The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Question

Jeremy Brett (1933-1995) has inherited the mantle of Sherlock Holmes from Basil Rathbone (1893-1967) – indeed, many who have never had the pleasure of seeing Rathbone’s definitive turn as the Great Detective now imagine Brett when mentally picturing Sherlock Holmes.  This is something of a shame.

The standard critical consensus on this is that Brett revitalized Holmes, that his characterization was the closest to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original conception, and that the episodes of Granada’s television series were the most faithful adaptations ever.

Well …. most of these perceptions are not quite true.

The Granda series did not revitalize interest in Sherlock Holmes; rather, the Granada television series is probably the culminating event in what was a decade-long revival of interest.  Throughout the 1970s, interest in Sherlock Holmes was nearly as high as it had been during Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lifetime.  Holmes returned to bestseller lists with Nicholas Meyer’s novels The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1974) and The West End Horror (1976); in fact, Seven Per-Cent received a glossy film treatment by Herb Ross in 1976, starring a woefully miscast Nicol Williamson (born 1938) as Holmes and Robert Duval (born 1931) as Watson.  In addition, the Royal Shakespeare Society revived William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes, running for many years on Broadway with such actors as John Wood (1930-2011), John Neville (born 1925) and Robert Stephens (1931-1995) in the lead role, and Paul Giovanni’s Crucifer of Blood also opened on Broadway in 1978, starring a sterling Paxton Whitehead as the Great Detective.

So, when Granada launched its series in 1984, it was really riding the crest of an almost unprecedented decade-long renaissance for the character.

As for the series itself, it is also not exactly true that the series episodes – largely scripted by John Hawkesworth and Jeremy Paul – were particularly close to Conan Doyle’s stories.  To be sure the level of fidelity was higher than Rathbone’s anti-Nazi war-time excursions, but the series all too often tacked on endings found nowhere in Doyle, or added irrelevant digressions to pad running time.  Indeed, the most faithful adaptations of Doyle were committed not to television, but to radio in two excellent series of programs starring, alternately, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, and, Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley, as Holmes and Watson, respectively.

Which takes us, finally, to Brett.  Any dramatized Sherlock Holmes story passes or fails largely on the strength of the actors playing the parts of Holmes and Watson.  Brett was very lucky indeed in his Watsons.  For the first two seasons Watson was portrayed by David Burke (born 1934).  Burke’s Watson was not the boob he is often portrayed to be lesser films, but, rather a competent medico somewhat in awe of the Great Detective’s powers.  There was certainly nothing wrong with Burke’s performance, but it lacked warmth and that touch of complicity with the audience that makes a compelling Watson.  Watson is the stand-in for our selves and, as such, Burke perhaps looked a tad too much like the late Joseph Stalin for his characterization to be totally effective.

Burke was replaced after the second season for the rest of the series by the extremely talented Edward Hardwick (1932-2011).  Hardwick, son of actor Cedric Hardwick, was simply the finest screen Watson we have had: warm, intelligent, steady, comforting and capable.  He was an eminently watchable actor, and his recent passing is a great loss.

Which brings us, finally, to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes.   If I seem reluctant to address his performance, it’s because I am.  His turn as Holmes has always left me deeply ambivalent – Brett was a beguiling, amusing and melodramatic presence, but he just wasn’t Sherlock Holmes to me.

In the first two seasons, it seemed as if Brett was determined to be the nastiest Holmes on film.  In The Adventure of the Dancing Men, one of the earliest episodes, Brett’s Holmes is rude and condescending to a client in ways never found in Doyle.  In The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle he bellows "I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies” in a manner more reminiscent of a possessed Linda Blair than Sherlock Holmes.  His boxing scene in The Solitary Cyclist is laughable, and some of his line readings in The Final Problem are simply bizarre.  His laugh is a strangled bark and he is too cool, too aloof, and too … reptilian.

None of these embellishments are particularly surprising when one keeps in mind Brett’s initial thoughts on the character – Jeremy Brett hated Sherlock Holmes.  In an interview with The Armchair Detective prior to the American debut of the series, Brett commented that Holmes was a dreadful man; indeed, he wouldn’t “even cross the street to meet him.”  This is hardly the Holmes of Doyle, who was capable of both great charm and great courtesy, whom Watson wrote of as one with a depth of “loyalty and love” and who had “a great heart as well as a great brain.”

However, after these first two years, something happened offstage that forever altered his performance as Holmes for the rest of the series run.  In 1985, Brett came to the United States to star in a Broadway revival of Frederick Lonsdale’s Aren’t We All?, also starring Claudette Colbert and Rex Harrison.  (Brett and Harrison worked together, of course, in the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady.)  While in the US Brett was on the receiving end of a torrential flood of love and admiration from Sherlock Holmes disciples.  He was applauded, feted and lionized – he was, after nearly 30 years of acting – a star with groupies.

This, I think, more than anything changed his Holmes.  The change is evident in his return to the series immediately after his US tour, and in the first episode (also his first with Edward Hardwick), The Adventure of the Empty House.  This new Holmes is warmer, funnier, and more affectionate.  Indeed, his badinage with Henry Baskerville in the two-part Hound of the Baskervilles is almost … playful. 

