Where Pastiche Begins...

by Michael Cox

In the early 1980’s, when I set out to make the best possible Sherlock Holmes series for television, I gave no thought to the question of pastiche. In my innocence, I thought that our films would be based fairly and squarely on Conan Doyle’s original stories and that was that. To begin with that belief held true. The first of The Adventures, no matter which collection of stories they came from, were entirely faithful to the originals with very few additional flourishes.

Then we reached the adventure of “The Greek Interpreter”, and I have to admit that an element of pastiche began to creep in. It happened because the grammar of film demands a different structure from the grammar of prose fiction. Conan Doyle brought the story to a curious conclusion. Once the interpreter has been rescued, he presents us with a series of unanswered questions about the fate of the villains. On the screen this would have left us feeling unsatisfied and deprived of a climax. So we supplied our own answers. I believe that they were in the style of the original and I hope they were satisfying as well as exciting. Above all, they obeyed the film maker’s imperative: Don’t tell me, show me!

As time went by, we took more liberties with the stories, although we were always determined to keep the original plots intact. Our most substantial addition was the one we made to “The Final Problem”. This is a curious detective story because there is no problem to solve and no mystery for Holmes to tackle. There is simply the battle of wills between The Master and Moriarty which leads to the shocking finale at the Reichenbach Falls. So we added a crime: The theft of the Mona Lisa and Holmes’s success in recovering it through his pioneering study of fingerprints.

Over the years that the series ran, we changed Watsons and the production team also changed. I moved into the background, and after more than thirty episodes disappeared altogether. When these changes were introduced, the scripts remained faithful to Doyle, but towards the end there were some extraordinary lurches into pastiche. Chambers Dictionary rather unkindly defines this as “a jumble”, and “The Eligible Bachelor” (or “The Unintelligible Bachelor” as one critic described it,) is a good example. Unhappily, “The Last Vampyre” is another. Both these episodes suffered from the schedulers’ demand for two-hour films, rather than the shorter format with which we began. Holmes has usually been happier in short stories.

Unfortunately, the writers were not aware of the very sensible rules which David Marcum has laid down for the contributors to this anthology. Neither (dare I say?) were the creators of the BBC series Sherlock. But you are in good company here. You can sit back and enjoy the additions to the Holmes Canon between the covers of this book. They all show a proper respect for that great storyteller, Arthur Conan Doyle, and add to our enjoyment of the world he created.

Michael Cox

Producer, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Granada Television 1981-1985

March 2017