Counting down to my favourite film of 2009…

10. Jennifer’s Body

directed by Karyn Kasuma; written by Diablo Cody; starring Megan Fox & Amanda Seyfried

Yes, of course, Jennifer’s Body is derivative of Ginger Snaps and, to a lesser degree, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But writer Diablo Cody’s dialogue is smart and snappy, with a voice of its own, and the film’s sexual politics are dead-on, incisive, and radical. All in all, deliciously entertaining. With the added bonus that, in this film, Megan Fox is hot, hot, hot. And, no, that doesn’t contradict my statement about the film’s sexual politics.

9. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

directed by Werner Herzog; written by William Finkelstein; starring Nicolas Cage & Eva Mendes

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans begs to be directed by David Lynch and, at times, it almost feels like it is. The film’s sound design is a too mundane to fully support the story, but what a great story, with fantastically weird moments, amazingly strange dialogue, and Nicolas Cage’s best performance in years. There’s an overall sense that the director doesn’t quite gel with the material, as though parts of it eluded him — although he does a top-notch job with the actors. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans falls a bit short of being quite as strong as it could have been. Nevertheless, a substantial work.

8. A Single Man

directed by Tom Ford; written by Tom Ford & David Scearce, based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood; starring Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, and Nicholas Hoult

Colin Firth’s heart-shattering and riveting performance anchors Tom Ford’s affecting and gorgeous adaption of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. The set designs are elegant and evocative, and the period details are fascinating. The film is filled with deftly written and deliciously intense moments. I loved the voice-only cameo by Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, which, given the setting, is a pitch-perfect Easter egg. There’s a big false note at the very end that takes the film down a notch, but, overall, it’s a great piece of filmmaking.

7. Sherlock Holmes

directed by Guy Ritchie; written by Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, Simon Kinberg, Lionel Wigram, and Michael Robert Johnson, based on the series and characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle; starring Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Strong

I’ve already written a whole post about Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes on this blog, in the context of my series on Sherlock Holmes pastiches and adaptations, but let me reiterate that it’s a perspicacious and daring adaptation, with Jude Law shining as the greatest screen Watson ever. Rachel McAdams looks a little too young to be fully convincing as Irene Adler, and that may be the only false note here. But she still does a good job. In fact, one of my favourite things about this film is how the Holmes/Adler dynamic is modelled on the Batman/Catwoman relationship — which is itself an iteration of the Holmes/Adler archetype; it’s ironic but fitting to see the original feed on and be informed by how the archetype has evolved in other, later characters. Sherlock Holmes is great fun. I hope the sequels live up to the standard set by this first episode.

6. Moon

directed by Duncan Jones; written by Duncan Jones & Nathan Parker; starring Sam Rockwell & Kevin Spacey

A low-key and intelligent SF film with a virtuoso performance by Sam Rockwell. Creepy and claustrophobic, and refreshingly free of hysterics, Moon is quiet and disturbing, beautiful and profoundly sad.

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox

directed by Wes Anderson; written by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Roald Dahl; starring George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Michael Gambon

George Clooney oozes roguish charm in this animated film’s title role. Madcap fun. Clever world-building. Top-notch voice acting by everyone involved. Fantastic Mr. Fox is guided by a strong vision that never compromises, and the result is a staunchly original and entertaining work.

4. Zombieland

directed by Ruben Fleischer; written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick; starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin

It’s hard to believe that such an unforgiving dystopia — almost the entire population has succumbed to a zombie plague — filled with such gruesome violence could be so … heartwarming. Seriously, as the end credits began rolling, the first thing I told myself was, this film is so cute. And I mean that in the best possible way. Zombieland is a grand entertainment that juggles drama, humour, horror, action, and romance with uncommon deftness. Having one of the year’s strongest ensemble casts and a kick-ass guest appearance by Bill Murray is gravy on top.

