Parlor Pink Private Detective Sherlock Holmes’ “Murder By Decree” Screed-Once Again-With The Teen Queens 1950s Song Hit “Eddie, My Love” In Mind

Parlor Pink Private Detective Sherlock Holmes’ “Murder By Decree” Screed-Once Again-With The Teen Queens 1950s Song Hit “Eddie, My Love” In Mind     

By Will Bradley

I have developed something a reputation around this publication (and others like Truth ) for busting up, busting up soundly all kinds of overblown if not false historical reputations what would now be called nothing but alternative fact press agent gibberish. I had originally been called to the task by the reaction of one fellow writer here the venerable Seth Garth, well-known for years as the king of all things detective who was offended that I would blow smoke number one pass the curled head, padlock hat and hashish-piped Sherlock Holmes who worked the docks (more later on this) so-called sleuthing against nefarious bad guys and as we shall see in this muck those who would foul up the works against Queen and Empire.  And other off-the-wall bullshit presumably done while high as a kite on his “dear friend” Doc Watson (once again for those wo don’t remember not the late Doc of mountain music fame) while some journalist-flak named Coyne, Coll, or whatever name he used depending on the publication addressed touting his small palaver work as, get this, an amateur parlor pink detective around the time of Queen Victoria.

I had enough sense gained from speaking to fellow writer and friend of Seth’s, Sam Lowell the famed film noir critic that I had better not go right after this old blowhard on the Holmes stuff right off but work my way up the food chain busting past overblown reputations to see what he would say, if anything once I pulled the hammer down on the Holmes-Watson operation and their quite unusual relationship which shocked the landlady at their digs on Baker Street to a heart-attack when she opened the door to find both men naked, so-called modelling themselves doing their “arts” But more on that later when I review the storyline of this film Murder by Decree and put a final put paid to that stinking moribund reputation.  

As acute readers well know, for my rookie effort (which drew some praise from the usually no praise editor), I blew the legend of one Robin Hood, you may not remember the name now since I did my “hatchet job”, that way back when who somehow had such good press agent, a guy named Nottingham I believe, that he went centuries looking like some friend of the poor and downtrodden. Of course, that was when he was sleeping under the stars eating tree bark. Once his boy Ricard the Lion-Hearted hit English shores and gave him some acreage he, under the name Robin Lockhart, became the worse rack-renter in England , had a few guys, guys who swore to follow him to the ends of the earth for a little medieval justice named John Little and Friar Tuck put on the thumbscrews just because they whined about the high taxes. With money and powerful friends on and around the throne he did awful sexually lustful things to the king’s underage female ward, Mary. I chopped this bum of the month down in about a week like so much Sherwood Forest forage. Now at the sound of his name women and children seek refuse from the cold in the arms of strong men or go screaming in the night. Easy work.

Of course, on the Lockhart case I had plenty of archival and manorial material to work with, including his payments for services rendered to that Nottingham press flak to prove that this bastard was from nowhere, was all hot air stuff. Later guys and gals were tougher strangely since the fine arts of press coverage vastly improved with the invention and workings of the printing press that would take anything you could ink on it. Despite that I gave Queen Elizabeth I a bloody nose over that nonsense about her being a virgin after reading some stuff from the Bodleian Library from her main lady-in-waiting who kept a diary and kept the back door to milady’s boudoir ready at all times for half of the in-house court to discretely come by, and not always men either.    

Lesser guys, guys with names surrounded by romance like Don Juan and Casanova proved to be much harder especially in the case of the former who may very well have been nothing but the wild unmet longings of some well-bred Spanish girls imprisoned by their families in convents. Casanova we know more about since he left plenty of love letters, diary entries and “broken hearts” except, and I granted him a few exploits for a short period when he was around Venice before they threw him in that silly so-called prison, most of the press stuff was written by his patron, one of the later generation of the Borgias who were trying to break out of their own  reputation for evil profligration.             

         

Before the Holmes bust up (and Watson let’s not forget Watson and if I do assume he is in the picture) my biggest “coup” was exposing a guy named Errol Flynn who worked under the name   

Captain Blood, who according to a well-respected writer of the times named Marlowe who actually did press work under another name while he was writing his plays, started out as a pirate, and then went into the King’s service allegedly to expand the Empire and fight off assorted bad guys at sea and make the whole world a British lake. Well that happened as we well know, still know a little and certainly had our noses dug in it in Sherlock’s time, but what is not well-known is all that swashbuckling bullshit was just that. Blood, and blood is the right name, was a kingpin in the Middle Passage trade, the slavery trade transporting Africans to the bloody sugar cane fields of the West Indies. The only sword he drew was when some shackled black man or women mumbled too loud. I have no proof but I believe the intellectual model for the English painter Turner’s chilling Slave Ship was directed at Blood’s horrible conduct.           

I believe I have demonstrated my “street cred” on this legend-busting business. Take it or leave it. The Holmes case drove me, continues to drive me crazy, since I have made nothing but a small dent in that blowhard’s “rep.” I have tackled the problem from several different angles and will try yet again to break this down, especially since this case involved state interests which he should have blown the whistle on, and didn’t (probably saving old Watson a heart attack since it involved the royal family, Prince Albert, named Eddy). Let’s see.

Strangely the storyline here of dear Eddy (Queen Victoria’s son and heir presumptive) and his well-known indiscretions with whatever lady, high-born or low attracted his attention, has the same moral and plea behind it as a popular song from the 1950s Eddie, My Love by the Teen Queens. Eddie come back and do the right thing. In the song the young woman, let’s call her Betty which is what Bart Webber called her when he did an analysis of the lyrics as part of a classical age of rock and roll series. Some good-looking Eddie from nowhere drifted into town on his high-end motorcycle, saw Betty, pretty and ready Betty I assume, walking on the street or at some soda fountain and charged forward. Bingo, they get along, for the times unstated but go “all the way.” Then Eddie, claiming he has a job in New Jersey somewhere, although it is not always Jersey for this caper, says he has to get dough to live, for them to live and he will be back come fall. And as you may have guessed way back at the start of this paragraph, Eddie is long gone and has not written to Betty for months-and it was not because he did not have the price of a postage stamp. Pine away Betty and take care of the little one as best you can when you go to “Aunt Emma’s for that nine month visit which means you are not coming back to town soon.

Forward to our Eddy, our philandering Eddy, as already noted, who got attracted to some serving girl at one of the family estates. Wined, dined, fake married her (since he was already married to some cousin-age arranged woman) bedded her and abandoned her. Not though without the obligatory child produced which made things very complicated in the crazy quilt line of succession that had been dead weight on England forever. Enter the cabal, the parliamentary leadership with Queen and Empire in mind. The child, and if necessary the mother must go under the sword. This after all is an affair of state. It is hard to believe that these guys could run a green grocery much less a far-fling empire, but they put together some of weirdest plans to achieve their goals, including trying to lay off the murders of innocents who got in the way, or who knew where mother and child were, or could be forced to tell on some Jack the Ripper wannabe.

Enter Sherlock who eventually sees the whole Jack the Ripper thing as a smoke screen for more nefarious conduct up in the ruling elite where he is not without friends or knowledge about the peculiarities of that elite. The blast is that while they, the cabal, had the mother locked up tight and on whatever passed for downers in those days so she couldn’t continue to blab about her affair with the ungallant Prince, and about their love child he was on the trail after the few false leads. It took Holmes’ energies to figure the whole mess out, with a little help from Watson when he found the mother, found out what was up and then the why of the ruling elite’s crushing desire to find the child and put her, the child, mother, whoever got in the way down. Never happened since for once Sherlock played the gallant.

More disconcerting though and not gallant is when Holmes confronted the cabal and basically balked at turning the big guys over in what in the film would have been the Queen’s and Empire’s mercies, not well known for mercy when it came to her own bastard Albert and his women. Why, and that is finally where I can wind up on this bum of the month Holmes who has haunted my dreams more than somewhat. A lot of what got my ire, got Seth Garth’s countervailing ire up was the proposition that I presented in a series of films that we both reviewed. My main contention, my main contention now as well, was that Holmes and Watson were part of the “Homintern” W.H. Auden’s shorthand name coined in the 1930s for those who were of male same sex persuasion, homosexuals in those days among gentile society, fags and Nancy boys further down the social chain where I lived.

