Tag Archives: Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes goes public in 2023

Big news in the literary world today – as this article from the Chicago Sun Times reports, Sherlock Holmes will finally be wholly in the public domain as of tomorrow, the last copyrights for his stories having run out. (If I understand correctly, most of the stories are already out of copyright, but Doyle was still cranking the things out – reluctantly – in 1927).

That was two years before he was filmed doing the interview above. It’s ten minutes divided into two halves. The first half – the interesting part – tells how he came to write Holmes, and discusses the character’s fame. In the second half, Doyle climbs up on his perpetual hobbyhorse, Spiritualism. You, like me, might want to give that part a miss.

I think Doyle underrates himself as a writer in this monologue. He suggests that the great appeal of Sherlock Holmes was the logical, “scientific” approach to problem solving. I think the great draw was always the inherent interest of the characters, especially the friendship between Holmes and Watson.

One of the little stock speeches I often employ to repel prospective acquaintances involves a comparison between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. If you watch very old Holmes movies (and I’ve viewed a few lately), you might be surprised to see that they’re always set in the years when the film is made. Thus we see him and Watson tootling around in automobiles and talking over phones. (In one strange film, The Speckled Band [1931], Raymond Massey plays a youngish Holmes employing a stable of secretaries to continually collate information for him, like a primitive database.)

I like to point out that people in the early 20th Century saw Holmes just the way we see James Bond today. The Bond stories were originally written in the 1950s and ‘60s, but the movies began in the ‘60s and have gone on from there. Thus we think of Bond as a contemporary. We assume he’s operating in 2022 (soon 2023), and that he carries a cell phone and uses a PC, among other things. The fact that this is a very different level of technology from what’s found in Ian Fleming’s original stories doesn’t bother us at all.

In exactly the same way, people in the 1920s thought of Holmes as a man of their time. They expected him to drive a car and use a phone (and in fact, in the later Doyle stories he actually does those things). The idea that Holmes should be stuck in the late 19th Century only came later. The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone (1939) was the first movie to put him back in period, and that was an innovation.

A blessed New Year to you.

‘The Complete Brigadier Gerard,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

As almost everybody knows, Arthur Conan Doyle will be forever linked (shackled, as he might have put it) to his epically successful detective character, Sherlock Holmes. And most of you will be aware that Doyle grew very weary of Holmes after a while, and killed him off (temporarily). He hoped he could win the public over to another character he created, an officer of Napoleon named Brigadier Etienne Gerard.

I bought The Complete Brigadier Gerard out of curiosity. There’s no question it’s a change of pace from the Holmes stories.

Brigadier Gerard is a Gascon, like D’Artagnan. And like D’Artagnan, he lives for honor and adventure. He is always ready to fight a duel or steal a kiss, and always first to volunteer for dangerous assignments. Where he differs from D’Artagnan is that he’s not terribly bright. His stories are told, we gather, in his old age, in an inn, to a group of friends. Gerard is now living on a pension, which he supplements by growing cabbages. He sighs over hard fate, which has denied him the advancement he has no doubt he deserved. He refers often to the medal for bravery he received from the Emperor himself, but which he never has with him. He keeps it, he says, in his apartment, in a leather pouch. I suspect we’re meant to understand that he actually had to pawn it.

In a series of semi-comic short stories, he tells of headlong adventures he enjoyed during the great wars. Sometimes on secret missions, sometimes accidentally separated from his company of hussars, he escapes from ambushes, traps and imprisonment, often (like the later Captain Kirk) with the help of some woman who has succumbed to his manly charm.

Generally (but not always) the joke is on Gerard. He can be counted on to run (or gallop) toward the sound of the guns, but he’s often clueless about what’s really going on. So confident is he of his own sagacity and aplomb that (in a manner that anticipates Inspector Clouseau) he often mistakes jeering for cheering. He is, however, never mean or small-minded.

I didn’t like The Complete Brigadier Gerard as much as I hoped to. The author is laughing at his hero (if somewhat affectionately), and the reader is too. For some reason that made me uncomfortable.

Your mileage may vary. No objectionable material. I might mention that I often forgot I was reading a Victorian/Edwardian book. Doyle wrote in a style ahead of his time.

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes

What we have above is a genuine treasure of Sherlock Holmes lore. The original popular image of Sherlock Holmes came from Sidney Paget’s illustrations for the Strand Magazine in London (bald, long nose). But in American magazines, the foremost illustrator was Frederick Dorr Steele, who based his image on the handsome actor William Gillette, who played Holmes more than 1,300 times on stage in a play he wrote himself. Steele’s Holmes largely superseded Paget’s as the popular image of the great detective.

