The Mary Russell Companion

Russell on Holmes:

I hoped to God this man actually was a friend. If he was my enemy I was in grave trouble. (Garment of Shadows)

*

Although it may not have been a union of conventional bliss, it was never dull. (Monstrous Regiment)

Holmes on Russell:

Why did it never occur before to me to have a vigorous young assistant to do what the Americans call my dirty work? (O Jerusalem)

*

He generally was aware of her presence, that sturdy physicality wrapped around a magnificent brain and the stoutest of hearts. . . this incomparable hard diamond of a woman. . . .(Locked Rooms)

Miss Russell’s Game

The world of Sherlock Holmes—the Conan Doyle world, that is, one in which the detective has yet to meet Miss Russell—is based upon what is called the Game, that deadly serious, tongue-firmly-in-cheek proclamation that The Great Detective was (indeed, is) a living man; that Dr Watson wrote the stories; and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson’s literary agent, whose presence permitted the residents of 221b Baker Street to go about their business without constant interruptions from the adoring public. Any conundrums held in the stories, be they chronological oddities or factual conflicts, stem either from our inadequate understanding, or are flaws introduced by the Literary Agent.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur, not being by nature an ironist, barely touches on the possibilities inherent in the Game. In The Greek Interpreter, Mycroft Holmes does say to Watson, I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler, but that is about as far as the Canon takes matters.

Metafiction is a game of fiction-within-fiction, sometimes ironic, other times playful. It is self-referential, leading back into itself, and carries with it the danger of nudging the reader out of the vivid dream of the story at hand.

Metafiction is an ongoing theme within the Russell Memoirs. For example, in (aptly enough) The Game, Russell is shown an old birth certificate from Ferozepore, on which is recorded a vaguely familiar name:

I’m sorry, I began, and then I paused, my mind catching at last on a faint sense of familiarity: Kimball. And O’Hara. Add to that a town that could only be in India…. No; oh, no—the book was just a children’s adventure tale. I’m sorry, I repeated, only where before it had connoted apology, this time it was tinged with outrage. "This doesn’t have anything to do with Kim, does it? The Kipling book?"

You’ve read it? Mycroft asked.

Of course I’ve read it.

Good, that saves some explaining. I believe this to be his amulet case.

He’s real, then? Kipling’s boy?

As real as I am, said Sherlock Holmes.

The Russian-dolls aspect of the books is there from the beginning, with LRK’s introduction to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, in which she describes receiving a trunk full of manuscripts and other odds and ends—which is then followed by Mary Russell’s own introduction concerning the book. The next three books continue the theme, with notes by King expressing her own befuddlement about the stories (real, or not? And why sent to me, she wonders?) that are later followed up by two explanatory stories that give details of how King came to have the memoirs (My Story and A Case in Correspondence, both in this Companion.)

The mirror world of Russell’s reality pops in and out of the books. She mentions Conan Doyle, ragging Holmes about the fairies in his garden shortly after Sir Arthur’s 1920 Strand article about the Cottingley Fairies exposed his gullibility to the world—an article that would surely have driven the world’s proponent of rationality around the bend.

Cottingley Fairies

Similarly, in Pirate King, Russell is startled at an overlap of fiction and reality (Which being which, the reader wonders?) "…when my husband’s name appeared on the flickering screen: Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr." Later, she reflects on the oddity of being married to a man whom the world considers a character in a book, and admits, I occasionally feel myself going translucent and fictional.

The Russell community, it should be noted, has embraced the conundrum with open arms, and never fails to place Russell squarely in the world of nonfiction.

About Mary Russell

(Although the sections in the Mary Russell Companion that deal with specific books generally take care to avoid spoilers, this section does have them. Readers unfamiliar with some of the books might wish to skip ahead.)

A Biography of Mary Russell

There is no one place where Miss Russell recounts her entire autobiography. Instead, she drops bits of personal history throughout the Memoirs. Her parents were Judith Klein Russell, an English-born Jewish woman, and Charles David Russell, a Boston Brahmin (gentile) who went to California when young and established his home there. Judith and Charles met in London’s British Museum, and married in 1896: both families seem to have strongly disapproved.

