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Unhinged

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When Granada TV, in the shape of my old friend Michael Cox, asked me to play Doctor Watson, I was very pleased (the heart of the jobbing actor always beats a little faster at the mention of the TV series), but also a little worried. I went to my wife and told her I had reservations about playing a man who had serious claims to be the most ordinary character in English literature. 'I wouldn't know how to play him,' I said. She turned to me with genuine puzzlement and said, 'What's your problem? It's you to a tee!' In the succeeding days her opinion was confirmed when several of my friends shook me warmly by the hand and swore that simply no other person could play the part as well as me. Since then I have had to live with the terrible truth that I was born to play Doctor Watson. The sacks of congratulatory mail which I have received since the series was shown have merely confirmed this. Consider the effect of this on the mind of a serious and sensitive actor (who has given his Othello twice): to be at the top of everyone's list to play Mr Pooter in The Diary Of A Nobody. However, I have always prided myself on being a practical, pragmatic sort of person; a realist and a stoic. So I got on with it and played the good doctor for 18 months of my life. Of course, it was child's play: I needed to change only clothes, my mind stayed exactly where it was. Indeed, I barely needed to think. I never consciously learned my lines: I opened my mouth, and the correct words uttered themselves. I leave the reader to decide whether this is a case of arrogance or humility.

Found this adorable excerpt from David Burke here.

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SORRY!! sorry. sherlock holmes canonically fucks around on his violin then plays watson's favourites to make up for it no ever tell me he isn't SO NICEYS

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first chapter of a study in scarlet and watson is already talking about wanting to study holmes he is INFATUATED with that man

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the beauty of johnlock is not the debate of whether it’s platonic or romantic - canon or not - but the generalised conception that one cannot exist without the other. when there is a Sherlock Holmes one asks where is Watson? and when there’s a Watson one asks where is Sherlock? they are interlinked forever, in every adaptation - old and new - you can’t have one without the other

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one thing that i really appreciate about david burke's version of john watson is that he frequently understands how holmes has arrived at his deductions, particularly during his parlor trick, and so gets to serve as the point of exposition rather than holmes. it made the partnership feel so much more equal and warm, since he was interested in holmes's methods, and capable of applying and interpreting them, even if he wasn't as good at it as either sherlock or mycroft.

i don't know, i like the interpretation of them as two deductive fanatics who wind themselves up noticing things. a holmes that values and respects watson, and a watson who likes holmes a lot but doesn't take him completely seriously is so much more lived in and affectionate. so many adaptations make watson a sidekick, rather than a peer, and that's just a weaker approach

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Which could mean nothing

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I drew the. THE SCENE. From Fawx & Stallion.

My chest hurts because I love them so much and that moment is just sooooo hhhhhhhhhhh

Halfway through the drawing process, I realised that Holmes is technically in disguise during that whole conversation buuuuut let's ignore that. XD Also please don't look too closely at anything that has to do with anatomy, and ignore that Watson's looks change dramatically halfway through - let's just say that kiss was life-changing! :D

Some of the individual drawings I'm of which I'm quite proud! :)

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Blessed pictures :)

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who is john. why is he locked. free him .

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ao3 is crazy because you'll read the most gut-wrenching 200k word slowburn that leaves you sobbing into your sweater at four in the morning and the author will be applejacksmonstercock

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I have a bucket list of Iconic Jeremy Brett Quotes that I’ve gathered from interviews with him and his colleagues that I want to be able to say in my life time.

“If it cheers the gays up I’m thrilled” is an obvious one, but a slightly more niche personal favorite (from an interview with David Burke ) is: “Dearheart! Do you realize…we are on a postage stamp??”

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The naval treaty.

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You’ve heard of one shots, now get ready for none shots! It’s when you think of an idea for a fic and then don’t write it

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looking for some people's common sense be like

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this is so John 'the narrator' Watson watching his husband Holmes ponder and scheme and work out the case and I'm so here for these little shots of him already narrating the adventure in his head

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A Different Kind of Queen of Crime- five ways that Dorothy L Sayers changed the way we see Sherlock Holmes

For my first Holmesian post- a crossover with one of my more usual subjects on my other blog! For when one is talking about Sherlock Holmes, in particular Sherlock Holmes scholarship, there are nor many more pivotal names than Dorothy L Sayers. Sure, Christopher Morley may have had a greater impact on Sherlockian culture, and Richard Lancelyn Green on Holmesian scholarship, to name only a few- but Sayers's contributions to scholarship and "the game" were early and underratedly pivotal.

If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who is unfamiliar with Sayers's influence, or a Sayers fan who had no idea she had any interest in Holmes, keep reading! (And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan who wants to know what I think about Sayers, check out her tag on my main blog, @o-uncle-newt. Or, more to the point, just read her fantastic books.)

