Sherlock in the Seventies

By Derham Groves

Every era has had the Sherlock Holmes it wanted or needed—except the 1970s. In that wild decade, all bets were off . . .

 

The popular image of Sherlock Holmes in any given period derives as much from the actors who portrayed the detective as it does from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories and Sidney Paget's famous illustrations. In earlier and subsequent decades this image was defined by a single stage or screen actor (from William Gillette and Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett and Robert Downey Jr.), but the nine Sherlock Holmes films made in the '70s re-imagine the detective in starkly divergent ways, from the boldly inventive to the flat-out irreverent. Holmes is variously portrayed as gay (Robert Stephens), crazy (George C. Scott), pompous (Stewart Granger), petulant (Gene Wilder), vulnerable (Nicol Williamson), camp (Roger Moore) wrong-headed (John Cleese), silly (Peter Cook), and socially conscious (Christopher Plummer). Yet all these films contribute in their own way to casting new light on the legend.

 

In Sherlock in the Seventies, Derham Groves offers an entertaining and absorbing account of these films, packed with shrewd analysis and insights, background details, numerous illustrations, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Visible Spectrum
• Release date: Jul 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201953966

Book preview

Preface

Derham Groves is a richly gifted creator, writer, and scholar, and all his talents are on display in this delightfully informative volume on that ‘wild decade of Sherlock Holmes films,’ the 1970s. Somewhat later, near the turn of the millennium, our paths crossed in Minneapolis. Unlike the infamous Professor Moriarty, I was never incommoded by this professor from the University of Melbourne. Quite the opposite, in fact. His plans for a Sherlock Holmes Research Centre on the campus of the University of Minnesota—his 1980 Bachelor’s thesis—never came to fruition, but they inspired future enterprises. Derham’s architecture students created fanciful house designs for characters in the Holmes canon, and many of their models and drawings found their way into an exhibit I co-curated with him in 2000, Better Holmes and Gardens: Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle and Architectural Design ‘Down Under.’ Additional creative pieces from Derham have found their way to the Sherlock Holmes Collections at Minnesota since our first meeting. I am grateful for his friendship.

It is a special pleasure, then, to add this work to a bountiful store, now guided by Derham through a decade that saw a resurgence in Holmes on many platforms after the many societal shifts and upheavals in the 1960s—a time when Holmes nearly disappeared from the scene. I’m tempted to add other words beside ‘wild’ into the mix in describing this book, bits and pieces heard as a teenager at the time—far out, radical, stoked—but I’ll spare readers my past memories. Settle down on the shag carpet and enjoy the films. Don’t let the Man keep you down. We’ll catch you on the flip side.

Timothy J. Johnson

E. W. McDiarmid Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections

Curator of Rare Books & Special Collections

University of Minnesota

It Was a Very Good Decade . . .

Peter Blau

¹

It is an interesting exercise, for someone who actually was there, to look back at the 1970s, a decade that started 50 years ago and of course is now history rather than current events.

When you typed, in 1970, you might have been fortunate enough to be using an electric typewriter. In 1973 the IBM Correcting Selectric II was unveiled, with a special ribbon that allowed you to dispense with white-out fluid, a true godsend for typists.

There were no desktop computers in 1970, but that changed (slightly) later in the decade, when personal computers were built from kits (the Apple I computer circuit board, which contained about 30 chips, was first sold in 1976). Computerized desktop calculators were beginning to replace adding machines. Music lovers enjoyed music on phonograph records and audio-cassettes.

There was no Internet in 1970. The ARPANET came first, created for the military, and by the end of 1971 there actually were 15 sites connected to it. It wasn’t until 1974 that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn first used the word ‘internet.’ You could communicate by telephone easily, thanks to the massive company many people called ‘Ma Bell,’ which presided over a firmly held monopoly.

There were books, to be sure, printed on paper, and television that actually had a handful of channels, but nothing to match what cable gives one access to today. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began operations in 1970, and the first episode of Masterpiece Theatre aired in 1971. Sherlock Hemlock first appeared on Sesame Street in 1971. Most viewers were watching programs on analogue over-the-air television sets, and were glad to be able to capture programs on video-cassettes.

The world of Sherlockians certainly was far smaller in 1970 than it is today; there were fewer Sherlockian societies and far fewer Sherlockian journals and newsletters. There was scholarship and pseudo-scholarship, of course. William S. Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective (1962) and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1967) had brought new Sherlockians into the fold.