In 1916, Essanay Studios of Chicago filmed the play (with additions), and Gillette played the role yet again. This historic film was long believed lost, but in 2014 a print was discovered in France. This version had been released as a serial for the French audience, and included extra material not found in the American version. This French version has been splendidly restored, and the dialogue cards have been recreated using Gillette’s script. The orange and blue tinting is original.

Artist Paget bestowed Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker cap on him, but it was Gillette who gave him the curved calabash pipe, which did not wiggle so much when the actor talked. I hadn’t heard about the re-discovery of this film, and am still astonished I can see Gillette himself in the role.

Like many an aging actor before and since, he’s playing younger than his actual age, with a love interest about old enough to be his daughter.

‘Sherlock’ and the Case of the Jumped Shark

I knew better. But I was seduced.

OK, let me rephrase that.

I had decided, at the end of the last season of BBC’s Sherlock, to stop watching it. I’d liked the first season very much. The second season I liked quite a lot. The third season alienated me. The production went from being a detective show (featuring lively riffs on the original Conan Doyle stories) into being a soap opera about the friendship of two men. I was particularly irritated by the condescending attitude I thought I detected toward the original material. As if Doyle had been waiting for the 21st Century for someone to inform him what he’d really been writing about.

But then they offered a Christmas special, which aired last night on PBS, and they did it in period, set about 1895, with Holmes smoking a pipe again and Watson sporting a handlebar mustache. I couldn’t resist that, could I?

Well, I couldn’t. And I guess it’s just as well. It was only 90 minutes, and that was long enough to put me off the series permanently. Continue reading ‘Sherlock’ and the Case of the Jumped Shark

What Kept Conan Doyle Going?

Before he created the most illustrious residents of Baker Street—whom he nearly called J. Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker—Arthur Conan Doyle had already written a novel that was lost in the mail, and contributed excellent short fiction to various magazines. “The Captain of the Pole-Star” (1883), set in the Arctic, is one of the most haunting Victorian tales of the supernatural. But the young writer could hardly think of quitting his day job as a doctor in Southsea. A Study in Scarlet was turned down by one publisher after another, until it was finally accepted by Ward, Lock, and Co., who offered to buy the British copyright for a derisory twenty-five pounds.

Michael Dirda describes Conan Doyle’s desire to write better work than his Sherlockian mysteries and what kept him writing them. (via Prufrock)

The Data of Sherlock Holmes’ Cases

Adam Frost and Jim Kynvin have developed several charts to display the numbers they have crunched from A.C. Doyle’s famous stories.  Here are two of the charts. Another states Holmes has been adapted for film and TV more than any other fictional character, except Dracula. (via Prufrock)

Holmes' Client types by Adam Frost and Jim Kynvin Other Holmes cases by Adam Frost and Jim Kynvin

TV review: “Elementary”



I ought to dislike the new CBS TV series, “Elementary” more than I do. Conan Doyle’s immortal character has recently been brilliantly updated by the BBC in the series “Sherlock,” which extracted the soul of the character with exacting precision and inlaid him in the 21st Century with barely a seam showing. This American version (starring Jonny Lee Miller) is far more ham-fisted. It takes an attitude to the source material closer to that of the recent Robert Downey films (which I did not like), except for the martial arts stuff, particularly in adding a grunge element which the original Holmes, a fastidious dresser, would have sniffed at. Nevertheless, I think it’s the very crudity of the adaptation that makes it watchable for me. I can never take this character seriously as Holmes, so I can watch him with amusement as a vaguely Holmes-like TV detective.

In this adaptation, the self-possessed, comfortably self-supporting character of the original stories is turned into a desperate drug addict who’d be living in an alley if his wealthy father (a character who never appears in Doyle) hadn’t hired Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) to be his companion and nursemaid in his exile in New York City. He worked as a police consultant in London before his breakdown, and in that capacity met Captain Tobias Gregson of the NYPD, who hires him for the same purpose here.

If you think the idea of casting a woman as Watson is fresh and edgy, well, it’s not. The idea was first bruited by Rex Stout to the Baker Street Irregulars (the foremost Sherlock Holmes fan group) back in the 1940s. It’s been done before too, both on film and on TV. Actually it would be a little surprising if they hadn’t cast a woman in the role. And if you’ve got to have a female Watson, Lucy Liu is always nice to look at.

As far as stories go, based on the two episodes I’ve watched, they seem to be adequate. Last night’s plot concerned bankers, which gave the writers the opportunity to have Holmes spout their favorite Occupy Wall Street talking points for them. But this Holmes is pretty deeply disturbed, so nothing he says not directly related to clues really needs to be taken seriously.

In brief, I don’t consider this Holmes a real Holmes in any meaningful sense. But once you’ve made peace with that, the show is watchable.

Is It Elementary?

Sherlock Holmes, an ever-evolving icon, according to techgnotic. This article has a lots of artwork, from realistic drawings of the actors who have portrayed Holmes to comic-style caricatures.