The Sherlock Holmes Book of Self-Defence – The Manly Art of Bartitsu

The Sherlock Holmes Book of Self-Defence – The Manly Art of Bartitsu, as used against Professor Moriarty is a fun-filled little book from the Ivy Press, based upon the original Edwardian articles and other writings of E.W. Barton-Wright, the devisor of Bartitsu.

While it’s a fun read, this delightfully-illustrated little book is practical too, and you might pick up a hint or two on defending yourself.

I spent a couple of decades indulging in martial arts, including Wado Ryu Karate, Kung Fu, boxing, wrestling, Jiu-Jitsu and Savate (French kick-boxing). Elements of the later two make up much of the ethos of Bartitsu. I’ve used similar techniques in training and the real world – they do work, though you really do need to practice and not just read a book.

Contrary to popular belief, Victorian and Edwardian society was not particularly safe. There were places in town and country where you might be attacked. Personal safety did prey on people’s minds.

Barton-Wright (1860-1951) was an interesting character. He was a consulting engineer by profession, work which took him all around the world, including Japan where he took up Jiu-Jitsu. Returning to London in 1898, Barton-Wright devised the hybrid Bartitsu (named after himself), publishing magazine articles and opening a Bartitsu Club in Shaftesbury Avenue. It didn’t last long, no doubt because of competition from many other schools of many other martial arts disciplines that became popular at the same time.

It did, however, make its mark on one famous writer – Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. When Doyle brings Holmes back from his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes explains to Watson how he escaped the grip of the fiendish Professor Moriarty:

We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of Baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me…

Notice that Doyle gets the name of the art wrong, Baritsu rather than the proper Bartitsu, though this could well have been a proofing error rather than the author’s fault. Interesting to see how widely Barton-Wright’s martial art had become known.

This present book presents us with a number of these techniques, from how to “Deal With Undesirables”, such as evicting a troublesome man from a room, to how to escape when grabbed from the rear or by the throat. There are short chapters on how to fight with a walking stick, dealing with an attacker armed with a knife, how to throw and hold an assailant on the ground, and even self-defence using a bicycle as a weapon.

All very interesting, though if you want to take this up seriously you should perhaps enrol in a club and learn hands-on.

But this little book is a delight and well worth a read for devotees of historic crime fiction.

 

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Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia

A Scandal in Bohemia was the very first Sherlock Holmes short story, published in the July issue of The Strand Magazine in 1891 and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes the following year. Holmes and Watson had made their first appearance in the longer stories A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and re-appeared in The Sign of Four (The Sign of the Four) in 1890. Neither of those two outings were particularly successful until the short stories took off in the Strand.

As a short story it is important because it presents a number of the tropes which become familiar to readers of the canon in subsequent stories – the initial consultation in Baker Street, the hospitality of Holmes’ housekeeper (though, presumably through error, she’s called Mrs Turner rather than Mrs Hudson in this story), the friendship of Holmes and Watson, the very characterful client – in this case the King of Bohemia, Holmes’ use of disguise, and the emotional coldness of the detective’s character.

It also features the character of the opera singer and courtesan Irene Adler who, although she only actually appears in this one tale and rates only brief mentions in several more, casts her shadow over the canon.

For, as the opening line of the story tells us “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” As Watson points out, there are no feelings of romantic or sexual love in that comment. Holmes is asexual in every sense of the word and I get a bit peeved when modern re-interpreters try to imply otherwise. And just as well – Holmes with romantic feelings simply wouldn’t be Holmes.

There are several other comments about Holmes’ character in the tale, which establish further the characters established in the two longer stories. Almost at the beginning we hear Holmes’ admonition to Watson “you see, but you do not observe” – a sentiment presented in various forms throughout the canon. “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data”. Another warning to Watson, who also presents Holmes as “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen.”

Several candidates have been put forward as possible inspirations for the King of Bohemia, including the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII  – who certainly led a Bohemian lifestyle – and the Crown Prince of Germany, later Kaiser Wilhelm II.

I rather tend to the thought that Doyle had the Prince of Wales in mind. It would certainly make more of the suggestion that Irene Adler, an opera singer born in New Jersey, is based on Edward’s mistress Lily Langtry, known familiarly as the Jersey Lily (as in Jersey in the British Channel Islands.)

The plot is basically very simple – you might care to read the story again before you read further here.

Irene Adler was the mistress of the King of Bohemia when he was still the crown prince. She has in her possession a compromising photograph and letters produced during their liaison. The King is now engaged to marry a princess from Scandinavia,who comes from a particularly puritanical family.

