A Study in Brown.

A Sherlock for the 21st Century IdiotIdiom.

Sherlock Holmes was to be updated, modernized, brought into the contemporary scene -- so ran the announcements late in 2009. Hardly the first time that Holmes had been brought forward from his native Victorian milieu and settled among a generation removed from that era by decades of world-altering events. Had not Universal and Basil Rathbone leaped fifty years from the paradoxical 20th Century Fox's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, set in the late 19th Century, to the series of iconic 65 minute B-movies set during the 1940s and World War II? At least twice he he had been cryogenically frozen and revived, once for a TV movie in the 1980s (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1987, with Margaret Colin as Jane Watson, and Michael Pennington as Holmes.) and again in a cartoon series set in the 25th Century.

Holmes has survived his creator's attempt to kill him with some risible prose and a plunge over Reichenbach falls, hundreds of mediocre or worse adaptations and pastiches, parodies and dotty impersonators (Judge Justin Playfair of They Might Be Giants being among the better versions of a mad Holmes). And then there are the imitations that are spread across current television channels.

Foremost among the imitations is Dr. Gregory House, M.D., who practices medicine and Sherlockian inferences on House, M.D., oddly enough, on Newscorp's FOX, the modern incarnation of the great studio. House not only has taken possession of Holmes' old address, but he takes over Holmes' source, Dr. Joseph Bell, the mentor of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. It was Bell who astounded the young Doyle with his perception and deductive ability, as he accurately read his patients' jobs, habits, places of residence and familiar relations from clues gathered by quick examinations of their persons. Second among the current imitations is Patrick Jane, The Mentalist. Jane exercises the same perception and penetration, but with crime-solving rather than medicine as his field. He is mocking and heedless of authority, even as he works with the police. He sees to the bottom of the criminal rather than the crime. It becomes a test of minds for Jane, who delights in outthinking murderers. A true spiritual son of Holmes. Least of these is Adrian Monk. If these copies can succeed in the modern world, despite all the advances in technology and information gathering, why not, then, the original, the Master Detective himself?

All the old cautions apply, beginning with the one, "In theory..." Yes, it could work, and you would imagine that, having come up with the notion of re-creating Holmes in the present, the idea would be auto-completing, like the software that intuits your typing on Google. But it's not that easy. It takes a visionary mind to translate Macbeth to another culture. It takes a mediocre mind to advance Sherlock Holmes a century within his own culture. The type of mind it took to produce "Sherlock" is mercifully hidden from me.

One would expect the modern Holmes, or Sherlock as we must henceforth call him, to possess the same character traits -- the comprehensive genius, the obsessive concentration, the scalpel-like incisiveness, the shortness of temper that comes with a mind that is always straining against the plodding of mundane reality, but expressed in the idiom of today. All the long-cherished features of the character would beam out in a new and shinier 2.0 release. Whatever. What we get is a collection of tics passed off as traits. Or, to continue the software metaphor, we get all the bugs and none of the features. The new Sherlock owes more to Adrian Monk than to his forebear. And if that were not sufficiently annoying, the production delights in its debt to Numb3rs, from which its visual style steals all the gimmicks but none of the solidity. We see Sherlock observing and examining, and, for some unfathomable reason, each observation and factoid must be labeled on-screen for those in the viewing audience who cannot wait thirty seconds. Yes, because in thirty seconds Sherlock will explain everything he has seen and all that he has deduced during his examination of the scene. What, then, do the labels accomplish? They provide a display. For viewers with an attention span conditioned by the refresh rate of an LCD pixel, there must be some ever-changing optical stimulation, lest they become comatose before the character can speak.

But that's not all! There's less! Not satisfied with reducing Sherlock to a narrow set of quirks, the producers have deprived him of about half the wattage of his massive brain. Sherlock has not gone Green. No, he has gone brown, as in brownout, or the color of diarrhea. Whereas the original Holmes could divine the essence of a case in the bare clues of the Lauriston Gardens murder, setting his snares and revealing all only after the criminal had been captured, the new Sherlock has to have the crime explained to him by the killer himself. Sherlock blunders ahead, making the trademark brilliant observations about everyone and everything, but completely in the dark about the criminal he is supposedly searching out with laser-like intensity. Holmes knew everything about Jefferson Hope after a few minutes in A Study in Scarlet. In A Study in Pink, he knows nothing until the last few minutes. Even the basics of human nature, which Holmes understood with clinical precision, and knew to be necessary to the understanding of the criminal mind, elude Sherlock, who finds such essentials of criminal investigation "boring." And then there are the outright stupidities. The most glaring of which occurs when a policeman calls Sherlock "our favorite psychopath." Sherlock, in a frenzy, wheels upon him and shouts, "I'm not a psychopath, Anderson. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research." Do your research, indeed. Apart from the redundancy of "high-functioning sociopath," that line reeks of TV profiling, wherein some writer has taken the catchy "high-functioning schizophrenic" and combined it with the ever-popular sociopath to form what sounds like a convincing classification of psych disorder. The real Holmes, the real modern Holmes, would know, would be intimately knowledgeable about, the DSM IV psychiatric diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is the real term used by real doctors to classify the popularisms psychopath and sociopath. This Sherlock is not the great detective with the scientific method coded in his DNA and expressed like bioluminescence. This Sherlock is a mutant, whose defective genes are coded with some weird albinism that mimics brilliance.