However, despite all the softening of the character, Brett’s Holmes was still too mannered, too bizarre, and too twitchy to be fully embraceable.  Brett was an actor with melodramatic tendencies too deeply pronounced for him to etch a characterization on a more approachable, human scale.  And his Holmes suffered from his excesses.  In addition, unfortunate illnesses and weight problems so altered Brett’s appearance throughout the remainder of the run that at times he looked like a dissipated Peter Lorre, and sometimes more like Mycroft rather than Sherlock Holmes.  His obesity at times seemed to amplify a somewhat natural effeminacy in his line readings, and the overall result near the end was dire.

Now for the many Brett fans out there who feel as if I have spat on an icon, I just want to underscore that I don’t think Brett was a bad actor.  He delivered many fine performances, for example, in the television versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray (a superb Basil Hallward) and An Ideal Husband (simply the best Lord Goring I have ever seen).  He is certainly fetching in My Fair Lady, and he was always a dependable television villain.  Nor was he a terrible Sherlock Holmes – for that, simply look to Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee, or Nicol Williamson – he simply was a poorly conceived one.

Sherlock Holmes and the Limits of Deduction

Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree (1979)

Knowing your correspondent’s love for all things Sherlock Holmes, a well-meaning friend recently tried to argue in favor of the recent Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes film.  (Good God, and more to come, with a sequel on its way!)  A kind gesture on the part of my friend to be sure, but it ultimately led to the melancholy observation that there has not been a serious mainstream Sherlock Holmes film in 30 years. 

A grim thought, indeed.  But why, I wondered, why was that?

The last straight, non-comedic Sherlock Holmes film was Murder By Decree (1979) -- a terrific film, I think, with a particularly fine Sherlock Holmes in Christopher Plummer (ably supported by James Mason as Dr. Watson).  The film concerned Holmes and Watson in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, the resolution of which is a massive government conspiracy and resulting cover-up. 

The very reason the film worked is, I think, may also be one of the reasons it was the last straight Holmes film: in the course of his investigations, Holmes discovers that the entire establishment that he represents is corrupt at best, criminal in its actions, and murderous in its intent.  "We've uncovered madmen, Watson, wielding scepters.  Reason run riot, justice howling at the moon," gasps a dispirited Plummer.

Admittedly Murder By Decree is a particularly Watergate-era film, but it was an important first step in what I think of as the limits of deduction.  Right around this time, Post Modernist theory emerged as a 'legitimate' mode of criticism in many universities.  Essentially, the mindset of the past 30 years is that truth is a malleable concept, that different people recognize different truths, and that 'absolute truth’ (or irreducible fact) was merely a construct reflecting the philosophy of the person(s) who held that truth.  This concept has been ruthlessly manipulated by politicians of the last decade or so (with sneering dismissal of 'the reality based community') and by academics, who, it seems, hold little value or respect for the disciplines that they teach. 

Now, the Post Modernist spin that science and/or truth is only a geographical construct is flummery of the most appalling nature (I would have liked to have seen Jacques Derrida hold many of his assertions directly prior to major surgery or while stepping off a plane in flight), but its effect on the overall popularity of detective fiction in general (and Sherlock Holmes in particular) has been devastating.  In a world where the establishment is criminal (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, whomever) and there is no 'absolute truth,' where is the place for a figure like Sherlock Holmes?

Hence, the limits of deduction.  Perhaps, in this Balkanized environment of a variety of different truths and dismissal of objective fact, the notion of a keeper or finder of absolute measurable, reducible fact holds no cultural currency.  To turn Sherlock Holmes into a Robert Downey action figure to amuse the groundlings who inhabit our movie houses seems (if you'll excuse the phrase) the only logical next step.

Tomorrow - Jeremy Brett as the Master Detective.

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part V

Today we conclude our week-long interview with Grand Master Lawrence Block.

JA: Are your comfortable making public appearances?

LB: I have been. Yeah, I enjoy it. I like travel. Even book tour-type travel. It's exhausting, but it's supposed to be. If it's not, it means you're not doing it right!

JA: Is it more and more part of a writer's life to take control of the selling of one's self?

LB: I don't know if you can control it. You take a part in it. But it seems to be, it seems to be. The book tours are a fairly recent phenomena in American book publishing. Fifteen years ago, hardly anyone toured and the tours were all media oriented and confined to writers of non-fiction or extremely topical fiction that would get on various local shows. Frequently there were no bookstore appearances. The idea of bookstore driven tours with signings, or sending out fiction and first book writers in many instances lately, I don't know how productive that is. I know it can be enormously frustrating for the writer who shows up at a bookstore where no one has heard of him and the store has anywhere between zero and one copy of his book. I think there may be rather more touring going on now than makes sense. But I enjoy it. Doing too much of it this year, because I toured for A Long Line of Dead Men in November, and for Burglars Can't Be Choosers in February. And I'm going out again in June for The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart.

JA: Where are you going?

LB: Mostly the mid-West.

JA: Are your biggest sales in the mid-West? New York? The West Coast?

LB: New York. But, all over.

JA: Would you say publishing has changed radically from your early days?

