The Mary Russell Companion (2 page)

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