Believing that Irene is obsessed with him, he fears that Irene Adler might use the photograph and letters for her own ends, which could undermine the settled order of the European monarchies, he commissions Holmes to recover the items.

Interestingly, he is prepared to pay Holmes a considerable amount of money for his services and provides a handsome advance. A reminder that Sherlock views his role as a consulting detective as a profession. Elsewhere, in The Problem of Thor Bridge, Holmes categorically states that “my professional charges are upon a fixed scale. I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether”. Which isn’t quite what happens in A Scandal of Bohemia.

The joy of the piece, for me, is the portrayal of Irene Adler. We get our first intimations of her character from Holmes’ notebooks, which portrays her professional character, and then from the King who describes her as “an adventuress”. Given the King’s predilections in the same directions, there is considerable hypocrisy there, though it is of course the sentiments of the time.

As it turns out, Irene Adler has moral scruples that the King of Bohemia could probably never imagine. At the end of the story she acts with a morality and sense of fair play which makes her a much worthier person than the wretched and dissolute monarch.

Furthermore, she is a worthy opponent for Holmes, and shows him a respect equal to the regard the detective comes to have for her. She is never the villain of this piece – only its heroine.

I’ve always been impressed by the Granada television version of the tale, starring Jeremy Brett – the first in the series to be broadcast, though not actually the first one filmed. (They filmed The Solitary Cyclist first as as shakedown episode). David Burke was a very fine Watson and Gayle Hunnicutt a superb Irene Adler.

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Novel Locations

We’ve been in York, searching out locations for the third William Quest novel. Interesting to walk around a city getting atmosphere for an historical thriller set in 1854. As an historical location, York is easier than most. Such a lot survives, compared to other places in Britain.

York Minster

In the first two books The Shadow of William Quest and Deadly Quest, my hero is mostly adventuring in London – a place which has changed a great deal since the mid-Victorian period. But the Victorian elements can still be sought out even there, though they are few and far between. I’ve spent such a lot of years studying Victorian London that it seems very familiar to me. Indeed, modern London seems strange whenever I’m there.

York is a joy. Although there has been modern development and new shop fascias, many of the streets would still be recognisable to a man from 1854. In my book, William Quest has never been to York before, so he’s lost one of the great advantages he’s had while  carrying out his often dubious activities in London – which he knows like the back of his hand.

For anyone who’s never encountered William Quest, he’s a mysterious figure, usually armed with a pistol and a swordstick, who rights wrongs, defends the weak against the strong, fights corruptions and has his own occasional vigilante methods of dealing with wrongdoers.

Grape Lane

 

But in this book he’s having to take on the role of detective as well, solving a puzzle that has baffled the citizens of York…

And it means peril, high adventure and a sinister conspiracy….

Having spent the past couple of months writing the third Quest (no title as yet), it’s great to revisit familiar old haunts in York – though I confess to spending a lot of time in bookshops. York has some great second-hand bookshops!

 

 

 

We go to York quite often and always do a lot of walking around the streets, but I felt I was at the point in the novel where I wanted to see again some of the places I’d mentioned in the chapters written so far. There is one particular street, Tanner Row, which appears in the book and which I didn’t really know at all  – an important street leading to what was once York’s original railway station. The one someone like Quest would have used in 1854.

This original railway station was within the city walls, the present station, though Victorian and magnificent is outside the walls. Much of the old station still exists, though it’s been revamped as offices for the city council.

Tanner Row

Nearer to the Minster, we walked the streets where the mystery occurs which provides my novel with its plot – the area around Stonegate and Grape Lane. I know these streets very well, but it was valuable to stroll through them with my characters in mind. It’s the little details that make the difference when you are imagining fictional characters in a real landscape.

Most of my novels are set in real places. I often get ideas for stories by just going for a walk. The whole story-line of my 1930’s Scottish novel Balmoral Kill changed when I walked around Loch Muick in the Highlands. You could re-enact the final duel in that novel across a real landscape if you wanted.

The Old Railway Station

I find as a writer that just going out for a walk is the greatest source of inspiration.

Some areas of York have changed since the 1850s. The streets known as the Water Lanes, down on the River Ouse, were a rookery at that time.  In the 1870s a new road, Clifford Street, was driven through and much of the rest redeveloped. It’s still Victorian and charming to walk through, but not quite the setting Quest would have known.

On the city walls

Much the same happened in London. Jacob’s Island, where my book Deadly Quest comes to an end, was a much viler rookery than the Water Lanes. Charles Dickens used it for the ending of Oliver Twist, where it is Fagin’s final lair. Today Jacob’s Island is full of very expensive luxury apartments. If the ghosts of the poor devils who lived in the diseased original Island could come back and see it, I do wonder what they would think?