3. Up

directed by Pete Docter & Bob Peterson; written by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, and Thomas McCarthy; starring Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, and Bob Peterson

Up is the most poignant film of the year, a constant source of surprise and awe, anchored by Ed Asner’s fantastic performance as the lead character and, of course, by the unequalled design and animation work of the legendary Pixar team. (I saw the traditional 2D version — 3D gives me headaches.)

2. Watchmen

directed by Zack Snyder; written by David Hayter & Alex Tse, based on the comics by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons; starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino , Matt Frewer, and Stephen McHattie

David Hayter — who helped kick-start the current spate of superhero films with his excellent script for the first X-Men movie — returns here with a superb adaptation of one of the superhero genre’s most revered works. Sure, the clock motif could have been used to better effect, and purists can nitpick that this or that element wasn’t faithful enough to the source material, but, damn, so much of it is so right, and the overall effect is reminiscent of Blade Runner — a sensually submersive SF experience drenched in noir, a film where the sets take on the narrative importance of characters. Also like Blade Runner, it’s one of those films that’s great in spite of having little details that don’t work, because the whole is much, much greater than the sum of its parts. My biggest peeve, as mentioned earlier this week, is that Matthew Goode is disastrously miscast. I also think director Zack Snyder erred in making the identity of the grand conspirator so obvious so early on. It takes away the mystery/suspense element without gaining anything in return. On the plus side, I think that the new cataclysm, replacing the giant squid from the original comics, is more organic to the story and more thematically resonant. Months after first seeing Watchmen, I’m still feeling the film resonate within me. It had a powerful effect on me, and my head still reels in awe and astonishment whenever I start thinking about the experience of seeing it. The extended director’s cut is even better than the original theatrical release, by the way.

1. Inglourious Basterds

written & directed by Quentin Tarantino; starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Krüger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, and Mélanie Laurent

Hitler and all the top Nazi brass get burned alive by a young Jewish woman seeking revenge and justice. Hitler. Burned alive. Of course, Inglourious Basterds is the best film of the year. Seriously, though, Quentin Tarantino is on a roll. His recent spate of films — all featuring strong female protagonists avenging the wrongs done to them and to the world in deliriously and deliciously orgiastic explosions of violence — have all been mind-warpingly strange, viscerally effective, mythically resonant, and relentlessly entertaining.

Love it, hate it, try to ignore it — it doesn’t matter. James Cameron’s Avatar is the 2009 film that won the cultural war. It’s the film people can’t believe you haven’t seen, or don’t want to see. It’s this year’s must-see film, the one that’s heralded as a game-changer for storytelling in cinema. I still don’t want to see it. I don’t like James Cameron’s work. I hate 3-D. And everything I’ve read about the story makes me think I would loathe this film. But that’s hearsay, since I haven’t experienced the story for myself. Let’s call it an educated guess.

For decades now, I’ve been a voracious reader of science fiction. Meanwhile, I’ve been a rabid film buff. And yet I only very rarely enjoy SF films. Most of them, I skip. Among other things, the James Cameron esthetic has long been dominant in mainstream SF cinema, and that spectacle approach doesn’t usually appeal to me.

In literature, for the past decade, arbitrary genre boundaries have been blurring, resulting in some very interesting and fresh work that flirts with SF in new ways. In 2009, with Avatar looming so large, it’s impossible to ignore how much SF has snaked into mainstream culture more than ever before. Indeed, many of the year’s best films are SF or toy with SF in some way.

First, let’s look at J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek. While I have some affection for the original 1960s series — especially the first fifty or so episodes — I’ve not liked anything branded Star Trek since. But Abrams pulled off what I thought was impossible: made me like Star Trek again. It’s probably best not to think about it too hard, or else the story might crumble, but there’s no denying that this new film is fun and filled with brio. The cast is superb (except, alas, for Chris Pine, whose Kirk lacked both gravitas and charisma). I’m looking forward to the next one, especially now that the origin story is out of the way.

Duncan Jones’s Moon — about a man isolated on a lunar station on a too-long tour of duty — is written and performed with sobriety and intelligence.

Up, from Pixar/Disney, evokes and elevates the magic of pulp adventure and science fiction.