LB: I'm sure it has, but I can't say how. I don't know that I had much sense of what was going on when I started out, so it's hard to tell how it's changed. There are fewer houses, but they're larger. Editors have less decision making power. Houses are run rather more by sales departments and less by editorial departments than they used to be. I don't know that any of these changes are good or bad.

JA: Surely the superstore has played a role?

LB: That's quite recent. It certainly is playing an enormous role. I don't know if it's affecting writers, but it's affecting independent book-sellers. It's unfortunate the way the smaller stores are getting caught in the crunch that way. On the other hand, it's hard to go into a brand new Barnes and Noble and say, "This is bad for American publishing," or "This is bad for American writers and readers."

JA: I think one of the problems with the superstores is that maybe new writers are on the shelves for three weeks, if they're lucky, and then they're remaindered or sent back. I think with smaller stores they would have longer shelf lives. But I don't know what the facts are.

LB: I don't know either. But they have a hard time getting into smaller stores, too. If a superstore carries a 120,000 titles, the smaller stores would carry a fraction of that. So I don't know if that's true. It has always been tough to be a first-book author. But it's always been tough to be an unpublished writer trying to get published. It's always been tough to aspire to a career in any of the arts -- and I think it's supposed to be tough. We say that it's more difficult now to break in, but I don't know if that's true. It's never been easy. And it seems to me that I remember hearing 30 years ago that it was tougher than it used to be! It's like Greenwich Village, for God's sake. When I first came here in the mid-1950s, people were saying, "It's nice here, but you should've seen it 10 years ago!"

JA: Mystery fandom has become so vocal and so active. The emergence of Murder Ink and Scene of the Crime and Foul Play bookstores can be directly attributed to fans, along with countless newsletters and mystery book bulletin boards on Internet and America On Line. Of course all of this has affected the market, but do you think it has affected the production of the work? For the writer?

LB: Has fandom affected me? I don't know. I'm not sure. I think the proliferation of all of this has been quite recent. For example, there was one conference for years, The Bouchercon, and only recently has there been an explosion of local ones. I think they're probably good for the biz, good for writers and all.

I think, though, there's a real danger for the writer in paying too much attention to all of that. Someone suggested that I subscribe to Dorothy L. on line, so I did. I subscribed to it for two days, and then unsubscribed. Not that there was anything wrong with it, but what did I need it for? I didn't want all that coming into my computer every day, and I realized it would be a real mistake to read it all. And this is not to deny the validity of anything that is said on it, I just think the writer should not be monitoring what is being said about him or anybody else too closely. One way to put it is that the worse disservice I could do to my readers is to try to give them what they want.

The hour grows late and the shadows lengthen. We finish our coffee and head for the street.

Kindly, he walks me to the Christopher Street subway station at Sheridan Square. Around me, the city night life shifts into gear. I ask one more question.

"The New York of Matt Scudder is such a dangerous place, the streets are mean. Do you feel safe here?"

He looks at the neighborhood streets. "Sure I feel safe. New York's no different. The world's a dangerous place."

And he smiled.

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part IV

More of our 1995 interview with Lawrence Block…..

JA: And your future books?

LB: There is an upcoming Burglar book in June.

JA: Really!?

LB: The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart. That's the next book that will be coming out.

JA: Can you give us a quick preview?

LB: Sure. It will remind people in certain ways of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, I suspect. In the course of it Bernie, because of a relationship he's involved in, goes to the movies every night during a Humphrey Bogart festival. So he sees two Bogart films every night, and this inevitably begins to bleed into his psyche as the case goes on.

JA: Sounds great. One of your most significant villains was James Leo Motley. From what sick part of your brain did he come from?

LB: (Laughs.) I don't know. He was just sort of there! He was such a good villain, I was sorry to kill him. When I finished that book, I thought that it was not sound economics. I should've gotten more than one book out of James Leo Motley. But as I said before, the bad guys are as much aspects of myself as the heroes. (His grin sneaks up on him.) I don't rush to proclaim this!

JA: Maybe there's a Motley prequel somewhere.

LB: Never know.

JA: I think it's fascinating that Scudder in essence executed Motley at the end. That's another adventure that changed Scudder as a man, and because of that Motley is more interesting a villain than someone like, say, Hannibal Lecter.

LB: Pretty compelling character, though, Hannibal Lecter. I don't know that I always manage it, but I like to try to get in touch with the humanity of the bad guy. For me one of the more interesting things about A Walk Among The Tombstones, for example, was that the villain was a real nasty guy. And there was one window of opportunity where Scudder was talking to him at the end, and the sense of the person came through. I thought that was interesting. There's a non-series book of mine called Random Walk, I don't know if you know it, that has a serial killer. It's a multiple viewpoint book, and about a third of it is from his viewpoint. I don't know if anything you do at a keyboard takes a tremendous amount of courage -- it's not like facing man-eating tigers in Borneo -- but the one thing my work does demand is the courage to confront parts of one's self that one would prefer not to look at. And that happens sometimes in the villain, and sometime in the hero.

JA: Have you come away disappointed with what you learned of yourself through other characters? Or happy?

