Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville review

Sherlock continued brilliantly this evening with The Hounds of Baskerville, second in the three episode run starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the sage of 221B Baker Street, Martin Freeman as Dr Watson, and Una Stubbs as an unlikely but appealing Mrs Hudson.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is far and away the best of the four longer Holmes stories. The idea came from a man called Fletcher Robinson (whose family business in Liverpool I've long had a happy relationship with, oddly enough) and I recall that the press once gave some publicity to a strange theory that Conan Doyle was responsible for Robinson's death. A book was supposed to be being written about it, but as far as I know, it never saw the light of day. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd be interested to hear more.

Back to Sherlock in the 21st century. Mark Gatiss used elements from the original story very cleverly. There was even a character called Fletcher. Baskerville turned out to be a sinister research centre, and the character given the name of Stapleton proved to be female. She was played by the excellent Amelia Bullimore, last seen as as a senior cop in Scott & Bailey. Sherlock's first visit to Baskerville was a marvellously funny and clever scene.

As with last week's A Scandal in Belgravia, I found the story very enjoyable - perhaps even better. I am sure many others did too, given that my post about last week's episode seems (if Blogger stats are to be believed, which I'm not sure about) to have attracted more page views than all but four of over 1300 previous posts.

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia: review

Sherlock returned to the screens this evening for a very welcome second series with A Scandal in Belgravia. The title is, of course, a play on the title of the first Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia', but I wonder if the scriptwriter, Steven Moffat, is aware that it is also the title of a very good book by Robert Barnard? In fact, it might just be my favourite of Bob Barnard's many entertaining novels.

Back to Sherlock. Benedict Cumberbatch is splendidly cast as the great detective brought up to date for the 21st century, while Martin Freeman is a likeable Watson. If you buy into the basic concept - and I do - then there's much to enjoy in these shows, given that the scriptwriters have a real feel for detective fiction and an evident respect for Conan Doyle's achievements. Moffat has also done great work on Doctor Who, but there's a danger, as one or two episodes of Doctor Who have shown in the last couple of years, that the demands of filling an extended time slot can lead to some narrative padding. Happily, that wasn't a problem in this episode, even though it lasted for 90 minutes. It was very well crafted.

There were plenty of witty lines (I enjoyed "The Geek Interpreter", for instance), but the story was also strong, with seemingly random jokes at the start of the story turning out to form a part of quite an intricate plot which avoided tedious over-elaboration. It involved Irene Adler as a dominatrix, in possession of compromising material kept on her mobile phone. Sherlock got hold of the phone - but what was the password to unlock it? The solution to this particular puzzle was very neat.

The supporting cast was strong. Mrs Hudson is given a distinctive personality by Una Stubbs, while Mycroft Holmes is played in suitably aloof fashion by Mark Gatiss, co-creator of this series, and a succesful detective novelist himself (I haven't read his books yet, but this is a gap in my reading I must fill). And Lara Pulver was suitably glamorous as Irene Adler. You could see why Sherlock thought she was the woman.

Robert Barnard

I mentioned recently that 1936 was the year in which three of Britain’s finest crime writers were born: Peter Lovesey, Reginald Hill, and Robert Barnard. They are three writers whom I admired long before I had the pleasure of getting to know them personally. I still can’t quite believe that I’ve joined them in the Detection Club.

I’ve not had much to say on this blog about Bob Barnard, so it’s time to remedy the omission. He’s a witty writer, who crafts neat and sometimes highly ingenious plots. His gifts are often shown to advantage in the short story, a form at which he excels, and I’ve been lucky enough to include several of them in anthologies that I’ve edited.

Bob Barnard is also a keen student of the genre, and his study of the work of Agatha Christie, A Talent to Deceive, is widely acknowledged as one of the best books ever written about the Queen of Crime. His enthusiastic, yet clear-eyed assessment of her work, is highly readable, and his analysis of her main plot devices is especially interesting.

Yet it is for his novels that he is best known, and quite right too. He has employed recurrent detectives – Perry Trethowan and Charlie Peace in particular – but the main focus on his books is on the skewering of pretension, coupled with neat mystification. Death in Purple Prose pokes fun at romantic novels, while Political Suicide offers a highly entertaining, if now rather dated, glance at political shenanigans.

My favourite Barnard is probably A Scandal in Belgravia. The title suggests a Sherlock Holmes connection, but this proves to be a red herring. The focus is, again, on politics (Bob used to work for the Fabian Society), and there is a great final twist. A fun book from a writer whose own talent to deceive is of a high order.