Pink is the new Scarlet

Clara has been pestering me for a long time to watch the BBC’s Sherlock.  Clara is in love with All Things-BBC (though her latest fan-girl obsession is MTV’s Teen Wolf, but about that the less said, the better), and so she stumbled on Sherlock some time ago.  Giddy, Clara was.  Even giddier when The Hobbit came out; beside herself with joy at the last Star Trek (if you have watched Sherlock and those two movies, you will know why she was so giddy at the movies.  The next installment of The Hobbit is sending Clara into sensory overload).  Now, I liked the Sherlock Holmes books a lot—I read them all many decades ago.  So, a show about Holmes was not something about which I had a strong aversion.  The recent Downey portrayals of Sherlock were not inspiring, but I was willing to imagine that the BBC version might not be so inane.  So, I have no excuse for putting off watching this series for so long.  At long last (or as Clara would say at very long last), I started the series.  I’ve now watched season 1—all three episodes (by the way, how is it possible to show three (3!) episodes and call that a season?  Season 2 also has 3 episodes.   Calling that a season is just ridiculous—we need a new word here.).  It’s good.  The first episode was quite clever, the second episode wasn’t terribly good, but the third episode retuned to being quality TV.  If you haven’t seen it, watch it.

All of which prompted me to revisit the books.  I just read A Study in Scarlet, the first ever Sherlock Holmes novel.  My memory of this novel was that it was lousy and barely about Sherlock.  My memory was wrong.  Two-thirds of it are about Sherlock; the other third is an elaborate backstory of the criminal.  And it was good.  Very enjoyable. 

Two notes:

1. The first episode of the BBC series is called A Study in Pink.  It has a lot of clever links to the story with a similar name.  The funniest: At a crime scene, our detectives find RACHE scrawled on the wall (in the book/floor (in the show).  In the Book, the idiotic police detective says that obviously this was meant to be Rachel, so they have to find someone with that name.  Sherlock, with disdain, says that the detective is an idiot and that “Rache” is the German word for Revenge.  In the show: the idiotic police detective says that “Rache” is German for Revenge and Sherlock tells him he is an idiot and that obviously it means Rachel.  The best part about that joke—you have to know both stories to get it.  Clara did not think this was funny, by the way.  Sometimes Clara has no sense of humor.

2. This is the second book I have read this summer with a serious anti-Mormon angle.  Riders of the Purple Sage was the other.  They are both from roughly the same era.  One forgets in the modern era in which Mormons are, well, rather normal people that once upon a time it would have seemed incredibly bizarre to hear about this cult living in the middle of the desert of America practicing polygamy.  The polygamy angle is played up in both stores as the primary proof that this is a terrible society—polygamy and a strict religious control over every aspect of life—that does seem like an odd society.  Curiously, in both stories, there aren’t any good Mormons.  It’s hard to imagine either of these books being written today—somehow it would seem insensitive.  But if Brigham Young had not been so authoritarian, would Mormonism have survived its exodus into the desert?  Would Salt Lake City even exist?  Seems like there is room for a really interesting nuanced novel set in this era.

A Study in Scarlet also has my all-time favorite Sherlock Holmes moment (which they used not in the first episode of the show, but the third):

My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

    "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

    "To forget it!"

    "You see," he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

    "But the Solar System!" I protested.

    "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

I have to admit, the logic of Sherlock’s point there has a certain appeal to me.  The hard thing though:  I can never figure out which facts are the useless ones.  Everything strikes me as an interesting part of a Giant Puzzle.  Well, except soccer.  And rap music.  And the Kardashians.