A Master of Disguise

 

My thoughts on why Sherlock Holmes lives a life of disguises, first presented in Crime Thriller Hound.:

There are two kinds of actors. One acts to reveal himself. The other acts to hide himself. The first has no protection from the world. She is all blood and bone and sinew and nerve, like an illustration from Grey’s Anatomy. She is always herself, on full view for the world to witness.

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The second is all armor, though the armor is constructed of quicksilver. We never get a glimpse of him. He is the hero with a thousand faces, a chameleon.

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It’s a well-known fact that Sherlock Holmes was a master of disguise, using his talent for transformation in some fifteen stories in the canon, from a sailor to a priest to an old woman, often delighting in showing off his talents by fooling Watson, who knows his face better than any man, having captured it in print in its every mood. Indeed, some, such as Captain Basil in The Adventure of Black Peter, seem to be regular characters with shadowy lives of their own. It has been conjectured that he must have had an early career on the stage. Watson at one point even bemoans when he opted to become a consulting detective—“The stage lost a fine actor," he says 

in A Scandal in Bohemia.

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Well, if we had to choose what kind of actor he is, I think all hands would go up for the latter, the concealing kind. Sherlock Holmes gives nothing away. His heart, his history, even his very thought processes are meagerly doled out to even his closest friend, John Watson. He’s more than ready to give credit for his work to Scotland Yard bumblers, to efface himself from the record books. He would have vastly preferred Watson’s accounts of his adventures to be pared down to scientific case notes, to let himself be equal to x. And the only woman he shows any warmth for at all is an actress who bests him by means of a disguise, while he never socialises with his own (even more unsociable) brother.

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But where does his fascination with disguise come from? His need to erase himself? Does Sherlock Holmes hate Sherlock Holmes, and if so, why?

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For the answer, or at least a conjecture, I think we have to delve into Holmes’s past, and we have little enough to go on there. We know that his father was a country squire, settled in his ways, yet he chose a French woman, from a family of prominent painters, as his wife. It’s an odd match.

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Perhaps she brought money to the estate?  The Vernets were certainly wealthy. Or perhaps it was a second marriage for Mr. Holmes, and he needed a new mother for his children from his first.  For her part, she could not be choosy at her age.

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Because since we know her family, we can find her in the family genealogy. She was almost certainly Louise Vernet-LeComte, whose mother Camille was the sister of Horace Vernet. She would have been about thirty-two when she gave birth to Mycroft, thirty-nine when Sherlock was born. Both her age and the gap between births suggest stillbirths in between, or at least children who did not live to majority. It’s entirely possible that she died giving birth to Sherlock.  If not, she would likely have been a very protective mother to her youngest son. But if so, his father, and even Mycroft, might have blamed her death on him. There’s reason to want to hide, estranged from his very birth from his family, carrying guilt as his original sin.

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And if he came from a family of country squires, where is the family seat? Neither Sherlock nor Mycroft seem to have inherited a country estate. Did his father lose it, either through drink or mismanagement? Or is there an older brother, whom they are so estranged from that neither ever lets his name pass their lips?

 

We know Holmes did not finish university. Could his father have died without leaving him a penny to his name, forcing him to “live by his wits?”

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Or could it be that Mr. Holmes was not his father at all, that Louise was sent back to live with her brother Emil when she could produce no more children after Mycroft, and she had an affair? The clue to Sherlock’s actual father may then be hiding in plain sight.  After Moriarty’s death he seems to have undergone some crisis of the soul,  traveling from one guru to another, ostensibly in the guise of a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson. Perhaps his father was a Norwegian explorer named Siger, and his wanderings after the death of Moriarty were actually for the purpose of seeking him out? Or (and this I will admit is stretching it to the limit) perhaps his father was George Sigerson, Irish neurologist, politician and poet, who visited France often in his youth. He would have been thirty-two at the time Sherlock was born. Illegitimate birth still held the stain of bastardy in the 19th century. That would have been reason enough for Holmes to plant a palisade around himself.

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Indeed, we have to ask ourselves why he ever abandoned the stage to create his own unique profession. I think it’s because there is a third type of actor. Most actors are self-absorbed. They shouldn’t be censured for it. It’s actually a necessary trait when one’s only instrument is oneself. But some actors are concerned more with the play than their part. They cannot see the tree for the forest. Because they are so caught up in the mise en scene, on every part, they cannot focus on themselves. Such actors make excellent directors.

I think Sherlock Holmes was so concerned with hiding his secrets that he made a profession of uncovering the secrets of others.  Even his clients must unmask themselves before Holmes will take them on, even if you’re the King of Bohemia. Holmes became a pioneer semiotician, carefully brushing away his own footprints in the snow.

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Perhaps we should just respect Sherlock’s privacy.  But let’s look at this another way: he chooses Watson as his friend and foil precisely because of his lack of artifice. Yet it is Watson who exposes him, over and over. I think that too is a deliberate  choice on Sherlock’s part, that he can only reveal himself when translated into third person. In that case, all this conjecture makes fertile soil for more stories, more encores.

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He’s amassed hundreds of encores. Let’s just give him a thundering ovation.

Holmes's artistic ancestry/Crimereads

 

My  speculations on Sherlock Holmes's Vernet ancestry, first published in Crime Reads:

Backstory. Probably Freud fault. 
Wanting to know whether we were in love

 with our mothers or had killed our fathers.