District 9 manages an agile tightrope walk. It’s an allegory about something very serious and dire, yet it never takes itself too seriously. On the flip side, it’s entertaining and darkly humorous without ever undermining or disrespecting its topic.

However, one of the year’s other dystopias, The Road, is relentlessly bleak. Perhaps a tad overlong and repetitive, but certainly uncompromising and courageous.

The hilarious and quirky The Men Who Stare at Goats only flirts with SF, with all its pseudo-science, but it could be argued that the surprising and wholly satisfying final scene catapults it into SF proper.

Sherlock Holmes, basically the archetypal superhero of rationality, was adopted by SF fandom a long time ago. The new eponymous film by Guy Ritchie, with its subtle steampunk veneer, has a sciencefictional aura without having any speculative elements per se.

Zombieland is pure entertainment from beginning to end: sharp writing, outstanding cast, and tons of surprising ideas.

Probably most people don’t think of Inglourious Basterds as SF, but it’s an alternate history, a subgenre of SF. The fun twist here is that, instead of looking at the long-term consequences of a change in history, as is typical with this kind of premise, Quentin Tarantino dramatizes the events that lead to the point of divergence.

One of the great pleasures of science fiction is the sense of being fully immersed in another world, in a world that could be but isn’t. Watchmen gave me that experience more than anything else I saw this year, pushing just about all of my sense-of-wonder buttons, keeping me on a constant high and leaving me feeling transformed.

Seeing a quintessential cinematic moment on a big screen can have a profound effect on the imagination. It can be a single shot, a part of or a whole scene, or a long sequence that flows with lyrical intensity.

On the other hand a really bad moment can be so jarring as to irreparably damage a story. This year’s guiltiest clunker is probably the inanely out of tone and utterly unbelievable action sequence set in the Guggenheim during The International, which might otherwise have been a suspenseful, realistically grounded thriller. Alas, it never recovered from that fatal misstep.

Thankfully, other films were graced with moments much more pleasing to the memory and the imagination, and much more suited to the story being told. Everything must always be in the service of the story.

The Bill Murray sequence in Zombieland will, I believe, become a humour classic.

In A Single Man, the scene of George and the young Spanish man flirting and smoking outside next to George’s car is tense with so many emotions and perfectly performed by Colin Firth and Jon Kortajarena. Riveting and unforgettable, with great dialogue, to boot.

The entire beginning sequence of Up — the story of Carl and Ellie’s love for each other — is a virtuoso piece of storytelling that very likely broke millions of hearts. Many filmmakers would have stretched that sequence to make an entire film out of it. But the creators of Up display uncommon imagination and bravery, pushing their story beyond ordinary or even extraordinary expectations.

Watchmen. Pretty much all of it. I have rarely felt so totally immersed in a film. Sure, there are a few missteps in storytelling and casting, but they couldn’t break the powerful spell of Zack Snyder’s images. From the first frame from to the last, my mind was catapulted into and firmly kept in sense-of-wonder mode.

But Inglourious Basterds takes the prize when it comes to creating an iconic, quintessentially cinematic moment permanently etched into my DNA. Having a gathering of high-ranking Nazis, Hitler himself included, burned alive to the tune of David Bowie’s “Cat People” (“…putting out fire with gasoline…”) was delicious beyond belief. The next day, I played the track nonstop on my iPod, re-experiencing the scene’s images and emotions so I could savour the pleasure over and over again. In all seriousness, the scene is more complex than that, and quite dark and moving, as many plot elements converge in a crescendo of action, symbolism, tragedy, irony, and consequences. Exquisite.

I have a weak spot for films that focus on ensemble casts rather than on so-called stars. After all, acting is most often an interactive art. Unfortunately, Hollywood latched onto the star system pretty early on and never let go. So we tend to think in terms of “lead” and “supporting” roles even when those epithets don’t really fit.

