to publish it immediately, “as the market,” they wrote to the author, “is flooded at present with cheap fiction.”

Perhaps in desperation, Conan Doyle sold his entire copyright in A Study in Scarlet for twenty-five pounds. But even after publication in 1887, the story sank almost without notice. Not until 1890, after promising reviews for an unrelated novel, did Conan Doyle resuscitate the detective in The Sign of the Four (under much more favorable terms).

The plot of The Sign of the Four begins with an apparently simple problem that grows to include a search for fabulous stolen treasure and a gruesome “locked room” murder. But the most remarkable -- and unexplained -- mystery is the transformation in Holmes.

From the man of A Study in Scarlet whose knowledge of literature and philosophy was -- to quote narrator Dr. Watson -- “nil,” by the time The Sign of the Four appeared, Holmes had become a reader of antique books and student of the German Romantic movement.

He still remained notable for his emotional detachment -- his latest twenty-first century incarnation is described as a “high-functioning sociopath.” But by his second appearance, he could sympathize to some degree with Dr. Watson’s distress over his
assessment of a family member’s character, based on an examination of the man’s pocket watch.

“I could not have believed that you would have descended to this,” Dr. Watson declares with considerable bitterness in the opening chapter of The Sign of the Four. “You have made inquiries into the history of my unhappy brother. . . .”

Holmes, amazingly, offers an apology. Not for his deductions, but for his insensitivity.

Conan Doyle offered no explanation for the change in Holmes, any more than for Watson’s wandering war wound, which moved over the course of the years from shoulder to leg. But the result of Holmes’ personal growth is, of course, a character with the depth to continue his remarkable adventures for decades to come -- and delight fans into two more centuries.

As Conan Doyle wrote in 1927, nearly forty years after Holmes’ first appearance, “I’ve written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do, but my hand was been rather forced by kind friends who continually wanted to know more.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a month of mysteries with a look at the originator of detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, and “The Purloined Letter.”)

Totally Texas -- Half-price attractions at the DMA

Dallas Museum of Art

1717 N. Harwood, Dallas

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“It’s a movie,“ the boys said.

My daughter’s five-year-old twins sat in front of the Dallas Museum of Art monumental painting, “The Icebergs,” by Frederic Edwin Church, waiting for the show to start. My daughter and I sat there, breathing in the coolness. Outside, the temperature hovered around a hundred degrees. Inside, the air-conditioned coolness seemed to slide deliciously downward as we absorbed the chill of this nineteenth century landscape painting.

We were at the DMA on a “cool Thursday” -- the day of the week in the summer when the museum offers half-price admission. That’s $5 for general admission and $8 for special exhibitions such as the current Art of the American Indians, from a collection at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. The exhibit continues at DMA through September 4.

Of course we went to the Indian exhibit. The boys liked the scary masks best, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. The exhibit will also be the focus of a celebration of Native American culture this coming weekend. From 6 p.m. until midnight this Friday, July 15, the museum will host the Apache performance group Yellow Bird with tours and artist demonstrations. Festivities continue Saturday, July 16, during the museum’s regular weekend hours, 11 a.m. until 5 p.m.

We ended with a trip through the outdoor sculpture garden. My daughter and I walked, the boys ran. Okay, they’re little kids -- an hour or so of walking decorously through art galleries is about all they can take. We had entered the museum through the parking garage, so I didn’t realize the sculpture garden opens directly onto the street. (Keep this in mind with children who might dash outside in their excitement.) Before we left, we visited one of my favorite exhibits, the glass mosaic, “Genesis: The Gift of Life,” by Miguel Covarrubias. A portion based on the Indian concept of “earth” illustrates this post.

If you need more incentive to visit the DMA, shop the summer sale through September 4 at the museum gift shop or online at www.shopdma.org/ Just don’t tell my daughter -- she never met a gift shop she didn’t like.

For more about the DMA’s programs, visit www.DallasMuseumofArt.org/

(Email from DMA after publishing this post told me that from July 14 through 30, the museum will be open every Thursday, Friday and Saturday until 9 p.m.)

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I’d been away from Half-Price Books too long. When I stopped by recently, its free summer movies were already in session. This Saturday, July 16, the show continues at the 5803 E. Northwest Highway location in Dallas with Sherlock Holmes (PG-13). The remaining schedule is July 30 -- Star Trek (2009), (PG-13); August 13 -- The Incredibles (PG); August 27 -- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (PG). Showings at 8:45 p.m. on the west end of the parking lot. Bring your own chair. Shows cancelled in case of bad weather.

(Next Monday -- Revel in the shade and water of the Japanese Garden at Austin’s Zilker Park )

Adventure classics -- murder most cozy

Whose Body?

by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Moving to a classic British cozy (and what other nationality did cozy so well?) from last week’s epitome of noir crime fiction is like stepping onto a brightly-lit operetta stage full of patter songs after emerging from a dark tunnel.  Making murder into a comedy as Sayers does, at least in the opening of her introduction to the inimitable Lord Peter Wimsey, seems, at first glance, offensive.  But even The Maltese Falcon, with its cast of grotesque eccentrics and risible opening scene of an adulterer unable to escape the embraces of a now-unwanted lover, is only a small step away from comedy.  And in the morality of murder mysteries, in which the sin of murder must be avenged, one of the worst punishments evil can face is to be made ridiculous.

Whose Body? introduces Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin – an aristocrat without a day job who solved puzzles of deduction as a game.  Such amateurs seemed more likely in the early nineteenth century, before the work of law enforcement reformers such as Sir Robert Peel in 1829.  But by the end of that century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes described himself acerbically as a professional “consulting detective,” relying on casework for his income, and deriding Dupin’s famous reproduction of a companion’s train of thought (a feat Holmes then replicated with Dr. Watson).

But the pendulum swung again.  Whether through the influx of women into the workforce following the First World War or the wave of democratic feeling that followed that war’s housecleaning of empires, amateur detectives returned in force in the early twentieth century.  And young Dorothy Sayers used the trend to plot a more lucrative use for her master of arts degree from Oxford than by writing poetry.  The rage at the time was for oddity, both in the crime and the detective, and Whose Body? has oddity in both departments.

A letter Sayers wrote in early 1921 contains the seed of the plot – “begin(ning) brightly, with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez.  Now why did she wear pince-nez in her bath?  If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer. . . ”

Sayers’ whimsical Lord Peter, even more than Dupin, engendered a line of mostly amateur detectives that contended for fans with the hard-boiled professionals of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  Usually combining Sherlockian skills of observation and forensic training with personal flaws both irritating and endearing, they find followers even today among readers who like their detection with a side of fun.  Who agree with the words Sayers put into Lord Peter’s mouth, “. . .this man possessed what most criminals lack – a sense of humour.”

(I had mentally divided mysteries into cozies and not-cozies, so a check of Duotrope’s Digest surprised me with its variety of mystery subgenres, including crime fiction, historic, supernatural and cross-genre.  What’s your favorite?  Next week – hard-boiled but with panache – Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.)