“Sherlock” (a nickname adopted by a consulting detective named Sara Shelly Futaba, played by Yūko Takeuchi) strides into crime scenes in trousers, asks incredibly rude questions, boasts of her investigative prowess, blithely digs her hands into cadavers, and makes astonishingly accurate deductions from the tiniest details, aided by the stalwartly decent Dr. Clearly riffing on the BBC Sherlock, the series reimagines both Holmes and Watson as women in contemporary Tokyo. That’s About to Get a Huge Test.įor sheer brio, audacity, and narrative dispatch, the Japanese TV series Miss Sherlock (now streaming on HBO Max) may be the most winning feminist twist on the Holmes canon around. The Man Set to Save the Superhero Movie Is the Opposite of His Peers. It Is Long Past Time to Retire the Oldest, Dumbest Debate in Literary History When the game is afoot, speed is of the essence! Thomas generates a heady Victorian atmosphere, but her plotting is on the leisurely side, and no one could ever accuse Conan Doyle of dawdling on the way to the chase. Her heroine, also named Charlotte, bridles at the constraints imposed by her upper-class 19 th century upbringing. Sherry Thomas does this in her Lady Sherlock series, beginning with 2016’s A Study in Scarlet Women. Turning Sherlock himself into a woman seems the best way to flip the boys-club ethos of the canonical Holmes. King’s Mary Russell series-beginning with 1994’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and now consisting of 16 novels, several of them New York Times bestsellers-has a retired Holmes, well into his 50s, befriend the series’s 15-year-old heroine, recognize her extraordinary intelligence, and, eventually, marry her. The TV series Elementary made Watson into a woman, played by Lucy Liu, attending to Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock, a recovering addict, in contemporary New York. A Study in Charlotte, a 2016 YA novel by Brittany Cavallaro, pairs Sherlock’s great-great-great-granddaughter Charlotte with Watson’s great-great-great-grandson Jamie to solve a mystery in the boarding school they both attend. Yet while not every depiction of a female member of the Holmes family is necessarily feminist, proximity to the great man remains a common theme in Holmes pastiches with that aim. ![]() The movie is not the first to conjure up a Holmes sister: The final season of Sherlock featured as its antagonist Eurus Holmes, more brilliant than her two brothers but also a manipulative, homicidal psychopath who must be institutionalized on a remote island. Hudson and perpetually ready to take on the next adventure. There the two friends live forever, nurtured by the redoubtable Mrs. Ten years later, popular demand obliged Conan Doyle to resurrect the great detective, whereupon Watson moved right back into the Baker Street flat. Arthur Conan Doyle got tired of it all long, long before his fans did, and married Watson off to a woman who mattered so little to her creator that he could not remember if she were alive or dead, and he killed off Holmes himself in 1893. ![]() Their world was incomplete, yet perfect, like all fantasies, as bewitching for what it excluded-regular hours, real jobs, sexuality and its discontents-as for the pipe smoke, disguises, and idle gunplay that it contained. ![]() Inside the sanctum of 221B Baker Street, Holmes and Watson existed in a fantasy of late Victorian homosociality, a cross between Oxbridge undergraduate life and feckless bohemia. John Watson agreed to share lodgings with a friend of a friend in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet, one of popular fiction’s great oases was born.
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