Sherlock Holmes and Horace Rumpole

Sherlock Holmes and Horace Rumpole:  

The Pleasure of Repetition

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

My future husband and I first bonded with each other because we both like Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. A shared love of detective fiction has glued us together more sturdily than many another inducement. Now that we’ve stayed together for over 30 years, our most enduring favorites have turned out to be Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole—most memorably portrayed by Jeremy Brett and Leo McKern.

Watching the DVD editions of the many British TV productions starring Brett and McKern, I wondered whether enjoying detective fiction reaches the status of universal passion. Do mostly Britons and North Americans read the genre with gusto, do other Europeans also favor it, and do people in our world’s many other cultures also hanker for the misleading clue, the too-obvious suspect, the inept official, and the eventual symbolic victory over chaos and evil?

Some look down on mystery fiction because it uses stock characters. In both poor and excellent detective fiction, characterization does remain at the surface level—essentially flat, predictable, unchanging. Actually, far from constituting a drawback, this provides the genre with its most solid attraction: the pleasure of repetition.

We yearn to hear Watson exclaim over Holmes’s amazing deductions, Holmes dismiss the praise with “Elementary,” or Rumpole quote Alice’s White Rabbit, “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” when alarmedly confronting a crisis. The successful writer of detective fiction devises a formula and writes according to formula.

Sherlock Holmes and Horace Rumpole basically remain surface characters. Watching them portrayed by Brett and McKern, we do not delve into the psychological complexities explored by such masters of film as Krzysztof Kieslowski or Pedro Almodóvar, nor do we really want to do so. How disconcerting to find Holmes cherishing a secret passion for one or indeed all three Mrs. Watsons, or to watch the Rumpole family truly revealing what their patriarch terms “the horrors of home life.” Indeed, the pilot episode of the McKern series, “Rumpole and the Confession of Guilt,” did exactly that—an error never repeated in the many subsequent dramatizations.

The valid contrast between the surface, stereotypical characterization of detective fiction and the much more subtle, far more complex portrayals in great films and novels pits the pleasure of repetition against the pleasure of surprise.

Nevertheless, Brett and McKern surpass most other actors of detective fiction by providing a mix of these two pleasures. One of Australia’s most valuable exports, McKern allows us at times to glimpse beneath Rumpole’s corroded shell of jokey cynicism to perceive the man’s profound discontent, as when the barrister grumpily confesses to a pupil, “After a lifetime at the bar, I have no interest in the law.”

Brett’s flamboyant take on Holmes leads him to deliver famous lines with elegance, whip a table cover from under the tea things with great flair, and show intense, if guarded, emotion. In fact, Brett’s psychological acuity leads him often to exceed the instructions inherent in his material, for surely Brett’s edgy, neurotic, explosive Holmes blends the actor with his character.

So true and effective are their depictions that many viewers can no longer watch any other actor than Brett play Sherlock Holmes. Certainly, no one else holds my interest. Nor can I even imagine anyone but McKern whom I would want to watch impersonating Rumpole of the Bailey.

first published in The Woodstock Independent