by
​Annette Wren

In 2014, the legal case Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate officially released the character of Sherlock Holmes from copyright. Surprisingly, the judge ruled in favor of placing the character within public domain because keeping Sherlock Holmes under copyright would “make it more difficult or more expensive for future artists to work, since a great deal of art draws on earlier works” (Schultz).

A mere two years later, Sherry Thomas introduced readers to Lady Charlotte Holmes, protagonist of the Lady Holmes Series set in Victorian London, so far consisting of A Study in Scarlet Women (2016) and A Conspiracy in Belgravia (2017).
The significance of Lady Charlotte Holmes lies in Thomas’s adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, and exemplifies Schultz’s point that kicking the detective out of copyright enables artists to explore freely their interpretations of Conan Doyle’s most popular creation.

Lady Charlotte Holmes is a consulting detective who reconstructs the spirit of the original Sherlock Holmes while also crafting a new and more appealing, sympathetic character. Specifically, Thomas presents a nuanced female protagonist that retains some of the original Sherlock’s traits while engaging with more current gender discussions, thereby dismantling the mythic male Sherlock Holmes.

Charlotte’s first point of success as an adaptation is her ability to embody Sherlock’s most popular characteristics and avoid simply becoming a female Sherlock Holmes. First, Charlotte retains Sherlock’s cold, calculating, analytical mind. For example, she knows marriage “is an eminently unsuitable choice” for her, and when Lord Holmes goes back on his word to pay for her education, Charlotte explains that her subsequent action to “remove [her] maidenhead and therefore nullify [her] marital eligibility” (Scarlet Women 40) was the only logical step. She seduces the already-married Roger Shrewsbury, and when Lady Shrewsbury finds her son in bed with Charlotte, our protagonist is unfazed, and goes on to polish off a large breakfast, quite unperturbed by the scandal of her actions (Scarlet Women 7). By engaging in adultery, Charlotte effectively removes herself from the marriage market to pursue a working life.

Charlotte also possesses Sherlock’s extraordinary deductive skills, which she calls “discernment” (Scarlet Women 153). As a woman, Charlotte cannot meet her clients in person. So, when clients come to consult “Sherlock Holmes,” as in Conan Doyle’s original stories, either Charlotte or Mrs. Watson (a benevolent widow who hires Charlotte as a companion) act as intermediaries, stating that Sherlock is bedridden from a “terrible episode” (Scarlet Women 181) but listening in the next room. When clients ask for a demonstration of the detective’s skills, Charlotte happily obliges. For example, when Inspector Treadles questions Sherlock Holmes’s acumen, his “sister” (Charlotte) provides the inspector with a demonstration: “You are from the northwest. Cumbria. Barrow-in-Furness. Your father was employed by either the steelworks or the shipyard…He was Scottish, your mother wasn’t” (Scarlet Women 183). Sherlock Holmes fans can easily recognize the detective’s extraordinary abilities in Charlotte.

And yet, Charlotte also exhibits gendered weaknesses, both culinary and carnal, which make her a more relatable character. For example, Charlotte tries to stay between “one point five and one point six chins” (Scarlet Women 151) to both indulge her love of decadent food and keep her figure.

Charlotte also has a romantic interest: Lord Ingram, her childhood friend. Their relationship is fraught with sexual tension. Ingram knows Charlotte is Sherlock, and his feelings for Charlotte are evident in his constant intrusions into Charlotte’s detective work. When they do finally kiss at the end of Scarlet Women, Charlotte’s reaction is passionate: “Sweet. Bitter. Pleasure. Pain. And then only fierce, mindless sensations, only heat and electricity” (321). This Charlotte, as opposed to that Sherlock, is an altogether more empathetic character. Readers can indulge in her “weaknesses” regarding food and lust, while simultaneously enjoying her calculating, analytical mind.

Thomas also toys with her audience’s nostalgia for Sherlock Holmes: “Sherlock” becomes “Charlotte” only to shift back to “Sherlock” because Charlotte uses the pseudonym “Sherlock Holmes” when communicating with Scotland Yard and clients who come knocking at 18 Upper Baker Street. This play on gender through an alias creates suspense for two purposes: first, to underscore Charlotte’s ability to successfully solve cases while constantly veiling her true identity; and second, to emphasize Charlotte’s disadvantages as a woman.

As a young, ruined woman, Charlotte encounters more challenges than Sherlock. After her adulterous affair, Charlotte plans on obtaining employment as an independent woman under a new name. Her hopes are dashed when she cannot find work. Her salvation comes in the form of Mrs. Watson, who supports Charlotte’s work as Sherlock Holmes. However, it is Charlotte’s interactions with Inspector Treadles that best underscore the Victorian female’s disadvantages.
Until Treadles discovers that Sherlock Holmes is a cover for a disgraced young woman, the inspector is captivated by Sherlock.By the time of Charlotte’s affair, Treadles has already consulted with “Sherlock” on several cases, and admires “the resolute agility of [Holmes’s] mind” and considers the detective “an institution in [Treadle’s] life”(Scarlet Women 50).

