The Strange Case of Eliza Doolittle

The execution falls short of the appealing premise of Miller’s ambitious debut, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that merges Conan Doyle’s characters with ones from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. In 1912, after the detective’s retirement, Dr. Watson is consulted by an old army friend, Col. Hugh Pickering, who’s concerned about a Cockney flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle, who has been taken into the London home of his friend, linguist Henry Higgins. As in Shaw’s play, the colonel and the professor bet whether Higgins can transform the way Eliza speaks so that she could pass as a duchess at a fancy party. But in Miller’s telling, Pickering suspects Eliza has been replaced by an imposter. Holmes agrees to investigate, and, in order to infiltrate the Higgins household, poses as a Sicilian-born American gangster in need of lessons in the King’s English. A notorious Robert Louis Stevenson character joins the over-the-top plot, in which Watson acts at times like an action hero. This fictional crossover isn’t in the same league as Philip Purser-Hallard’s Sherlock Holmes: The Spider’s Web, which features Oscar Wilde characters. (Jan.)