Following Auden, who kept serious tabs on this segment of society, I found compelling evidence (this well before the shocked landlady found them buck naked on some drugged escapade at Baker Street) that they were using their so-called investigative powers to run a male whorehouse among other things featuring the dregs of sailor, wharf, and river life. Were running under cover of night every illegal operation known to man from white slavery to liquor. That made a certain sense since neither man was otherwise gainfully employable yet wanted to keep up the lifestyle of that crummy elite that lived and died for Queen and Empire when the deal went down.

Most troubling though, the thing that should put the punk Holmes (and the viciously punk Watson who had the audacity to proclaim for the foolish prince out loud and in public) in the shades was going back to my original take on these high-end English. Then I started putting two and two together. Started looking at the real connections between the edgy Holmes and the cabal. As it turned out, and I should kick my own ass for not realizing this early on, they all went to Cambridge or Oxford, places like that notorious as breeding grounds for the “love that dare not speak its name.” The interconnectedness between the members bonded them together into some sort of sordid brotherhood not permitting them to “drop the dime” on each other-ever. No wonder nobody fell for all the murders, the death of the mother and Eddy succeeded to the throne and that was that. If this doesn’t put a big dent in the Holmes mythology nothing else could. And I say shame.   

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part II-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes” (1939)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part II-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes” (1939)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Danny Moriarty

(Once again as I did in my initial offering on the bogus Sherlock Holmes legend Sherlock Holmes Faces Death, hah!, in the interest of transparency which has become more of an issue these days when every medium is under scrutiny Danny Moriarty is not my real name. As then and will be discussed again below in my research about the “fake news” legend of Mr. Holmes I have run into a notorious cult-like band of desperadoes known as “The Baker Street Irregulars,” why that name I do not know. This clot of criminals, who I am told have very stylized rituals involving illegal drugs and human blood, and are the bane of the London Bobbies, have been connected with the disappearance of many people who questioned the Sherlock myth, and not a few unsolved murders of people who have washed up on the Thames over the years.

This need for an alias, for cover, is no joke since that first review I have been threatened, threatened with I won’t death, death threats, but some nasty actions which necessitate my keeping very close tabs on my security apparatus as I attempt to deflate this miserable excuse for a detective, a parlor detective at that. I will not be stopped by hoodlums and blood-splattered junkies.)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone (if that is his real name which is doubtful although unlike myself he has never been transparent enough to say that he is using an alias), Nigel Bruce (a name which has been confirmed as a British National active in the 1930s and 1940s), 1939 

We live in an age of debunking. An age perhaps borne aloft by cynicism, hubris, sarcasm and above all “fake news,” not the fake news denying some reality that you hear so much about these days, but by the elaborate strategy of public relations cranks and flacks who will put out any swill as long as they are paid and not a minute longer. That hardly started today but has a long pedigree, a pedigree which has included the target of today’s debunking one James Sherlock Holmes out of London, out of the Baker Street section of that town. From the cutesy “elementary my dear Watson” to that condescending attitude toward everybody he encounters, friend or foe, including the hapless Doctor Watson this guy Holmes is nothing but a pure creation of the public relations industrial complex. As I have noted above I have paid the price for exposing this chameleon, this so-called master detective, this dead end junkie, with a barrage of hate mail and threats from his insidious devotees.

Maybe I better refresh for those who may not have read the first review, may be shocked to find their paragon of a private detective has feet of clay, and an addiction problem no twelve step program could curtail in a million years. Here are some excerpts of what I said in that review which I stand by this day no matter the consequences:      

“Today is the day. Today is the day I have been waiting for since I was a kid. Today we tear off the veneer, tear off the mask of the reputation of one Sherlock Holmes as a master detective. Funny how things happen. Greg Green assigned me this film out of the blue, at random he said when I asked him. However this assignment after viewing this film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (of course he doesn’t face, hadn’t been anywhere near any danger that would put death in his way but that can wait until I finish out defanging the legend) set off many bells, many memories of my childhood when I first instinctively discovered this guy was a fraud, a con artist.

Back then my grandparents and parents hushed me up about the matter when I told them what I thought of the mighty Sherlock. They went nutty and told me never to speak of it again when I mentioned that a hard-boiled real private detective, a guy who did this kind of work for a living, a guy named Sam Spade who worked out in San Francisco and solved, really solved, the case of the missing black bird which people in the profession still talk about, which is still taught in those correspondence course private detection in ten easy lesson things you used to see advertised on matchbook covers when smoking cigarettes was okay, who could run circles around a parlor so-called detective like Mr. Holmes. 

[Even Sam Spade has come in for some debunking of late right here in this space as Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs have gone round and round about how little Spade deserved his “rep,” his classic rep for a guy who was picked by some bimbo out of the phone book and who couldn’t even keep his partner alive against that same femme he was skirt-addled over. Kept digging that low-shelf whiskey bottle in the bottom desk drawer out too much when the deal went down. The only guy who is safe is Phillip Marlowe since nobody can call him a “one solved murder wonder” after the string of cold as ice, maybe colder, cases he wrapped up with a bow over the years. They still talk about the Sherwood case out on the Coast even today, talk in hushed tones too. You notice nobody has tried to go after him, not even close. D.M.]            

That was then. Now after some serious research as a result of this film’s impact on my memory I have proof to back up my childhood smothered assertions. Sherlock Holmes (if that is his name which is doubtful since I went to the London telephone directories going back the first ones in the late 1800s and found no such name on Baker Street-ever) was nothing but a stone-cold junkie, cocaine, morphine, lanadum and other exotic concoctions which is the reason that he had a doctor at his side at all times in case he needed “scripts” written up. A doctor who a guy like Sam Spade would have sat on his ass a long time before as so dead weight.

That junkie business would not amount to much if it did not mean that high and mighty Sherlock didn’t have to run his own gang of pimps, hookers, con men, fellow junkies, drag queens, rough trade sailors and the flotsam and jetsam of London, high society and low, to keep him in dough for that nasty set of habits that kept him high as a kite. There are sworn statements (suppressed at the time) by the few felons whom the Bobbies were able to pick up that Sherlock was the guy behind half the burglaries, heists and kidnappings in London. And you wonder why the Baker Street Irregulars want to silence me, show me the silence of the grave….

Of course the Bobbies, looking to wrap up a few cold file cases which Sherlock handed them to keep them off the trail, looked the other way and/or took the graft so who really knows how extensive the whole operation was. In a great sleight of hand he gave them Doctor Moriarty who as it turned out dear Sherlock had framed when one wave of police heat was on and who only got out of prison after Holmes died and one of Holmes’ flunkies told the real story about how Holmes needed a “fall guy” and the wily Doctor took the fall.”             

This The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes cover-up is a classic example of police collision to cover their own dirty tracks. Everybody knows that Sherlock made his name after he beat down some poor mistreated dog who should have been reported as abused to whatever they call the humane animal treatment society in merry old England.

You don’t have to be one of those correspondence course private detection in ten easy lessons that you used to see on matchbook covers when cigarette smoking was okay like I said before to know that these high society cases are inside

jobs. Naturally the luckless and clueless Holmes has his fall guy all set up. A guy like I mentioned before named Professor Moriarty (no relative since if you remember this is my alias) who is a salt of the earth type but whom Holmes has a deep hatred for ever since the good doctor stopped feeding him his drugs, told him to go cold turkey. That good advice and good cheer despite the obvious fact that no twelve step program was going to do anything but drive Holmes to who knows what paranoid delusions. All the good professor did was to clue in a guy whose father had been bamboozled by this high society young woman’s father. Had been murdered by the dame’s old man.