LB: No, not sorry. But generally one is reluctant to look into the dark corners of one's self. But what you learn eventually is that they are there anyway, whether you look or not.

JA: Any thoughts on a writer's life? Would you tell your son to be a plumber?

LB: I've told my kids to do whatever they want. But I think that it's a wonderful life. I'm enormously grateful for it. That doesn't mean that every moment of it is unmitigated joy, but that's okay.

JA: Didn't you own a gallery somewhere at some point?

LB:  Oh yeah, for one year in 1970-71. In New Hope, PA. I opened it so I would have something to do.

JA: Were you writing at the time?

LB: I was writing and living in the country. Writing would only take up so much of my time. I would go into the city to an apartment I kept there and hole up and write. But I needed something to do for the rest of the time, where there would be people to talk to. So I opened a gallery. Didn't last terribly long, but it was interesting to do. But as soon as the lease was up, I was out of there.

JA: What sort of work did you exhibit and sell?

LB: Whatever artist would turn up, I'd take their work. Some good stuff.

JA: Did you get a book out of it?

LB: No.

JA: Not yet.

LB: I learned certain things, not the least of which is I'll never do it again. But I was thinking about all of that recently when I was thinking of the amount of non-writing work that I was doing these days. The amount of correspondence, interviews, book tours, speeches, all the stuff, and I was contrasting that to twenty years ago when the only work-related thing I did was write. That, and every once in awhile carry the manuscript to my agent. And that was why, for example, that I had the time to do something like open a gallery. But now... no time! I'm not objecting. I like what I'm doing. And I could certainly cut down on some of it if I wanted to, like eliminate some of the travel and correspondence, but it's manageable.

Tomorrow we conclude our interview!

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part III

Welcome to the next installment of our Lawrence Block interview.

JA: You seem to be a quintessential New York writer. What is it about this city?

LB: It's home to me in a very important way, I guess. That's been as true even for the times I haven't been living here. I grew-up in Buffalo, but I visited New York off-and-on starting with my college years. I love it. I find it terribly energizing.

Lynne and I got our "Golden Years" out of the way early. We moved to Florida in the mid 1980s and discovered that it was manifestly not for us. So now we feel that we've had a retirement to look back on! But, down in Florida, I figured that now that I'll be here for the rest of time, I'll start writing novels set down here. And then I thought, gee, I don't know if I can do that, because I don't know what human lives are like down here. Intuitively. I do know that in New York. I somehow always have, and I can't say that about other places.

New York's not only my home, but will always be my spiritual home. That makes it nice to be living here and writing about it. A lot of people have said that the city is almost a character in the Scudder books. And I suspect that's true. I've written books set elsewhere, of course, and will undoubtedly continue to, most probably short stories than novels. But you can never tell what the future holds. But I think I'm advised to keep most of my stuff in New York, because that's what I handle better.

JA: Your series reflects very different New Yorks. The city in the Scudder books is another world from Bernie's.

LB: Same streets, but very different. Every once in a while I get the question, could Bernie and Scudder ever be in the same book? My answer is always -- they're don't live in the same universe! They're both in New York, but they're very different.

JA: You mentioned short stories a moment ago. Like a Lamb to the Slaughter is a wonderful collection. What are the different demands of the short story? Do you have a preference?

LB: Hmm. I don't know what the difference in the form is. I know that any number of novelists don't write short stories, or can't write them. I've always found myself comfortable with the shorter length, as well.

Short stories are enormously satisfying. They come a good deal closer to instant gratification -- about as close as writing comes. You sit down with one idea, pretty much hold the whole thing in your mind at once, and that day or the next you get up and you're done. It would be nice to write books that way, but one can't.

JA: Unless you're Edgar Wallace!

LB: Right. They're also satisfying because there are any number of things for myself that I can do in a short story that I wouldn't be inclined to do in a novel. Settings I wouldn't use, or write from the point of view of characters that I wouldn't be interested in sustaining for a whole novel. All sorts of things like that.

Someone asked if there would be an Ehrengraf novel, and the answer has to be no. He couldn't sustain a novel, but he's perfect for short stories. Lots of things like that. They're fun that way.

JA: The Ehrengraf stories are tremendously satisfying. What was his genesis?

LB: Ehrengraf came about as the result of an adventure in creative plagiarism. Not the obvious plagiarism, that he is a lineal descendent of Randolph Mason,  Melville Davisson Post's character. I can see where one could come to that conclusion, but I never read those stories so I couldn't plagiarize Post exercising all the will in the world.

There was an element of a Fletcher Flora story in an issue of Manhunt sometime in the 1950s where a friend saves her friend from a murder conviction by committing another similar murder while the guy was in prison. I thought there had to be something I could do with that that wasn't actionable plagiarism. Then I thought of a defense attorney who did that, and the character just evolved. Fred Dannay at Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine was very taken with Ehrengraf because he immediately thought it was a homage to Melville Davisson Post, and made it clear that he would be pleased to see more stories about Ehrengraf. I found that more ideas accrued, but there were a limited number of variations one could work on this theme. And I didn't want to write the same story over and over, and I think there is a total of eight Ehrengraf stories. It's very frustrating, because publishers said if I got a book-length collection of them, they'd publish it. But there was no way that was going to happen. Happily, Jim Seels in California did that small press, limited printing of the eight stories collected.

