An interesting piece on the author of a popular new Holmes book.

Sherlock Holmes the girl genius

He has been a hound, one half of an African-American duo busting crime in modern-day Harlem and has, over the years, matched wits with everything from Martian invaders to flesh-eating zombies.

But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, the great detective who continues to inspire legions of adaptations across mediums, is rarely reimagined as a young girl.

With her debut young adult novel A Study In Charlotte, American writer Brittany Cavallaro, 29, fills that gap.

"There's been a gold rush of adaptations, but it seemed like Sherlock was getting reimagined every which way but as a teenage girl. It was important for me to do a feminist retelling of Sherlock Holmes," she tells The Sunday Times over Skype from her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

"I thought it was crucial to give girls - especially now, with young girls so interested in the television and film adaptations of Sherlock - a genius character that looked like them. I love that Elementary (a television series with Lucy Liu as "Joan" Watson) reimagined Watson as a woman, but it's important to have the complicated, difficult genius - the person actually calling the shots - be a girl."

She experienced firsthand the casual assumption that mysteries are a man's domain.

Would we accept Sherlock's flaws if he were a woman? We're tougher on female characters than we are on men.

AMERICAN AUTHOR BRITTANY CAVALLARO

When she was a young girl, her grandfather gave her little brother a leather-bound edition of the Holmes stories.

"It went to him - you know, the boy, the one who my grandfather automatically identified as the one who'd be interested in reading about and solving mysteries. And I stole it," she says with a laugh.

Holmes became a life-long interest for Cavallaro, who would go on to study detective fiction when she did her PhD in English literature.

And when she started on A Study In Charlotte, the first book in a planned trilogy, she knew right off the bat that it would be built around a prickly girl genius.

Charlotte Holmes and Jamie Watson, descendants of the original Holmes and Watson, are teenagers struggling to figure themselves out, but are already burdened with the legacies of their ancestors.

Marooned in an American boarding school, the two develop a tentative relationship when they find themselves framed for a classmate's murder.

The fun, fast-paced novel dangles new twists and mysteries that pay tribute to Doyle's canon. It is also Cavallaro's way of confronting expectations attached to gender.

"People don't tend to look to girls to be the genius. And when they do, they still want them to be pleasant and social and likable. Charlotte isn't any of those things and I wanted to see what the consequences of that would be," she says.

"When you're a girl who doesn't really understand her place in the world, when you're a girl who has the same kind of self-destructive eccentricities Sherlock had, how would that play out? Would we accept Sherlock's flaws if he were a woman? We're tougher on female characters than we are on men."

Her Charlotte is flawed and fumbling: She was sexually assaulted by the classmate whose death she is now being blamed for, and indulges a drug addiction.

Cavallaro says it was also crucial that she stick to Doyle's tradition of telling the story through Watson's eyes. In the book, Jamie - whose problems are of the run-of-the-mill teenage variety, among them hormones and grades - reports on Charlotte's frenetic, self- destructive fervour with fascination and confusion.

"I wanted him to be the storyteller and for the girl to not be there just to further his story. She's not a manic pixie dream girl. She's not just a love interest or arm candy," says Cavallaro, who is married.

"She's somebody who's driving the story, who's just fine without him, and he knows it, shows it and respects it."

She started on the novel in 2013, while she was trying to put off studying to sit a big examination for her PhD. She banged out the draft in about six weeks and finished revising the novel with her literary agent in early 2014.

Months later, the book was snapped up by HarperCollins.

Cavallaro has just turned in the second book and is getting started on the third.

She says: "Holmes has been a huge part of my life - I'm a Sherlockian and proud of it. So to have this as my Sherlockian calling card, to put my own spin on a character that's been embedded in the common consciousness for so long, is amazing."

•A Study In Charlotte ($32.13) is available at Books Kinokuniya.

Credit where credit is due.

Okay, this is funny. . .

Ah, . . . the roar of the grease paint, the smell of the crowds. Wait, wrong venue. . .

Broadway-Bound Sherlock Holmes Sets Director

BY ADAM HETRICK

MAY 11, 2016

Tony nominee Daniel Evans will direct the Broadway premiere of the play that promises to bring a new edge to the classic tale. 

Daniel Evans, who directed the London revival of Show Boat and was seen on Broadway in the revival of Sunday in the Park With George, will direct a new Broadway-aimed production of Sherlock Holmes that promises to bring “thrills and dynamic energies” to the classic mystery series.