But he is modern, with all the vapidity that the term implies. I give him that.

A footnote: The business of the police mistakenly calling the string of murders suicides is lifted from the Rathbone movie, The Spider Woman, one of the better entries in the Universal series. You would think that, what with the Holmes canon being in the public domain with the lapse of 75 years since Conan Doyle's death in 1932, the producers would have plenty of material to pollute without dipping their feet into movie adaptations, but they seem to have sunk well below even such low expectations.

"Sherlock" at PBS Masterpiece. Sunday Oct. 24, 2010.

The Fiddler in the Subway: A review

Print journalism is dying, they say. The evidence is all around us. The shrunken corpses of once mighty newspapers lie crumpled and discarded, soon to vanish on the next puff of wind. Great buildings that once had throbbed with huge machinery, devouring paper forests and drinking ink rivers, are veritable whited sepulchers, empty and silent, empty even of echoes. The universe, too, is winding down, if we are to believe the reports. Nothing lasts forever. But there are yet bright spots in the darkness. That is one of the corollaries of entropy. Some papers are still turning out thoughtful work. The Washington Post is one of those bright spots. Yes, it has suffered along with the rest of the industry, but it has fought back. There are still reasons why print journalism matters. Gene Weingarten, more often than not, is one of those reasons. The articles collected in this book demonstrate why newspapers were and continue to be necessary. Nowhere else can you find writing this good about subjects that, however unlikely to warrant attention some may seem, should be noticed. Newspapers make this kind of writing possible.

The topics run the gamut from b to b, baseball to babies. Well, there are some other letters, too. There is great reporting in The First Father, an investigation that begins in the dark, literally, and ends up bringing to light the hidden story of Bill Clinton's biological father, W.J. Blythe. There is the search for the Armpit of America, in which our intrepid reporter has to stumble upon something nice to say about Battle Mountain, Nevada. And then there are the two pieces for which Pulitzer prizes in Feature Writing were awarded: the title story, The Fiddler in the Subway (originally titled Pearls Before Breakfast), the story of what happens when an audacious but simple stunt turns into a wildly successful feature, reprinted everywhere, and Fatal Distraction, an unflinching look into a grievous modern-day trend, the deaths of children through inattention.

Those are the topics, but the real subjects of all the included articles are lurking in the background. They are two, the more potent of whom is Time. For it is Time that stalks through each of these journalistic essays. Journalism is, after all, the record of what happened in the day. Time the patient, inexorable hunter, whose arrows fly but one way, straight into the heart, is the prime mover of all these works. The time since Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's single season home run record. The instant of time it takes to forget a child in the back seat of a locked car. Time to stop and listen to the falling of the rose petals of a violin concert, the notes almost drowned out by the tread of the mundane. And the second subject? Time has a companion, a bloodhound, who lopes along before his master. But the bloodhound likes to pause and circle and backtrack when it comes upon an interesting scent. It likes to dig in the most peculiar places, and often in the most disgusting messes. Its gait is loose, sloppy, leisurely. It is the reporter. You glimpse him now and then, but it is his voice that you hear downwind, seemingly far off at times, but insistent. Yes, it is the reporter and Time who are the real subjects. So, when the obituary for print journalism is finally written, there is one person who should be chosen to write it: Dave Barry. Gene Weingarten will be busy sniffing under some rock, trying to make sense of it all.

Ever notice?

Did you ever notice that Hugh Jackman resembles the young Clint Eastwood?

Mystery Bill Murray Photograph

Do you know when this photo of Bill Murray was taken?

Proposed New Jersey Turnpike Rest Area

Elisabeth Shue Rest Area. Food. Restrooms. Gag'n'Go.

Evidently, this was too much for The Washington Post website. Despite that Ms. Shue has made a movie, Gracie, which is a fictionalized account of her teenage battle with bulimia, and has appeared on national television with her brother to discuss the subject, it is impossible to refer to it in jest in comments about a humor column.

Who is it?

Is it Susan or Wendy?

From yet another episode of Danger Man.

Separated at Birth Two?

Two photographs of the same woman?

NO!

The first is of Susan Hampshire, star of innumerable TV miniseries, including the original The Forsyte Saga, The First Churchills, The Pallisers and Monarch of the Glen.

The second is of Wendy Craig, also the star of numerous TV series, most memorably appearing as Ria in Butterflies.

Both screencaps are from episodes of Patrick McGoohan's Danger Man, aka Secret Agent.