JA: Are they still available?

LB: I think he has some left. It's a hefty price. I think he gets $125 for it. It's a very limited edition and beautifully produced. His phone number is (714) 455-1319.

JA: You were talking about the genesis of Ehrengraf. Now for the question that all writers dread: where do you get your ideas?

LB: I keep up with the newspapers, and read things that pass in front of my eyes. I don't specifically seek anything out. An idea only works if it somehow resonates with a writer at a particular time. There are ideas that cross my mind that I shrug off, and years later they have something for me that they didn't the first time.

JA: Can you think of one?

LB: (Laughs.) No.

JA: Favorite mystery writers? Preferably dead, so you won’t get anyone mad at you.

LB: So many. I did a piece for American Heritage years ago that I think mentioned 16, and...

JA: I have trouble answering questions like that, myself. People ask your three favorite movies on Monday, and on Thursday you come up with three different.

LB: Right!

JA: But there are no mainstays that come to mind?

LB: No. I read less now than I used to. I hesitate to...

JA: I'll let you off the hook. What about authors you recommend to other writers. I know you have a great affection for P.G. Wodehouse and Somerset Maugham.

LB: And John O'Hara, whom I continually reread. I can't think of anyone in particular that all beginning writers should be advised to read. I think beginning writers should read what works for them. I have any number of writer friends who recommend Faulkner, and he has clearly been an important influence on fiction. But you know what? Faulkner never really worked for me. This is not Faulkner's fault; I don't know that it's my fault. But there are books that may have little to recommend them, but when I read them they were alive to me in a certain way that made them more significant.

More tomorrow!

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part II

Today, we continue our marathon interview with writer Lawrence Block, first conducted in April 1995.

JA:  With Scudder, or Bernie or Tanner, to what degree are any of your characters autobiographical?

LB:  Well, every character is, including all the villains! They are all who one would be if one were that character. And certainly the ones that I've chosen to write more than one book about are probably aspects of self to a greater degree than others.

JA:  Are you more Bernie, or more Matt? Or more Evan, for that matter?

LB:  I don't know. If I had a clue to who I was, I wouldn't have to sit around and write about other people. It's probably just a cost-effective form of therapy, don't you think, as it is for most writers.

JA:  One of the things that make your books so successful is the rich supporting characters. Mick Ballou, or Jan, or Carolyn -- they are so vividly drawn. Do you find them taking over a book mid-way, and you have to keep them in line?

LB:  No, not as such. But there are occasionally executive decisions that I find I must make. For example, in A Walk Among The Tombstones, I sent Ballou to Ireland because I didn't want to find myself writing buddy books where he was a major force each time. There is a danger in any on-going series, I think, when there are sufficient supporting players accumulated over the years that you find yourself burdened with them. Like a repertory company where everybody has to shuffle on-stage and do his particular bit. It's the great temptation, I see it a lot in other people's work, and try to guard against it in my own. It becomes a shortcut; you can do that instead of having real stuff happen. It's much easier to fall into that in the Burglar books, which are light anyway and no one would necessarily object. You can have all tail and no dog very easily, and you find there's no room for story.

JA:  Do you think that's what happened with The Burglar That Painted Like Mondrian?

LB:  I liked that best of the books until then. There's nothing in or about that book that explains why there wasn't another one for eleven years. It just happened that way. I certainly wasn't aware of that problem in the book.

JA:  Was it easy to take Bernie up again?

LB:  Well, it took a while to do, as you know.

JA:  I know, but once you got started, was it hard to bring him back?

LB:  No. Bernie was right there. Bernie was there, how he sounded was right there. That part was easy. What was difficult was just the plot. The plot was difficult.

JA:  The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams has one of the best openings in the series.

LB:  Thanks. I was afraid while I was doing it that it wouldn't have an ending! But it all fell together to my delight and surprise.

JA:  There is the standard cliché about starting to read something and not being able to put it down, but here it's true. No one can read the opening chapter and not go immediately to the second. Staying with Bernie, what about the movie version with Whoopee Goldberg?

LB:  Well, I haven't a whole lot to say. The casting was the most curious thing about the movie, and Whoopee was certainly one of the best things in it. She gave a pretty good performance.  A thankless task! I thought the movie was close to working. If only it had a lighter hand to give the script a polish, and if they shot that director and hired another one, it might've been much better. It wasn't bad.

JA:  What was your involvement with the film, if any?

LB:  None. None at all. I saw it in a theater when it opened.

JA:  And probably said to yourself, "Did I write that?"

LB:  Actually, they were rather more faithful to the plot than they needed to be.

JA:  It seems inexplicable to me, when there is a built in audience, to buy the title, buy the plot, but not use the character.

LB:  Well, that wasn't the original intention. The original script was for a male lead. At one point Whoopee was going to play Carolyn, and Bruce Willis was one of several people booted around to play Bernie. This was when Moonlighting was on, and he had a somewhat softer screen persona before Die Hard. He would've been fine; it was a good casting choice. But either he turned it down, or they couldn't come to term with him, or whatever it was, and then, as I understand it, either Whoopee suggested herself for the role or someone else did. They had a three picture deal with her, and they needed something to stick her into between Jumpin Jack Flash and whatever the hell the other picture was. They gave the script a sex change operation and shot it.