Judith, the granddaughter of a rabbi, raised her children (Mary, born January 2, 1900 and Levi, 1905) in her faith, teaching them Hebrew and Rabbinical wisdom from a young age.

The family lived in London and in San Francisco throughout Mary Russell’s childhood, being in California during the great 1906 earthquake and fire (although Russell’s young mind shies from recalling those events). They were again in San Francisco when the Great War began in August 1914, and Charles Russell enlisted, slated to join Army Intelligence. Before leaving in October—Charles for the army and Judith and the children for Boston—the Russell family took a last drive to the family Lodge south of the city. On the way, in an incident that later turned out to be criminal, their car went off the cliffs into the Pacific Ocean. Judith, Charles, and Levi were killed, Mary was thrown out, leaving her orphaned, badly injured, and consumed with guilt over having not only survived, but knowing that she had contributed to the accident.

When she recovered enough to travel, around her fifteenth birthday, young Russell demanded to return to wartime England, to her mother’s beloved farm on the Sussex Downs. There she lived with her mother’s younger sister, a woman she detested but whose legal guardianship was necessary because of her youth.

It was on those Downs, three months after her fifteenth birthday, that Mary Russell encountered Sherlock Holmes. Distracted by the Virgil she was reading, she came near to tripping over him, observed the paint on his fingers and on nearby honeybees, deduced what his purpose is, and told him what she noticed. She then turned to leave him to his task.

Fortunately, he did not permit it.

Somehow, this lifelong misanthrope recognized the potential in a young, bespectacled, English-American girl with long strawberry-blond plaits, dressed in her father’s outdated suit. He took young Russell as his apprentice.

Russell’s skills

As might be expected of someone who is a match for Sherlock Holmes, Russell’s skills, both natural and learned, are formidable.

* Deductive skills: Russell notices what others do not, and puts facts together more quickly. From their first meeting, when the fifteen year-old sees paint on bees and instantly knows that this eccentric older man is looking to replenish his hives, not only do we see that this is a Holmes in the making, but Holmes himself sees it. Realization is confirmed later that day, when young Mary drinks his tea and recites the details of his life, from a recent spy case to his rocky relationship with his family.

* A gift for throwing: One of her more useful natural abilities is that of a wickedly accurate throwing arm. Whether it is the knife she carries in her boot-top or darts in a public house, her hand (the left one) hits what it aims at.

Throwing knives

* Languages: Russell’s other natural gift is that of languages. Her modern tongues include French, German, Italian, Spanish, and modern Hebrew; classical languages include Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Arabic; she learns a degree of Hindi, Japanese, and Romany, and can decipher hieroglyphics and Coptic.

* Martial arts. Under Holmes’ direction, Russell enrolls in an Oxford school, or dojo. The Conan Doyle stories refer to Holmes’ expertise in baritsu, which was probably a version of W. W. Barton-Wright’s Bartitsu (Barton/jujitsu), introduced to England in 1899. There she learns self-defense, yes, but the lessons are also a means of taking control of her growing limbs (she is very tall for a woman of her era, just an inch short of six feet). One imagines that some of her physical clumsiness when young was a result of her injuries from the 1914 accident, which left her with many scars and which, one assumes, went untreated by physical therapies.

Bartitsu

* Academics: Russell enters an unnamed Oxford college in the war year of 1917, reading (i.e., majoring in) Theology and Chemistry. The latter subject tends to disappear as the Memoirs progress, but theological speculation forms a common thread throughout her adventures. Her particular area of interest (which, it is worth noting, she shares with her literary editor Laurie King) lies in feminine aspects of the Divine, with a concentration on the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament).

* Skilled though she is in many areas, there are some true failures in her life. For one, she seems to be an abysmal cook, incapable of boiling water without scorching the pan (One comes to suspect that, taking into account her background in chemistry, Russell’s chronic inability to translate laboratory techniques into the kitchen is to some extent deliberate: women of her era tended to be urged toward the stove rather than the Bunsen burner, and it would have been simpler to assert incompetence than to proclaim a dislike.) She also has a poor ear for music, a source of conflict with her music-loving husband. However, when a case demands it, she is able to reproduce a simple tune on a tin whistle.

