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Author: Bob Byrne

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: All The World’s A Stage

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: All The World’s A Stage

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Speck_PagetSnake
Sidney Paget’s well-known drawing from The Speckled Band

There are two Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that have a gothic feel to them. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of four novels featuring Holmes and the best-known story of the sixty which Doyle wrote. The other, the ninth short story to feature Holmes, is “The Speckled Band.”

A creepy mansion; exotic animals roaming loose, gypsies, an imposing stepfather, eerie whistles in the night and the mysterious death of a daughter some years before: it has all the trappings. Doyle himself listed it as his favorite story and I’m not going to ruin it here. If you haven’t read “The Speckled Band,” you should go do it right now. Well, after you finish this post.

Doyle wrote several plays, two of which featured Sherlock Holmes. The Crown Diamond was and remains a poor one (as does “The Mazarin Stone,” the Holmes short story it mirrors).

But the other, born of financial necessity, was a big hit.

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House of Cards Kicked the Cat

House of Cards Kicked the Cat

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Houseofcards_RichardsonI mentioned Netflix’s wildly successful House of Cards in a recent Public Life of Sherlock Holmes posting. I’ve written a couple of screenplays that will be made into movies shortly before the Earth plunges into the sun.

Or more likely, sometime after that event. Just as I enjoy reading books on writing, I’ve also found lots to learn from books on screenwriting (which is a very different proposition).

A brief aside: Amazon (which should give me stock with the number of purchases I’ve made from them) includes screenwriting as a subcategory of “Humor & Entertainment.”

Not every screenwriting book is funny. In fact, the most useful ones generally aren’t! That said, we resume our normal programming.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

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Gently_HolisticThe plan is to go non-Holmes every fourth post or so, just to mix it up a bit.  So, today, we move over to the mystery field. Well, sort of…

Race Williams, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Peter Kane, Max Thursday, Lew Archer, Travis McGee, Dave Robicheaux: the list of accomplished private eyes is a long one. And of course, Sherlock Holmes was the first professional consulting detective. But there has only been one holistic detective. Dirk Gently.

It’s hard to imagine a better science fiction parody than Douglas Adams’s marvelous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Five books (plus one short story and an authorized sequel), they are the standard.

Adams’s brilliance was equally on display when he tackled the private eye genre with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

If you’ve read any of the Hitchhiker’s books, you know that Adams was not your typical writer. Gently, though mentioned earlier, does not appear until page 114. In fact, the main character is really Richard MacDuff, though Gently is certainly at the center of things.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes – Creation to Death and Back

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes – Creation to Death and Back

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Ormond1In 1882, Arthur Conan Doyle (not yet “Sir”) opened up his own shop as a doctor in Southsea (England). Business was slow and his most notable triumph was marrying the sister of a patient who died of meningitis.

With some spare time on his hands, Doyle wrote fiction. Somewhere around 1886, he came to the conclusion that he could write detective stories better than the ones he was reading. He would create, “a scientific detective, who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.”

Putting the pen to the paper, he completed A Study in Scarlet (working title, The Tangled Skein) that year. Originally starring Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker, the names had settled into the now familiar Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Doyle’s stories of Holmes owe a debt to Edgar Allen Poe that has been discussed by far better minds than mine. The now mostly forgotten Emile Gaboriau was also acknowledged by Doyle as an influence.

Mystery maven and Doyle biographer John Dickinson Carr stated that Holmes was clearly based on Doyle himself, which seems overly flattering.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Short-Lived Holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Short-Lived Holmes

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HouseofCardsNetflix’s House of Cards redefined what can be achieved by a web series. Everything about it, from casting to story to visuals, screams “quality.” The fact that it was intended to run for only a single season yet has already been renewed for a third testifies to the success that the show has had. It’s tough to maintain viewership when there’s almost nobody to root for, but they’ve done it.

But I wonder how many people realize that it is a remake of a 1990 British miniseries (apparently lust for power transcends decades. And centuries…)? Ian Richardson plays the Kevin Spacey role. Francis Urquhart has a disarming smile that makes him seem more warm than Spacey’s Frank Underwood. Don’t be fooled!

HouseofCardsRichardsonThe original House of Cards has a few Holmes ties. Female lead Susannah Harker appeared opposite Charlton Heston in the TV version of Crucifer of Blood, a modified version of The Sign of the Four.

She was also the client in Jeremy Brett’s version of The Adventure of the Dying Detective. Also, Colin Jeavons was Brett’s Inspector Lestrade. But it is Richardson’s brief tenure as Sherlock Holmes that we will look at now.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Lord of Misrule

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Lord of Misrule

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LeeQuestion – What do Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, James Bond, Fu Manchu, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, John Belushi and Sherlock Holmes all have in common?

Answer – Lee. Christopher Lee (one of his autobiographies was titled Lord of Misrule)

In May, talented British actor Christopher Lee turns 92 years old. Thanks to his performance as Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he is as popular today as he ever has been. And proving he knows how to get in on a winning franchise, he was Count Dooku in the second Star Wars trilogy. Which chronologically was the… oh, never mind.

But Lee first made his name in the horror flicks produced by Hammer Films in Great Britain in the late fifties and sixties. Lee played the monster (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy), while friend Peter Cushing was the protagonist.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes

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Sherlock BBC-smallMe? Oh, why, thank you for asking. I’ve been into Sherlock Holmes since the early eighties. Columnist, contributor, reviewer, short story writer, screenwriter, newsletter editor, website creator: I’ve found many ways to express my Holmes geekiness.

I used to run a Holmes On Screen website, which I dropped just before the first Robert Downey, Jr. movie: how’s that for timing? Swing by www.SolarPons.com to see my (not one, but) two free, online newsletters inspired by the world’s first private consulting detective.

If you have a pulse, you may have noticed that Sherlock Holmes is rather popular these days. In the mid-eighties, the British TV series starring Jeremy Brett had revived interest in the detective. That interest waned as Brett’s health deteriorated and the series quality fell off towards the end. A few made-for-television movies, including ones starring Matthew Frewer (that Max Headroom guy), Richard Roxburgh and Rupert Everett, didn’t generate much excitement. Sherlock Holmes and the Vengeance of Dracula, once the hottest script in Hollywood, lost its luster and became a dead property. Sherlock Holmes was as viable as Martin Hewitt.* “Who,” you say? Exactly.

Then, on Christmas Day, 2009, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes opened and grossed over a half a billion dollars worldwide. A sequel did even better here and abroad. Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat, deciding to expand beyond Doctor Who, grabbed Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, put them in modern day London and helped make Sherlock Holmes even more popular than during the stories’ initial run with their simply titled Sherlock.

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