In 2009, two ensemble casts stood out for me. One of these, ironically, played in a film that didn’t really work but not because of the cast, who were all magnificent; I’m referring to A Serious Man (see yesterday’s post, on the disappointments of 2009) starring, among others, Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Wagner Lennick, Fred Melamed, and Aaron Wolff.  The interaction of this ensemble was constantly pitch-perfect, juggling pathos, weirdness, and comedy with aplomb. But I should also mention Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin, who were all utterly charming, each in their own quirky way, as a quartet of unlikely survivors of the zombie apocalypse in Zombieland, one of the year’s most entertaining films, in large part because of the magical chemistry between these four actors.

All that said, every year, some individual performances never fail to stand out.

George Clooney oozed his customary charm in all three of his 2009 films: The Men Who Stare at Goats, Up in the Air, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. But his roguish and incorrigible Mr. Fox seduced me the most.

In Sherlock Holmes, Jude Law overshadowed all other actors who ever played Doctor John Watson, with an interpretation unparalleled in the range of its nuances.

The fractured and fragile George was brought to heartbreaking life by Colin Firth in A Single Man.

Sam Rockwell’s performance in Moon was a multilayered tour de force, mesmerising in its understated subtlety.

In yet another irony, my favourite solo performance of the year was in a film that was all about ensemble acting. In fact, had it not been for the disastrously miscast Matthew Goode in the key role of Adrian Veidt, Watchmen would have featured my favourite ensemble cast of 2009. But Goode, an otherwise fine actor, invariably set the wrong tone whenever he was on screen. Which was exactly the opposite effect than that of Jackie Earle Haley’s eerie, haunting, and relentlessly disturbing interpretation of Walter Kovacs AKA Rorschach. Despite Goode’s miscasting, Watchmen remains a powerfully immersive experience, and much of that can be attributed to Haley, who anchored the film by so perfectly incarnating the film’s most important role.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. For the rest of this week, I’ll be discussing what I loved the most about and among the films of 2009. But first I want to mention the films that disappointed me. For the most part, these are not out-and out bad films, and I think all of them are honest films, or try to be honest films. They all had ambitions, some of them very high ambitions indeed, but, in some way or other, they all lost their way and, to put it bluntly, failed.

9

directed by Shane Acker; written by Pamela Pettler and Shane Acker; starring Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover, Martin Landau, Christopher Plummer, John C. Reilly, Fred Tatasciore, Elijah Wood

2009 was rife with films with the number 9 in the title, which tended to be more than a tad confusing. This is one is the animated SF dystopia featuring android dolls struggling to survive in a violent and inhospitable future where perhaps all biological life has been destroyed. The first fifteen minutes or so are glorious: scary, unsettling, filled with visual wonders, and deftly kinetic. But then it swiftly degenerates into a mishmash of horrid sentimental clichés, spiritual pablum, self-important speechifying, and thematic contradictions. Long before the end, the characters’ motivations don’t make any sense anymore, and neither does the story.

One Week

written & directed by Michael McGowan; starring Joshua Jackson

Like many people, I was charmed by Joshua Jackson’s performance as Pacey in the the 1990s TV series Dawson’s Creek. Ever since, I’ve been waiting for a big breakout leading role for him. (Please let’s pretend Fringe doesn’t exist.) I thought One Week might be it. Until I saw it, that is. This film tries too hard to make its too obvious point. Very little of it feels genuine. And aside from a few surprisingly effective and inspired moments, there’s almost no effort to lift the script from its morass of cliché.

The Invention of Lying

written & directed by Ricky Gervais & Matthew Robinson; starring Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., Jennifer Garner, and Rob Lowe

The Invention of Lying could have been a really savage and subtle satire. Its premise is fascinating: what would the human world be like if we were genetically incapable of lying? Alas, it doesn’t push its thought experiment far enough to be really satisfying. Time and again, the film pulls its punches, whether in regards to its characters, its ideas, or the consequences of its premise. It paints everything and everyone too broadly, shies away from darkness too often, and in the end it fails to mean anything.