The dispute had been over dough money which the guy should have gotten as inheritance but didn’t and wound up on skid road. While this young heiress and her ne’er do well a con artist and card shark from the word around town brother lived high off the hog. The stuff you heard about the good professor trying to take the Crown jewels is nothing but fake news. They were never in danger of being stolen but our man Sherlock raised a big hue and cry after smoking too much hashish and thought he saw them floating over the Thames. Called copper for them to nab favorite fall guy the hapless professor. You never hear about this of course since the coppers kept it hush-hush but that was the night in a drug frenzy Sherlock tried to murder the good professor. Kill him dead. RIP, Professor, RIP. Didn’t happen but the good professor got the slammer anyway and it was only Sherlock’s overdose death that sprung him after “Five Fingers” Benny Boren gave the real story.   

Like I said last time, a fake, fake all the way. Unless that Irregular crowd of thugs and blood-stained aficionados get to me this is not the last you will hear about this campaign of mine to dethrone this pompous junked-up imposter. I am just getting into second gear now.      

“Elementary, My Dear Watson”-The Film Adaptation Of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Saga “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1939)

“Elementary, My Dear Watson”-The Film Adaptation Of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Saga “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1939)

DVD Review

By Alden Riley

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Allan Jackson who for what seems like a millennia used the moniker Peter Paul Markin after a high school friend who had told him what was what in the writing world, was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

 

The Hound Of The Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce. Richard Greene, from the crime novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1939

A number of us, of the younger writers mostly, the ones who have identified ourselves as the “Young Turks” in the 2017 ouster and from unconfirmed reports shunting off to Utah so I have heard of Allan Jackson, the former site administrator, have chaffed a little under having to have below our by-lines the statement above about how we overthrew the “tyrant,” and now must seemingly suffer for who knows how long with the constant reminder of our valorous  deeds. (Although this has absolutely nothing to do with Allan’s exile or this review I can’t help but say Utah is a lovely place which may not stay that way long with recent moves, 2017 moves, by President Trump and his oil and fossil fuel-soaked cronies  to open up now designated National Monument to wide-scale exploitation of natural resources and which even if ruined has got to be a better place of exile than Alabama where seriously demented asocial people rule the roost any day of the week.) In fairness the older writers who supported Allan almost to a man are also subjected to the statement so-ordered to let everybody know a new more democratic road is ahead but as the losers in the internal struggle they can claim some kind of red badge of courage out of the sentiment. Nobody wants a fight to the death over the matter of the disclaimer not after the recent blood-letting but enough is enough. 

That said we have also as the attentive reader may have noted been encouraged to speak our minds as part of our writing about various points which brought about the internal explosion at this publication in order as Greg Green and the Editorial Board have stated to give those readers and inside view of how a social media-driven sources of news and opinion should work when in its previous incarnation it was anything but, had turned into an Allan Jackson nostalgia for all things wild and wooly 1960s franchise- end of story. I have had my say elsewhere on other aspects of the controversy, but I feel that I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t mention how hard it was under the Jackson regime to get something as simple as a review of a film featuring one of the classic detectives of all times, Sherlock Holmes the fertile creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose crime novels filled many a youngster’s hours years ago.  

Without seeming to pile on the now departed Jackson what was a basic free-for-all being leveled by writers young and old against his regime and its foibles there is a little point to be made. I had tendered under the old regime to concentrate on more modern films and then Senior Film Critic, a title now mercifully abolished, Sandy Salmon on the older films. Except that as a child I devoured the Sherlock Holmes books and was interested when I saw that the film was open for review on the office assignment board to watch the film and write about my take on the venture. Markin (oops Jackson’s longtime moniker at this site) said no. Said no not for his usual reason that older films were Sandy’s province but that he did not want any “parlor detectives” to muddy up the site since he believed that after the emergence of hard-boiled anti-hero private investigator crime detection with the likes of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe such types were passe. End of story. Subsequent to Jackson’s bumpy road departed under a cloud I approached new administrator Greg Green and asked if I could do some work on the Sherlock Holmes films which were the stock-in-trade of a whole generation of movie-goers who thrilled to the wit of Holmes and the buffoonery of Watson. In two seconds he gave his approval noting that the Holmes character was widely loved by many movie-goers on both sides of the Atlantic just because he was not hard-boiled (and not a “parlor” detective either). So here goes.    

Much has been made by old-time writer and reviewer Seth Garth , a long-time friend of the departed Jackson  and hold-over under the new regime because, well, as Greg tells it he can write, in an alternative series of reviews in the Rathbone-Bruce version of the Holmes legend about the “odd” relationship between the two men and the persistent rumor that they were using the private detective dodge out of Baker Street as a front for half the criminal activity in greater London. Today we would call that “peculiar” relationship between the two merely another gay twosome if we said anything at all and as for the criminal activity underneath the so-called P.I. front well people have to live and their landlady over on Baker never squawked. The real point being what does that either of those understandings have to with solving mysteries like the one under review, the classic Hound of the Baskerville which still makes me shutter and respect Brother Holmes’ expertise.

Why? This one is strictly based on what wants the dough badly enough to set the Baskerville dynasty asunder since the last of the Baskervilles, Sir Henry, is under threat. At least that is the story that his close and worried friend tells Holmes and Watson. Tells them too that legend has it that the Baskervilles are marked with the sign of Cain, that somebody or something is out to destroy the family for purposes unknown (although I can tell you right now that the Baskerville fortune is extensive and so the first thing anybody should figure out, as Holmes did, was who wanted the dough, the estate once the last of the line passed on-with or without help). If you can believe this the villain of the piece is a dog, a huge Great Dane, who has the disturbing habit of offing the average Baskerville in the area. Just ask Sir Hugo, an uncle of Henry’s who met his gory demise in such a manner. Of course the dog could not act alone, could not become a vicious monster without human help, without somebody who wanted that pile of dough so bad he devised a nasty plan involving that demented dog (and a person who should be immediately reported to the local humane society). Not without some difficulties Holmes wraps this one up in the end without a fuss once he figured that the hook was somebody who had a stake in getting the estate if Henry was out of the way. A guy named Stapleton fit the bill and after a dog scare and some gunplay he escaped but not for long since the coppers posted along road would get him if a homicidal maniac in the dreaded moors didn’t first. Beautiful work Sherlock I knew you could do this one with no sweat and with little help from your dear friend Doc.  

Once Again Through The Sherlock Holmes Miasma-Round Up The Usual Private Eyes- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s-Based “Voice Of Terror” (1942)-A Film Review

Once Again Through The Sherlock Holmes Miasma-Round Up The Usual Private Eyes- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s-Based “Voice Of Terror” (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Sherlock Holmes And The Voice Of Terror, starring foppish Basil Rathbone, fellow fop Nigel Bruce, Evelyn Ankers, 1942

Finally, I have gotten rid of the lame idea of having to do “dueling” reviews with young pup Will Bradley in this seemingly endless series of Sherlock Holmes flics. This is the series where Sherlock, played by aging dandy Basil Rathbone, and his male companion, make of that what you will, funky Doc Watson, played by foppish Nigel Bruce have been resurrected from late Victorian times to World War II times when it really was touch and go whether there would be some sun setting on the British Empire courtesy of Hitler’s Third Reich.

In this either twelve or fourteen series I can’t get a straight answer about how many they did they do their bit, do more than yeomen’s work, maybe OBE work to stem the freaking Nazi tide, a movement that had more than a few supporters in high places in old London town. Hell, the joint was crawling with them. In the previous ten or so reviews I have under the guiding hand of our esteemed site manager, Greg Green, aka the guy who hands out the assignments and hence esteemed, had to “battle” young Bradley for the true meaning of the Holmes myth. Greg’s idea, foolish idea if he dares to print this, was to have an old-timer vs. fresh look at the films to see what flushed out. I will not bore the reader with the details of that dispute, essentially a question of challenging the myth about the supposedly platonic Holmes-Watson relationship with hard evidence or their then closeted love for each other and their joint knee-deep involvement in every criminal operation from illegal drugs to armed robberies and more in greater London using the private eye gag as a cover. Against Will’s unbelievable naivete, really head in the sand, both on the true sexual relationship between the two men and the way they really supported themselves in the lap of luxury and idleness in their Bake Street digs.  