When the decade dawned, it seemed as though the Universal films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were rather like the British Empire, on which the sun never set: somewhere, on any given day, some television station was broadcasting one of their films. The 1960s had offered little else for Sherlockians, other than John Neville and Donald Houston’s A Study in Terror (1965), and the BBC’s Sherlock Holmes series (1964–68) starring Douglas Wilmer (1964–65) and Peter Cushing (1968) as Holmes, and Nigel Stock as Watson.

That certainly changed in 1970, as you soon will see in Derham Groves’ discussion of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and many other fine films that followed. And there was much more to the 1970s than excellent films, of course. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival of William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes in London in 1974 and then in Washington and New York and on tour in the United States ignited a spark that led to an explosion when Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was published later in the year and then made into a film that won Oscar nominations for best screenplay and costume design.

‘I do not think that I am in need of booming,’ Sherlock Holmes told J. Neil Gibson in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge,’ but Holmes benefited greatly from the ‘boom’ in the 1970s. It is grand indeed that DVDs and the Internet now make it possible to so easily watch the many Sherlockian films that were made in that decade, and of course that readers will benefit from the stories that Derham tells so well in this book. Enjoy!

---

1 In 1959 Peter E. Blau became a member of the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), the world’s oldest Sherlock Holmes society, based in New York. He was given the canonical name ‘Black Peter’ after the ship’s captain in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’ (1904). He is currently the BSI’s ‘Simpson’ (i.e., secretary). Blau has been a font of information about Holmes for decades. He and the author have been pen pals and friends since the mid-1970s.

it was a very good decade . . .

Introduction

Between 1887 and 1927 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. I have been hooked on the detective ever since Mrs. Vines, my form one English teacher at Oberon High School in Geelong, Australia, read Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ (1892)¹ out loud in class one day in 1969. Thus the following Holmes films made during the 1970s were very timely for me. In chronological order they were:

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), directed by Billy Wilder, starring Robert Stephens as Holmes and Colin Blakely as Watson.

They Might Be Giants (1971), directed by Anthony Harvey, starring George C. Scott as Justin Playfair/Sherlock Holmes and Joanne Woodward as Dr. Mildred Watson.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972), directed by Barry Crane, starring Stewart Granger as Holmes and Bernard Fox as Watson.

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), directed by Gene Wilder, who also starred as Sigerson Holmes, with Marty Feldman as Orville Sacker.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), directed by Herbert Ross, starring Nicol Williamson as Holmes and Robert Duvall as Watson.

Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976), directed by Boris Sagal, starring Roger Moore as Holmes and Patrick Macnee as Watson.

The Strange Case of the End of Civilisation As We Know It (1977) directed by Joe McGrath, starring John Cleese as Arthur Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Lowe as Dr. William Watson.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978), directed by Paul Morrissey, starring Peter Cook as Holmes and Dudley Moore as Watson.

Murder By Decree (1979), directed by Bob Clark, starring Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson.

‘About once every 10 years [Sherlock Holmes] gets rediscovered by everybody, as opposed to that relatively small group of two million or so who are always buying and reading his books,’² Nicholas Meyer, the author of the best-selling Holmes novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), told Bruce Russell of the Vancouver Sun.

Meyer was right, but I would add that in any given period most people agreed what Holmes was like and who they liked best to portray him on stage and screen. In the early 1900s he was William Gillette. In the 1940s he was Basil Rathbone, whose interpretation of the detective in fourteen films cast a very long shadow indeed. In the 1960s he was Peter Cushing. In the 1980s and 90s he was Jeremy Brett. And in the early 2000s he was Robert Downey Jr. In the 1970s, however, the image of Holmes was all over the place, which was perhaps a reflection of the decade’s charming flakiness. He was gay (Robert Stephens); he was crazy (George C. Scott); he was pompous (Stewart Granger); he was petulant (Gene Wilder); he was vulnerable (Nicol Williamson); he was camp (Roger Moore); he was wrong (John Cleese); he was silly (Peter Cook); and he was sensitive (Christopher Plummer).

‘I can’t believe that any other fictional creation has been at once so adaptable, so impervious to change and so capable of accommodating the audiences of such different eras as this remarkable eccentric who, I’m sure, still lives at 221B Baker Street,’³ wrote the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby. How very true!

In 2019 publisher Steve Connell invited me to contribute a volume to his new series, The Visible Spectrum. As I was retiring from teaching architecture at the University of Melbourne at the end of that year, I was looking for a meaty project to get stuck into, and the idea of writing about Sherlock in the Seventies seemed to fit the bill very nicely. Little did I know then that it would also be my 2020 COVID lockdown project!

