The Granada Television productions starring Jeremy Brett adapted 43 of the 60 works in the Sherlock Holmes canon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) into 41 episodes, two of which drew upon a pair of short stories each. Those 41 comprise four series: The Adventures… (1984-1985), …Return… (1986-1988), …Case-Book… (1991-1993), and …Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994). The titles match four of the five books collecting all 56 short stories, the majority of which were first published in The Strand Magazine—Adventures (1892), Memoirs (1894), Return (1905), Case-Book (1927)—with the outlier being His Last Bow (1917), yet there was not a one-to-one correspondence between them.

   Granada’s Return included adaptations of 11 stories scattered among all except The Case-Book, which I will analyze in this three-part post, as well as two of the four novels, The Sign of the Four (1890) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). In the interests of full disclosure, as one who grew up watching the Twentieth Century-Fox and Universal films starring Basil Rathbone, long before Brett assumed the role, I consider him the definitive screen Holmes. Yet those films, which at Universal were updated to the present, often drew little if any of their plots from Doyle, so between the interpretation of Brett (1933-1995) and its comprehensiveness, Granada’s is likely the definitive version of the canon.

   Only one of the short stories adapted for Granada’s Return (in which Edward Hardwicke replaced David Burke as Dr. John Watson for the duration), “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (The Strand, December 1891), is from Adventures. Watson and his wife, Mary, who curiously refers to him as James, are visited by her friend Kate Whitney, whose husband, Isa, has spent two days at the Bar of Gold opium den in Upper Swandam Lane. Agreeing to extricate him, Watson locates a repentant Isa, and is about to conduct him into a cab—not to mention out of the story—when he is buttonholed by “a tall, thin old man” with a pipe who secretly reveals himself to Watson as, gasp, Holmes, there on an unrelated case.

   En route from Middlesex to The Cedars, his client’s home in Kent, Holmes explains that on an errand nearby, she unexpectedly caught a glimpse of her husband, Neville St. Clair, who by all rights should have been doing business in town, at the den’s upstairs window, from which he quickly vanished. By the time the lascar manager denied his presence and she returned with the constables, the room’s only occupant was his lodger, professional beggar Hugh Boone, recognized by the horrible scar disfiguring his lip. He was arrested after the discoveries of blood on the window-sill and Neville’s coat on the Thames tidal mud-bank below it…weighed down with 421 pennies and 270 half-pennies in the pockets.

   No sooner has Holmes reluctantly told Mrs. St. Clair that after a week he thinks Neville is dead than she produces a letter she has just received—unmistakably in his hand, and with his signet-ring enclosed—saying, “All will come well….Wait in patience.” After finding “the key of the affair” in the bathroom, Holmes takes Watson to the cell of Boone, whom two swipes of a wet bath-sponge reveal as, you guessed it, Neville. Posing as a beggar for a newspaper article years earlier, using make-up skills from his prior stage career, he had discovered how lucrative it could be, and gave up reporting for a new profession, but having unluckily been spotted by his wife, he wanted to spare his family from any shame.

   “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (8/13/86) was directed by Patrick Lau and adapted by Alan Plater; their only other Holmes credits were, respectively, “Shoscombe Old Place” (3/7/91) from Case-Book and “The Solitary Cyclist” (5/15/84) from Adventures. None of the story takes place in Baker Street, to which Plater relocates the opening, eliminating Mary while adding landlady Mrs. Hudson (Rosalie Williams), who shows Kate (Patricia Garwood) in to Watson, awaiting Holmes and soon off to fetch Isa (Terence Longdon). Otherwise extremely faithful, the episode expands upon Doyle, e.g., with Mrs. St. Clair’s (Eleanor David) trip through the “vile alley,” surrounded by desperate young mendicants.

   Plater gives Neville (Clive Francis) dialogue exemplifying the “remarkable faculty for repartee” that, along with his pitiable appearance, distinguished Boone among beggars, quoting Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, W.S. Gilbert, and Wordsworth. The lascar (Albert Moses) is given several lines and a Malay—rather than Danish—assistant (Ozzie Yue) to help eject Mrs. St. Clair. There is a nice scene in which Holmes talks through various points of the case with, instead of Watson, his respected Scotland Yard colleague, the good-natured Inspector Bradstreet, played here in Denis Lill’s first of three Granada appearances, succeeding Brian Miller in “The Blue Carbuncle” (6/5/84) from Adventures.