But enough of that, and good riddance, since Greg has now seen that the younger generation does not give a fuck about the old has-been Holmes and Watson and get their idea of this match-up from later Robert Downey, Junior-type interpretations of the Holmes myth. So with the film under review Voice of Terror I will just do what my old friend Sam Lowell, a fellow reviewer who is now, rightly so, under siege in his own older-younger writer wars called giving the ‘skinny.”

Apparently not trusting the vaunted foreign and domestic intelligence operations, MI5 and MI6 (the latter the one that one Bond, James Bond, took out of disgrace after Kim Philby ran the organization a merry chase during the early post-World War II Cold War period Winny Churchill kept warning about) the British intelligence inner council, you know the lords and such who ran things into the ground called in Holmes and by extension Watson to stop the flow of Nazi saboteurs and propaganda flooding Merry Olde England in post Munich, post Neville Chamberlain times. They really were running amok creating mortal terror among the ordinary citizenry especially with their radio broadcasts, their voice of terror broadcasts, about bad things happening in the country before they happened. Have everybody on edge. Looked like curtains for old John Bull (and his colonial tyranny).          

Off to work, off to figure out who was running the operation, the hearty team is stopped in its tracks when one of its operatives is killed trying to find out who is working for the filthy Nazis and where. All of this leads to two things first grabbing that operative’s wife Kitty, played by screaming Evelyn Ankers (who is not the dreaded voice of terror in this one like she was in a series of forgettable horror films, okay) and pumping her for information about the last words of her late husband. This is nothing but a ruse, an inner circle joke between Holmes and Watson since the last word was “Christopher,” meaning the dark and mysterious Christopher Wharves which they were quite familiar with from their trolling for “dilly boys” who worked the area and whose services both men were very familiar with. (If you are not familiar with the term “dilly boys” look it up but remember that reference to their sexual preferences and you will not be far off.) Be that as it may this was also the hideout of the key German operatives who had their own off-beat sexual proclivities to take care of. In any case through either Holmes or Watson’s stupidity they and Kitty were “captured” casing the area. Eventually they escaped as to be expected and found out that a German espionage operation was planned for southern England.

Off they go and from this point on you have to do some serious suspension of disbelief. As it turned out as almost anybody could tell who has read at least one detective novel in their lives this had to be an inside job. And it was. One of the esteemed members of the inner council was a traitor (remember I told you the sceptered island was swarming with Nazi sympathizers in high places) and that was that. Well not quite because Kitty in her attempts to thwart the Nazi scum took a fall, got killed holding off the leader of the Nazi thugs. A good soldier. Here is where that “suspension of disbelieve” comes in. Of course a member of the inner council could not be a British traitor, this before the Philby Cambridge spies exposes, no way, so the gag is that that person was an impostor, a German of similar appearance and status, sent as an infiltrator to England after killing the real guy. What gave him away. Well the real guy had a scar from an early age. The imposter’s was only about twenty years old and so it was another case of “elementary, dear (note the “dear”) Watson.” WTF. And you wonder why I have spent some considerable time bursting this balloon, taking these overblown amateurs to school who guys like Larry Larkin, Sam Spade, and Phil Marlowe, would have had for lunch and still have time for a nap.    

    

The So-Called Unmasking Of The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IX-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Dressed To Kill” (1946)-A Film Review

The So-Called Unmasking Of The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part IX-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Dressed To Kill” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

Sherlock Holmes: Dressed To Kill, starring Basil Rathbone which is the well-known screen name for the actor who played Holmes in this British series, Nigel Bruce who did have his medical license suspended for a time for prescribing too many opium-laced drugs but who was given a suspended sentence and never saw the inside of Dartmoor Prison unlike the congenital thief in this film, 1946   

[I have mentioned more times than I care to remember that not everybody who starts out in the film review, film criticism if you have an academic bent and want to upscale the profession, makes it to the end. The profession eats its own, has more treachery per square inch that the denizens of academy with all their conferences and learned papers and incessant back-biting ever thought off. A professor, let’s say a professor of cinematic studies, would last about two minutes in this dog eat dog business. That is why a lot of them spent their two minutes and then headed fast to the groves of academia.

Like I was telling somebody recently in dealing with a bunch of fellow reviewers who work at this publication it was a lot easier in the old days when the studios would pass out their so-called press releases. You just rewrote from there or if you were drunk and hungover just signed your name on top either way mercifully you did not have to actually watch the stinker. Which many of them, too many to count, were. (My estimate of the ratio is that about one in ten even rates a review and that might be too high of late.)  

All this intro talk to say that something has happened to Bruce Conan, or whatever name he was using in this Sherlock Holmes debunking mania he got himself caught up in. The last review of his I had seen maybe Part Four (I think I saw that his last one was Part VIII Greg Green supplied the Part IX in the title so assume I was correct) he was using the name Danny Moriarty so it could have been any name-except his real one which I will not divulge out of fear for his safety or his wrath if he resurfaces anytime soon.    

When I say the vague “something has happened to Bruce” that is exactly what I mean. He did not show up at the Ed Board meeting last week to turn in and have his latest review worked over. Greg Green asked me to pinch-hit for him. All I know is that Bruce was setting himself a very tall task trying to bump old Sherlock Holmes down a peg or two. How many times have I, you, we uttered “elementary, my dear Watson” to some rattled-brained holy goof who was clueless about everything including which was his or her left hand. Yes, a tough task indeed. I think the job might very well have driven him over the edge, he was certainly kind of paranoid when I would ask him how his crusade was going. Didn’t want to talk about it much and although he said he trusted me what about the “others” they could be working for those “damn Irregulars” (his term). 

Before the reader goes off the deep end along with Bruce in conspiracy theory speculation I very much doubt that the crew known as the Baker Street Irregulars according to him but who I found out after a little investigation is actually called the Sherlock Holmes Preservation Society (SHPS) had anything to do with his disappearance. The SHPS is NOT a group of nefarious criminals, pimps, whores and dope fiends but well-respected Holmes (and Conan Doyle) scholars. They are very perturbed I guess would be the word that Bruce has denigrated Holmes and Watson as bullshit amateur parlor pink private detectives. Incensed that he had “outed” them from their homosexual closets, something that a spokesperson told me the Society was well aware of but was keeping private out of respect for their respective relatives and for the hard fact that it was irrelevant to their adventures in sleuthing. But that spokesperson also assured me that they would take care of Bruce in the public prints not in some dark alley like they were agents of the dastardly Professor Moriarty or like in the old days a group of Stalinist thugs. I believe them because I think now that I am armed with that information poor Bruce got caught up in something that was too big for him, something that drove him over the edge.    

That is where the treachery of the business comes into play. As some readers may know there was a big internal power struggle inside this publication last year which resulted in a dramatic change of site leadership and the addition of a watchdog Editorial Board. The new leadership wanted livelier coverage of, well, of everything from politics, culture to reviews and that after the rather lax atmosphere toward the end of the last regime’s time meant to get a bit more edgy. One form of that edgy feel I am very familiar with and may be the reason that I was assigned this review is a continuing “battle” between two reviewers here over who is more representative of the 007 James Bond cinematic character Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan. Another manifestation is old time reviewer Sam Lowell’s reported change of heart about the virtues of Bette Davis as an actress from Oscar-worthy to nothing but a repetitive same old untamed shrew and hack actress.