Having burned through the 1970s myself—starting the decade as a 14-year old schoolboy and ending it as a 23-year old married man (miraculously, Ping and I are still married 42 years later!)—I had great fun remembering my wild years through these wild films. I have tried to capture the voices of the 1970s, letting people speak for themselves whenever possible by quoting from interviews and reviews from the time. What’s more, even though it is now over 50 years since the first of these films was released, I was able to speak to a surprising number of actors and crew members who helped make these films during the 1970s.

I became fascinated by the Thomas Pynchon-style coincidences, connections and contradictions that are ‘hidden’ in the nine Holmes films of the 1970s. For example, the actor who played Grandpa in The Munsters is in They Might Be Giants and the actor who played Uncle Fester in the rival TV series The Addams Family is in Sherlock Holmes in New York. And in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution—a film about Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud—the wife of the actor who plays Holmes plays Holmes’ mother in the film. Talk about the Oedipus complex! I was also amazed to discover how desperately Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s heirs wanted Andy Warhol to ‘reinvent’ the detective for the groovy 1970s. Now who would have guessed that?

In conclusion, something about my interest in Holmes post-1970s.

In 1980 I designed a Sherlock Holmes Centre for my Bachelor of Architecture design thesis at Deakin University in Geelong.⁴ Designing that building paved the way for me to go to the University of Minnesota in 1984 and work with the incredible Austin J. McLean, then head of Special Collections at the university library, which has the world’s largest collection of Sherlock Holmes material. That was my idea of heaven at the time!

In 1985 I was the first Australian to become a member of the Baker Street Irregulars and was given the canonical name ‘Black Jack of Ballarat,’ after the Australian bushranger in Doyle’s ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ (1891).⁵

In 1987 I curated Holmes Away From Home⁶ at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia (7 December 1987–31 January 1988)—the first of many Holmes exhibitions I have organised.

Working in the Department of Architecture first at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and later at the University of Melbourne, I ran numerous architectural design studios based on the Holmes stories.⁷

I have created many limited-edition surrealist artist books about the detective, which I print and bind myself; these include Sherlockian Visiting Cards (1997), Parallel Worlds: Sherlock Holmes and Tintin (2004), and Sherlock Holmes’ Book of Moustaches (2021).⁸

I have also edited and written several other types of books about Holmes, including You Bastard Moriarty (1996),⁹ There’s No Place Like Holmes: Exploring Sense of Place Through Crime Fiction (2008)¹⁰ and Victims & Villains: Ken and Barbie Meet Sherlock Holmes (2009).¹¹ However, none of these was more fun to write or illustrate than Sherlock in the Seventies: A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films (2021).

---

1 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892), ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ in William S. Baring-Gould (ed.), The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, London: John Murray, 1968, vol. I, 243–262.

2 Bruce Russell, ‘I Say, Holmes, What Do You Make of this Chap Meyer?’ Vancouver Sun, 26 Sep. 1975, 35.

3 Vincent Canby, ‘Sherlock Holmes Can’t Be Killed,’ San Antonio Express (San Antonio, TX), 28 Nov. 1976, 92.

4 Derham Groves, ‘A Sherlock Holmes Centre,’ Transition (Melbourne, Australia), vol. 3, no. 1, Mar. 1982, 21–31.

5 Doyle (1891), ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ in Baring-Gould (ed.), 1968, vol. II, 134–152.

6 Jennifer Boone and Derham Groves (curators), Holmes Away From Home: An Exhibition at the State Library of Victoria to Celebrate 100 Years of Sherlock Holmes in Print, Melbourne: Library Council of Australia, 1987.

7 Derham Groves, ‘Holmes Is Where the Art Is: Architectural Design Projects’ in Edward J. Rielly, Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2009, 61–69.

8 Robert Littlewood, ‘The Black Jack Press’ in Derham Groves and David Harris (eds.), In the Privacy of Their Own Holmes, Melbourne: Blackbird Books, 2004, 29–34.

9 Derham Groves, You Bastard Moriarty: Being a Consideration of the Collectability of Ephemera Related to the Greatest Detective That Never Lived: Sherlock Holmes, Melbourne: Littlewood Press, 1996.

10 Derham Groves, There’s No Place Like Holmes: Exploring Sense of Place Through Crime Fiction, Carlton North: Black Jack Press, 2008.