* Perhaps supporting the theory that her inabilities are chosen rather than thrust upon her, Russell is most competent behind the wheel, and (rather as Watson carried the revolver when their partnership demanded) is generally the one to drive a motorcar when the partnership needs to be somewhere fast. Holmes is capable of driving—at least, he had recently posed as a motor expert (His Last Bow)—but Russell’s reaction times and willingness to race back roads, while disconcerting to her more conservative partner, have yet to bring her to grief.

Morris Bullnose Oxford, 1913

A Protest: Russell and the Mary Sues

Since the Memoirs first began to appear, with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice in 1994, the person of Mary Russell has attracted controversy. Many devout Sherlockians raised their (generally) manly voices in protest, at the thought of their honored detective having a life past August, 1914—moreover, a life that not only included a woman, but one who was not The Woman, Irene Adler.

More recently, another form of outrage has been raised, under the accusation of Mary Sue! A Mary Sue, for those unfamiliar with the term, denotes a writer whose personal fantasies, generally of the romantic variety, blatantly override the good sense of a storyteller. This stand-in character is invariably hugely gifted, generally wealthy, and so impressively clever as to leave all the established characters either gaping in her wake or succumbing to her charms.

The question of Russell’s Mary Sue-ness stands apart from one’s acceptance or rejection of her actual, physical reality. If she is real, then one must take at least the major part of her memoirs as being accurate. If she is a work of fiction, then being (as Laurie King has said in interviews) designed around the existing template of Sherlock Holmes, her omni-competence is inevitable: if Holmes himself is composed of lighting-fast wits, physical competence, honed senses, and arcane knowledge, then so must Mary Russell be. In either case, the lady is no Mary Sue.

Where’d she go?

Maps of the Russell travels

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

Britain: Sussex, London, Bristol, Cardiff, Wales, Oxford

Palestine (Israel): Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Jericho, Sea of Galilee, Plains of Esdraelon, Acre

Monstrous Regiment of Women

England: Sussex, Portsmouth, Essex, London

A Letter of Mary

England: Sussex, London, Oxford, Cambridge

The Moor

England: Oxford, Devon, Dartmoor, Plymouth

O Jerusalem

Palestine (Israel): Javneh, Acra, the Sinai, Beersheva, Jerusalem, Dead Sea

Justice Hall

England: Sussex, Arley Holt (Berkshire), London, Dorking

France: Paris, Lyons

US: New York

Canada (Ontario): Toronto, Webster

The Game

England: London, Sussex, Kent, Dover

France: Calais, Paris, Marseilles

Egypt: Suez Canal

Yemen: Aden

India: Bombay, Delhi, Simla, Khalka, Khanpur

Locked Rooms

Japan: Tokyo (mentioned only)

Hawaii

California: San Francisco, Los Angeles

The Language of Bees

Britain: Portsmouth, Sussex, London, York, Edinburgh, Inverness, Orkneys

The God of the Hive

Britain: Orkneys, Lakes District, London, Edinburgh

Pirate King

Britain: Sussex, London

Portugal: Lisbon, Cintra

Morocco: Salé and Rabat

Garment of Shadows

Morocco: Rabat, Fez, Erfoud, the Rif mountains

A Woman of the Twenties:

Mary Russell, Feminist?

The Twentieth century was a whirlwind of women’s activities. Matters were well under way long before the Great War blew up the well-established structures of the Victorian and Edwardian eras: the Suffragette movement (as opposed to the less assertive Suffragists) got under way in 1903, two years after the death of Queen Victoria. The militant wing of women’s rights, under the leadership of the three Pankhursts, mother and daughters, advocated any act short of taking a life—including giving one’s life for the cause. Hunger strikes, willing arrests, suicide under the hooves of the King’s horse—society in general did not approve, but it had to admit that the women were serious.

Suffragette Emily Davison’s suicide(?) at the Epsom Derby

Then came War. The Suffragettes shelved their militant actions for the duration and set about proving themselves in other ways. By the time Armistice was declared, Parliament could no longer deny the right to vote: if women could be trusted to run public transportation, farm the land, and police the streets, surely they could be trusted with the Vote.