I think fellow film reviewer Laura Perkins was on to something when she mentioned in that Bette Davis business that the “boys” were trying to one up each other like in the old neighborhood where some of them grew up (even if not the same neighborhood the same ethos, mostly working class). What I called, not her, please, a “pissing contest.” Bruce a less stable character than the ones that I have mentioned got himself up in lather as well when he decided to pick on poor misbegotten Holmes. That unseen pressure and the yardstick that he used to declare who was a real private detective from the 1930s and 1940s got him in too deep. His standard, a good one but hardly universal, for a private eye were guys like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe two tough as nails guys who weren’t afraid to throw a punch, take a slug, take a few whiskey shots from the bottom of a hacked up desk drawer and bed an off-hand dangerous femme before hand-delivering the villains personally to the clueless public coppers. Of course the bloodless Holmes and the hapless and laughable Watson pale by comparison but that was hardly after all this time a reason to go on the warpath.          

A few examples should close this introduction out until we find out the fate of insecure and frantic Mr. Conan. He was on fairly safe grounds when he left his “critique” of Sherlock (whom he called Lanny Lamont after a while which I will get to in a minute) when he noted that the guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a gun, let the bodies pile up sky high before his vaunted deductive reasoning kicked in and when he let the public coppers grab the bad guys instead of handling the task himself. (Bruce went crazy and maybe rightly so when Holmes let some innocent fourteen year old girl get wasted for no reason except his own sloth.) Where he went off the track was when he started “investigating” Holmes’ background, started looking at records and such which led him into that Baker Street Irregular trap.         

First off was the not really surprising fact that Sherlock Holmes was not his real name, nor was Basil Rathbone a name he used on occasion to keep the bad guys guessing. Bruce claimed to uncover proof that the guy’s real name was Lanny Lamont who was born in the slums of the West End of London of an unwed mother who shunted him off to a charity orphanage. This is where Bruce really started breaking down. The first crack may have been his “discovery” that nobody named Holmes had ever lived on Baker Street in London. That suspicious fact led him astray though. See everybody in London knew that Holmes was an alias but also knew that his real name was Lytton Strachey, a gentleman born and bred. Bruce was so crazed to “get the goods” that he traced the trail the wrong way working on that Rathbone lead. Tough break.        

The worst thing though and here I agree with the Sherlock Holmes Preservation Society’s take on the matter even if as was obvious to even the most naïve Holmes and Watson were more than just roommates, were homosexual lovers, today gay, in a time that was socially and legally dangerous what of it. Pulling this rather cold and unattractive pair out of the closet just because they didn’t take a run as Sam did with Brigid or Phillip with some thumb-sucking Candy and a few other dishes in their professional work. Strangely as well since he admitted openly that if this was the situation today nobody, including him, would think anything of it. Would yawn it off. I know Greg Green and a couple of others were concerned with the allegations and worried about law suits from their respective estates. Worried too about image having taken early stands in favor of gay rights and self-sex marriage. Bruce can sort it out if and when he surfaces. For now here is a straight review of Sherlock Holmes: Dress to Kill without conspiracy theories and Irregular goblins.  

Willie Sutton the legendary bank robbery cowboy angel rides was often quoted as having been asked by the coppers after he was caught why he robbed banks. Easy answer when you think about it-that’s where the money is, or was before all sorts of things made bank robbing kind of old-fashioned in the brave new world of white collar fingerless crime. That same premise at one remove is where this Holmes adventure leads. Why steal bank note plates from the Chancellery of the Exchequer (Treasury in America)-that’s how to make the money. That is the logic behind a congenital thief in Dartmoor prison. (Remember neither Holmes nor Watson spent time there unlike Bruce’s contention that that was where the pair met and became lovers and partners in crime solutions.)  

That thief got them out of the jail via some three music boxes-not a bad decoy but the damn things wound up in an auction and sold to highest bidders. The race then becomes between the clueless Sherlock and the brains of the criminal enterprise that wants those boxes to unlock a secret code necessary to go into the printing business in a very profitable way with very low overhead and that criminal . Of course the idea that the villain, the brains of the operation, is a female would have had   Bruce apoplectic, would have had him beside himself when Sherlock didn’t make play number one for her before he sent her over. Like I said a private detective’s love life, of whatever preference, is not germane to the solution of the crimes. Now this Hilda who ran the operation, played by Patricia Morison really was a 1940s-style femme and Sam and Phillip would have a field day with her but she still had to go down, had to take the big step for her actions, including a fistful of murders along the. Sherlock was able to snag the last music box and keep the Bank of England from going under in a bale of counterfeit pounds. The only knock I have on Sherlock’s efforts is that as Bruce pointed out he lets the bodies pile up before he can figure stuff out. That and why the hell he has a holy goof like Watson dragging him down.          

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VIII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Woman In Green” (1945)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VIII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “The Woman In Green” (1945)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

The Woman In Green, starring Lanny Lamont (aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes, aka a million other aliases to be discussed below), the Fixer man (aka John Watson, MD, aka John Watkins, aka Nigel Bruce also to be discussed below), 1945   

Okay no more Mister Nice Guy, no more trying to be reasonable with these felons, miscreants, dopesters, grifters, grafters, con men, whores, pimps and murderers of the nefarious group the Baker Street Irregulars who work out of London town as far as I know but who seemingly have tentacles all over the world, or at least to the United States where they have attempted to hunt me down. Apparently they have something of a central committee, or organizing center, the notorious Kit Kat Club a known hang-out for degenerates and riff-raff of all sorts who people the tables at the place and have ever since King George III’s day. Now that my family is finally safe and beyond the reach of these craven fiends I can take off the kid gloves, can reveal what everybody knows by now and which these Irregulars fear to become public knowledge. Their idol Lanny Lamont (really their idle if you think about how little detective work he actually did once he turned over the hard dirty work to the real if corrupt coppers at Scotland Yard) aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes is an impostor, nothing but a parlor pink amateur sleuth that even Agatha Christie laughed at without embarrassment. Him and his buddy Doc Watson aka Doc Fixer Man were a great deal more than roommates, were the stately queens of England if you get my drift.

I have been chastised, berated, called a political Neanderthal, a homophobe and that is just the nice things by what I can only consider is a slander/libel campaign run by the Irregulars to dismiss me and my fact-driven contentions. That alone tells me I am on to something since this Irregular cohort is made up of those who are the most degenerate devotees of the Lamont legend, those who are into unspeakable blood rituals in order to sate their unholy desires (as is standard operating procedure now that I have uncovered his real identity after great efforts refuse to call him anything but his given name Lanny Lamont born in the West End slums of London to an unwed mother who attempted to abandon him at birth).

I have decided in any case to take on the legend hereafter strictly on the basis of competence, of ability to do private detection and will leave out further reference to the unholy and then scandalous relationship, the “sin that dare not speak its name” between these two, ah, roommates. That means that I will give up all the proof I directly gathered from the archival journals of the Kit Kat Club that they were members in good standing of that hell-hole nefarious operation and almost bankrupted the place with their fiendish opium habits and their unbridled unnatural lusts. So be it.   

Finding the real name, that Lanny Lamont name on the birth certificate though I cannot give up since that really is the initial lynchpin for what seemed totally wrong from the beginning about this brittle character who went by a million names (Basil Rathbone, like that moniker could be a real name be serious, Lytton Strachey, Sailor Jack when he was plying the trade among the rough waterfront sailors, Benny Worth, Harry Smyth, not Smith, and a half dozen others). Claimed to be a private detective. I looked up the International Private Detection Association membership lists and the London private detective licensing lists from the 1920s to the 1950s. No Lanny Lamont or any of the other aliases, nothing. I did find a Lanny Lamont who served time in Dartmoor Prison in the 1930s for drug trafficking, assault, carrying a concealed weapon and a raft of other minor charges. (Also made the connection of how Lanny and Fixer Man met, by the way the only other name I found on him was John Watkins, having met in Dartmoor when he was serving a long stretch for practicing medicine without a license, performing illegal abortions, selling illegal drugs, and sodomy.) The clincher though was a thorough run through all the London telephone directories for those years (a task that will be harder to do with all the singular cellphone use now and in the future).Yeah you guessed it no Lanny or any other name. Nowhere. And certainly not on Baker Street his, their last known address. An old lady had lived in his claimed residence by herself since her husband died during most of that time.                