A Serious Man

written & directed by Joel & Ethan Coen; starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Wagner Lennick, Fred Melamed, and Aaron Wolff

No-one can fault the Coen brothers for lack of productivity. They’re constantly working, and they’re not afraid to take risks. Their output is quirky and eclectic. Alas, I also feel that their artistically successful films are fewer and farther between. Without exception, all of their films have something remarkable about them. Here, the historical recreation and the cultural POV are astonishingly engrossing in all respects, including set design, characterization, and more. The offbeat humour is as charming as ever. The actors’ performances are outstanding and utterly convincing. And yet, like with too many of their films, especially most of the recent ones, I can’t help but feel that the script could have used a good editor, that somehow the story failed to coalesce, and that we are left with the promise of greatness rather than greatness itself.

The Brothers Bloom

written & directed by Rian Johnson; starring Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Robbie Coltrane, Rinko Kikuchi, Maximillian Schell, and Rachel Weisz

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

directed by Terry Gilliam; written by Terry Gilliam & Charles McKeown; starring Christopher Plummer, Heath Ledger, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield, Vern Troyer, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law

I’m grouping these two together because, especially considering how utterly bizarre each of them is, they are strikingly similar in theme, narrative technique, and mood. They also both fail in almost exactly the same way. And I can’t think of any 2009 film I more wanted to love than these two.

The Brothers Bloom is the second feature by Rian Johnson, whose debut, Brick, is one of my favourite films of the last decade. (If you’re any kind of film buff and have yet to see it, I can’t urge you strongly enough to rush out right now and watch it.) Terry Gilliam is the legendary director of Brazil, Time Bandits, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, three of the finest fantasies ever filmed. Already, it’s almost impossible not to have high expectations.

Both of these new films seem to have everything to make me love them: unabashed romanticism tinged with unforgiving darkness; wildly serpentine plots filled with exotic settings; great actors playing bizarre characters; layers of truth and fantasy that refuse easy explanations; the sense of being in a world that is weirdly but subtly askew from our own … but in both cases it all falls flat. It never sings. There’s a core missing in each case, some cohesive emotional urgency that would make it all shimmer with the power of myth. There’s an overt motivation that drives each plot, but in each case it’s not enough. Ultimately, both of theses films meander, as if the story were trying to find itself and failing (a lacuna made all the more glaring by the fact that both of these films are about the power of storytelling to create the world we inhabit). There needed to be at least hints to a deeper, perhaps ineffable motivation lying beneath and interacting with the ostensible raison d’être of the story. I’m asking for a lot here, but these films both demand and promise a lot. Their ambitions, and the skill of their respective creators, are of such superlative calibre that the stakes are very high. The films themselves promise much, and their failure to deliver, especially when the promises are so alluring, disappoint with the sting of heartbreak.

From my first glimpse of the poster for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, with its steampunk esthetic and with Jude Law’s flamboyantly macho posture as Watson, I suspected I would love this film. I was, at first, a bit dubious about the choice of Robert Downey, Jr., as Holmes, but despite his physical and national shortcomings (he’s too short and he’s American) he pulled off a magnificent and fresh take on Holmes.

I was also dubious because of the director. I had loved Ritchie’s debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but his subsequent films had left me cold. But, again, my fears proved to be groundless: I think Sherlock Holmes is Ritchie’s most accomplished and entertaining work.

The film has elicited a lot of discussion about its faithfulness, or lack thereof, to the Doyle canon.  For example, the film has been criticized for having a plot that strays too far from Doyle, for being too action-oriented, for being more steampunk than strictly Victorian, etc.

One of my friends, fantasy author Leah Bobet, after the film came out, said something that had never occurred to me but that rang so true: “Sherlock Holmes was always steampunk.” Indeed, Doyle’s Holmes stories, stylistically decades ahead of their time, were proto-steampunk.

Doyle’s Holmes stories were rife with bizarre conspiracies and flirtations with the supernatural, the latter invariably debunked by Holmes the superhero of rationality. Thus, anyone claiming that the film’s story is unlike Doyle has not read the same stories I have or simply does not really remember Doyle.