I came back from York enthused by what I’d seen. The visit spurred me on to finish the book. I hope it will be out at the turn of the year.

Though I still don’t have a title!

If you haven’t read the first two William Quest novels, there are links below. Both are available in paperback and on Kindle – and there’s a free Kindle App available for your Smartphones if you like to read on the move.

 

 

 

 

Hammer’s “Hound of the Baskervilles”

Very slight spoiler alert, but I suspect most readers will be familiar with the tale – so here goes.

Hammer film’s 1959 film version of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, has all the hallmarks of Hammer productions during its gory days (pun intended!)

We watched it again the other day. Like most Hammer productions based on novels, it takes considerable liberties with the plot. That being said, it is terrific fun and has the great merit of really good portrayals of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with the wonderful Peter Cushing as the detective and Andre Morell as Watson.

Peter Cushing, of course, did another version of this classic “tail” for the BBC several years later – probably the most faithful version yet filmed, actually using real Dartmoor locations. I saw portions of that one being filmed during my Dartmoor rambles at the time.

Apart from a couple of stock-shots, Hammer went nowhere near Dartmoor. Dartmoor in this production comes courtesy of Surrey’s Chobham Common and Frensham Ponds, plus a lot of studio exteriors. None of the locations look much like Dartmoor. But then Hammer’s Dracula film sets probably only bear a passing resemblance to Transylvania.

This Hammer version might be slightly hammy, but is saved by the lead actors, who also include Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville, John Le Mesurier (best known as Sergeant Wilson in the classic Dad’s Army) as the butler Barrymore, Ewen Solon as Stapleton and Miles Malleson, doing his familiar doddery old fool act, as Frankland – elevated to a bishopric in this telling.

As with most Hammer films there is a voluptuous leading lady, in this case Marla Landi as Beryl Stapleton. Miss Landi (who went on in real life to marry the baronet Sir Francis Dashwood, descendant of that famous gent in history with Hellfire Club connections), plays the role with her own very strong Italian accent, though her father, Stapleton, is clearly English. And in the film she is Stapleton’s daughter, rather than his wife (posing as a sister) as she does in the book.

Normally I’d quibble a bit at this bit of casting, but Miss Landi is great fun as Baskerville’s femme fatale. And a Hammer film without a bit of sex appeal wouldn’t be a Hammer film.

The film, as I’ve suggested, does take considerable liberties with the plot of the novel: enter a tarantula spider, a ruined abbey, Holmes trapped down a Dartmoor tin mine, ritual sacrifice, Frankland as the collector of butterflies rather than Stapleton, Sir Henry Baskerville with a serious heart condition, a malevolent Miss Stapleton – the list goes on.

But then, if you want a more faithful rendition seek out Peter Cushing’s BBC version. The Hammer version is not one for the Holmesian purist, but if you want a bit of escapist fun then Hammer’s attempt passes an amusing couple of hours.

And the Hammer brand is now in itself iconic. During their heyday they produced great entertainment. This Hound, for all the liberties it takes, does give a real flavour of the book and it probably introduced new readers to the Sherlock Holmes canon. Its absurdities are no worse than those taken in the recent modern day Sherlock and similar re-tellings.

Archive blog: “The Country of the Hound of the Baskervilles” May 2015.

 

The Limehouse Golem

Last week, we went to see the film The Limehouse Golem, based on Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, which I blogged about a couple of years ago. (I’ve put my original blog on the novel below to save you searching.) 

It’s a terrific take on the novel, with some great acting, a literate script by Jane Goldman, and some excellent sets that take you right back into Victorian London. The photography is superb.

I’m not going to say much about the plot, because I’ve mentioned the salient parts in the book blog below. Jane Goldman has made a few minor alterations to the plot for film purposes, but these make no difference to the story.

I’m always wary of filmed Victorian crime stories, because the slightest error jars. But there are no errors here. I was completely absorbed by the telling of the tale. Rarely have I seen a crime novel set in this period so well done.

This film stars Bill Nighy as Inspector Kildare, his role slightly expanded from the novel. The part was to have been played by Alan Rickman – one of our favourite actors – who sadly died early in the project. But Nighy makes an excellent Kildare, every inch the Victorian policeman. And how good to see Nighy get a lead credit.

There’s a great deal of British acting talent here – familiar faces such as Daniel Mays, Clive Russell, Eddie Marsan and Henry Goodman. All looking as though they’ve emerged from the streets of Limehouse.