I could go on with all the lies and deceit but I said that I would take Lanny on his own ground, take him apart as a parlor pink amateur detective that a kid like Jimmy Olson who is just starting could beat six ways to Sunday on a case and have time for lunch and a nap. Take this Women in Green case where this fraud tried to take down heroic Professor Moriarty, tried to pin the so-called ‘finger” murders on that much maligned man. First off Lanny and Fixer Man were so stoned out of their gourds for weeks at a time that they did not know thing number one about the “finger” murder spree until it had grabbed four young innocent random women in its net. Sat around swilling booze when he could have nailed somebody for the job pretty quickly even if he had to fake the evidence. Pin it naturally on a woman and just as naturally a good looking blonde who looked like she liked to get under the silky sheets without too much effort. Of course Lanny could have cared less about running that route but he just let the bodies pile up like a cord of wood until he got done with his high.

While every detective private or public, was on this case to protect womanhood if nothing else Lanny waited for the daughter of one of the guys who thought he had murdered a young woman to show up at his door. Had the tell-tale surgically sawed off finger in a box in his pocket. Five down, make it six when that guy took the fall. That woke Lanny up a little, not Fixer Man though he persisted on a landudum high until Lanny was in danger of falling of a roof and then he started crying for his man. After what seemed like six months Lanny finally had an idea-finally figured that somebody was manipulating the killers somehow-although how was a book sealed with seven seals. Then one of the guys who was sent to kill Fixer Man (it was probably a busted drug deal but the case went into cold case history and was never solved) screwed up and Lanny finally caught on. The guys were hypnotized and the “finger” in the box in their pockets was to blackmail them when they couldn’t figure out whether they had killed the young woman that belonged to the finger or not.

Naturally Lanny’s number one suspect was much put upon Professor Moriarty since they were sworn enemies since Kit Kat Club days when the good Professor “took” some guy away from Lanny according to an old-time reprobate member who remembers those battles for the young guys which were fierce. Lanny confronted the Professor but he blew Lanny off with the suggestion that he will take the Fixer Man away from him. Lanny in terror backs off. The long and short of it is that Lanny never really was able to pin the murders on the Professor who had an alibi any way that he had been in Scotland. Here is what Lanny never figured, never thought through. What about the blonde dish, what about maybe she had something to do with it. She had after all been seen right in the Pembroke Club with the last murderer where he was sucking up scotches. Not until the bodies were sky high did he take a run in that direction. And didn’t, I repeat didn’t, like any red-blooded private detective from the 1940s take a run at her under the sheets before turning her over. Let Scotland Yard take the tough collar while he pranced around in exotic drug high. Yeah, a fake and fraud. Where is Sam Spade when you need him.       

          

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman” (1943)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VII-“Bumbling Down The Primrose Lane”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman” (1943)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

[Well I am still standing although it has been a close thing of late, a very close thing. But even if I don’t make it to the end, the end being finishing up the twelve, no fourteen, damn films that were made about the fraudulent so-called deductive reasoning amateur private detective Sherlock Holmes’ legend, then I will at least have gotten this very important review out to the previously fawning public. Despite endless harassment and threats to me and my family who I have now twice had to move for their own protection from a nefarious organization, a cult really, calling itself the Baker Street Irregulars I finally have the proof I need to debunk an important aspect of the legend. The film under review, The Spider Woman, will put paid to my important contention that Sherlock Holmes, aka as Basil Rathbone but whose real name is Lanny Lamont which is the name I will use for the rest of this review and his boon companion Doc, Doc Watson, were lovers, were to use a word from the time “light on their feet,” committed “the love that dare not speak its name” for then obvious reasons that it was a high crime in Merry Olde England. If you don’t believe me just ask famed playwright Oscar Wilde or more recently code-cracker Allan Turing. 

A lot of the charges which I have hurled at the Lamont legend (remember aka Sherlock) about his abilities as a private detective can be considered somewhat inconsequential. For example, Lanny’s inability to shoot and hit the side of a barn when pursuing dead ass criminals, his letting the bodies pile up due to his inane bone-headed adherent to deductive reasoning when even a rank kid P.I. knows for dead certain that murder, murder one, murder most foul has no such rhyme or reason and his inevitably letting others face danger and grab the miscreants. But for private detectives of his era the failure to pursue and bed the most hardened femme fatale due to his preference for men, for bumbling Doc Watson is fatal to his legend. Proves beyond a doubt that he is a fake and a fraud. I have used the examples of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade who went down on the pillows with one of the most gun-simple femmes around, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe to make my case. Enough said.       

I have been accused, mercilessly accused, of being anti-gay, homophobic, a Neanderthal, politically incorrect and a million other things in a smear campaign which I believe has been orchestrated by the denizens of the Kit Kat Club, a homosexual club that has been around since the days of King George III and my discovery that Lanny and Doc were member was one of the first pieces of hard evidence for my decisive claims. These men are also part and parcel of the more broad based Irregulars, a band of bandits and desperadoes who have been plaguing the citizenry of London with their criminal activities from robbery to dope, maybe murder if we ever find out the facts about a lot of bodies that have washed up from the Thames over the years are committed to claiming Lanny and Doc publically to the Homintern. These cultists have gone out of their way to malign me and my discoveries by those simple anti-gay charges. That despite my well-known, this space’s well-known early support for LBGTQ rights, support for same-sex marriage when that was nothing but a dream over a decade ago (although being on marriage number three I am not sure if that will work out any better than in my case but good luck), and a stellar defense of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower and Trans advocate Chelsea Manning.   

If say one of today’s famous private detectives Lance Lawton came out of the closet and said he was gay or Tran or whatever I, and I hope everybody and their sister would agree we would yawn, could care less and good luck. But back in the day, back in the heroic age of the private detective a right of passage was to go mano a mano with some dangerous woman, better women, hit the sack (real or implied as was the case on the screen), and personally sent them over to the law a la Sam Spade or forget them and move on to the next dangerous woman. Simple, case closed]  

*****

Sherlock Holmes And The Spider Woman, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again a cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1943 

I first mentioned publically my suspicions about fraudulent Lanny’s preference (after much research especially that decisive membership in the Kit Kat Club) in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon where Lanny and this good-looking young woman were trapped together in a room after Lanny had been captured by a bad guy and the young woman had been kidnapped since she probably had the formula to the secret weapon of the title. Lanny made no play, didn’t even look at her the whole time they were captivity. Proof positive he was sailing under a false flag. This Spider Woman saga is the definitive proof.          

The story sets up that an unnaturally large number of prominent and wealthy men in London are committing suicide with no explanation for the spike. Lanny faking as usual his disdain for what is happening while on vacation up in Scotland fakes his death after having a tiff with Doc causing the good doctor in an unmanly manner to bubble over in tears and head back to London to settle Lanny’s estate. Suddenly Lanny comes back to life and all is forgiven by Doc who is glad as hell to see him. Lanny’s ruse was allegedly so he could smoke out the murderer of that pile of wealthy guys, a murderer who could only be a woman by Lanny’s lights (and just another example of his contempt for women). The hounding and pursuit of some woman to take the fall against all other possibilities drives the rest of the disgusting story.     

Naturally Lanny has to set a trap, a trap involving himself at first once he figured out that this woman, this good-looking femme gang leader is using a life policy scam to kill these guys who may have been wealthy at one time but whose gambling had led them down the primrose path (although you know in the end that he will fall down, will let the real coppers of the corruption-filled Scotland Yard, coppers these days who have bungled the investigation of the whole Baker Street Irregulars crime spree). Further investigation shows that the method used dastardly for sure was to use an immune pygmy to set a deadly spider on each victims’ premises. Nice right. Sherlock temporarily falls into the femme hands but escapes in terror and let’s Scotland Yard as expected close the operation down. I can’t let this one go without mentioning Sam or Phillip would have bedded her, would have headed toward the danger and then dropped her like a hot potato.      