As for the action criticism … again, I refer back to Doyle. Doyle’s Holmes often got into physical fights (being explicitly described as an expert boxer), often, and with extreme glee, engaged in housebreaking, and frequently reminded Watson to bring his gun. Doyle’s Watson was a war veteran, a man of action, and a sensualist with an eye for the ladies. Jude Law’s Watson surpasses even David Burke’s Watson (from the ITV series). Indeed, there’s a hint of Burke to Law’s Watson, but Law pushes his Watson further, makes him more human and believable than any actor ever has.

Although the Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film does not strictly adapt any Doyle story, it is, in spirit, true to the original. It’s a daring and successful reimagining of Sherlock Homes as a 21st-century film series. I can’t wait for the sequel!

In the mid-1990s Marvin Kay edited a trio of Sherlock Holmes anthologies that are by far, among a near-infinite number of such volumes, my favourite volumes of Holmes stories by other hands.

The first was also the best and heftiest of the three: The Game Is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes. This volume is a generous and authoritative retrospective through various genres of post-Doyle Holmes literature: parodies, faux-scholarship, straight pastiches, fanciful pastiches, and more. It’s basically 512-page love letter to the most enduring adventure hero in popular fiction.

Next came the extremely entertaining Resurrected Holmes, which features new Holmes stories by contemporary writers aping the styles of classic authors. For example, chameleon extraordinaire Richard Lupoff contributes “The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin,” “ascribed” to Jack Kerouac . This volume also includes Holmes stories as per H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemmingway, Lord Dunsany, Dashiel Hammett, etc. And, of course, H.P. Lovecraft. Writers can’t seem to resist blending Lovecraft and Holmes.

The series came to a close with the more traditional The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, featuring straightforward pastiches — i.e., stories trying to fill in the gaps in Holmes’s career left by Doyle.

Doyle was an expert in teasing his public’s imagination by constantly referrring to, within the canonical stories, other Holmes cases, often deemed of a too sensitive nature to be published, or by giving hints about Holmes’s past, and the like. For generations now, writers and fans have been having fun filling in those gaps, imagining what else the Great Detective may have been up to that Doyle failed to report, which has given rise to a wealth of entertainment. Like these three exemplary anthologies.

In 1984, UK network ITV began broadcasting The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Jeremy Brett as fictiondom’s most archetypal sleuth. Gone were the accoutrements and distortions of countless vapid stage and screen adaptations, this looked to become the definitive screen version of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The series began with the first Sherlock Holmes short story:  the well-known “A Scandal in Bohemia”, which introduced the notorious Irene Adler, the adversary for whom Holmes held a platonic yet somewhat romantic admiration.

But what was most startling were the portrayals of Holmes and Watson themselves, uncommonly faithful to Doyle’s originals. Watson’s dignity, intelligence, and resourcefulness were restored, after decades of mistreatment in popular culture. And Jeremy Brett simply radiated Sherlock Holmes. He instantly became the default voice and image — at least in my mind, but I suspect in the minds of many Holmesians — for the great detective.

The Adventures of Sherlock Homes lasted thirteen episodes. It was succeeded by The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which, although still excellent, saw David Burke, who had so extraordinarily embodied Watson in the first series, replaced by the capable but not quite so astonishing Edward Hardwicke. This second series featured eleven regular episodes, plus two feature-length movies, adapting the novels The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Despite the series’ critical and commercial success, it went on hiatus after 1988, to come back three years later, in 1991, with a third set under the banner The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. And this is where it starts to unravel.

The first six episodes of the new set are quite good. Brett is perhaps starting to lose a bit of vigour in his portrayal of Holmes but not enough to seriously undermine the quality of the adaptations. But The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes wrapped up its run with three feature-length TV movies adapting three short stories that could not really withstand being stretched to such a length. In addition, there was a palpable melodramatic overindulgence at play in these overlong adaptations, replacing the series’ signature subtlety.  But the worst was yet to come.