Rachel Wagstaff and Duncan Abel have written the play that will have its U.K. premiere in summer 2017 prior to a Broadway arrival. Specific dates of a Broadway premiere have not been determined. Antonio R. Marion is lead producer.

The creative team will also include Tony and Olivier Award-winning scenic designer Christopher Oram, Tony and Olivier-winning lighting designer Hugh Vanstone and six-time Tony-winning costume designer William Ivey Long.

“We have worked long and hard to assemble a creative team that will not only bring a compelling new edge to the beloved characters of Sherlock Holmes, but will also bring to life a dark, Victorian underworld, where everyone, including Holmes, has something to hide,” Marion said in a statement. “With one of London’s hottest young directors, and a pedigree design team, audiences will experience the thrills and dynamic energies of Sherlock Holmes in a way that has never been rendered on stage.”

“Staged as a mystery within a mystery, the case presented to Holmes forces him to confront his murky past,” press notes state. “But is the unravelling of his childhood just a dangerous diversion? Sherlock Holmes is an original tale which will offer a new and deeply theatrical exploration of the mind of the famous detective, while remaining faithful to the mysterious world created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” 

source

The season ends - S4 E's 23 and 24, my thoughts.

Speaking of bombs!

Okay, okay. Maybe it wasn't that bad.

Season four came to an end this past Sunday with episode 24, 'A Difference in Kind',
A continuation of episode 23, 'The Invisible Hand'.
I must admit that the fact that my 'The Woman', Natalie Dormer, did not return may be clouding my review, but I will do my best not to be jaded.

In 'The Invisible Hand' people surrounding Morland Holmes are dropping like flies. And it is eventually determined, by Sherlock, that the lead suspect, in his book, Vikner, is responsilbe.
Vikner also turns out to be the leader of Moriarty's crime sydicate, and the father of her daughter.

In episode 24, 'A Difference in Kind', the Holmes' try to get another top ranking boss in Moriarty's orginazation to help bring down Vikner, An Iraqi diplomat, she feels Vikners death is the only way to really bring him down. (Why she would want to bring on Moriarty's dipleasure about this is beyond me.)

It is shortly after this that we find Morland has been recruited to head the organization, and he accepts the job to protect Joan and Sherlock.

Morland has spent most of this season trying to get back into Sherlock's good graces. And unless Morland dives in front of a bullet to save Joan, that does not seem likely to happen. And the ending of this season may have been a way to get him out, at least for the time being, of the story line.
While the Canonical Moriarty and the 'Elementary' Vikner seem to be able to carry on a normal life in public view as teachers, I doubt if Morland will be allowed to do so.

While in the canon we never really find out what happens to Moriarty's organizaion, every one telling Sherlock in these last two episodes seems kind of like a dig to his abilities and that he left something unfinished and now Morland needs to clean it up, as he did with Sherlocks drug problem by finding Joan. It felt to much like, "What do I have to do to prove myself to you Sherlock, die?"
Canonically many of us believe Holmes spent a good part of his time in hiatus helping to round up most of Moriarty's compatriots in crime, finishing off with the capture of Moran in EMPT.
(The spotting of someone in the flat from across the street rang of EMPT.)
If the cliff hanger of this season had been the bomb going off and Joan and the rest of us not knowing what happened to Sherlock, it may have worked better. But since B.C's. 'death' as Sherlock in 'Sherlock', the public may have seen that coming.
At this point in time, if Dormers 'Moriarty' will not be returning they need to come up with their own 'FINA'. Dormer was Elementary's Moriarty and it will be a shame if they can not bring that story to completion without her presence. And if indeed John Noble's 'Morland' is pretty well gone, it leaves very much about this season unresolved.

 That also leaves Sherlock as the least effective of all individuals involved with the resolution.

The way this episode ended, did however make room for new story developments that do not include Morland or Moriaty and actually help the show advance into better stories.

While I find this season the strongest so far, for me, these two episode, along with 'Hounded' are the weakest.

A good question from these two episodes would be; Could a Sherlock Holmes in modern times take on an organization like Moriarty's?

If I look at these two episodes as the season finally ending a story line I was getting tired of, I can fairly give these episodes;

I'm okay with this. . . .

Elementary: John Noble Not Returning as Series Regular for Season 5

By Vlada Gelman / May 8 2016, 7:59 PM PDT

After taking over Moriarty’s organization in order to protect Sherlock and Joan, the senior Holmes said goodbye to New York City during Sunday’s Season 4 finale. (Get scoop on that twist and more here.)