   Doyle’s brief description (“Holmes stooped to the water jug, moistened his sponge, and then rubbed it twice vigorously across and down the [sleeping] prisoner’s face”) is built up into a more dramatic climax, as Holmes repeatedly immerses the huge sponge and seems about to smother a cowering Boone with it. Neville is mortified to learn that the lascar’s delay in posting the letter had caused his wife distress. Their reconciliation—not addressed in the story, where Bradstreet merely agrees to hush the whole thing up, since no crime has been committed—is effectively and wordlessly depicted as he timorously takes her hand in the background, behind the bonfire in which he burned Boone’s effects.

   “[The Adventure of] Silver Blaze” (December 1892) and “…the Musgrave Ritual” (May 1893) debuted in The Strand and were collected in Memoirs; my edition uses the shorter titles. In the former, Holmes and Watson travel to Dartmoor to help Inspector Gregory—“extremely competent,” if lacking imagination, in his only appearance—investigate the disappearance of the titular favorite for the Wessex Cup and death of trainer John Straker, employed by Colonel Ross at King’s Pyland. After stable-boy Ned Hunter was drugged with powdered opium in his curried mutton, the horse vanished from the locked stables, while Straker was found at the bottom of a hollow, his skull shattered by a heavy weapon.

   Gregory arrests race-track tout Fitzroy Simpson—seen earlier seeking information from Ned—who had a weighted walking stick, and whose allegedly lost cravat was clutched in Straker’s hand, but he admits that the evidence is circumstantial; adds Holmes, “A clever counsel would tear it all to rags.” Moreover, a wound on Straker’s leg is thought to have been accidentally self-inflicted by the delicate cataract knife in his other hand, with which he had curiously equipped himself. Holmes and Watson find horse tracks, first alone and then accompanied by a man’s, which lead partway home before doubling back to nearby Mapleton stables, managed by Silas Brown and the home of second favorite Desborough.

   Furious on seeing groom Dawson being questioned, Brown totally changes his tune after Holmes speaks to him privately, leaves the cringing trainer with undisclosed instructions, and explains that having encountered the wandering horse on the moor, he had concealed it to ensure his large bets on Desborough. Without explanation, Holmes assures Ross that Silver Blaze will run in the Wessex Cup, telling Watson his “manner has been just a trifle cavalier to me. I am inclined now to have a little amusement at his expense.” Gregory, his attention drawn to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” says, “The dog did nothing in the night-time,” to which Holmes replies, “That was the curious incident.”

   Sure enough, four days later, a horse bearing Ross’s colors but unrecognized by him wins the Wessex Cup, and Holmes says that washing his face in spirits of wine will reveal his eponymous marking. As for the killer, Holmes identifies him as…Silver Blaze, who had instinctively lashed out with his steel shoe when Straker—a familiar presence that did not alert the stable dog—prepared to nick his tendon subcutaneously, having practiced on the sheep. Straker lived a double life, bet heavily against Silver Blaze to pay debts incurred on behalf of a mistress with expensive tastes, and made sure, as Simpson could not have known, that Ned’s meal would conceal the taste of the opium, found solely in his portion.

   Directed—like Brett’s Baskervilles (1988)—by Brian Mills, “Silver Blaze” (4/13/88) was adapted by John Hawkesworth, who developed the series for television and again adds Mrs. Hudson, bringing Holmes the telegrams requesting aid from Ross (Peter Barkworth) and Gregory (Malcolm Storry). The episode exemplifies how direction and performance can affect interpretation; Mills and Jonathan Coy, as Simpson, give an ominous feel to his visit, which in retrospect we know to be relatively innocuous. Holmes’s interactions with Gregory play far less cordially, omitting Conan Doyle’s “My dear Inspector, you surpass yourself!” when he proactively brings Straker’s, Simpson’s, and Silver Blaze’s footwear.

   Holmes shows sympathy by placing his black-gloved hand reassuringly on those of maid Edith Baxter (Manda-Jayne Beard), who is obviously discomfited in recalling Simpson’s approach to Ned (David John), and Mrs. Straker’s (Sally Faulkner) summons early the next morning to help locate the body of her husband (Barry Lowe). Unlike in the story, Holmes is able to give Dawson (Nicholas Teare) a coin before Brown (Russell Hunter) appears. Once more, the climax is made more dramatic, with Holmes—seemingly in a “Twisted Lip” redux—brandishing another huge sponge to clean off Silver Blaze’s face himself before the start of the race, rather than merely advising Ross to do so afterwards.

