by Marvin Kaye
Over mutton chops and ale at Keens Chophouse late one Wednesday night in February, I came to learn just how seriously Marina takes her devotion to the great detective. The night was cold, the fireplace at Keens was roaring, and the candlelight shone rosy on the fluted glassware of Marina’s cosmopolitan. (I was drinking ale, but that struck me as much too mundane for her.)
Marina Stajic is an elegant woman of Yugoslavian/Jewish descent—although she is a longtime smoker, she looks much younger than her chronological age. Her voice is smoky, with throaty Eastern European vowels. Her impressive credentials as a scientist lend a kind of authority to her admittedly intense involvement with all things Sherlockian. As Marina herself puts it, “Never mind devout Catholics—Sherlockians are serious.”
She is also a great storyteller.
Marina Stajic was born in Novi Sad, a town in Serbia on the Danube River, fifty miles north of Belgrade. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I, and she points out that there was a cultural difference between her hometown and the Turkish influence in Serbia proper. She liked chemistry as a child; her first chemistry class was in the fifth grade in Yugoslavia. She still remembers thinking, “Chemistry will be really neat—physics will suck.” Her interest was spurred on by wonderful chemistry teachers in grade school and high school, who influenced her to major in chemistry. (When pressed, she admits that her grandfather was a butcher in Yugoslavia, but insists that had little influence on her interest in forensics.) Her interest in crime, though, predated her interest in science. She liked crime fiction, and read translations in Yugoslavia.
Her first contact with Sherlock Holmes came in the summer of her thirteenth year. She was at a summer boarding school in Switzerland, and her best friend at school was from Afghanistan. Her friend’s father was a military attaché in Moscow, and the two girls communicated in Russian, the only language they had in common.
One day, in a paddleboat on Lake Geneva, her friend told her the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles. She was captivated. As it happened, the movie version with Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Henry Baskerville was playing at the time in the cinema, but the girls couldn’t go because of the minimum age limit of seventeen! It’s hard to imagine anyone censoring that, movies being what they are these days, but Marina had to wait until her seventeenth birthday to see the film.
However, that didn’t stop her. She went home to Yugoslavia and went to the library and read every one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, starting with “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” followed by “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” Her parents thought it was trash, and urged her to read Heidi, instead!
“You know, I feel there’s actually a connection between Heidi and Holmes,” she comments, leaning back in her chair as we order a second round of drinks. “They must have met in Switzerland around the time of the Reichenbach Falls adventure. They’re about the same age.” Not only that: Marina is convinced that they had an affair and that Heidi gave Holmes the idea of using the Baker Street Irregulars!
She also admires Agatha Christie, and points out that Christie’s knowledge and use of poisons is better than Doyle’s. “After all,” Marina remarks, “she worked in the dispensary in World War I—all of her poison stories are very good.”
Marina’s first experience of the United States came at the age of fourteen, when she and her mother crossed the country by bus—99 days for $99 on Continental Trailways. They boarded the bus in New York City, and went nonstop straight to Phoenix, Arizona, and then onto Los Angeles. They returned the same way: it took them three days and nights going, and three days and three nights returning. They had breakfast at a diner, and were served the rest of their meals on the bus. It sounded grueling to me, but being from Yugoslavia, Marina says, the bus seemed to her like a luxurious way to travel—it actually had a toilet!
She eventually came to America for good, moving to Baltimore in 1972, where her brother was a Medical Examiner. Forensic toxicology was a developing field in those days, with very few women in it, and she immediately saw that it offered career possibilities. Other chemistry related fields were more saturated, so she settled on toxicology. She earned her PhD at the University of Maryland in Baltimore in forensic toxicology. In those days Baltimore was a rough town. “It became a better city after I left,” she comments, “much as NYC became a better city after I moved here.”
Her graduate school was close to “The Block” in downtown Baltimore known for all the strip joints—Belle Star even ran a place there. Edgar Allan Poe’s grave was also only a couple of blocks away. Her school was in the downtown Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland, the main campus being in College Park, Md. The University of Maryland, she points out, has more campuses than any other university in the world.
