Everyone knows the brainiac detective who hangs out at 221 B Baker’s Street solving dastardly crimes and haring off after evil criminals. All who had not heard of Sherlock Holmes would surely have heard of him thanks to Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC television show, Sherlock .
The show also introduced Sherlock’s elder, brainier, lazy brother, Mycroft. Mark Gatiss, who created the show with Steven Moffat plays Mycroft, who first appears in the short story, The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. Mycroft in Sherlock is rather different. “The inspiration for Mycroft is from the 1970 Billy Wilder film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ,” Mark Gatiss says over the phone from London. “That is the inspiration for the antagonistic nature of the relationship between the brothers. Christopher Lee played Mycroft in the film and we thought it would be funnier to have a thin Mycroft who is worried about his weight rather than the corpulent one of the books.”
In The Bruce-Partington Plans , Sherlock describes Mycroft as “the British government.” Gatiss explains, “He is a darker force in the series.”
Sherlock Holmes seemed to have fallen into a reverential fog of glistening cobblestones and hansoms till Gatiss and Moffat “cleared all that away” and brought him to the 21st century texting and using GPS. “After the initial scepticism, the show was a super success.”
As part of the modernisation, instead of a pipe, Sherlock uses nicotine patches. So what about his cocaine habit — the seven per cent solution mentioned in The Sign of Four ? “Well, we have hinted that Sherlock has a past. He is an ex-smoker and an ex-addict. He is clean at the moment…”
Gatiss came to Sherlock Holmes via “the Basil Rathbone films. The first story I read was Scandal in Bohemia . When I had German measles, I read the entire collection. My favourite would be The Bruce-Partington Plans . I like it because there is the underground in it. I love the tube. There are spies, espionage... It is a reworking of an earlier Sherlock Holmes story, The Naval Treaty and is so clever. I also like Red-headed League , The Blue Carbuncle …”
A fan of Agatha Christie’s novels, Gatiss has written three episodes of the television show Agatha Christie’s Poirot with David Suchet as the little Belgian detective. While Sherlock has been modernised, the USP of Poirot is the recreation of Thirties. “I am sure the Thirties were a whole lot grubbier, the series however is a celebration of the period and that has worked well.”
Gatiss wrote the adaptation for Agatha Christie’s The Big Four , which features Poirot’s brother, Achilles (Hercule Poirot even says “don’t you know every detective has a brother who is smarter but less practical than himself). “Unfortunately I had to write out Achilles. Even Christie would agree that The Big Four is a big mess of a book. Cramming it into 90 minutes was a challenge and Achilles faced the chop.”
Sherlock has been updated and Poirot frozen in time, what about the ultimate pop cultural icon James Bond? If Gatiss were to reboot the franchise, how would he go about it? “That is a good question, because the movies are periodically reinvented. Maybe a reboot could be set in the Fifties like the books with the Beretta and the Bentley.”
A fan of the suave super spy, Gatiss says, “I am very pleased that Andrew (Scott, who plays Moriarty in the series) is part of the new James Bond film—pleased and insanely jealous!”
Gatiss is a fan of detective fiction. “Apart from Dorothy Sayers, I like obscure detective stories, like I recently this absolutely brilliant book called The Beast Must Die .” In Jasper Fford’s Thursday Next series, Mycroft is Thursday’s uncle and hides in the Sherlock Holmes stories. “I read the first book, The Eyre Affair ,” the 48-year-old comments. “I didn’t know about Mycroft hiding in Sherlock Holmes stories…”
Apart from detective fiction, Gatiss is a fan of horror movies and has made a documentary series called A History of Horror which he followed up with a documentary on European horror called Horror Europa . “I hope to look at Asian horror soon. I love horror, I love to be scared. There is a strong, spooky element in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which we have incorporated in Sherlock as well.”
Insisting he is too squeamish to enjoy the gory, horror movies, Gatiss says: “ Saw was clever while the sequels were just grossed out. My all-time favourite horror movie is Robert Wise’s The Haunting . In recent times, I enjoyed this Australian film called The Babadook . It is a study of mental breakdown and quite harrowing.”
Of his appearance at Comic Con in Mumbai this weekend, Gatiss says he is “enormously excited. I have just had my jabs.” About Sherlock coming to India (he is tracked down to New Delhi in the Christmas special, Many Happy Returns ), Gatiss says: “There is a lot of India in the original stories—from The Sign of Four to The Empty House . We, however, shoot mainly in Cardiff and it would be quite a job to move it all to India, but you never know. And don’t make that a headline! ”