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part V-“Bumbling Up The Moors ”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Terror In The Night ” (1946)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part V-“Bumbling Up The Moors ”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Terror In The Night ” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Danny Moriarty

(Frankly, as I mentioned in my fourth debunking of the so-called legend of punk amateur detective Sherlock Holmes and his paramour the bumbler-in-chief Doctor “Doc” Watson in Sherlock Holmes In Washington I am tired, tired beyond endurance, of having to once again tell a candid world that Danny Moriarty is not my real name. Yes, for the skeptics and assorted evil-doers associated with the name Holmes I said paramour which I can now say freely since it had been confirmed by at least three separate and unknown to each other sources that Sherlock and Doc belonged to the Kit Kat Club, a club that had been established by the wild boys during the reign of King George III, an exclusively then called homosexual, now called gay, establishment for the private school boys once they got old enough to afford the fees, more on that new twist below. I use this Moriarty moniker to protect me against some very real threats from a bunch of dope-addled Holmes aficionados, no, worse cultists known far and wide as the Baker Street Irregulars. Not that I am not proud of the name Moriarty, the last name of the heroic professor who ran afoul of the greedy grafter Holmes and became the “fall guy” for every evil deed that bastard did to throw dirt on the good professor’s name. I will continue to defend his honor here in the review of this twaddle called Terror at Night. Another case where Holmes and company let the bodies pile up and somebody else has to lay the competition low.     

These nefarious Irregulars known to the police, to the see no evil hear no evil London peelers, the Bobby Peel guys so named after the guy who put together the first real police force in London but which has gone way downhill since then who have ignored my pleas for protection, who have dismissed the threats against me as child’s play, kid’s stuff. What passes for the law, the coppers, have gone back to their tea and crumpets as usual routine while half of the toddling town gets ransacked by these Baker Street hooligans who have sworn vengeance unto the seventh generation against me and my progeny for exposing their boyfriend hero for the fake and closet homosexual snoop that he is, was.

I stand here again today despite my need to hide my identity, my whereabouts, my voice and features and having had to send my family into private hands hiding stating I will not wilt like some silly schoolgirl under the blare of their evil deeds. This motley of criminals, junkies, and cutthroats is being protected by high society personages. The peerage I think they call it in Mother England, you know the House of Lords holy goofs with the cheapjack woolen wigs sliding all over the place and made in Bangladesh sweated labor textile factory robes who spend endless hours talking about the good old days when everything was simpler, when the mob knew its place or it better had under Charles I, monarchs like that. 

These Irregulars in case I don’t survive the onslaught to number twelve in this series of film which may be a close thing as these bastards have trolled the Internet spreading false rumors that I am homophobic, anti-same sex marriage, against sexual variety, and whatever other dirty innuendoes that can spew out to an unsuspecting social media world,  a series of blatantly propagandistic films, which has done more to create an “alternate facts” Holmes world than anything any dastardly British monarch could ever do to keep the masses at bay.  I am told this clot of degenerates and rough trade aficionados have very stylized rituals involving exotic illegal drugs, LSD being one of the milder ones, and human blood, especially of opposing tribes like the remnant of the Moriarty operation.

Yeah, these guys are the bane of the London Bobbies and maybe not so strangely corruption-infested Scotland Yard neither operation which has lifted a finger in the matter. Moreover these Irregular cretins have been connected with the disappearance of many people, high born and low, who have questioned the Sherlock myth, and not a few unsolved murders of people who have washed up on the Thames over the years. I know I am on borrowed time, I am a “dead man walking” but maybe someone will pick up the cudgels if I have to lay down my head for the cause.  

I don’t want to frighten the audience, the reader but this need for an alias, for cover, is no joke since that first review and the subsequent second and third ones I have been threatened, threatened with I won’t death, death threats, but some nasty actions edging up in that direction which necessitate my keeping very close tabs on my security apparatus as I attempt to deflate this miserable excuse for a detective, a parlor detective at that who even Agatha Christie dismissed out of hand as a rank amateur which couldn’t keep up with even one of her weakest sleuths. From my sources, serious sources under the circumstances, of ex-Irregulars who have left the organization as its attacks have become more bizarre and its blood rituals more gruesome including allegations of human sacrifice I have been told I am on their “watch list.” Told my days are numbered if I continue to “speak the truth no matter how bitter.”  

I know and can prove that I have been the subject of cyber-bullying without end including a campaign to discredit me by calling me Raymond Chandler’s “poodle” and Dashiell Hammett’s “toadie” for mentioning the undisputable fact that these hard- knock, hard-working professionals, real life detectives peeking under keyholes and into windows like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe were as likely to grab some wayward young woman and go under the silky sheets between exchanges of gunfire as kick ass on some bad guys and still have time for lunch. Sherlock and Doc, was much too dainty, much too worried about, literally, getting his hands dirty for that kind of heading to the danger work. I am willing to show an impartial commission my accusations with documents and affidavits. Believe me the pressure against me to stop my expose, including from site manager Greg Green who is worried about my security and that of my family, is getting worse and once I get a grip on who is who in that nefarious organization I will be taking names and numbers.  These twelve films have been nothing but propaganda vehicles for the Holmes legend so I have plenty more work cut out for me. Until done I will not be stopped by hoodlums, wild boys, rough trade artists, Homintern agents, your lordships and ladyships, and blood-splattered junkies. D.M.)

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Terror At Night, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again a cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1946 

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As I have mentioned previously and nothing recently has changed my view we live in an age of debunking. An age perhaps borne aloft by cynicism, hubris, sarcasm and above all “fake news,” not the fake news denying some reality that you hear so much about these days, but by the elaborate strategy of public relations cranks and flacks who will put out any swill as long as they are paid and not a minute longer. That phenomenon hardly started today but has a long pedigree, a pedigree which has included the target of today’s debunking one James Sherlock Holmes, aka Lytton Strachey, aka Lanny Lamont out of London, out of the Baker Street section of that town. From the cutesy “elementary my dear Watson” to that condescending attitude toward everybody he encounters, friend or foe, including the hapless Doctor “Doc” Watson, aka Nigel Bruce, a fellow inmate at notorious Dartmoor Prison in the early 1930s this guy Holmes, or whatever his real name is nothing but a pure creation of the public relations industrial complex, the PRIC. As I have noted above I have paid the price for exposing this chameleon, this so-called master detective, this dead end junkie, with a barrage of hate mail and threats from his insidious devotees. I have been cyber-bullied up to my eyeballs but the truth will out.

Maybe I better refresh for those who may not have read the first three reviews, may be shocked to find their paragon of a private detective has feet of clay, and an addiction problem no twelve step program could curtail in a million years. Here are some excerpts of what I said in that very first review which I stand by this day no matter the consequences:      

“Today is the day. Today is the day I have been waiting for since I was a kid. Today we tear off the veneer, tear off the mask of the reputation of one Sherlock Holmes as a master detective. Funny how things happen. Greg Green assigned me this film out of the blue, at random he said when I asked him. However this assignment after viewing this film, Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (of course he doesn’t face, hadn’t been anywhere near any danger that would put death in his way but that can wait until I finish out defanging the legend) set off many bells, many memories of my childhood when I first instinctively discovered this guy was a fraud, a con artist.

Back then my grandparents and parents hushed me up about the matter when I told them what I thought of the mighty Sherlock. They went nutty and told me never to speak of it again when I mentioned that a hard-boiled real private detective, a guy who did this kind of work for a living, a guy named Sam Spade who worked out in San Francisco and solved, really solved, the case of the missing black bird which people in the profession still talk about, which is still taught in those correspondence course private detection in ten easy lesson things you used to see advertised on matchbook covers when smoking cigarettes was okay, who could run circles around a parlor so-called detective like Mr. Holmes. 

