My director's note for Mrs. Hudson Investigates

So many of our most beloved stories are about exceptional people, and Sherlock Holmes is certainly one of them— the brilliant and talented hero who uses their God-given abilities to bring light to where once there was dark. My own Victorian super-detective Mrs. Hawking owes a lot to this kind of character, and through her I’ve gotten a fair bit of experience writing heroic Victorian mystery-solving women. So when PMRP was looking for someone to devise an adventure centered on Mrs. Hudson, I suppose I seemed a natural fit.

But in coming up with a case to be solved by Sherlock Holmes’s long-suffering landlady, I wanted to explore something different. Though the series gives few details about the character, still it didn’t feel right to me to depict her as yet another brilliant deductive mind, quietly absorbing all Sherlock Holmes’s techniques in the course of keeping house for him. But do only geniuses get to have interesting adventures? Are they the only ones worth telling stories about?

So, in this story our heroes are very ordinary people, graced with no particular innate powers that would make them great detectives. Instead, I wanted to follow some decent folk who are good at their own little corner of the world, whose virtues lie in the choices they make and the effort they put in. Most of us aren’t geniuses, after all— and yet any one of us can decide to show up for a friend, stand up for someone unjustly accused, or pay attention to things that most people allow to pass unnoticed.

Additionally, I wanted this very much to be a women’s story, centered on recognizing traditional women’s work. Historically women have always been expected to take on disproportionate responsibility for caretaking and domesticity, tasks that have also traditionally been devalued— perhaps because they are so often the province of women. But here, the only hope of solution lies in the little details of the domestic world that women never get enough credit for managing, that so often go ignored.

In my usual work with Mrs. Hawking, the patriarchy is challenged by stealth infiltrations and knife fights. But here, it’s by scrubbing the floors and dusting the curtains and knowing how to brew a proper cup of tea. I’m happy to have the chance to pay tribute to both.

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