Unfortunately, the inspector cannot overcome his reservations once he discovers that Sherlock is the disgraced Lady Charlotte. To Treadles, Charlotte’s sex scandal is incongruous: he cannot reconcile how “such a diamond-bright mind could have made such foolish, downright immoral decisions” (Scarlet Women 313). And, when Treadles encounters Charlotte at the beginning of Belgravia, he emphatically believes that she is “a fallen woman, one who had never seemed remotely bashful” of her actions(2). Treadle’s reaction comes from Charlotte’s position as a New Woman: a heroine who forgoes marriage and challenges the bourgeois cultural code (Ardis 26), which requires Victorian women to remain in the home.

Victorian novels’ use of the marriage plotemphasized heterosexual marriage “as the only logical outcome, as inevitable, climatic, and conclusive” (Dever 158). By “disgracing” herself, Charlotte releases herself from the home, and a new consulting detective rises from the ashes of Victorian respectability.
​
And yet, there is a significant plot twist at the end of Scarlet Women: Thomas reveals that it was Lord Ingram who sent Mrs. Watson to assist Charlotte. However, Ingram’s instructions were to provide Charlotte with funds, not set up a house together and start a detective agency (Scarlet Women 321). So, while the patriarchy, embodied in Ingram, might have helped Charlotte escape poverty, it could not control subsequent events.

Overall, Thomas’s series exemplifies Linda Hutcheon’s point that adaptation’s popularity “comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise” (4). Readers can enjoy the continuation of Sherlock Holmes’s cunning and discerning acumen while also seeing Victorian London through the eyes of a young woman whose piquant character and use of clever disguise and subterfuge crafts a new and provocative discussion of gender.
The enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes raises the question as to why this series continues to resonate with readers. As Jennie Marchand explores in her blog post concerning Agatha Christie’s enduring popularity, the answer lies in the underlying structure of the original works themselves and their adaptations. Marchand’s findings also apply to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. While Sherlock Holmes’s adventures will remain near and dear to detective genre enthusiasts, the ability to adapt will ensure that the detective never grows old.
 
Works Cited
Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Rutgers University Press, 1990

Dever, Carolyn. “Everywhere and nowhere: Sexuality in Victorian Fiction.” A Concise Companion to The Victorian Novel, edited by Francis O’Gorman, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 156-179

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2013

Marchand, Jennie. “The Timeless Nature of Agatha Christie: Cosy or Cruel?” International Crime Fiction Association, Captivating Criminality Network, 30 Oct. 2017, captivatingcriminalitynetwork.net/blog/archives/10-2017. Accessed 16 Dec. 2017

Schultz, Colin. “‘Sherlock Holmes’ Is Now Officially Off Copyright and Open for Business.” Smithsonian, 14 June 2014, smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sherlockholmes-now-officially-copyright-and-open-business-180951794/. Accessed 15 Dec. 2017

Thomas, Sherry. A Conspiracy in Belgravia. Berkley, 2017

Thomas, Sherry. A Study in Scarlet Women. Berkley, 2016

Edited by Dr Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko (University of Warsaw, Poland), this collection aims to redress the imbalance in criticism on nineteenth-century real and fictional detectives, which tends to focus on Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of Sherlock Holmes at the centre of interest, whilst other fictional detectives somewhat revolve around him as a contemporary backdrop.

It gives much stronger critical focus to contemporary rewritings of Victorian detectives, who have received much less scholarly attention, such as Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket from Bleak House (1853) or Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff from The Moonstone, as well as looking at characters who occupy other professions yet perform the functions of a detective in fiction, such as psychiatrists. This aims to bring perhaps lesser or forgotten characters back to the forefront in terms of understanding their contribution to Victorian literary culture, and their importance in the development of the detective genre.  

This shift in focus away from Sherlock Holmes has also allowed a stronger foundation for exploration into how Victorian detectives are utilised in contemporary adaptations and recreations today, including in TV, film and literature.
​
Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture: Beyond Sherlock Holmes is published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

ISBN: 978-3-319-69310-1
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-69311-8

by
Jennie Marchand

Agatha Christie is a woman with one of the best literary badges a writer could hope for: best-selling author of all time. With a career spanning over 50 years, producing 66 detective novels and two of the most enduring detectives, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot in crime fiction, she has sold over 4 billion copies and her ‘whodunit’ fiction is still widely read and discussed today.
 
So what is it about Christie’s writing that resonates with her readers?
 
