Sherlock Holmes is an instant connect. Many childhoods and chunks of adult life have been nourished by these pages to adventure. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes and his trusted lieutenant John H. Watson have inspired many to explore the plot further.
The latest to join the tribe is Partha Basu, more known for his quizzes and the presence in BBC Mastermind India .
With “The Curious Case of 221B — The Secret Notebooks of John H Watson, MD”, the first time fiction writer seeks to turn the canon on its head. The book unveils the secret diaries of Watson, treasured for long, which gives a different perspective to the well-known cases in the Holmes repertoire and a different face to the detective himself. The letters have incidentally travelled to India and are discovered accidentally by Jit after his parents, the custodians of the diaries were shot down in Deoghar, a town not far away from Calcutta.
In the book, Watson grows beyond the façade of “a perfect foil” or “even the Fool” he is forced to be in the company of Holmes. So most of Holmes’ cases, be it “A Scandal in Bohemia” or “The Adventure of the Invisible Client”, we realise don’t end where we thought it did. Basu gives them a spin.
“What I have done is twisted the stories,” says Basu. If earlier writers attempted to fill the gaps in the original, Basu explores the “what if” aspect of the tales.
Objective assessment
Never a Holmes maniac, his approach to the detective is clinically dispassionate. “Sherlock Holmes is not the best detective in the world,” says Basu. According to him, Holmes is not a “pure, hardcore detective” like Hercule Poirot. “I look at Holmes as high adventure,” he says.
Basu believes Holmes has been placed on a pedestal — the one who could do no wrong. “He was harsh on Watson, insulting and was highly opinionated,” he says. Point out the camaraderie and the moments of warmth the men shared, Basu asserts, “moments of being harsh outweighed” those of compassion.
“I thought why not support Watson for a change,” says Basu about the birth of the book. “The Curious Case of 221B” published by Harper Collins, is about “de-mystifying Holmes and having a bit of fun at his expense.”
Holmes, however, can be a dicey subject and a minor flip could draw the ire of loyalists. The author spent considerable hours in painstaking research and getting facts right. He says, “If I had gone wrong, I would have been crucified.”
Another challenge, says Basu was to get the ethos of the time, the idiom and the body language right. Probe him on the India connect he brings to the tale, the bond between Watson and Jit’s parents forged in the 1920’s, he says, “The walnut box (in which the letters were found) could be found anywhere, why not in India?”
“The Curious Case of 221B” can be read in the post-colonial context, with the secrets of a British icon resting in the hands of an Indian. But rather than giving it an empire writes back perspective, Basu says “it is more of a positive link between the coloniser and the colonised.” He brings in Emma, daughter of the landlady Mrs. Hudson, who acts as a bridge across time, connecting Watson’s dairies and Jit.
On a high granted by fiction, Basu is contemplating a few more. “Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, somewhere in the future there would be a book on Moriarty.” He is also working on another based in Silicon Valley and the changes it brings about in people and values.