As I said, it comes close to working even with all that's wrong with it. Ultimately it doesn't. People laughed a great deal while watching it, and on the way out said: "That wasn't much good, was it?"  If you listened in the theater, it sounded as if everyone was having a good time. They just then told their friends not to go.

JA:  Staying with film for a second, you wrote the screenplay for one of the most interesting horror films of the 80s: Funhouse.

LB:  No I didn't. It says Larry Block. I don't know who that is. I've never written as Larry Block and I don't know who that is.

JA:  I have a few reference books that say, "respected mystery novelist Lawrence Block!" And the magazine Cinefantastique also said it was you.

LB:  I'm glad to know it's interesting. I've never even seen it. There's an actor who uses the name Larry Block, and he may write as well. It may be his work; it may be somebody else's. There's another film, Captain America I think, with the credit line Lawrence Block, and that's not me either.

JA:  Do you have screenplays to your credit?

LB:  I'm not sure credit it the word we're looking for! No, I haven't done any screenplays. But there are a couple of things that make it look as if I have.

JA:  Sorry about the mix-up.

LB:  No, it's a very understandable one. When Funhouse came out, I was getting calls from people and I didn't know what the hell they were talking about! I hadn't seen an ad for it at this point.

JA:  Rent it. It's a good film -- take credit.

LB:  (Laughs.)

JA:  For me, some of your most interesting work has been your books for writers: Telling Lies For Fun and Profit, or Spider Me a Web. Could you talk a bit about your efforts to teach people how to write, and to what extend people can be taught?

LB:  Well, I don't know if I was trying to teach people how to write. I was trying to write a column on the subject of fiction writing. I did that, remarkably enough, for fourteen years. A long time. I don't think I was specifically trying to tell people what to do as much as discussing problems I dealt with, or didn't deal with. I thought, early on, that it wouldn't be long before I ran out of things to write about, and then I discovered, empirically, that I could just take it for granted that once a month I would think of something to write. I never had trouble getting the column written, it was never late.

And, of course, it led to the two books you've mentioned, which were collections of columns. And also, I've done a book on writing the novel. It was a great experience for me. It was instructive in that it focused me in a particular way. Just as you read a differently when you're a writer, somehow you read a little differently when you're writing a column about writing. It was helpful, I think I learned a lot doing it.

JA:  And you've done seminars as well.

LB:  Yeah. My wife Lynne and I put on a seminar for a couple of years in the mid-1980s. It was like a traveling road show. We called the thing "Write For Your Life!" but a better title might've been "The Inner Game of Writing," or "Working on the Writer Within." Something like that. It had very little to do with what ended up on the page, and as a result, we never knew if the people who took it had written or were writing, or how good they were at it. It was immaterial. And it was a wonderfully successful seminar. I keep running into people who said they had taken it and they published this or had done that. But it was enormously demanding: it was a full day, an eight-hour one day seminar. It was draining to do it, because I had to be "on" all the time doing it. I understand there are people who make a profit doing that,  I don't know how. I know the hotels made money, and the airlines made money, and the direct mail house made money, but it took all our time, and we were making about 50 cents an hour! But it was fun to do, though.

JA: I can tell you from experience that your books have been a great help.

LB: Thank you.

JA: I just finished my second novel, and I think the best, and the most, help that I had was found in Telling Lies for Fun and Profit.

LB: Great! I'm delighted to hear that!

More tomorrow!

Down Mean Streets With Lawrence Block Part I

Here is a special treat for Jade Sphinx readers.  Those who follow this blog know of my addiction to quality detective fiction.  Well, many years ago (1995!) I had an opportunity to interview one of America’s greatest mystery novelists, Lawrence Block.  The interview was scheduled to run in a magazine now defunct; and it has been languishing in my files ever since.

So, here is the interview in its entirety, spread out over the course of this week.  Enjoy!

The creator of tough guy Matt Scudder has a great smile.

Author Lawrence Block talks with measured deliberation: he's a man who chooses his words with care. The eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses are affable and benevolent. His close-cropped hair and iron gray mustache are more mindful of a career military man than a journeyman writer. A battered green felt hat rests at his side, the kind of hat that inspires wild speculations of dark nights and rumpled trench coats.

But it is his smile that is most striking. It slowly creeps up on him, and he smiles with his whole face. His grin is disarming. Smiling, Larry Block looks like the classroom dreamer, the kid we all knew in school who easily made up stories.

And make up stories he does! Lawrence Block is one of the most popular and well-respected novelists working in the mystery field today. He has created three series characters that have had particular resonance with mystery readers for more than twenty years: private eye Matt Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and secret agent Evan Tanner.

Mr. Block is also responsible for several books on the craft of fiction, which, along with his seminars, have helped aspiring writers nationwide.

He has won virtually every award a mystery writer can receive: three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, four Shamus Awards, a Nero Wolfe Award, and two Maltese Falcon Award. He has also been awarded the highest honor a mystery writer can receive: the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award.