The final set of six, 1994’s The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, is nothing less than a travesty. The stories are poorly adapted. Brett’s failing health is evident, and there’s even one episode in which Holmes has only a cameo. Hardwicke, as Watson, doesn’t even appear in every episode. One wonders why these were made at all. The love, craft, and attention that had characterized the early episodes are nowhere in evidence.

We are nevertheless left with 32 exemplary Sherlock Holmes adaptations. It’s best to simply ignore and forget those last nine aberrations. Still it’s a shame that the entire canon was not adapted in the manner of the early episodes and especially that Brett and Burke were never assembled to perform an adaptation of A Study in Scarlet, the legendary first meeting of Holmes and Watson.

British thriller writer John Gardner, most famous for his James Bond sequels, published three novels featuring the most iconic of Sherlock Holmes’s adversaries, Professor Moriarty — two in the mid-1970s and a third posthumously, in 2008, simply titled Moriarty. I have yet to read the new one (we’re still waiting for a paperback on that one, and somehow this series screams “paperback” to me, although I fear that, in today’s market, if we do get a softcover edition, it’ll be in the larger trade format and not the more appropriate massmarket trim).

I first encountered the series in the late 1970s — while deep in my first bout of Holmes mania, buying every Holmes-related paperback I could lay my hands on — with The Revenge of Moriarty, having no clue that it was the second. It was sophisticated, thrilling, and more adult in its sensibilities than most Holmes pastiches I was reading. It was also much better written than most such books, with surprisingly nuanced characters. And, best of all, it unfurled a complex and fascinating hidden history that peered behind the well-known Holmes canon while respecting and honouring it.

It took me fifteen years to finally lay my hands on the first in the series, titled (perhaps confusingly) The Return of Moriarty, and I devoured it as soon as I finally found it. It didn’t have quite the enormous impact on my imagination that my earlier, younger reading of its sequel had had, but I enjoyed it tremendously. I’m eager to read the third one, but I’m willing to be patient, as I know there will no more after that.

Part of the fun of being a Sherlock Holmes fan is that, although Arthur Conan Doyle himself only wrote a limited amount of Holmes fiction, there’s an inexhaustible supply of material to discover and explore.

Sherlock Holmes fandom has, of course, spawned a multitude of pastiches — Holmes fiction by other hands — as well as crossovers in which Holmes meets famous characters of history and literature or in which his fictional world intersects with other, more fantastical fictional universes (the Lovecraftian/Holmesian hybrid is a subgenre unto itself). But Holmes fandom has also spawned a particular brand of literature that, while not exclusive to it, is otherwise unparalleled in quantity, scope, and obsession: metafictional nonfiction that treats the Doyle canon as historical documents.

(One of my literary heroes, Philip José Farmer, himself a Holmes fan, took this formula and ran with it to joyfully insane extremes with biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage that also managed to weave almost every character of adventure fiction ever conceived into a complex secret history. Massively entertaining.)

In the 1990s, under the banner Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library, were reprinted several classic volumes of Holmes studies — none of these are literary criticism; they are, as stated above, fictional nonfiction written as if Holmes were a historical character.

To name a few volumes: Baker Street Studies, edited by H.W. Bell; The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, by Vincent Starrett; Holmes & Watson, by S.C. Roberts; Baker Street By-Ways, by James Edward Holroyd; My Dear Holmes, by Gavin Brend; Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction?, by T.S. Blakeny. (There were more volumes in the series, including a few collections of Holmes fiction per se, but the bulk of this set of books is comprised of this kind of metafiction.)

In these wonderfully obsessive pages, we explore the geography of Holmes’s London; we try to reconcile the contradictions in the Watson/Doyle canon (was it Watson, the ostensible author, or Doyle, the “literary agent”, who intentionally misinformed readers so as to protect the true identities of Holmes’s clients?); we delve deep into the private lives of the Holmes characters, both major and minor; we try to discover the true location of “221b Baker Street”; we play detective, trying to solve the unsolvable mystery of Sherlock Holmes himself, the archetypal Great Detective.