Today I have a special guest post by Rohase Piercy with Charlie Raven focused on A Case of Domestic Pilfering. It's a story that presents Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
through the eyes of another couple, Guy Clements and Max Fareham, with whom
they become embroiled through a series of misunderstandings.
Bio:
Bio:
Rohase Piercy was born in London in 1958 and now lives in Brighton with
her husband Leslie, dog Spike and a small flock of racing pigeons. She has two
grown-up daughters.
Rohase enjoys exploring alternative perspectives in her writing, taking a well-known scenario, partnership or sequence of events and presenting it from an unfamiliar point of view. There’s always another story waiting to be told.
Rohase has written a series of 3 articles for her GoodReads blog about the ‘decadent’ angle of Sherlock Holmes, his relationship with Watson, and how the characters have been portrayed in the media.
Rohase enjoys exploring alternative perspectives in her writing, taking a well-known scenario, partnership or sequence of events and presenting it from an unfamiliar point of view. There’s always another story waiting to be told.
Rohase has written a series of 3 articles for her GoodReads blog about the ‘decadent’ angle of Sherlock Holmes, his relationship with Watson, and how the characters have been portrayed in the media.
A Tale of
Two Stories
by Rohase Piercy
Picture
the scene: it's 1987, Centenary Year of the publication of the very first
Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Jeremy Brett is camping it up
as Sherlock on the Granada TV series, the bookshops are full of Holmes
memorabilia, shiny new editions, pastiches, scholarly discussions of the
'Holmes Phemomenon' etc … and two friends, Rohase Piercy and Charlie Raven, are
reading the stories for the very first time and quickly becoming obsessed. What
we are becoming obsessed by, however, is not so much the great detective's
extraordinary powers of observation and deduction as the relationship between
Holmes and his faithful sidekick Dr Watson, with its very obvious (to us, at
least!) homoerotic subtext. 'His cold fingers closed around my wrist' … 'He
drew me back into the shadows … the fingers which clutched me were quivering' …
why were post-Freudian commentaries not brimming over with observation and
deduction about this?
Fast-forward
a year, and the answer was being made abundantly clear. 'Write the story you'd
love to read' - isn't that standard advice? We'd both done just that, and
Rohase's story My Dearest Holmes had just been published by the Gay
Men's Press. 'Sherlock Homo!' screamed The Sun; 'He's gay in
new book!' 'So dangerous, this urge to update the past', lamented A N
Wilson in The Daily Mail. 'Just because two chaps share digs, doesn't
mean they're queer!' expostulated Captain Bill Mitchell, Secretary of the
Sherlock Holmes Society. Interesting a publisher in a second Holmes/Watson
romance was not going to be as easy as we'd hoped ...
And
so Charlie's story was put into cold storage for nigh-on thirty years,
until the sea-change in public perception of the Holmes/Watson relationship
facilitated by Guy Ritchie's two 'bromance' films and the bucketloads of
innuendo that laced the BBC series Sherlock encouraged Rohase to
retrieve the old mildewed typescript from a bottom draw and commit it to
Dropbox, editing and slightly re-shaping it in the process. A few months ago, a
mere generation later than its twin, A Case of Domestic Pilfering was
finally unveiled to the reading public. Care to give it a try?
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