“This was always the plan that we would have John aboard for Season 4,” and he would then exit, executive producer Rob Doherty tells TVLine. “We wanted Morland — and, by extension, John — to help us define Season 4, and he absolutely did that. I feel like we told the one long story we wanted to, but we [also] got to tell a lot of smaller stories about Sherlock and his father, and then Morland trying to develop a relationship with Joan. We feel like we did everything we set out to do.”

Houdini played by Watson . . under 'I did not know this!'

Known for his Watson in Young Sherlock Holmes, Alan Cox at one time played Houdini.

Houdini and Doyle, what can we expect. . . . .

This weekend I watched the first episode of Houdini and Doyle not knowing what to expect.

The episode, and I am guessing the rest of the series will be like it, centers on  a murder case that seems to center around spirits and ghosts.
With Houdini trying to prove it wasn't a supernatural killer and Doyle, of course, trying to prove it was. In between is a sensible female constable trying to prove herself in a mans world.

Doyle is of course irritated that the public is still crying for more Holmes while he is trying to prove he is capable of more than that.

Lots of Doyle connections are made throughout the show. Two of Doyles children are present in the household, as is Doyles first wife.

The most fun about the new show is the Victorian settings and costumes and the young female police constable played by Rebecca Liddiard. While women were still not present on the police force at this time, her character balances Doyle and Houdini. (Nor had Doyle and Houdini actually when this show is set.)(And the context of how much Doyle was involved with spiritualism at this period of time is a little off also.)

I think this will be a fun show, and much like Sherlock and Elementary it could become a game of catching as many Doyle and Sherlock Holmes references as one can.

I will let Doyleokian tell us how much is fact and how much is accurate.

Here is a link to some info on Houdini and Doyle at the Guardian.

Okay, this one is for my love of Yorkshire Pudding. . . . don't know if Sherlock ever had any or not.

3 local pubs that are fantastic for Yorkshire Puddings

THIS week, we are looking at not one, not two, but three superb Yorkshire pubs.

They're separated by many miles but linked by one common thread: their reverence for the beauty that is the Yorkshire Pudding.

We've hunted high and low, north and south, to bring you today's recommendations, especially in honour of Yorkshire Day.

And now, after a bitter but brilliant batter battle, we have three recommendations. So if you're looking for a splendid lunch, look no further....

1 - First up is a pub we have recommended before: The Ship Inn in Aldborough, a pretty little village near Boroughbridge.

I headed out here in 2012, after a letter writer to The Press said the beef was the best she'd ever tasted and the Yorkshires the most amazing she’d seen - and we weren't disappointed!

This is a fantastic place, reputed to have been a pub since the 1300s, and run by Brian and Elaine Rey for the past few years. It's splendid, but the roast dinner in particular is hard to beat.

The beef is matured for 21 days and slow cooked for 20 hours, and the portions are enormous. The piece de resistance is what they call "Brian's world famous Yorkshire puddings" - humongous crisp balls the size of grapefruit, which I still remember fondly.

2 - Next up, a couple of miles south of Pickering on the A169, is The Black Bull.

This place changed hands in March, and the new owners are full of fighting talk. A roadside sign declares: "We serve probably the best Yorkshire pudding in Yorkshire" - a claim that demanded to be put to the test.

There's no shortage of choice here. There are giant filled Yorkshire puddings and the house speciality - homemade loaf tin Yorkshire Puddings with a choice of five fillings. I plumped for steak and ale and chips and it was fantastic.

The method was inspired; the result was a hefty brick-shaped pudding, topped with steak and ale and with a mound of chips on the side.

Best in Yorkshire though? It's good - but it can't beat our final pub......

3 - Step forward The Crooked Billet at Saxton, directly opposite the historic Lead Chapel near Towton battlefield, just south of Tadcaster.

I've had this pub on my radar since a visit to its sister pub (The Cross Keys in Hillam) introduced me to the some of best pub burgers I've encountered. Here, the speciality in a vast and varied menu is the filled Yorkshire pudding, and the quality is outstanding.

All come filled with mash, veg, gravy and a choice of two sausages, roast meat of the day, steak and kidney, or vegetables and veggie gravy.

I've tried the first two now (on separate trips) and both were excellent. It looks a bit messy, buckling under its own bulk, but it tastes tremendous.

If you're in this neck of the woods, and want a proper lunch for Yorkshire Day weekend, in surroundings laden with Yorkshire history this is the place to go.

The puddings at The Crooked Billet (left) and The Black Bull.

