Elementary, my dear Watson (article 1 march 1933)
Elementary, my dear Watson is an article published in The Bystander on 1 march 1933.
The review is about the play The Holmeses of Baker Street (1933) with Felix Aylmer as Sherlock Holmes.
Elementary, my dear Watson
The rout of Scotland Yard at the hands of William (Alfred Clark), Shirley Holmes (Rosemary Ames), Dr. Watson (Nigel Playfair), and Sherlock Holmes (Felix Aylmer). The unfortunate officers are Detective Withers (Vincent Holmes), complete with black eye, and Detective Laker (Ernest Borrow).
One Way to Catch a Husband
Shirley Holmes (Rosemary Ames) hooks a prisoner (Martin Walker) for life, to the undisguised disgust of the chief crook (Henry Hallatt)
At the Theatre
"Elementary, my dear Watson"
Sketches by Rouson
"The Holmeses of Baker Street," at the Lyric
To bee or not to bee... that is the question. Holmes, a widower in rustic retirement, has good reason (alias his daughter, Shirley) for telling Inspector Withers and the White Cross Gang to go to the devil. The old rooms in Baker Street smell invitingly of gun-powder — Shirley, confound her, has been target-shooting with her revolver — and Scotland Yard are importunate for assistance in the matter of the missing Medici pearl.
The code of the hive and the tricks of heredity dictate Shirley's future. A crack shot with either hand, this chip of the old block must be hustled from a career of crime and shepherded to the altar as a queen bee to its industrious husbands. As in the hive, so in matrimony. Queens most be queens and workers workers. There is no such thing as a neuter. Marriage is woman's sole existence, and a whole-time job. You cannot be a good wife and a lady detective.
Wherefore the apiarist, quelling the old sleuth within him, determines on a bee-line for the country. To hell with crime; there's no place like Holmes sweet Holmes; those thirty years of retirement are eloquent with warnings. Marriage with the late Mrs. Holmes was a failure because of those acute powers of deduction which perceived the absence from home of Mrs. Watson by the dust on the Doctor's bowler hat. Marriage, being based on mutual deception, became impossible for a woman who never once succeeded in putting over the mildest bluff on a husband who guessed what she was up to before she was up to it.
This is an equally delectable idea for Conan Doyle fans and psychologists alike, and the brightest thought in Mr. Basil Mitchell's attempt to revive the ghosts of Baker Street. Thanks to a brilliantly sustained piece of characterisation by Felix Aylmer as Holmes, more than a faint whiff of the old atmosphere is captured.
Unfortunately, the affair of the pearl, which was sent to Holmes in a queen-bee case, burgled for fun by his daughter and Mrs. Watson, re-burgled by Holmes himself, bungled but not burgled by Scotland Yard, and nearly collared by the arch-crook (with wig) operating an innocent gang of Bright Young Stealers, including the Peer's son who kept a wireless shop and loved Shirley, cannot rank with the Adventures of yore.
In a weak market Sir Nigel's dashing caricature of the egregious Doctor is a welcome bright spot. It keeps the plot near boiling-point, but that bulging waistline and ubiquitous umbrella will, I fear, contort the hundred per cent. Watsonians into spasms of acute pain.
The author's admirable notion that the best detectives make the worst husbands suggests that the right Holmes for resuscitation was not the widower droning over his bees, but the married sleuth still in harness.
Picture those after-breakfast tiffs over the foul pipe and the untidy habits; the womanly revolt against prolonged violin-playing, while the infant Shirley whimpered in her cradle over a first tooth. Imagine the henpecked Watson turning for sympathy to the chatelaine of Baker Street and dropping in, while the lord and master was trailing footprints on Dartmoor, to make discreet love over the teacups. And conceive the Doctor's discomfiture and Mrs. Holmes's despair when Sherlock exposed their elementary secret in a flood of cold reasoning, linger-tips pressed together, a contemptuous look in the far-away eyes. "I observe, my dear Watson, from the faint trace of powder on your left lapel..."
Leaving conjecture for achievement, it remains to commend the comic obtuseness of Vincent Holman's Inspector Withers, and the wonted air of casual unconcern with which Martin Walker adorns Shirley's embryonic crook and future king bee. That it does not appear to matter very much whether the young man goes to quod or marries Shirley must be attributed to that young lady herself. To infuse flesh and blood into this precocious sleuth demands a more pronounced array of charm, assurance and sympathy than Rosemary Ames seems to me at present capable of mustering.
TRINCULO.