But the film rises with the talents of two newcomers to me. Douglas Booth is quite stunning in the role of Dan Leno, totally believable as perhaps the greatest of music hall showmen. I’ve always had a great interest in Leno, a fascinating individual who forged the way we perceive popular entertainment of this kind, from straight entertainment, jests and songs, pantomime to burlesque, Leno was the grand master. His relatively early death in 1904 shocked the nation.

The tragedy of music hall before this period is that we have only scratchy recordings of some of the best acts (we’ve got just such a recording of Leno). Not being able to see these stars visually makes it hard to grasp how good they might have been. I’m old enough to have seen some of the early twentieth century stars live on the stage. They were good indeed – we’ll not see their likes again. But few of the Victorians were filmed, then only silently.

But Douglas Booth surely captures a great deal of Leno’s magic. Here’s an actor to watch out for in the future.

The key role of Elizabeth Cree goes to Olivia Cooke. Cooke is as good as Booth in portraying the growing confidence of a music hall singer, caught up in the murderous twists of the tale.

Try and see it at the cinema if you can with an audience around you – more like a music hall atmosphere than watching it at home on DVD.

Though we’ll be adding it to our DVD collection when it’s out.

Here’s my blog on the original novel…

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem has now been out for over twenty years. Given my interests in Victorian crime and the history of the music hall I’ve always been meaning to read it.

Now I’ve finally got round to it and I can say that it’s a terrific read, evoking a real feel of the Victorian underworld in Ackroyd’s usual and very vivid writing style.

As a writer Ackroyd is well-known not just as a novelist but as an historian and biographer. If you haven’t read it I commend to you his London – A biography – perhaps the best of all recent histories of the city.

Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is not your usual crime read. It’s a deeply literary novel which happens to be about crime and the low-life and middle-class existence of Victorian London. And there’s a lot more to it than that. Ackroyd has a way of plunging you deep into this imagined vision of a past age.

For those who don’t know, Dan Leno was perhaps the greatest star of Victorian music hall. But he is not the only real-life character encountered in this book. We also see the struggling writer George Gissing and a glimpse of Karl Marx during his London exile.

This is a book which begins with a hanging and works backwards. We see how his key character Elizabeth Cree progresses as a music hall turn, the murders of a serial killer, the legend of the Jewish golem, a trial at the Old Bailey and pages from the diary of John Cree delineating many aspects of Victorian life – for this is a novel of multiple viewpoints.

Ackroyd is so very good at exploring the sinister hinterlands of the Victorian underworld. The author’s great knowledge of London shines through on every page. Terrible secrets are revealed and the ending is just stunning.

A novel you’ll want to read more than once – thoroughly recommended!

The Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney

If any one book inspired me to write my William Quest Victorian thrillers it’s this one, Kellow Chesney’s very readable and scholarly book on the Victorian underworld. It was first published in 1970 and – for me – is the standard work on this fascinating subject.

I first encountered it when I was an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Although I majored in literature, I did a minor in nineteenth-century social history. The underworld was only a small part of my studies, but discovering Kellow Chesney’s book sent me of on a wider reading programme, both in secondary reading and the primary sources.

When I’m asked to recommend a book on the Victorian underworld this is the one I suggest as a first read. There are several other titles I like – and I hope to give these a mention on the blog in the coming months – but Kellow Chesney’s book is the most comprehensive and the best introduction.

It’s all here, starting with a walk through the mid-century streets of London – and how vividly the author portrays the place. This is no dull work of scholarship, it’s a page-turner as exciting as all the best mystery thrillers.

Then from the main streets frequented by the richest members of society, Kellow Chesney takes the reader to the borders of the underworld, the places where the dispossessed and those forced into crime to survive are obliged to lurk – and the boundaries between the rookeries and the smart streets of society are often back to back.

We are then taken on a journey into the rookeries themselves. Kellow Chesney conjures them up in all their awfulness. It is impossible to understand the Victorian criminal underworld unless you can understand the causes of crime.

Here are the beggars, the pick-pockets, the footpads and the swell mob. The skilled cracksmen who break the safes and steal the jewellery of the richest members of society. Here are the magsmen, gonophs, macers and shofulmen. The screevers and the Newgate mob. (I’ll talk more about these in a blog early next week.)

There were perhaps 80000 prostitutes in Victorian London alone. Kellow Chesney deals sympathetically with their plight, whether they were working the poorest streets in the East End for pennies or selling themselves for much more in the night houses in the West End.

The book is wonderfully illustrated, mostly with the sketches of the great Gustave Dore, adding to the feeling of being there so brilliantly evoked in Mr Chesney’s words. If you can, seek out one of the original hardback editions – the pictures are not so well reproduced in the paperback editions.

When I came to write William Quest, Kellow Chesney’s book was the first I re-read. If you want a good understanding of the Victorian underworld, I commend it to you.

