Abstract
This chapter investigates disguise in the Holmes canon, and offers reasons for its relative scarcity in the adaptation Sherlock. Drawing on Alec Charles’s identification of Holmes as an example of the “trickster” archetype, the chapter considers the connection between the trickster and the anti-hero, and the different attitudes of Holmes and Sherlock to disguise. Analyzing Sherlock’s “The Empty Hearse” and “His Last Vow” – and their canonical precursors – the author argues that the contemporary Sherlock’s inability or unwillingness to disguise himself asserts his authenticity, and distinguishes this anti-hero from villainous characters. The aspects of disguise and slumming that the canon and the TV series expand upon or downplay are also, the author suggests, reflections of different approaches to storytelling in these two mediums.
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Notes
- 1.
Alistair Duncan, too, notes that by becoming engaged to Agatha, Holmes is effectively committing breach of promise, the same offence for which he threatened to thrash Windibank (124–25).
- 2.
Indeed, the “patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks” on the wall of their Baker Street rooms, as described in “The Musgrave Ritual,” is one of the canon’s most enduring images (Doyle 386).
- 3.
Steven Moffat acknowledges the influence of Moriarty on subsequent representations of the villain: “With Moriarty, the original, Conan Doyle – in another moment of genius – invents how to write every single supervillain from then on” (quoted in Dundas 273).
- 4.
The canonical stories narrated by Holmes himself are “The Blanched Soldier” and “The Lion’s Mane”; as Klinger remarks, both stories employ the device of the key to the mystery being knowledge that only Holmes himself possesses (ii 1482), stacking the odds rather unfairly against the reader’s powers of detection.
- 5.
This revelation may, in turn, point to the possibility that Sherlock’s visit to the crack house in “His Last Vow” – and the careless disguise he adopts, as discussed earlier in this chapter – was not for investigative purposes. If so, this double-bluff would be an instance of the show disguising the truth about a character’s assumed lack of disguise.
- 6.
This point owes something to Bran Nicol’s insight that watching detective drama “puts the viewer in the position of the high-functioning sociopath” since we are “coldly interested in getting to the bottom of the mystery” (135). In my argument, it could be said that it is the series itself – and its fiendish co-creators, Moffat and Gatiss – that manipulates audiences with “sociopathic” ease.
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Poore, B. (2017). The Trickster, Remixed: Sherlock Holmes as Master of Disguise. In: Naidu, S. (eds) Sherlock Holmes in Context. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_5
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