After a stint working as a toxicologist in Virginia, in a suburb of Washington, D.C., she moved to New York City on April 1, 1986—“the year the Statue of Liberty was one hundred years old,” she adds proudly. “In New York City I felt like I finally came home.” She joined the Office of Chief Medical Examiner as Director of the Forensic Toxicology Laboratory, a position she still holds today.
When the subject of belief comes up, she shrugs. She’s not an atheist or agnostic; she’s a self-proclaimed “nothing.” She simply isn’t interested in the question. She claims to know what happens after you die, because it will be on Yogi Berra’s tombstone: “It’s over.”
The closest thing she can think of to church is Yankee Stadium. “If I say I went to church, my friends say, ‘Oh, yes, she went to the stadium.’” When the subject of Nero Wolfe comes up, she complains that the problem with Archie Goodwin is that he’s not a Yankees fan. She points out that Conan Doyle actually went to a Yankees game against the Philly A’s when he was in New York.
She smiles. “If there is a heaven I will be just one of the Yankee Stadium ghosts.”
When asked about interesting cases in her past, she tells the story of the only truly Christie-like poisoning she worked on. It was in Virginia. She points out, murder by poison is not as common as it used to be (“because it’s much easier to shoot someone.”) Also, poisons are more controlled than they used to be.
It involved the death of an eighty-year-old man, who began feeling bad one day. He went to the hospital, where he subsequently died. The old gentleman was a widower and had been living with a woman who was thirty years his junior—in fact, he had children her age by his first wife. They lived on a farm outside of Washington, DC, and he had left the farm to her in his will.
His children by his first wife claimed it was murder, and that their ‘stepmother’ had killed him. Everyone doubted them, but they insisted, calling the pathologist who did the autopsy, claiming that their father was poisoned with rat poison. However, there was no indication of the presence of the usual suspects—anti-coagulants or cardiac glycosides—so poison had initially been ruled out. He didn’t have bleeding, which would have been expected if anticoagulants were used and he had been in the hospital under observation for a whole week.
Finally, the pathologist agreed to further toxicology testing, “just to calm them down.” He realized that the children were thinking of arsenic—which he considered highly unlikely—but he ordered the tests anyway. It turned out that the old gentleman was loaded with arsenic. The conclusion was that he had died from an overdose of rat poison. Fortunately, the police still had a garbage can with his vomit in it, as well as a bottle of Scotch from the house. They were both loaded with arsenic, an ingredient found only in older forms of rat poison.
When they confronted the “widow”with the toxicology results, she confessed at once. She admitted she didn’t want to wait any longer to inherit the farm, and so had poisoned her common law husband. It seems that since it was an old farm, she had managed to get tins of old rat poison—hence the presence of arsenic. They got a conviction and sh
e went to jail.
Marina also cited another interesting case in which a man poisoned his two year old child with benadryl. He claimed that the little girl got the drug from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He was careful enough to plant her footprint on the toilet seat underneath the medicine cabinet, but not smart enough to realize that she wasn’t tall enough to reach it! As a result of his conviction on this case, an earlier case of a child he had suffocated was re-opened.
If these stories feel like they’re right out of CSI or Forensic Files, it’s no wonder. Marina and her colleagues actually do the things we watch the television scientists do: examine samples, run mass specs and high pressure liquid chromatographs. Perhaps it’s not quite as glamorous as on television, but it’s fascinating work nonetheless.
One can only imagine that Sherlock would be very impressed.