Sherlock Holmes: The Man with the Twisted Lip

Spoiler alert: We usually try not to give away the plots of the stories we look at, but it’s next to impossible not to with Sherlock Holmes’ short stories. I suspect most of you will have read the story. 

The Man with the Twisted Lip is one of my favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. It has a very vivid London setting and lots of those elements that plunge you back into the Victorian world of Holmes and Watson – menacing alleys, disguises, the sinister banks of the River Thames, Opium Dens etc.

Holmes and Watson are at their best too, though I always believe the great detective is having a bit of an off day in his field of expertise, given how long it takes him to work out the only obvious solution to the puzzle – that Neville St Clair is the beggar Hugh Boone.

Who cares? Just to plunge into the murky world of Victorian London in the company of Holmes and Watson is enough for me. There is the added bonus that you get a glimpse of Watson’s home life in the company of the first Mrs Watson, though – like everyone – I’m puzzled that she calls her husband James instead of John at one point. You might like to comment your thoughts on that – whole essays have been written on what most suspect is an authorial slip.

Doyle wrote these stories for the Strand at a fair speed and such slips are not uncommon when a deadline is looming.

There is a worse slip elsewhere in the story. When Holmes and Watson visit the Kent home of Mrs St Clair, she asks that the detective tells her the worst – “I am not hysterical or given to fainting”, she says. But earlier in the tale, she has told Holmes that she fainted on  seeing blood on the window of the opium den in Upper Swandam Lane.

The Man with the Twisted Lip is one of the earliest of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, first published in The Strand magazine in December 1891. It was Doyle’s sixteenth favourite of his personal top nineteen Holmes stories. Interesting too, that it doesn’t actually feature a crime, though I suspect in reality, Hugh Boone and his alias might have been prosecuted for wasting police time and probably for begging as well.

The opium den and Upper Swandam Lane are wonderfully drawn. I once spent a happy morning in London seeking the location from the geographical details given by Doyle. Of course there’s nothing resembling the place in existence now, though not far away is a set of steps set in Victorian or earlier London Brick leading down to the swirling waters of the Thames. On finding them, my imagination swirled as much as the river.

At some point, every Victorian crime novel series should feature an opium den, and Doyle’s is one of the best in literature, menacing but quite accurate. There are, going off at a tangent, a couple of other good ones in literature. Sax Rohmer gives us a glorious one in The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu, and Charles Dickens opens The Mystery of Edwin Drood in just such a place. Opium was legal at the time – in fact the British Empire and its entrepreneurs made a fortune and fought a couple of wars out of the trade. Opium dens, which were often a front for other crimes, were perfectly lawful as well.

I like Doyle’s description of Upper Swandam Lane as a ‘vile alley’: so much atmosphere in two words. I confess to borrowing them to describe an alley in my own recent Victorian crime novel Deadly Quest. I put in an opium den for good measure as well!

Neville St Clair as Hugh Boone is not the only disguised person in the story. Holmes makes his first appearance in the Bar of Gold opium den as an addict, though he swears to Watson that he didn’t actually participate – hard though surely not to inhale in such a place.

London itself becomes almost a character in the story, the streets and alleys around the north side of the Thames vividly drawn. All the more remarkable when you recall that Doyle was a relative newcomer to the city when he penned these early Sherlock Holmes stories.

There was a silent film version of The Man with the Twisted Lip as early as 1921. More recent television versions include the BBC Douglas Wilmer version of 1964 – I almost certainly saw that as a child, as I was a fan, but I remember nothing about it.

More recently there was a very good adaptation in the Granada Television series The Return of Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and Clive Francis (best known as Francis Poldark in the first and superior version of Poldark) as Neville St Clair/Hugh Boone.

The latter is a superb version, even if Mrs Watson was written out of the programme concept. Upper Swandam Lane is vividly depicted, as is the Bar of Gold opium den. The casting of the small parts is very well done and Alan Plater’s script gets a real feeling for the original story.

Clive Francis makes a splendid Hugh Boone, throwing out his beggar’s repartee at the police and showing the charm that made him such a successful beggar. His quotations from Shakespeare and other poets seem so integral that I’d forgotten that they’re not actually part of Boone’s repertoire in the story. I believe the idea of having Boone acquainted with literature in this way was first trialled in the Douglas Wilmer version.

The transformation of Boone into St Clair is done to great effect. The urbane and civilised St Clair in the interview with Holmes and the Bow Street police which follows, demonstrates the considerable range of Clive Francis’ acting ability – a masterful performance.

A great Sherlock Holmes story – one I never tire of reading. A masterpiece of short story writing.