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Author: Bob Byrne

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Copyrighted Detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Copyrighted Detective

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Copyright_SnoopyThis column was written the day before a nine-day, 1,900 mile round trip venture to Disney World. So, it’s a bit of a rush job. I’ll tackle the issue in more depth when the Supreme Court gets going.

Did that catch your interest?

Beginning with his children, the heirs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have battled to maintain control of the Sherlock Holmes copyright. The sons developed a reputation that endures to this day of gleefully trying to stick it to anyone who wanted to use Holmes without paying them their due.

When August Derleth attempted to publish his first collection of Solar Pons tales (you’re going to be reading lots more about Pons in this column: trust me!), the deceased Doyle’s sons threatened to sue him. Derleth persisted and happily, over 70 Pons stories would be published.

Derleth said, “The plain fact is that the Doyle sons are a pair of lazy bastards who have tried to eke out a complete living from proceeds of their father’s writings. Others have told me that before; I was dubious; but I am less so.”

All 60 of Doyle’s Holmes stories are in the public domain in England. At one time they also were in America, but when Disney backed legislation to protect their ownership of Mickey Mouse, the last set of Holmes stories, collectively known as The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, came back under copyright protection.

The characters from all non-Casebook stories and those previous stories remained in the public domain, for use by all. To avoid “trouble,” and/or to get the Estate’s blessing, many authors, filmmakers, etc., have paid a fee to use Holmes.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The International Exhibition of SH

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The International Exhibition of SH

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Exhibit_Room
The scene of the crime, where you have to determine a bullet’s trajectory

The International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes began its run last year in Portland and has set up shop here in Columbus, OH, from February through September of 2014. It will be moving on to St. Louis, Dallas, Santa Ana, and Denver before the final stop in Seattle in October of 2016.

The Exhibition capitalizes on the massive popularity of the world’s first private consulting detective. Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1886, Holmes has never been more popular worldwide than he is over one-hundred and twenty years later.

It is a traveling Holmes museum and includes a mystery that you attempt to solve by examining clues and conducting tests. And the various items, which are all enclosed in glass cases, are absolutely worth seeing.

The show is hosted on the second floor at COSI: the Center of Science and Industry. After being instructed that you cannot take food or drink in, take pictures or use your cell phone inside, you are given your Notebook for solving the mystery.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Murder By Decree

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Murder By Decree

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That hairy fellow is director Bob Clark

Thanks in large part to Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution (book and film), Sherlock Holmes had a revival of popularity in the mid seventies. This resulted in an under-appreciated British-Canadian big-screen effort, Murder By Decree.

The most famous detective had tackled the most famous serial killer, Jack the Ripper, in 1965’s A Study in Terror. Originally conceived as a sequel to Christopher Lee’s under-achieving Sherlock Holmes & The Deadly Necklace, John Neville played a solid Holmes, though saddled with Donald Houston’s doofus of a Watson.

A bit lurid, it’s a good Holmes film, though promoted to appeal to Adam West’s very popular ‘Batman’ TV show crowd (“Here comes the original caped crusader”).

The Ripper File was a book based on Jack the Ripper, a BBC miniseries in which two popular TV detectives investigated the Jack the Ripper case. That miniseries introduced Joseph Sickert and his royal conspiracy theory (later turned into Stephen Knight’s book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution) to the world.

Director and producer Bob Clark (whose next film, improbably, would be Porky’s) built his story around The Ripper File. There are several variations of the royal conspiracy theory and Murder by Decree changes some (but not all) of the names and follows one of them.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Crimes Club

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Crimes Club

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CrimesClub_DoyleHoudini
Doyle with Harry Houdini

Violette Malan wrote a post about Isaac Asimov’s Black Widower mysteries. These were stories about a group of men, members of a private club, who met monthly and tried to solve a guest’s mystery.

The Black Widowers were based on a real-life group that Asimov was a member of, The Trap Door Spiders. Founded by science-fiction author Fletcher Pratt, I believe that the roots go even deeper and can be traced back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Name That Crime – In December of 1903, six men met for lunch at the Carlton Club in London. That meal was the genesis for the formation the following year of Our Society, better known as The Crimes Club. The founding members, including Doyle, met at London’s Grand Central Hotel on July 17, 1904 for a dinner.

The Crimes Club would meet three or four times annually on a Sunday evening. After dinner, a member and/or a guest would give a talk about a celebrated crime, recent or historical, and the members would discuss and debate it, likely over drinks and cigars. Often, lawyers who had been involved in the case would provide inside information.

Doyle was pleased with the opportunity to hear what had happened to persons in the famous cases, as well as to see trial exhibits and even handle actual evidence.

Such items included strychnine pills found on convicted poisoner Dr. Thomas Neill Cream when he was arrested and bones from the right arm of the Radcliffe Highway Murderer, John Williams.

Williams’s burial site had been dug up when a water main was being laid in 1910. Club member George Sims saw a unique opportunity and grabbed the bones!

And of course, they talked about Saucy Jack: Jack the Ripper!

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Nero Wolfe

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Meet Nero Wolfe

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Wolfe_Drawing1In 1926, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned his last Holmes tale, The Adventure of the Retired Colourman. Rex Stout, a fan of those tales, would shortly create a detective who would not only evoke memories of Holmes, but who would cast his own (gargantuan) shadow: Nero Wolfe. The seventy-four stories, written over forty-one years, would be collectively known as the Corpus, akin to the Sherlockian Canon.

Nero Wolfe lives in a New York City brownstone with Archie Goodwin, Fritz Brenner, and Theodore Horstmann. This boys’ club (Wolfe makes Holmes look like a romantic) is a self-contained unit, with Wolfe and Archie solving crimes, Fritz cooking and taking care of the household chores, and Horstmann assisting Wolfe with his hobby, the cultivation of orchids in a rooftop greenhouse.