Christie’s success lies in the structure of her writing and her ingenuous and cleverly designed plotting. She was fascinated by the intricacies of human nature and what drives people to commit horrendous deeds such as murder, a subject clearly intriguing to many of her readers alike. The ‘Queen of Crime’ introduced many classic plot devices, some of which have become integral to succeeding detective fiction. The ‘locked room’ mystery, red herrings and the ‘least likely’ suspect ploy, are all strategies designed to keep her readers enthralled and guessing until the very end. A typical example of the ‘least likely’ method can be seen in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the novel which established her reputation in the crime genre. Here the murderer is revealed to be the unreliable first person narrator, who the audience assume cannot be criminal. In her writing, Christie’s strategies combine together to form a complex puzzle to be solved, her audience trying, and rarely succeeding, in resolving the crimes due to her renowned plot twist endings. Strikingly original and well thought-out, her novels are beautifully crafted to form a neat, satisfactory conclusion often within a mere 200 pages, leaving no loose ends or unanswered questions.
 
Christie’s fiction has controversially been labelled as ‘cosy crime’, a term for the lighter sub genre of crime fiction, coined in the late 20th century, in which violence and sex are downplayed or treated humorously. This subgenre is often set in seemingly peaceful, idealistic and picturesque country villages, the latter a typical characteristic of Christie’s fiction. Indeed, it is rare that Christie’s detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple ever come face to face with pain or physical danger and it is also significant that the crimes and dead bodies are infrequently depicted in highly graphic and violent terms which may be expected of a crime scene. This branch of detective fiction stands in stark contrast to the hardboiled fiction genre of gritty and morally ambiguous stories set in the big city, which feature violence and sexuality more explicitly, made popular by writers such as Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy.
 
Nonetheless it seems difficult to label her novels, which feature poisoning, hit and runs and countless murders, as ‘cosy’. As a genre filled with suspicion, criminality and bloody murder, which intends to unsettle its audience, many critics believe this association is problematic and diminishes the true purpose of her crime fiction. It must not be forgotten that the focus of the vast majority of Christie’s detective fiction deals with cold-blooded killing, an issue that is far from cosy. Indeed, one of the most disturbing of her plots reveals a 12 year old girl as the murderer of her wealthy grandfather because he won’t pay for her ballet lessons.
 
Despite the popularity of ‘cosy’ detective fiction, the past few years have been abundant with successful Agatha Christie adaptations which provide an altogether different perspective to her novels. The BBC’s adaptations of her standalone novels And Then There Were None and Witness for the Prosecution (with a third adaptation of Ordeal by Innocence due in December this year) received raving reviews. The director, Sarah Phelps, has commented on Christie’s ‘cosiness’, stating that she feels Christie’s characters, such as Poirot and Miss Marple, have become synonymous with a ‘a lovely cosy afternoon watching TV on the sofa’[1], with neat plots, the bad guys always getting caught and the comfort that ‘everything will be alright in the end.’[2] Christie herself disliked many of the past screen adaptations purely because of their fluffy, ironic nature. However, these new mini-series focus on the darker, more psychologically complex aspects of human nature and Christie’s characters, and highlight the unsettling, cruel elements of the storylines, depicting them with increasing violence. James Pritchard, Christie’s great grandson, has praised these new takes on her novels, noting the enduring nature of her literature, “Since reading Sarah’s scripts even I’ve started looking at the books slightly differently because she brings so much to them.”[3] He continues, ‘the one thing I take away from the BBC adaptations especially is once again realising how well these stories stand up to modern treatments.’[4]
 
It seems that the popularity of the author is unwavering. Christie’s fans will be treated to a shiny new cinematic adaptation of her classic 1934 Poirot novel Murder on the Orient Express in November this year, with Kenneth Branagh directing and staring as the world-renowned Belgian sleuth (other famous names include Johnny Depp as Edward Ratchett, Judi Dench as the Russian royal Princess Natalia Dragomiroff and Michelle Pfeiffer as Mrs Hubbard). Branagh has promised that his version of the story will hold “some surprises” for those who think they already know the tale: “Our goal is to try and find a new approach. That’s why classic stories are worth retelling.”[5]
 
Perhaps it is the multifaceted quality of Christie’s work which allows her legacy to remain intact, and for continual reimaging of her classic titles for modern audiences and a new generation of fans.
 
Movie trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq4m3yAoW8E

References: 
[1] ‘Lock away your grandparents: BBC’s new Agatha Christie how is no “cosy” a afternoon drama, director warns’, The Telegraph < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/13/lock-away-grandparents-bbcs-new-agatha-christie-show-no-cosy/> [accessed 20 October 2017]

[2] Ibid.

[3] ‘Agatha Christie: Why we still love her ‘cosy crime’ novels’, The Independent <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/agatha-christie-cosy-crime-novels-murder-mystery-writer-why-we-love-a7942901.html> [accessed 20 October 2017]

[4] Ibid.

[5] Vejvoda, Jim ‘Murder on the Orient Express: How Kenneth Branagh recreated the legendary train and reimagined the Agatha Christie classic’, IGN < http://uk.ign.com/articles/2017/06/01/murder-on-the-orient-express-how-kenneth-branagh-recreated-the-legendary-train-and-reimagined-the-agatha-christie-classic> [accessed 21 October 2017]