The idea of the New Woman actually got its start in the nineteenth century, a reference to the independent, educated, and assertive women one found among Society, and especially living the expatriate life in Europe. (It should be noted that in the literature dealing with the New Woman—stories by Henry James being foremost—things rarely end happily for the woman in question.)

The New Woman was a member of the privileged classes—even for men of the times, higher education was rare, and only the daughters of the rich could set up their salon in Paris or Vienna without having a willing husband in tow. However, by the Twentieth century, the dissatisfaction with one’s lot was beginning to extend to the non-privileged classes. The women’s health and birth control clinics of Marie Stopes in the UK and Margaret Sanger in the US reached the lives of the poor (although it must be noted that both women seemed less interested in merely helping than they were in eliminating the unfit—i.e., the poor). Early suffrage proponents were as determined to achieve divorce and inheritance reform as they were the actual vote: most women of the time had little consideration of any inheritance, and in any case, not until 1928 were women put on the same footing as men when it came to the Vote.

Marie Stopes

Privilege was the key.

Privilege has always been key in the rights women could claim for themselves. Mary Kingsley celebrated her freedom from caring for aged parents by heading off to West Africa to finish the research on a book her father had been working on. She blithely plunged into jungles, across the rivers, and up mountains (wearing Victorian bombazine and bustles—which, when she fell onto the stakes in a tiger pit, saved her life: The blessings of a good thick skirt.), coming home to celebrity. But Kingsley was not interested in feminism, and did not believe women should have the vote while large numbers of men did not.

Mary Kingsley

Gertrude Bell similarly fell in love with life in the wild places, in her case the desert of the Middle East. She became the eyes of British Intelligence, advisor to nations, and was central to the division of Mesopotamia into its modern countries. She also, ironically, was a proponent of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League—rather as Phyllis Schlafly later made a career out of being against (among other things) career women.

Gertrude Bell

Women like Bell and Kingsley regard themselves as outside the question of sex. And they are so regarded by others: when Bell blithely moved across the face of the desert, she simply assumed that any sheikh, governor, or military general would be pleased to speak with her on equal terms. When Kingsley hired porters and guides to take her into Africa, the men didn’t shake their heads and refuse to take this white woman anywhere. (Although they may have shaken their heads—and admittedly, they may not have recognized this bombazined and be-hatted creature as a female, per se.)

Q: When is a woman not a woman? A: When she is a force of nature.

Mary Russell is both like these women, and different from them. Certainly when we first meet her, she demonstrates more of the wealthy elite’s tendency to blind self-confidence then she does the chronic uncertainty of the usual fifteen year-old girl. When Russell’s editor, Laurie King, speaks of the Memoirs as the coming-of-age story of an extraordinary young mind, this is what she means, not merely the apprenticeship of a clever woman detective.

How does a person go from the shallowness of I am me to an attitude of, I am me, a woman—then beyond that towards, I am me, a woman of privilege?

We can only speculate what might have become of Miss Russell had her parents not died. Would she, too, have gone lightheartedly off into a world where a rich woman and her housemaid have no more in common than the roof under which they both lived?

But her family did die, leaving her to stand alone, questioning the rightness of the universe and the permanence of life. This doubting attitude is further emphasized when she is apprenticed to a man who questions everything he sees. Russell is driven towards self-awareness in ways Gertrude Bell never faced—or, faced only when she was long beyond the flexibility of youth.

So, if feminism means an awareness that privilege is given, not deserved; that fairness is an ideal, not a state; that when a man and a woman do the same job, they should receive the same pay, then yes: Mary Russell is a feminist.

On Matters Unspoken

One element of the Russell & Holmes memoirs that excites considerable interest among her readers is the question of the marital relations between the principals. Generally speaking, Russell is decorous when it comes to personal revelation, although she does admit (A Letter of Mary) that Holmes is as energetic and scrupulously attentive to detail in the physical aspects of marriage as ever he was in an investigation or laboratory experiment, then adds that he was not otherwise a man demonstrative of his affections. In Locked Rooms, Russell says that not only was she well matched mentally to Holmes, she was also well suited physically, to a man who interested my intellect, challenged my spirit and roused my passions.

He brushes her hair. He sits beside her and fiddles with her fingers. And that is as steamy as the Memoirs