Archie often comments on the beauty of the orchids, which is a far cry from the thoughts of General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep: “Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, and their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.” Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe, I guess.

Because the characters do not age, the stories all have a comfortable familiarity about them. Also, they are set contemporary to their writing, so while in a Holmes tale, it is ‘always 1895’, the Wolfe stories feel much more like modern mysteries, even though some are over seventy-five years old.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: New Treasures: The Game’s Afoot (Wordsworth)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: New Treasures: The Game’s Afoot (Wordsworth)

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Wordsworth_GamesAfootOur fearless leader, John O’Neill, has been reviewing entries in Wordsworth’s Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural series: with emphasis on the supernatural end. So…I figured I’d look at one of the mystery entries.

Sherlock Holmes: The Game’s Afoot, offers twenty new tales of the world’s first private consulting detective. The real mystery is why I couldn’t find a single reference to this book anywhere on Wordsworth’s website. Curious, indeed.

Sherlockian pastiches are meant to emulate the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original tales. As opposed to parodies, which spoof Holmes.

With the explosion of self-publishing, the quality of pastiches has come to vary wildly. There is quite a bit of dreck out there and the days of buying every Holmes story listed on Amazon are long gone.

The eleven authors who contributed to this collection worked hard to create the same kind of atmosphere Conan Doyle did. David Stuart Davies is the editor of this Wordsworth series and is a well-respected Sherlockian. He includes three of his tales. June Thomson, John Hall, Dennis O. Smith … there are some well-respected Sherlockian names in this collection.

 

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: When Elric of Melnibone Came to 221B Baker Street

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: When Elric of Melnibone Came to 221B Baker Street

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Moorcock_DorsetLodgerWell, not quite. That title was just to grab your attention. But Elric’s creator did set a tale at London’s most famous address, 221B Baker Street. And it’s a pretty ‘normal’ Holmes tale; which you might not expect from the guy who created Stormbringer.

I enjoyed Fletcher Vrendenburgh’s post last week on Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. I devoured the tales of Corum, Hawkmoon, Erekose, and of course Elric in my middle-school years.

Being a Dungeons and Dragons player, these books were awesome. I think I even used Rackhir the Red Archer in a game. If you’ve not read  significant parts of that saga, your fantasy education is lacking.

Moorcock’s work encompasses much more than just the Eternal Champion tales. I’m a Christian and I was fascinated by the premise of The War Hound and all the World’s Pain (an excellent read: the sequel, not so much).

I even wrote a paper on the idea for a high school religion class. That got me an invite to see the teacher, a priest, after class.

Back in 1995, Moorcock wrote “The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger” as a privately printed chapbook which he let friends of his, who were opening a hotel on Dorset Street, give away to their first guests.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Gary Gygax’s Role Playing Mastery

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Gary Gygax’s Role Playing Mastery

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Gygax_RPMcoverMy Dungeons and Dragons roots don’t go back to the very beginning, but I didn’t miss it by much. I remember going to our Friendly Local Gaming Store with my buddy. He would buy a shiny TSR module and I would get a cool Judges Guild supplement.

And I remember how D&D was the center of the RPG world in those pre-PC/video game playing days. And Gary Gygax was IT. It all centered around him. So, I’ve been reading with interest a book that he put out in 1987, less than twelve months after he had severed all ties with TSR.

Role Playing Mastery is his very serious look at RPGing. He included the 17 steps he identified to becoming a Role Playing Master.

If you’re reading this post, you probably know that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson co-created Dungeons and Dragons circa 1973-1974. Unfortunately, it was not a long-lasting partnership and lawsuits would ensue. While both were instrumental in creating D&D, it is Gygax who is remembered as the Father of Role Playing.

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John D. MacDonald: A Writer’s Writer

John D. MacDonald: A Writer’s Writer

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MacDonald_Typewriter
That thing he’s using is called a ‘typewriter’

“With sufficient funds to cover four months’ living expenses, he set out and wrote at an incredible pace, providing eight hundred thousand words. Writing for a wide variety of magazines, he kept more than thirty stories in the mail constantly, not giving up on a story until it had been rejected by at least ten markets

In the process he accumulated almost a thousand rejection slips after five months of effort. During this period, MacDonald worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, literally learning his craft and gaining the experience of a decade as he went along, which was important for a man who made no serious attempt to write until he was thirty.”

– Martin H. Greenberg, in the introduction to Other Times, Other Worlds.

That is how John D. MacDonald, thirty years old, fresh out of the military in 1946 and with one published short story (which he actually sent to his wife in a letter: she submitted it to a magazine) learned the craft of fiction writing.

One of America’s finest writers (note: I didn’t qualify that with the word ‘fiction’) set himself upon a course that no sane person would have undertaken in that situation.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Hammer Hound

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Hammer Hound

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CushingHoundPoster1
There are several good posters for this film.

Last week, we looked at Tom Baker’s relatively unknown Hound of the Baskervilles. As this post is being published on May 26, which is the birthday of a classic Holmes, we’ll look his version of The Hound. For on this date in 1913, Peter Cushing was born in Surrey.

Basil Rathbone’s contract expired in 1946 and, feeling imprisoned in the role of Sherlock Holmes, he refused to renew it. So great was his shadow that it would be thirteen years before another studio even attempted to make a Sherlock Holmes movie. Hammer Films is legendary in England for their run of horror films, starting in the fifties.

Those old Universal classics from America had never caught on across the pond. Hammer, however, made a series of successful horror films, frequently co-starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

In 1959, Hammer broke new ground with the first colorized version of The Hound. Not surprisingly, they turned to Cushing and Lee to carry the movie.

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