Credit where credit is due. . . .

A good question. . .

Would Sherlock Holmes be a coke addict today? It’s an interesting question

US opioid sales quadrupled from 1999-2010, but there can serious side effects even when taken as directed

Mon, May 2, 2016, 16:00

Legions of Benedict Cumberbatch fans will be delighted with the news that filming has just got under way for the fourth Sherlock Holmesseries. Feature- length episodes are due to hit our screens in the autumn.

With a modern rather than a Victorian setting, the writers had to decide how to tackle the issue of Holmes’s addiction to cocaine and opium when the series began. Steven Moffat said: “I think you’d have to ask the question would a man like Sherlock Holmes be a coke addict today? In Victorian times everybody was taking some kind of drug, largely because there was no such thing as a painkiller. It is a very different thing to say that Sherlock Holmes is a coke addict now.”

It’s an interesting perspective. There has been an explosion in opiate prescribing, especially in North America. US opioid sales quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. This was in part a response to undertreatment of patients receiving palliative care and those with acute pain. However, opioid therapy for chronic musculoskeletal pain, including back pain, also grew substantially and disproportionately. And as US opioid sales quadrupled, admissions to substance misuse treatment programmes and opioid- related overdose deaths also increased fourfold.

Opiate prescribing dates back to Sir Thomas Sydenham, who, in the 1660s, promoted laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. Sir William Osler, a famously cautious prescriber, called it “God’s own medicine”. For the first time doctors had access to a reliable painkiller, a sedative and, because of its tendency to constipate, a useful treatment for diarrhoea.

People bought opiates in much the same way as they buy paracetamol today: patented formulations such as Dover’s powder were kept in the kitchen cupboard. Godfrey’s Cordial or Street’s Infants’ Quietness not only reduced colic in infants but made it easier to sedate children. The intoxicant effects of opium were also appreciated – brewers added it to their products.

Opiates are compounds found naturally in the opium poppy plant Papaver somniferum. Heroin is perhaps the most famous opiate, but there are numerous derivatives including methadone, oxycodone and fentanyl.

Some experts rank heroin as the most addictive drug. It causes the level of dopamine in the brain’s reward system to increase by up to 200 per cent. In addition to being arguably the most addictive drug, heroin is dangerous, too, because the dose that can cause death is only five times greater than the dose required to experience a high.

By 2010, deaths related to prescription opioid overdose had reached 16,500 a year in the US, far exceeding deaths from cocaine or heroin. Deaths from prescription opioids have also increased in the UK. The Centres for Disease Control (CDC) reckon as many as one in four people receiving prescription opioids in a primary-care setting struggles with addiction.

Earlier this year the CDC issued a formal warning to doctors about opiate prescribing. Acknowledging the important role of opiates in relieving suffering for patients with active cancer or others in hospice or palliative care, it noted that “studies are not available to indicate whether opioids control chronic pain well when used long-term”.

In addition to the serious risks of addiction and overdose, the use of prescription opioids can have a number of side effects, even when taken as directed. These include: physical dependence (ie symptoms of withdrawal when the medication is stopped); increased sensitivity to pain; vomiting; drowsiness; itching and sweating; and depression.

No one likes being in chronic pain for months or more. But before you move to a prescribed opiate for non- malignant pain it’s important to discuss with your doctor all pain treatment options. Be open about past or current drug and alcohol use. And have a detailed discussion about the risks and benefits of taking prescription opioids.

Credit where credit is due.

The man who would be Holmes. . . . The Burmese Holmes

Nationalist writer Shwe U Daung adapted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous literary creation and transported him to Rangoon in the 1930s to espouse his political views.

By OLIVER SLOW | FRONTIER

It was London in the late 19th century and Dr Watson, the sidekick of famed detective Sherlock Holmes, was sitting at home by a fire, smoking a pipe and reading a novel.

Shortly before midnight, an excited Holmes arrived, asking for Watson’s help in “one of the strangest cases which ever perplexed a man’s brain”. He asked Watson to accompany him the next morning to Aldershot, a town on the outskirts of London.

Some decades later, and more than 5,000 miles away in Rangoon, Thein Maung was, like Watson, sitting at home reading when there was a knock at the door. A man entered and asked Thein Maung for his help in a case similar to that in which Holmes had sought Watson’s assistance. The next day they would travel together, not to Aldershot, but across the Bago River to Thanlyin (then Syriam).