SCREEN OF THE CRIME, by Lenny Picker
Man of Thought, Man of Action, or How A Study In Terror Got the Balance Right (Unlike a Certain Other Film)
A substantial portion of the by-no-means-universal adverse reaction to the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes—both from Sherlockians as well as from lay viewers and reviewers—stems from its focus on portraying the detective as an action hero who in many respects resembles Batman, who also used his fists as well as his brain to combat crime. As an example, one of the opening scenes in the film, in which Robert Downey, Jr.’s Holmes analyzes the specific impact of his martial arts moves before immobilizing an opponent is, if not a conscious homage to, then a close parallel to a scene in a Frank Miller comic book, in which Gotham’s protector does almost exactly the same thing. Even The New York Times editorial board, in opining on whether Holmes should be fully in the public domain, noted that “the master of the cerebral has been turned into an action hero” in the movie.
While I found the movie neither as bad nor as good as it could have been, I anticipate that fans of it who then turn to the Canon for more of the same will find Doyle’s brilliant tales of scientific investigation disappointingly sedate. Despite thoughtful analyses by those such as Robert Davis (“Film Friday: Comparing Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes to Conan Doyle’s Stories”), there’s a difference between scattered references in the originals to Holmes mastering the Japanese art of baritsu, to his being a gifted amateur boxer, and to being a singlestick expert, and the long fight sequences in Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram’s vision.
But as the Master himself quoted from Ecclesiastes, in A Study in Scarlet, “there is nothing new under the sun,” (with the possible exception of a naked Holmes handcuffed to a bed by Irene Adler for no particularly good narrative reason). Almost half a century ago, another filmmaker sought to depict the sleuth as more of a man of action than had been the case in previous screen incarnations, and the publicity campaign for the movie even tried to appeal to the fans of the campy Adam West Batman TV series by using the slogan “Here comes the original caped crusader!” But in spite of the sensational and misleading tagline and a cheesy poster replete with sound effects rendered into words—“Biff!”, “Crunch!”, etc., straight from the television show, (presumably selected under the theory that salting the ads with “Observe”, “Contemplate”, and “Deduce” wouldn’t pack the seats), the forces behind 1965’s A Study In Terror convincingly integrated action and combat into a storyline true to the spirit of the detective Conan Doyle created, by making such scenes secondary to actual deduction. By doing so, they made one of the best-regarded, if least-known Holmes films of all time.
A Study In Terror broke ground on a number of fronts, most notably for pitting Holmes against Jack the Ripper on film for the very first time. While that concept may seem unremarkable today, given the 1979 movie Murder By Decree, and numerous pastiches (most significantly, Lyndsay Faye’s 2009’s standout Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson), it was novel in 1965. And as Holmes was at the peak of his career during the 1888 Autumn of Terror during which the Whitechapel murderer operated, setting him on the serial killer’s trail made perfect sense, as I argued in a 1981 article for the Baker Street Miscellanea (“A Few Words On Behalf of Jack the Ripper”). The panicked frenzy the Ripper created would not have allowed Holmes to sit idly by, even if the savagery of the crimes differed from his usual case (a conclusion that rests on the good doctor’s admitted exercise of discretion in determining which investigations conducted by his friend were fit for publication).
Its recent addition to Turner Classic Movies’ roster (it debuted during the Christmas 2009 marathon) should give American audiences more opportunities to view it, despite its continued unavailability on DVD over here, notwithstanding reports that Sony was to release it in the fall of 2009. In my view, any serious admirer of the characters should seek it out, and Messrs. Ritchie and Wigram would be well-advised to widen their gaze to include it before beginning their already-green-lighted sequel that is expected to bring Professor Moriarty front and center, a storyline that cries out for a carefully-crafted battle of wits between intellectual equals, rather than focusing on fisticuffs. While A Study In Terror does have its flaws, they are relatively few, and more than outweighed by a stellar cast, superb pacing, and an intelligent script that seamlessly integrates quotes from the Canon, with clues as to the identity of the Ripper placed fairly before the viewer, while offering multiple suspects for consideration.