   “Musgrave” opens as Holmes, urged to store some of the papers inundating their Baker Street rooms, draws from the large tin box housing the records of his early cases a small wooden one. It contains relics related to the titular ritual: “a crumpled piece of paper, an old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old discs of metal.” As in “The Gloria Scott” (The Strand, April 1893), “the first [case] in which I was ever engaged,” he tells Watson of the third he’d tackled while rooming in Montague Street near the British Museum, to which “I trace my first stride towards the position which I now hold,” engaged by an old college acquaintance, Reginald Musgrave.

   He is “a scion of one of the very oldest families in the kingdom” whose manor in western Sussex, Hurlstone, is “perhaps the oldest inhabited building in the county.” Widowed butler Richard Brunton’s days as a Don Juan seemed over when he became engaged to second housemaid Rachel Howells, who had fiery Welsh blood, but he threw her over for the head game-keeper’s daughter, Janet Tregellis. Sleepless one night, Musgrave caught Brunton going through some family documents, which he’d been comparing with a hastily concealed map, and dismissed him on the spot, yet was reluctantly persuaded to give him one week in which to salve his honor by appearing to resign of his own volition.

   After two days, Brunton disappeared, leaving behind most of his belongings, notably his boots, and on the third night after that, Rachel—hysterical and recovering from brain-fever—vanished as well. Her tracks led to the lake, which when dragged revealed not a body but “a linen bag [containing] a mass of old rusted and discoloured metal and several dull-coloured pieces of pebble or glass.” The paper Brunton had been consulting was just a copy of the curious catechism that begins, “Whose was it?/His who is gone,” and has since the mid-17th century been recited by each Musgrave in a coming-of-age ceremony; Holmes is convinced that solving the riddle of the ritual will answer all of their mysteries.

   Using mathematics and his peg-and-string tool, Holmes follows the cryptic directions to the cellar, “as old as the house,” wherein Brunton’s muffler is attached to a large, heavy flagstone with an iron ring. Raising it, they find his body beside a brass-bound wooden box with the old key in the lock; Brunton had clearly lifted the stone to enter the hole with the aid of, and handed the contents to, Rachel, who either deliberately closed him in or kept silent when he became trapped, and threw the evidence into the lake. Inside the bag were coins and, unrecognizable, “the ancient crown of the kings of England,” hidden by Sir Ralph Musgrave, “the right-hand man of Charles the Second in his wanderings…”

   “The Musgrave Ritual” (7/30/86) was directed by David Carson, who’d contributed two episodes to Adventures; a mainstay represented in all four series, Jeremy Paul won an Edgar Award for his teleplay, and would be nominated for “The Problem of Thor Bridge” (2/28/91) from Case-Book. Dispensing with the flashback structure, he makes Holmes—accepting an invitation to Hurlstone “to escape my lethargy” and collate the records of his early work—and Watson both participants. Already acquainted with Brunton (James Hazeldine), and impressed with his intelligence and knowledge of the Musgrave history, Holmes speaks far less cordially to Watson of Sir Reginald (Michael Culver) in the show.

   Paul economically visualizes the romantic triangle as the unseen Rachel (Johanna Kirby) watches Janet Tregallis (sic; Teresa Banham) bawdily seduce Brunton up in the hayloft, interrupting his vision of a rider carrying a bag containing the crown. Tregallis (Patrick Blackwell) even gets a brief onscreen appearance, albeit no lines; when Brunton is found, Janet loudly accuses the jealous Rachel of killing him, and he is asked to take her away. Holmes make himself further disagreeable with cocaine before the mystery occupies him, while Watson provides his forensic expertise to Inspector Fereday (Ian Marter), not found in the story, where Reginald merely says that the county police “are at their wits’ end…”

   Retaining much of Conan Doyle’s dialogue, Paul also creates a new scene that dramatizes Brunton’s recruitment of an understandably skeptical Rachel to help him lift the stone, claiming to regret his dalliance with Janet and promising that they can flee together with the treasure he believes is beneath it. Although Rachel is scathingly contemptuous when they find nothing of any apparent value, the visuals suggest that the wooden support holding the slab open slips out of place accidentally, rather than being deliberately dislodged by her. And while the story leaves her fate completely open, the episode ends with Janet screaming as she sees Rachel’s body surface in the lake, presumably a suicide.

To be continued.

Edition cited

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Doubleday (1930)

Online sources