At home with Holmes

Jeremy Brett does his usual wonderful Sherlock Holmes in "The Devil's Foot."

In rural Cornwall, a greedy sibling poisons his brothers to madness and his sister to death, thus killing the great love of one Dr. Sterndale's life. By the end of the story, we discover that the Doc engages in private justice and takes the life of the murderer. When he offers himself up to Holmes for remanding to the authorities, Holmes sends Sterndale off to continue his scientific work in Africa. Watson puts up a token resistance but both agree that, in similar circumstances, they would do the same thing and that justice had been served, even if not through the usual channels.

Sounds good to me.

The Victorians certainly had vast numbers of restrictive rules that bound them. But we imagine that because our rules don't focus on the same issues, we enlightened and liberated types have fewer of them. I'm not at all sure. Do you know what can happen to you in the freewheeling city of San Francisco if you light up a cigar in Golden Gate Park or fail to give the garbageman three separate bags for compost, recyclables and trash? Ever try to exercise your Second Amendment right to bear arms or get the local police to deal with illegal immigrants or refer to a designated minority group as "you people"? All societies are rule-bound, but where the rules predominate makes a big difference.

It's the very rare TV drama in our time that would countenance the private justice of a hero like Holmes. One of the side effects of the rain of police and lawyer shows we have watched for a couple of generations is that we feel the need to involve official organs of justice to a far greater degree than the Victorians did. Besides, we are virtually weaponless. A rogue vigilante in the Death Wish films can give us some guilty pleasures. And an ordinary man deprived of peace can sometimes cross the public/private line, as in 2001's In The Bedroom or, to a lesser degree, in Urbania (2000). But a regular trope in our legal dramas is that that private avenger kills the wrong man, or woman. It is the rule of the law in its official form which dominates almost universally. Even the vilest of criminals need to be processed in the legal system.

And if, after 25 years on death row, a murderer is finally executed, as recently in Utah, we have to listen to the deep regrets of bleeding hearts over his bleeding heart, including a morally superior lecture from...The European Union.

But Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian world, where nannies took care of children and were not the ubiquitous functionaries of a post-feminist health-and-safety state who make men into them, understood that sometimes justice served privately by good men is still justice served and suffices. If I had to choose whether to rely on the sense of justice of the bureaucrats in Brussels or the sleuth from Baker Street, it'd be a no-brainer.

Sometimes people do things which deprive them of their right to breathe among us. It's not a question of deterance or rehabilitation or restoration. It's just desserts. Our ancestors, who lived in far rougher and more uncertain times than we do, were sometimes too quick to strike. We, on the other hand, sin by excess of opposition, to the point where what looks like morality is actually cowardly nihilism.

No shit, Sherlock!