11 Derham Groves (ed.), Victims & Villains: Barbie and Ken Meet Sherlock Holmes, Vancleave, MO: Ramble House, 2009.

A Sherlock Holmes Centre, ink and Letratone (Derham Groves)

Acknowledgments

The Andy Warhol Museum, Humphrey Barclay, Rebecca Batties, Peter E. Blau, Mattias Bostrom, Pat Brackenbury, Doug Brode, Burbank Films Australia, Michael Cashman, Michael Connell, Steve Connell, Joseph Connellan, Catherine Cooke, Ken Cuthbertson, Tom Dale, Paul Engelen, Stephen Faehle, Qi Ge, Dana Gillespie, Matthew Gray, Derek Griffiths, Huey Groves, Loom Groves, David Harris, Betty Hukill, Charlie Hukill, Jin Jiacai, Roger Johnson, Timothy J. Johnson, Patrick Kincaid, Khoo Ping Tiang, Karen Kondazian, Stan Kranc, Vane Lindesay, Robin Marchal, Karal Ann Marling, Anthony May, Jerry Margolin, Leo McKern, Nicholas Meyer, Bart Mills, David Moore, Redmond Morris, the Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America, Adriana Neculai, Ivo Nightingale, Howard Ostrom, Holly Palance, Edmund Pegge, Greg Pierce, Waseem Qrayeiah, Ann Rado, Ben Schmideg, the Sherlock Society of London, Nick Tate, Heather Vines, Pat Wade, Henry Woolf, Paul Zaza.

Advertisement for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

(from the Los Angeles Times, 26 December 1970)

 Colin Blakely as Watson and Robert Stephens as Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

1

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

‘Hollywood, May 31—Director Billy Wilder says, The greatest figures in fiction for the screen are Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes, and there’s never been a decent movie about any of them. So he’ll do something about it in his next, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,’¹ reported the American gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1963.

The prospect was a tantalising one for Holmes fans: A ­movie about the detective with a huge (for those days) ten-­million-dollar budget,² directed by the six-time Oscar-winning Billy Wilder, responsible for such Hollywood classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like it Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), and The Fortune Cookie (1966)—to name just a few.

Wilder had been looking for a Holmes vehicle for a long time. In 1955 he purchased the rights from the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), the author of the original four Holmes novels and 56 Holmes short stories, to make a Holmes ­musical in collaboration with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, composer Frederick Loewe, and playwright/stage director Moss Hart. But it never happened.³

When Wilder was initially casting The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (hereafter referred to as Private Life) in 1964, he offered the role of Holmes to Peter O’Toole (1932–2013) and that of Dr. Watson to Peter Sellers (1925–1980). They had appeared together on screen in the French-American film What’s New Pussycat? (1965), written by Woody Allen and directed by Clive Donner, with O’Toole playing the playboy Michael James and Sellers his demented psychoanalyst, Dr. Fritz Fassbender. O’Toole had starred in the British ­biopic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Sellers had played multiple roles in the American satirical film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Each was nominated for an Oscars for those films, but they both missed out.

Initially, Wilder wanted David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia, to write Private Life, but in the end Wilder and his long-time associate, scriptwriter I. A. L. (‘Izzy’) Diamond (1920–1988), wrote it themselves.⁴ O’Toole was reluctant to accept the role of Holmes before he had read the script.⁵ On the other hand, Sellers was on board to play Watson regardless. ‘Wilder is the only one I would sign with, not having seen a script,’ he said. ‘There are many of us who would do that. Wilder is quite a phenomenon.’⁶

Wilder had also chosen Sellers to play Orville J. Spooner in his romantic comedy Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), but the actor suffered a heart attack six weeks into filming and had to return home to England to recuperate. Wilder replaced him with Ray Walston, best known for playing Uncle Martin in the American TV sitcom My Favourite Martian (1963–66), and re-shot all of Sellers’s scenes.⁷

Sellers then criticised Wilder in the English press for his casual and jocular ways on the set of Kiss Me, Stupid, and this caused a major rift between them. This was ‘a sad blow for director Wilder,’ reported Harold Heffernan in the Valley Times, ‘since he still had faint hopes that Sellers would fulfil an old agreement to play Dr. Watson in his coming film production of Sherlock Holmes.’⁸

By the time Private Life was ready to start production in 1969 (it had originally been scheduled for 1965 release), O’Toole had moved on and Sellers was still in Wilder’s doghouse. Sellers never got another chance to play Watson, but O’Toole did get to play Holmes (as well as Lord Peter Wimsey and Philip Marlowe) in the stage play Dead Eyed Dicks (1976) by the English writer Peter King.

