Holmes & Brown, and the faces on the streets

"Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers; look at the faces on the streets." -G.K. Chesterton

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes

I just watched the pilot episode of the TV series "Sherlock." It features Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch, set in modern-day London, and though I only saw the one episode, I enjoyed the mildly unnerving quirkiness of a modern Holmes, and the endearing qualities of the uncertain-but-curious-to-expand-his-boundaries Watson.



The title of the pilot episode was "A Study in Pink" and it drew slightly from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original "A Study in Scarlet." Which I haven't read since high school, but I did recognize some nods to the story. (That's thanks to my excellent English teacher! :)

Just as a side note, this post will involve spoilers of not only the Sherlock episode, but of a G.K. Chesterton mystery story as well. You have been sufficiently warned.

Basically, a series of unrelated apparent suicides end up being murders by someone who is virtually invisible, or at least automatically trusted (and ignored) in modern-day society: an ordinary little cab driver. When Holmes has his intellectual throw-down with the cab driver in the climax, no mercy is shown, and the cab driver reaches his own demise.

It's a bit disconcerting to see Holmes harshly press on the cab driver's bleeding arm as the man cries for mercy during his last breaths. Of course, we have the given understanding that Holmes is not exactly tuned into human emotion in a normal way, and besides, Holmes needs to get the name of the man's informer/connection/"fan" trying to defeat Holmes. So... for the sake of the story, it works.

Switchover to the G.K. Chesterton mystery I referenced.

While at the library, I took out the complete Father Brown mysteries by Chesterton. (I seriously doubt I'll be able to get through that tome before my two weeks is up, so I'm planning on having to renew it at least once.)

I read his story "The Invisible Man," which involves, once again, a criminal -- a murderer in fact -- who passes by everyone virtually invisibly, and essentially ignored by all.

This story is a bit creepy in the way Chesterton tells it: footsteps in the snow up to the door of a murdered man's house, but no one is seen to leave the footprints; a vanished corpse that leaves a pool of blood, but no one knows where the corpse went; a voice beside the ear of a young lady who sees no one nearby.

The "invisible man" turns out to be someone who, as Father Brown mentions, rarely matters in society, just like the servants and the housemaids: the mailman.

As Father Brown explains:

'Have you ever noticed this -- that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean -- or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, 'Is anybody staying with you?' the lady doesn't answer 'Yes, the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,' though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says 'There is nobody staying with us,' meaning nobody of the sort you mean ... A man did go into the house, and did come out of it, but they never noticed him.'

-The Invisible Man , G.K. Chesterton

Once the mystery is solved, however, Father Brown is said to have "walked those snow-covered hills under the stars for many hours with a murderer, and what they said to each other will never be known." 

I have heard Father Brown presented as something of an anti-Sherlock Holmes: he's an inconsequential, bumbling, absent-minded Catholic cleric from the mellow English countryside, which is nearly as close as you can get to being the opposite of the coldly musing, attractively egotistical Mr. Holmes.

In these two stories, both Brown and Holmes figure out that the murderer is the invisible person in society, the person that nobody ever notices (or suspects, for that matter).

But their approach is quite different, and I think I've finally found a sufficiently solid reason that puts the two at odds with each other. Holmes cares about the actions committed, and then the person involved. Brown cares about the person, despite the actions committed.

I thoroughly enjoy both of these sleuths, and plan to follow the adventures of "Sherlock" in this intriguing series. I'm curious to follow his character further, and see what the show's creators do with him.

I do know that if I were to end up caught in any sort of mystery, though, I'd much prefer to be working with the man called Brown.