After three prostitutes are savagely slaughtered on the streets of Whitechapel, Holmes (John Neville) is sent an anonymous package addressed in “a female hand,” containing a set of surgical instruments with the post-mortem knife removed, which nicely sets up the absence of something, rather than its presence, as a clue, in the spirit of the classic “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” from “Silver Blaze.” The case containing them provides a splendid opportunity for Holmes to demonstrate his deductive method. Holmes’s careful examination of the object leads him to conclude that “[t]hese instruments belonged to a medical man who has descended to hard times,” explaining to Watson (Donald Houston), portrayed here as a solid, dependable and intelligent companion, rather than Nigel Bruce’s Boobus Britannicus, the logical basis behind his conclusion: that “the instruments of one’s trade are always the last things to be pawned,” and that the presence of a “fleck of white, silver polish,” on one of the instruments shows that “they have been treated like common cutlery by someone concerned only with their appearance.” The presence of a three-digit pawn ticket number in chalk on the outside of the case confirms his deduction.
Houston’s Watson does not react with dumb-founded amazement; instead, he’s comfortable challenging the conclusion, suggesting that the case could have been “stolen from a doctor and then pawned,” a perfectly logical hypothesis that establishes from the outset that he will serve as an asset, rather than a liability to the inquiry to come.
Holmes responds by explaining why the doctor’s theory is wrong. (“If the pawnbroker had thought they were stolen, he would never have displayed them in a window.”)
But the hyper-intelligent Holmes is just getting started, astonishing Watson, and the viewer by declaring, with supreme self-confidence, “The shop faces south in a narrow street. And business is bad. I should also add that the pawnbroker is a foreigner.”
When Watson starts to protest that he cannot see how Holmes reached these conclusions, Holmes impatiently cuts him off, “You see everything, but observe nothing,” a combining of the lines from “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “You see, but you do not observe,” and, from “The Blue Carbuncle”, “You can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see.” The master reasoner elucidates:
Observe how the material has faded here. The sun has touched the inside of the case only when at its height, and able to shine over the roofs of the buildings opposite. Hence, the shop is in a narrow street, facing south. And business had to be bad for the case to remain undisturbed for so long.
This initial depiction of Holmes is fully in the spirit of the Canon, echoing similar scenes of demonstrated brilliance in “The Blue Carbuncle,” “The Norwood Builder,” and The Hound of the Baskervilles. It portrays the character foremost as a man of intellect. In contrast, Downey’s Holmes is first seen calculating the blows he will land on an adversary. Unfortunately, this sort of opening is a rarity. (The only parallel that springs immediately to mind from the big screen is Rathbone’s Holmes accurately identifying personal details about Dr. Mortimer based on a study of the latter’s forgotten walking-stick.) But perhaps this failing, is not, on reflection, surprising, given the thought needed to simulate the brilliant staccato deductions Doyle managed with apparent ease.
Holmes’s further examination of the medical case finds that it bears the coat of arms of the Osbourne family, and the pair’s visit to the family home yields the revelation that it had been given as a gift by Edward Osbourne, Lord Carfax to his older brother, Michael, who had been studying to become a doctor, over the objections of the Duke of Shires, his father, who considered the pursuit beneath the dignity of the family. The search for the missing eldest son and heir, and the connection between his property and the Whitechapel murders drives the rest of the plot, culminating in a taut and dramatic confrontation between detective and killer.
By seeking to attract the viewer to Holmes based on his amazing brain, rather than some other characteristic, the screenwriters, Donald and Derek Ford, ground the violence of their story firmly in tradition, insuring that it is not the tail wagging the hound. The movie’s subject matter naturally lends itself to the inclusion of action scenes, but they are integral to the plot. After questioning a suspect, Holmes and Watson are set upon by thugs he dispatched out of a concern that they had learned too much about his illegal operations, a scene reminiscent of one in the Downey movie. As the death toll mounts, the pair take to the streets in an effort to find, as Holmes puts it, “the detail that matters,” but are too late to prevent the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. But their proximity to the crime (in the movie’s most serious departure from the historical record—the time between the murder and the Ripper’s flight from Kelly’s room is much too short to allow for the obscene surgery the killer conducted) allows Holmes to almost catch his man in a frantic and gripping sequence. There is also a fight sequence at the movie’s end when he eventually traps his quarry.