Word: sherlock
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...should have been elementary, but it did not turn out that way. Just a short stroll from 221B Baker Street, London, where Sherlock Holmes once dwelt, a bold gang broke through the floor of a closed handbag shop, dug a 40-ft. tunnel, and cut through two feet of concrete into a vault containing about 1,000 safe-deposit boxes in Lloyds Bank at 185 Baker Street. It was a case similar to the episode in which Holmes captured two tunneling bank crooks in A. Conan Doyle's The Red-Headed League -"a three-pipe problem," as Dr. Watson...
Unlike their more evanescent brothers of the flesh, the great figures of fiction are not covered by the laws of libel. Did not Sherlock Holmes admirers helplessly endure odious allegations asserting that Dr. Watson was a woman? Accordingly, anyone fond of Midshipman, Lieutenant, Captain, Commodore or Admiral Horatio Hornblower naturally approaches this new biography with suspicion. Will Britain's second greatest seaman, one wonders, be spuriously presented, for example, as a Hermaphrodite Brig? Or Nelson's long-lost younger brother...
...meth freaks, lumberjacks, a man called Simply That, and a vaporous presence named Aretha with "religious thighs" and "no goals" who is described as "one step soft of heaven." A large supporting cast includes "mrs. Cunk," who sells "fake blisters at the World's Fair," Cardinal Spellman, Sherlock Holmes and Shirley Temple. The pages are liberally sprinkled with obscure metaphors and allusions to E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Shakespeare and Rabelais, scraps of song lyrics, even a self-composed epitaph: "here lies bob dylan demolished by Vienna politeness . . . bob dylan -killed by a discarded Oedipus...
...wealthy jurist, Justin (George C. Scott) goes insane when his wife dies and fancies himself Sherlock Holmes, complete with Inverness coat, underslung pipe and austere vanity. His brother-in-law tries to have Justin put into an institution to gain control of his fortune. Faced with "Holmes," the asylum assigns a real psychiatrist named Watson (Joanne Woodward). Even though the sex is wrong, the Baker Street Irregular decides that she is the Dr. Watson ("Elementary, my dear"), and the shrink goes along with the gag. Soon the two are tooling along in Manhattan in pursuit of a villain known inevitably...
...course, a particularly original theme in this genre, but Orton doesn't strive for chills as Pinter did in Accident. Instead, he applies black humor within the blissfully sloppy and easy-going frame of character-types which are so familiar that they never really threaten to be ominous: The Sherlock Holmes sleuth who stalks, magnifying glass in hand, the unctuous undertaker who speaks of "floral tributes," the cool-as-ice nurse who hides a whopping sex drive. With characters such as these, each occupationally linked to death, but in funny, obsessive ways, Orton spins a yarn about stolen money which...