[Even Sam Spade has come in for some debunking of late right here in this space as Phil Larkin and Kenny Jacobs have gone round and round about how little Spade deserved his “rep,” his classic rep for a guy who was picked by some bimbo out of the phone book and who couldn’t even keep his partner alive against that same femme he was skirt-addled over. Kept digging that low-shelf whiskey bottle in the bottom desk drawer out too much when the deal went down. The only guy who is safe is Phillip Marlowe since nobody can call him a “one solved murder wonder” after the string of cold as ice, maybe colder, cases he wrapped up with a bow over the years. They still talk about the Sherwood case out on the Coast even today where he rapped the knuckles of a big time gangster like Eddie Mars, and his goons, to help an old man going to the great beyond no believing that he had raised a couple of monster daughters without working up a serious sweat. Talked in hushed tones too. You notice nobody has tried to go after him, not even close. D.M.]            

That was then. Now after some serious research as a result of this film’s impact on my memory I have proof to back up my childhood smothered assertions. Sherlock Holmes (if that is his name which is doubtful since I went to the London telephone directories going back the first ones in the late 1800s and found no such name on Baker Street-ever) was nothing but a stone-cold junkie, cocaine, morphine, landudum and other exotic concoctions which is the reason that he had a doctor at his side at all times in case he needed “scripts” written up. A doctor who a guy like Sam Spade would have sat on his ass a long time before as so much dead weight.

That junkie business would not amount to much if it did not mean that high and mighty Sherlock didn’t have to run his own gang of pimps, hookers, con men, fellow junkies, drag queens, rough trade sailors and the flotsam and jetsam of London, high society and low, to keep him in dough for that nasty set of habits that kept him high as a kite. There are sworn statements (suppressed at the time) by the few felons whom the Bobbies were able to pick up that Sherlock was the guy behind half the burglaries, heists and kidnappings in London. And you wonder why the Baker Street Irregulars want to silence me, show me the silence of the grave….

Of course the Bobbies, looking to wrap up a few cold file cases which Sherlock handed them to keep them off the trail, looked the other way and/or took the graft so who really knows how extensive the whole operation was. In a great sleight of hand he gave them Doctor Moriarty who as it turned out dear Sherlock had framed when one wave of police heat was on and who only got out of prison after Holmes died and one of Holmes’ flunkies told the real story about how Holmes needed a “fall guy” and the wily Doctor took the fall.”             

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Now to a quick film review where once again Holmes/Strachey/Lamont lets the bodies pile up before areal detective grabs the bad guys and makes them cry “uncle;”  

Apparently this Sherlock, no, Lanny Lamont,  madness knows no borders, could not be contained with the four walls of England, hell, maybe even the bloody cockeyed Empire since the film under review has these two desperadoes travelling up moorish Scotland to muddy the highland waters there. This caper centers on the shell game played on Lady Somebody’s, do surnames really matter in the nobility trapped Empire, famous and valuable Star Of Rhodesia (for a long time now Zimbabwe) which is heading to Edinburg town on the midnight train (hence the “night” part of the film’s title) and the boys are along for cheap protection since Lady Somebody’s son is also a member of the notorious Kit Kat Club which they too belonged to although they barely knew him except a cheapjack attempt by Doc to seduce him right under his mother’s nose. The lad though was victim number one in the attempt to steal that damn diamond which as its own set of curses on it-and our dynamic duo’s eyes looking for the main chance and a quick turnover to grab a ton of dope and put them in opium den heaven. 

As the old bank robber Willie Sutton answered when asked why he robbed bank and replied “that was where the dough was” the same was true of another operation on the train trying to grab the diamond led by a remnant of the Moriarty organization one Colonel Moran, a friend of Doc’s from their public school days (no mention of whether they had been lovers then but probably before degenerate Lanny got his hooks into poor Doc. Moran had developed a pretty good plan to grab the diamond by sleight of hand. Had a hardened rough trade boy hide in a casket compartment and do his deeds grabbing the stone and nobody the wiser. Here’s where Lanny and Doc with a corrupt Scotland Yard agent in tail screwed up. Moran’s guy grabbed the diamond although a train guard bought it before the deal when down. Number two down. Moran and the thug had a falling out-number three. All while Lanny and Doc are hitting the bong in their railroad suite. Meanwhile that Scotland Yard detective totally out of character for such an officer wraps up the caper when a bunch of fake coppers hired by him try to take Moran away. No go. Meanwhile Lanny and Doc are chanting oms and wondering who the hell had the damn diamond and why. Another “victory” for the legend, another “victory” for the alternative facts bogus legend.      

But let’s allow the so-called master deductive reasoning detective have his minute just for kicks although I will never tire of letting everybody know that Sherlock made his name after he beat down some poor mistreated dog who should have been reported as abused to whatever they call the humane animal treatment society in merry old England. Also that he worked overtime to keep his name in the public prints through his friendship with the editor of the London Times despite the fact that he had no gainful employment, no source of income except whatever his thug cronies delivered to him from their various escapades and that he had the goods on that editor as they used to say since he was “light on his feet,’’ gay. The minute up I hope to high heaven at least a few viewers will finally back off from this nasty legend stuff and look to Sam and Phillip for real detection works.

[This is probably as good a place as any to discuss the elephant in the room. The whole sexual preference business that was always until the last couple of decades only inferred on film, in books, in society, if at all. I wouldn’t have though much about the matter, about the “sin that dare not speak its name,” you know, sodomy, about catamites if I hadn’t noticed in the previous film Sherlock Holmes Goes To Washington that when Sherlock and the Partridge twist were being held by Hinkel he never even looked at her and she was a dish to look at.

That started bells ringing my head that there was a reason, a real reason why Sherlock couldn’t shot straight, wore a silly boy’s regular hat no self-respecting man would be seen dead in, and had no lady-friend like Spade and Marlowe the former with that gun-simple Brigid who led him a merry chase and the latter with a string of honeys starting with that Vivian Sternwood who put him through his paces before she broke with one Eddie Mars. Either of whom had who would have eaten the Partridge dame her up with their eyes in a minute, run her to ground in the sack, the billowy pillows and had time for a hearty breakfast afterward (that Lanny Lamont time also a time when explicit sexual desire and carnal knowledge among heterosexuals also was done by indirection even among married folk-who can forget those double beds with bed stand in between once the scene invaded the marital bedroom), and had stuck it out through thick and thin with giddy, bubbly Doc Watson. Yes, a Nancy, a mommy’s boy, a fag to use the old time neighborhood term from my growing days in, no I had better not say where which might give aid and comfort to the thugs at Baker Street explains a lot of things. Tells a lot about the dope to take the unmanly shame off his face for being what he was, the outwardly improbable tell-tale scorn of women and why he and Doc were an item, in the closet.

Nowadays, recently, the whole sexual preference would not even be a subject for discussion except for what I have heard from an ex-Baker Street Irregular who broke hard with the organization after having spent the better part of twenty years in the closet about  his membership in the club as well as his sexual proclivities, who told me that there was a big division in the club between those who wanted to “out” Lanny/Sherlock and claim him for the mythical Homintern and those who wanted to not attract attention to their various nefarious activities and crimes by such a scheme. Back then though when Sherlock was roaming the world pissing off that candid world with his fake fortune-teller madness the example of poor Oscar Wilde and his youthful catamite which drove him to Reading Gaol and as recently as the Durning case in the 1950s it was not safe, was criminal to “come out.”

Of course the English public schools for boys, our private schools, were hotbeds of gay activity among the young boys isolated from young girls and who knows what by male teachers so it no wonder an odd-ball like Holmes got flighty and never looked back. Here is the problem everybody knows that no way a gay guy, a gay couple if you included Watson could then juggle dealing with hardened criminals the coppers couldn’t cope with and survive if it were known they were lovers, even platonic lovers. The pair would be in Reading Gaol themselves. Just remember what they did to Wilde and Durning. The next few films should put paid to that notion of mine that Sherlock was nothing more than a parlor plotter once the sexual preference angle intruded itself into the mix.]        

Like I said the last three times, a fake, fake all the way. Unless that Irregular crowd of thugs and blood-stained aficionados get to me, especially those who will be livid for my exposing  Lanny before they could “out” him themselves, find my hideout, this is not the last you will hear about this campaign of mine to dethrone this pompous junked-up imposter. I am just getting into high gear now.