The man at Thein Maung’s door was San Shar, a character based on Holmes who was created by the famous and prolific writer of crime fiction, Shwe U Daung.

Sherlock Holmes was the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his fireside interruption of Watson occurs at the start ofA Crooked Man, in which the detective investigates the death of Colonel James Barclay. The police believe he was murdered by his wife, Nancy, but Holmes, using his famous deduction skills, establishes that Barclay died from shock at the sight of a former rival in love, Henry Wood, whom he thought he had ordered killed when they served together in the British Army in India.

Shwe U Daung’s version of the novel, A Strange Murder Case, is almost identical to Doyle’s story, except that it is set in Syriam and Rangoon in the 1930s. In the story, San Shar establishes that former military officer U Tin Pe died from shock at the sight of U Chit Maung. Tin Pe thought Chit Maung had died after he sent him on patrol when they served together at Myitkyina. Like Nancy Barclay, Tin Pe’s wife, Daw Mya Hnit, is cleared as a murder suspect when San Shar solves the case.

Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories about his most famous character, with most set in London between 1880 and 1914.

Shwe U Daung wrote nearly 170 novels between 1917 and 1961. “Many of them are adaptions of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, although some are not,” said Ms Yuri Takahashi, a Japanese academic who lives in Sydney.

Shwe U Daung attracted Takahashi’s interest when she was assigned to the Japanese embassy in Yangon in 1991 as a Myanmar language expert. The result was a monograph, The case-book of Mr San Shar: Burmese Society and Nationalist thought in the 1930s as seen in the Burmese Sherlock Holmes Stories, that Takahashi presented at an Asian studies conference in Melbourne in 2008.

As well as A Strange Murder Case others included An Indian Woman Hiding in Her House (an adaption of The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger, in which a woman is mauled by a lion while trying to have her husband killed), A Murder Case on Boundary Road (adapted from the original Holmes story A Study in Scarlet) and Kyaing the Cripple (adapted from The Man with the Twisted Lip).

“The character of San Shar is very important to Burmese people,” said writer Ko San Lin Tun, who has translated some of Shwe U Daung’s novels into English. “And the work of Shwe U Daung remains very influential for many of the writers who came later,” he said.

The stories were incredibly popular, but, in common with Doyle, Shwe U Daung grew tired of his best-known character and killed off San Shar in his adaption of The Final Problem, in which Holmes dies after plunging into Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls during a fight with his nemesis, Dr Moriarty.

In Mr San Shar is Caught by the Villains’ Hands, the detective dies after falling into a waterfall in Shan State during a fight with his rival, Professor Tun Pe. He is described as “an incredibly talented Burmese man who was once a chemistry professor at Rangoon University, but because of misconduct he was dismissed and became a criminal mastermind in Rangoon”.

Shwe U Daung brought his character back to life in The Assassination of Mr San Shar, an adaption of The Empty House, in which Holmes reappears as a bookseller. In Shwe U Daung’s version, San Shar returns as a Buddhist hermit.

There were times when San Shar’s destiny differed from that of Holmes. In The Disappearance of Governmental Treaty,published in 1937 and an adaption of The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, San Shar discovers that a murder was committed by the younger brother of a Burmese official after he was approached by a rich Japanese businessman, Mr Kalawa.

In her monograph, Takahashi argues that this incident illustrates a distrust of the Japanese at the time when Tokyo was trying to enlist the support of Burmese nationalists, causing grave concern to the British.

At the end of the story, Holmes receives a gift from Queen Victoria, but no similar event occurs in Shwe U Daung’s version. “Shwe U Daung must have felt that receiving a gift from the British was no longer appropriate for a Burmese nationalist hero,” Takahashi wrote.

The 1930s were a time of heightened nationalism and anti-British sentiment in Burma.

“Shwe U Daung himself was a journalist and a nationalist,” said San Lin Tun. “It is strange then that his main character was an adaption of a British one,” he said.

Although Takahashi argues that Shwe U Daung was a nationalist, his views differed from those of the “Dobama Asiayone” (We Burmans Association), the main nationalist movement in the 1930s, which was predominantly Bamar.

A consistent theme throughout the San Shar stories is of the detective helping people regardless of race or religion. The Scorpion’s Traitor and A Murder Case on Boundary Road, are about the Indian victims of Indian gangs, and The Examination Paper shows a friendship between an old Bengali servant and a young Burmese student. San Shar was also commonly helped by a group of Indian boys, an adaption borrowed from Holmes’ famous “Baker Street Irregulars”.

Source