Tag Archives: Sherlock Holmes

Rejected Book Tour and Reading Dante in Ukraine

An original limerick for your weekend.

In meetings at Kensington Cross 
For lingo I searched at a loss. 
One word—marinara 
Was all I could bear, uh, 
For the spots on my shirt were all sauce.

No shirts were stained in the composition of that limerick. Now, on to the links.

Memoir: Rob Henderson has a memoir releasing next month called, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. J.D Vance praised it for a “gripping” message. Others called it “extraordinary.” But major city bookstores don’t want to schedule tour events for him, even though he had tens of thousands of social media followers (over 137k on Twitter).

Sherlock Holmes: Getting the great detective into print was a challenge for Conan Doyle in that he hoped to publish one of the better markets. Historian Lucy Worsley, who has a new BBC series on the author’s relationship with his detective, says the first stories were rejected thrice.

The rejections scarred Arthur and made him slightly ashamed of his character, because he wanted to be a high brow writer. Nevertheless, he persevered because he was short of money, and he had a family to support, and he was also very, very hardworking, and energetic.

After Sherlock’s first two outings, both of which were lacklustre in terms of readership, his literary agent suggested a new magazine called The Strand, which was a mid-market magazine aimed at commuters, who were hustling and making a life for themselves in the busy throbbing urban world of London, in the 1890s, that Arthur struck gold.

Self-Awareness: We seem to be overly aware of ourselves, don’t we? But we aren’t yet schizophrenic. “The cult of the ironic, distanced observer, aware of his own awareness, unable to break out of his solipsistic construction of himself and his world, has displaced what is now seen to be the naive, immediate relationship with reality as it is felt. This point of view has developed its own orthodoxy, even if most of us go about our lives as though we were actually involved with things, events and people not entirely of our making.” (via Rob Henderson)

Enraptured: February 12, 2024, will be the 100th anniversary of the first public performance of George Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue. World Radio had a segment on it earlier this month, discussing the piece and how it’s been altered in many recording.

Dante’s Inferno: Somewhere in Ukraine right now, my friend who publishes books orders printers in the bombed out city of Kharkiv to produce thousands of copies of Inferno. The trucks deliver weapons into Kharkiv. And, going back, empty, they decide to pick up thousands of copies of Dante’s Inferno.

“This is an image of war that happens as I write it: cars are bringing weapons into the besieged city that’s bombed daily, and they leave full of books.” (via The Book Haven)

Photo by Danya Gutan on Pexels.com

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.

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

Alone with Classics

Author Sarah Perry was “raised by Strict Baptists” in Essex and not allowed to watch movies or read contemporary books. The result? “I turned my back on modernity and lost myself to Hardy and Dickens, Brontë and Austen, Shakespeare, Eliot and Bunyan. I memorised Tennyson, and read Homer in prose and Dante in verse; I shed half my childhood tears at The Mill on the Floss. I slept with Sherlock Holmes beside my pillow, and lay behind the sofa reading Roget. It was as though publication a century before made a book suitable – never was I told I ought not to read this or that until I was older. To my teacher’s horror my father gave me Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was still at primary school, and I was simply left to wander from Thornfield to Agincourt to the tent of sulking Achilles, making my own way.”

And she soaked in the King James Bible. Her debut novel, After Me Comes the Flood, is reviewed here. (via Prufrock)

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.

Television Review: Sherlock: A Study In Pink

Although we naturally (and quite rightly) think of Sherlock Holmes as a character comfortably ensconced in Victorian London, with its hansom cabs rattling down cobblestone streets, yellow fog, and helmeted bobbies, the idea of updating the character isn’t actually a new one. The early Holmes films were always set in the year of their production, just as we today think nothing of seeing James Bond (whose stories were written in the 1950s and ’60s) using a laptop computer or carrying a cell phone. The first Holmes film actually set in period was The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone, released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1939. Then, after one more Victorian film for Fox (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), the series moved to Universal and back to the cheaper approach of updating.

I was prepared to dislike the new BBC series Sherlock, broadcast on PBS, but to my surprise I quite liked it. The new Holmes operates as a police consultant in contemporary London. The police are suspicious of him (one accuses him of being a “psychopath,” to which he replies that he’s a high-functioning sociopath). He doesn’t wear a deerstalker or Inverness cape, but those costume elements have tended to be overused (and inappropriately used) in films and TV shows anyway. The modern world doesn’t allow him to smoke, so he relies on multiple nicotine patches when he needs to think out a problem. He does take drugs. The actor who plays him (one who rejoices in the name Benedict Cumberbatch) looks too young for the part, but has the attitude exactly right. Continue reading Television Review: Sherlock: A Study In Pink

In which I look more like Sherlock Holmes than Robert Downey did

'The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual'. Dr Watson watching Sherlock Holmes going through mementoes of his old cases. From The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle from The Strand Magazine (London, 1893). Illustration by Sidney E Paget, the first artist to draw Sherlock Holmes. Engraving.

Not a bad weekend, all in all. The storms did no damage to my house that I’m aware of. I’d planned on doing something constructive and diligent in terms of house maintenance, but wasn’t able to manage it. On Sunday I gathered with other Sons of Norway members at Wabun Park in Minneapolis, and oddly enough it wasn’t for anything having to do with Vikings (much). We had a picnic to celebrate the centennial of our district. Somebody had spoken vaguely of dressing in period for 1910, so I made an effort. I wore a white dress shirt with a tie, light-colored khaki trousers with suspenders (Y shaped. You’ve got to have the Y configuration). And I topped it off with my panama hat. I actually looked sort of like I might have come from the 1930s, if you didn’t look too closely, but I made the effort. This paid off when somebody showed up with a 1913 Moline automobile, and I got to ride around in it a little because I was dressed right.

Sometimes—rarely–virtue is rewarded in this world.

Also watched the DVD of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey.

What shall I say about this very odd concoction? Continue reading In which I look more like Sherlock Holmes than Robert Downey did