The writer lives in Greenwich Village, and we caught up with him in a local coffee shop.

JA:  Well, let's start with your latest, and work our way back. Tell us about your latest book.

LB:  Well, the latest book, of course, is the re-issue of Burglars Can't Be Choosers, which is just out. The latest Scudder came out in November, A Long Line of Dead Men, from Morrow. And, I don't know what to tell you about it, exactly...

JA:  Were you pleased with it?

LB:  I was quite pleased with the way it came out. The central element of the book:  the idea of a survivors club of that sort, is an idea that got planted in my consciousness 30 or more years ago. I was reading something about a club of that sort somewhere; I don't remember where I read it...

JA:  Could it have been Stevenson's The Wrong Box?

LB:  No, this was an article. It wasn't anything fictional. And it took a long time before I thought of using it in a book. And when I did get the idea of using it as the central element of a book, my first thought was to use it in a multiple-viewpoint sort of book and not a Scudder novel at all. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to resonate with Scudder. So I went with it.

JA:  And the upcoming Scudder?

LB:  Can't talk about the upcoming book.

JA:  Not even a title?

LB:  Sorry. Promised.

JA:  Going back to the beginning. When did you decide to become a writer? Was it what you always wanted?

LB:  Well, I don't think it was always what I wanted. I think there was a time when I was four and I wanted to be a fireman.

 It was sometime during 11th grade in high school that I realized that it was what I wanted to be. It wasn't that long after that I was doing it professionally.

JA:  And your first published book was?

LB:  Well, the first published book was anonymous. The first book under my own name was in 1961, Mona.

JA:  Can you telling us what some of your early, pseudonymous work was?

LB:  Not in any detail. I will be writing about that in a memoir that I'm going to be publishing in the next couple of years. I'm doing some work on it now, an autobiography of my writing life. So, when I bring that out I'll talk at length about the pseudonymous stuff, which I've always declined to discuss. But I was writing various paperback novels, but not for terribly long before using my own name.

JA:  You worked for a time at a literary agency.

LB:  That's right.

JA:  Reading the slush pile. Was that very instructive?

LB:  It was wonderful! It was enormously valuable. I was reading no end of inexpert manuscripts every day. And you learn much more reading bad work than good work. Studying expert writing is not valueless, but it's not terribly instructive. You look at it, and know it's good, but it doesn't show much. But when you're reading something not that good, and you can see why, it's enormously instructive. You learn much more from it.

JA: Did you start writing mysteries because it was the genre you most appreciated?

LB:  I don't really know. That's not terribly easy to answer. The first short story that I sold was not written to be a crime story initially, but it sold to a crime fiction magazine, Manhunt. Over the years, it seemed to me, that the work that I found satisfying and seemed to have some aptitude for, was in the crime fiction field. So, it was gradual. There was never a decision made that "I will be a mystery writer," or even that I am a mystery writer.

JA:  Do you think of yourself as a novelist, or a "mystery writer?" Do you pigeon-hole yourself when you sit behind a typewriter?

LB:  No, not necessarily. I just work.

JA:  The character Scudder progresses throughout the series. The Scudder in A Long Line of Dead Men is a different man from the Scudder in A Stab in the Dark.

LB:  Oh yeah.

JA:  Both are equally satisfying, but you're approach is more a slice of life than the average detective story. Not that I'm taking a swipe at detective fiction, but--

LB:  I know what you mean. I don't know if that has been a progression as much as the series keeps changing. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have a very low boredom threshold. I think I tend not to repeat myself too much. Not because I have any moral objection to doing so, but because I can't write something that I find tedious. I think I stopped writing books about Tanner because it seemed to me that I was repeating myself. I don't think readers objected too much on those grounds, though.

JA:  I miss Tanner.

LB:  A lot of people had said that.

JA:  I missed Bernie Rhodenbarr, too. Glad he's back. Getting back to Scudder for a second, if I can. A great many readers of detective fiction like the comfort of coming back to a place that doesn't change. I think Somerset Maugham said that you know no more about Sherlock Holmes after sixty stories than you do after one. But Scudder has evolved a great deal: starting out as an alcoholic, and then his going to Alcoholics Anonymous, meeting and finally marrying Elaine. Has all of this alienated readers who want the mixture as before?

LB:  I don't know. Traditionally, books in a series have not varied much and the character has been the same in the beginning as the end. And I had no intention of Scudder's changing in the course of the series. But, it just seemed to me that the books were operating at a level of reality in which he had to be affected by what he experienced. And he couldn't come out of the books unchanged. And this just sort of  happened, I write more intuitively than intellectually. I go a lot by how it feels, and it began happening that way.

A Stab in the Dark was the first significant change. The first three are pretty much of a piece, but not entirely for even there is some kind of a shift. But by the time A Stab in the Dark was finished, Eight Million Ways to Die was inevitable. And he's continued to evolve. He has also aged. I've never been specific about his age, but with A Long Line of Dead Men it would've been wrong not to be specific. The book was so much about other people's age that it would've been coy for him not to be specific. It would've been inconsistent. So I figured, all right, let's go on the record and give him a specific age.

 So he has grown and changed and evolved.