That is to say, that every character—every modern character—needs a backstory, according to today’s practice, all worked out by a writer (or an actor), even if the details of the backstory are never actually revealed to the audience. Adds depth, don’t you know? It didn’t use to be the case. We’re not concerned with Hamlet’s childhood, or Faust’s, or Quixote’s. And none of them felt the need for 23and me.

But those days are gone. Now we want to know a character from the inside out. Now we even want (thanks, Superman) an origin story. And writers like Barret-Gould and Vincent Starrett have been accommodating, to a point. But I’ve don’t think they’ve dug enough into the only clue that Doyle gives us, in his famous introduction to Mycroft Holmes, The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter:
“My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

Now why Doyle decided to hook his fictional character up with the very real Vernets, the family of distinguished French artists, is a matter for conjecture. It’s been hazarded that it was because he came himself from a family of (far less distinguished) English artists. Nor do we know how the Vernets felt about having Holmes foisted on their bloodline (although of course nowadays the Vernets would largely be forgotten without the Holmes connection—fame is fleeting).

Nevertheless, at the time the Vernets were a wildly popular tribe of painters, three generations, connected by marriage to a whole host of other successful French artists. And since there were three generations, Claude, Carl, and Horace, there is some ambiguity as to exactly which Vernet is meant. Since Horace and Carl both feature (in paintings) the aquiline nose and piercing eyes that Holmes also boasts, that doesn’t clear up the question.

But in truth, it can only mean Horace, because only Horace, the youngest, fits into our timeline. Born in 1789 (in the Louvre, where both his father and grandfather had apartments), he was a childhood prodigy and by the age of 13 he was already receiving orders for his work. He painted with lightning speed and his brush was likened to a machine. He also had a phenomenal eye for detail and a prodigious memory. He would have made, dare I say it? an excellent detective.

He had only one sister, Camille, which makes that simpler for us. She married the painter Hippolyte Lecomte, who made his mark, like Vernet, mainly with paintings of battles, though he certainly wasn’t lauded like Vernet, who was a recipient of the Legion of Honor.

His son in turn was the famous Orientalist painter, Emile LeComte, and he had two daughters. The first, Fanny LeComte, born 1809, is also listed in the family genealogy as a painter. Unfortunately, I was able to find no further information on her. It would be fascinating to trace her career in what was still largely a men’s-only club at the time.

This brings us at last to Louise, Lecomte’s second daughter, born in 1815. This lady, of whom nothing more is known, I think must have given birth to Mycroft Holmes in 1847, at the age of thirty-two—remarkably old at the time for a first child. Could she have had earlier miscarriages? Or could she have been Siger Holmes’s second wife? (In which case the Holmes brothers may have had unmentioned half-brothers or sisters, wholly bereft of that artistic spark which Sherlock and Mycroft share.) Or perhaps she was pursuing her own career as a painter up until the point she met her future husband? We can only speculate. But speculating is what historical fiction writers absolutely adore.

One may wonder how this staid son of squires made a match with this lively French mamselle so steeped in the art world? Perhaps he was taken with her beauty. We have, alas, no portraits of her, but we do have one of her aunt, also a Louise, painted by her father Horace, and she was quite a beauty. And perhaps for her part she might have been anxious  to get away from her brother, Emil, whom she might have been employed as housekeeper to, since he seems never to have married.

How did she and the country squire meet? Probably in France. Perhaps neat La Londe les Maures, near the Riviera, where Horace Vernet had once had a castle built. Perhaps Siger was a younger son, who had to make his way as a wine merchant. Certainly Sherlock was an aficionado of fine wines, and the Montpelier area nearby, which seems to have held some significance for Holmes,  was well-known for wine-growing.

At any rate, she would have been thirty-nine, then, when Sherlock was born in the dead of winter. Could she have died in childbirth? Very possibly. Would Siger have blamed her death on Sherlock? Also all too likely. This would explain why he never mentions his parents. It might explain too why he had to live by his wits, inheriting nothing from his father, and why he and Mycroft are more than somewhat distant.

Or—could it be that that Sherlock and Mycroft had different fathers? But then who—

Okay, I won’t open that can of worms. Leave Sherlock Holmes some mystery. In the meantime what about Watson’s family history? (I won’t even raise the spectre of his many wives.) Was Moriarty an American? Maybe I should just stop there. 

 

 

Historical Novel Society review of the Dutch Painter

 From the Historical Novel Society:

"While the book contains deft Holmesian plotting and a plethora of historical tidbits, the real draw for me is the extraordinary voice of Miller’s narrator: hilariously pompous, erudite, and evocative. The
sheer riot of his descriptions captivates and invites readers to linger over the sentences rather than rush headlong through the story."

For the entire review, check out the Historical Novel Society:

Interview with Nerds that Geek/The Dutch Painter

 
NTG: Do you think Sherlock Holmes would have good taste in art? Why / why not?

 

Timothy Miller: Watson claimed that he had dreadful taste in art, but then Watson was something of a Philistine himself. But I think Holmes would have been more apt to analyze art, to try to derive clues from it rather than simply enjoy it. I think he would have been more comfortable with abstract art, Kandinsky, for instance, which would have allowed his mind. to release its grip, the same way that improvisation on the violin did.

For the full interview on The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter, visit 

Nerds That Geek.