O’Toole was also the first choice of Nicholas Meyer, author of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), to play Holmes in the 1976 film version of his book (see chapter 5). The Irish actor also voiced Holmes in the animated film versions of Doyle’s Holmes novels produced by Burbank Films Australia: (1) Sherlock Holmes and a Study in Scarlet (1983), based on A Study in Scarlet (1887)⁹; (2) Sherlock Holmes and the Sign of Four (1983), based on The Sign of the Four (1890)¹⁰; (3) Sherlock Holmes and the Baskerville Curse (1983), based on The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)¹¹; and (4) Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear (1983), based on The Valley of Fear (1915).¹² The Australian actor Earle Cross played Watson.

Finally, O’Toole also played Doyle in a film about the Cottingley fairies hoax called Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997), directed by Charles Sturridge.

In 1969 Private Life was finally ready to go, and Wilder urgently needed a Holmes and a Watson. He considered several actors for the plum roles, including the Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr as Watson,¹³ which would have been worth seeing, although it is hard to imagine. Wilder offered the role of Holmes to Nicol Williamson, who ‘turned it down because the character seemed too corny.’¹⁴ On the other hand, Rex Harrison desperately wanted to play the detective and eagerly offered himself for the role, only to be humiliatingly rejected by Wilder.

In the end, Wilder chose two English stage actors from the National Theatre who were virtually unknown to filmgoers at the time: Robert Stephens (1931–1995) as Holmes and Colin Blakely (1930–1987) as Watson. They had already appeared ­together on stage in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) by the English playwright Peter Shaffer.

Stephens was highly regarded by many theatre critics and widely seen as the natural successor to Laurence Olivier, the director of the National Theatre and the most outstanding British actor of his day, who could play everyone from Hamlet in the Academy Award-winning film (1948), which he also directed, to Sherlock Holmes’ arch-enemy Professor James Moriarty in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (discussed in chapter 5).

Wilder told the English TV producer Mark Shivas: ‘I’d never seen Stephens except for 20 minutes in the bar of the Connaught Hotel, but I thought ‘What’s good enough for Larry Olivier is good enough for me.’¹⁵

Even so, Stephens had to be persuaded to play Holmes. ‘At first I was certain that this was a part that I was not right for,’ he told the veteran Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas. ‘But I then had one meeting with Billy, and I quickly became convinced.’¹⁶

According to David Stuart Davies, the author of Holmes of the Movies: The Screen Career of Sherlock Holmes (1976), the director James Hill had earlier wanted Stephens to play Holmes in A Study in Terror (1965),¹⁷ but Hill must not have been as persuasive as Wilder, and John Neville played the detective in that film instead.

Stephens’ portrayal of Holmes is more melancholic and disillusioned than any other, apart perhaps from that of Jeremy Brett in the outstanding British TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984–94). But as Mark Gatiss, the creator of the Emmy Award-winning British TV series Sherlock (2010–17), commented in 2014, while Stephens’ Holmes is hardly anyone’s idea of the detective, it suits Private Life perfectly.

Tragically for Stephens, however, conveying Holmes’ on-screen moroseness required little acting on his part because his marriage to the actress Maggie Smith was disintegrating and he had a serious drinking problem. Furthermore, he had great difficulty with Wilder’s almost obsessive desire for word-perfect dialogue. According to the film’s editor Ernest Walter, Izzy Diamond would mouth the actors’ lines out-of-shot as they spoke them and stop the action if what they said did not correspond exactly to the script.¹⁸

Shortly after returning from filming in Scotland, Stephens felt so overwhelmed by everything that he tried to kill himself with sleeping pills and whiskey, delaying Private Life a further ten days while he recovered.

But even though playing Holmes took a heavy personal toll on him, in 1976 Stephens agreed to replace John Neville as the detective in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s American touring version of the stage play Sherlock Holmes (1899), written by the American actor/playwright William Gillette.¹⁹ The previous year Neville had replaced John Wood in the role.

Rather than playing Watson more seriously like, say, André Morell did in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) or Donald Houston did in A Study in Terror, Colin Blakely chose to play him mostly for laughs, like Nigel Bruce did in the fourteen films he made between 1939 and 1946 with Basil Rathbone as Holmes.

Blakeley’s Watson is funny, bumptious and indignant, with a dollop of pathos thrown in. According to Mark Gatiss, he ‘is almost the perfect Dr. Watson; an incredibly funny man who has a heart of gold.’²⁰ He reminds me personally a little of George Costanza, Jerry Seinfeld’s neurotic best friend in the American comedy TV series Seinfeld.

Since Stephens and Blakely had already ‘done many plays ­together,’ they also had ‘a relationship and a respect and an affection,’ explained Stephens, which in his view meant ‘you’re halfway there. The relationship between Holmes and Watson has to come across