JA:  It think that gives the character the great vibrancy that he has. Much as I admire them, if you've read one Nero Wolfe book, you've read them all.

LB:  Yeah, which I never objected to in the Nero Wolfe books, and I happily went on to read them all. I don't think I could've written twelve books about Scudder if he hadn't changed. I would've gotten tired of him.

JA: What event in Scudder's life drew the strongest reader response?

LB: Probably when he cheated on Elaine. I really heard about that, got lots of mail.

JA: Why'd you have him do it?

LB: Don't know. Maybe I think that's the way men really are.

More tomorrow!

Around With Nero Wolfe

One of the many blessings of not having cable or access to broadcast television is that my (rare) viewings are dictated solely by my own tastes.  I have recently been watching the Nero Wolfe series with Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin and the late Maury Chaykin (1949-2010) as Nero Wolfe and have enjoyed it immensely.  AMC’s Nero Wolfe was wonderfully smart, stylish and funny.  No wonder it did not last more than two seasons (2001-2002).

A DVD boxed set of the series can be found on Amazon, or, more affordably, on EBay.  I was lucky to find mine in a Barnes and Noble sales bin at half price, and could not have spent the money better.

Detective fiction has been a lifetime guilty pleasure, and I have been reading Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe books with great satisfaction for over 30 years.  I’ve always had a rude picture of Archie in my mind – mostly of a hard boiled detective with a fast mouth.  However, Hutton has managed to sponge away nearly 30 years of envisioning and replaced the picture in my mind’s eye with himself.  I will never be able to see Archie in any other light again.

Chaykin is good as Wolfe (perhaps too emotional and somewhat sloppy for my taste), but Hutton is a revelation.  He plays Archie less like a tough guy and more like a 1930s sharpster.  He is less Bogart and more Lee Tracey.  He’s raffish, rakish and jaunty.  He doesn’t walk, he saunters.  His hat is cocked and his mouth is smirked.  He’s the quintessential New York wiseass between the World Wars – a vanished American everyman who is equal to every occasion.  He has smarts, savvy and his eye on the payoff. 

Archie, as conceived by Stout, is too much a comic character to exclusively be a tough guy (though toughness is one of his attributes).  That’s why Archie on film as a hardboiled dick doesn’t work; but, as a classic period smartass, Hutton is letter perfect.  Hutton’s Archie is a fast-talking American dandy, with a sense of style, sexiness and moxie.  Too bad the series didn’t last longer!

The series closely adheres to the original stories – each episode is an adaptation of a Rex Stout story.  And though the Nero Wolfe books are thematically and structurally securely fixed as part of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, they have always, to this reader, also stood apart from it.

Stout’s singularity in the field rests first in language. Few of the Golden Age writers were stylists, but Rex Stout (1886-1975) was a unique voice.  (Novelist Bill De Andrea used to say that the classic Stout sentence was: “Wolfe drank beer.”)  People with no taste for mysteries at all can read them with great satisfaction. Indeed, it's not surprising that P G Wodehouse was a great admirer. Like Jeeves and Wooster, the tale itself is only part of the pleasure -- most of the satisfaction is in the telling.  And, like Wodehouse, Stout had deftly captured an idealized national idiom -- his is a distinctly urban American voice at the height of the American Century.  Reading Stout is to savor a distillation of a national type that typified an era.  Stout is the music of the American idiom as Wodehouse is to the English.   

Another key factor in the success of the books is the Wolfe-Archie ménage. The brownstone and its routines is so completely conceived that it ranks with Conan Doyle's Baker Street as a place so fully realized, that it is a character in and of itself.  It becomes, in a way, our home as well, a refuge that delights, protects and nourishes us.  Once inside Wolfe’s brownstone, we invest in it all of the positive emotions we associate with ‘home.' And, because Wolfe guards this haven so zealously, it acts as an anchor for us --- a place of certainty in a changing and dangerous world. 

Unlike Dorothy Sayers, Stout was not an ambitious novelist. However, like Sayers, he wrote fully realized characters. Though they don't change throughout the series, Wolfe and Archie are drawn with a warmth and reality that elevate the books above mere mysteries.  The love-hate relationship between the two (one wag called it the struggle of two iron-willed co-dependents), their interactions, their mutual insults and antagonisms hiding affection, are the engines which drive the stories.

For all of his flamboyance, Wolfe never descends to simple caricature.  This is a problem with many characters found in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction – most of them become cartoons before overlong.  But Wolfe, with his weight and regimented life hiding some deeper mystery (some deeper tragedy?) is very real.

Finally, we come to Archie Goodwin. The real genius of the books is Stout's creation of Archie. Stout found a deep and rich vein of comedy in the books through Archie's amused, wry and cynical take on Wolfe and the world around him. He walks on the balls of his feet on the sunny side of the street -- hat cocked and dressed to the nines. And for all his cynicism, Archie is all heart.

AMC’s Nero Wolfe was a program with a flamboyant color scheme and high style.  Well, with their love of language and clever artfulness, the same can be said of the Rex Stout novels on which they are based.  The mystery novels of Rex Stout, and the Nero Wolfe series based upon them, are a tonic that is highly recommended.