Sherlock

Serious Sherlock Holmes fans know full well that “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” is a phrase from Arthur Conan Doyle’s story Silver Blaze, published in 1892. The dog - or, more precisely, the dog not barking: the lack of any curious incident at all - is crucial (the significance of the dog’s silence may even be a clue in both stories, if you’re really sharp).

Sherlock Holmes is Christopher Boone’s hero. Apart from the fact that he is fictional, Holmes is the perfect role model: he views life dispassionately and bases his conclusions on hard facts and probability, rather than on the confusing minefield of emotions. Christopher wouldn’t put it like that, because he doesn't like metaphors. But, to him, his other passion - maths - is a kind of detection, and vice-versa: both are concerned with and determined by examining the facts in order to produce a reasonable conclusion or prediction.

The popularity of Holmes has soared in the last five years, thanks to Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s genre-redefining Sherlock. So much so that people now refer to him simply by his first name, as they would Elvis or Beyoncé. I wonder whether Christopher would be a 'Sherlock' fan: on the one hand, it would feel modern and accessible to him. But it plays with the genre, and I don’t know how Christopher would feel about that. Significantly, Holmes - particularly in Moffat and Gatiss' interpretation - is socially inept: he cannot maintain conventional social behaviour, nor relationships. He is, by his own description, a high-functioning sociopath.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, practiced medicine in Plymouth and lived in Birmingham: all cities that we have visited on this tour. In March, while we were in Plymouth, every day I walked past the building in which he worked. Last week, in Birmingham, there was a Conan Doyle convention. Doyle supposedly bought a violin here, in Sherlock Street: allegedly the inspiration for the character's name (a friend, who knows about these things, tells me that he was going to be called Sherringford). In Mark Haddon's novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles is Christopher's favourite book: an entire chapter is devoted to Christopher's analysis of the story. Some say the name Baskerville also hails from Birmingham.

There are many more references to Doyle and to Holmes in Mark Haddon's book than there are in Simon Stephens' play. It's a measure of the lasting popularity of Sherlock Holmes that, occasionally, fans feel compelled to point this out.

To quote Doyle, and to paraphrase Haddon:

"...his mind...was busy in endeavouring to frame some scheme into which all these strange and apparently disconnected episodes could be fitted." And that is what I am trying to do by writing this blog.