There's a great compilation of Sayers's writing and lecturing on the topic of Holmes called Sayers on Holmes (published by the Mythopoeic Press in 2001), though some of her essays are also available in her collection Unpopular Opinions, which is where I first encountered them. It's not THAT extensive, and it's from an era in which Sherlock Holmes scholarship, such as it was, was still very much nascent. While a lot may have happened since Sayers was writing and talking about Holmes, she got there early and she made an immediate impact- and here's how:

She helped create and define Sherlockian scholarship: Don't take this from me, take it from the legendary Richard Lancelyn Green! At a joint conference of the Sherlock Holmes Society and Dorothy L Sayers Society, he said that "Dorothy L. Sayers understood better than anyone before her the way of playing the game and her Sherlockian scholarship gave credibility and humor to this intellectual pursuit. Her standing as an authority on the art of detective fiction and as a major practitioner invigorated the scholarship, and her...Holmesian research is the benchmark by which other works are judged. It would be fair to say, as Watson said of Irene Adler, that for Sherlockians she is the woman and that …she 'eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.'" We'll go into a bit more detail on some specific examples below, but one important one is that, as Green notes, Sayers was not only a mystery writer but an acknowledged authority on mystery fiction, whose (magisterial) introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, a then-groundbreaking history of the genre of mystery fiction, included a highly regarded section on the influence of Holmes on mystery fiction. She was able to write not just literate detective stories but literate critiques of others' stories and the genre (as collected in the excellent volume Taking Detective Stories Seriously), and as such, the writing she did on Holmes was well received.

She cofounded the (original iteration of) the Sherlock Holmes Society of London: While the current iteration of the Society lists itself as having been founded in 1951, a previous iteration existed through the 1930s, founded as a response to the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars in New York and run by a similar concept- the meeting of Sherlock Holmes fans every so often for dinner at a restaurant. Sayers, who seems to have been much more clubbable than Mycroft Holmes, helped run the Detection Club on corresponding lines as well. (Fun fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to be the first president of the Detection Club! However, he refused on grounds of poor health and, either right before or right after he died, the Detection Club met for the first time with GK Chesterton as president.) While the 1930s society didn't last, and Sayers didn't decide to join the newly reconstituted club in 1951, her presence from the beginning was key to the establishment of Holmesian scholarship.

She helped define The Game: Sayers didn't invent The Game, as the use of Higher Criticism in the study of Sherlock Holmes came to be called. (The Game now often refers to something a bit broader than that, but it's a pretty solid working definition to say that it is the study of Holmes stories as though they took place in, and can be reconciled with, our world.) Her friend Father Ronald Knox largely invented it almost by accident- as Sayers described it, he wrote that first essay "with the aim of showing that, by those methods [Higher Criticism], one could disintegrate a modern classic as speciously as a certain school of critics have endeavoured to disintegrate the Bible." This exercise backfired, as instead of finding this analysis of Holmes stories silly, people found it compelling and engaging- and this style of Sherlockian writing lives on to this day in multiple journals. Sayers, with her interest in religious scholarship as well as Holmes, was well equipped to both understand Knox's original motivations as well as to carry on in the spirit in which further Game players would take his work, as we'll see. She also wrote the line that would come to define the tone used in The Game- that it "must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord's; the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere." While comedic takes on The Game would never vanish, her establishment of tone has lingered, and pretty much any in-depth explanation of The Game will include her insightful comment.

Some of Sayers's ideas became definitional: Here's a question- what's John Watson's middle name? If you said "Hamish," guess what- you should be thanking Dorothy L Sayers. (When this middle name was used for Watson in the BBC Sherlock episode The Sign of Three, articles explaining its use generally didn't bother to credit her, instead saying that "some believe" or a variation on that.) She was the one who speculated that the reason why a) Watson's middle initial is H and b) Mary Morstan Watson calls Watson "James" instead of "John" in one story is because Watson's middle name is Hamish, a Scottish variant of James, with Mary's use of James being an intimate pet name based on this nickname. It's as credible as any other explanation for that question, but more than that it became by far the most popular middle name for Watson used in fan media. Others of Sayers's ideas include that Watson only ever married twice, with his comments about experience with women over four continents being just a lot of bluster and him really being a faithful romantic who married the first woman he really fell for (the aim of this essay being to demolish HW Bell's theory of a marriage to an unknown woman between Mary Morstan and the unnamed woman Watson married in 1903, mentioned by Holmes in The Blanched Soldier); that Holmes attended Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (she denied that he could have attended Oxford, having gone there herself- fascinatingly, Holmesians who went to Cambridge usually assert that he attended Oxford! Conan Doyle of course attended neither school); and reconciling dates in canon (making the case that one cannot base a claim for Watson's mixing up on dates on poor handwriting as demonstrated in canonical documents, as it is clear from the similarity of different handwriting samples from different people/stories that they were written, presumably transcribed for publication purposes, by a copyist).

She wrote one of the only good Holmes pastiches: Okay, fine, I'm unusually anti-pastiche, and genuinely do like very few of them, but this is one that I love- and even more than that, it's even a Wimsey crossover! On January 8 1954, to commemorate the occasion of Holmes's 100th birthday (because, of course, he was born on January 6 1854- Sayers was more in favor of an 1853 birthdate but thought 1854 was acceptable), the BBC commissioned a bunch of pieces for the radio, including one by Sayers. You can read it here (with thanks to @copperbadge for posting it, it's shockingly hard to find online), and I think you'll agree it's adorable. The idea of Holmes and Wimsey living in the same world is wonderful, the way she makes it work is impeccable, and it's clearly done with so much love. Also you get baby Peter, which is just incredibly sweet!

I got into Dorothy L Sayers, in the long run, because I loved Sherlock Holmes from childhood and that later launched me into early and golden age mysteries- but it was discovering Sayers that brought me back full force into the world of Holmes. Just an awesome lady.