Search Results for: Sherlock Holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett’s intro to The Adventures of Solar Pons

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I received my DVD of Ian McKellan’s Mr. Holmes in the mail and anxiously popped it into the player, with the expectation that I would be writing about it for this week’s post. I fell asleep during the first try. Hey: I’m 48 years old and by the time my son is asleep and I settle down in front of the television, I’m near my own bedtime. It happens. It took two further sessions to complete the film. It was…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Edgar Smith’s ‘The Implicit Holmes’

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By sheer numbers, Sherlock Holmes is more popular than he has ever been. This is in large part due to the massive success of BBC television’s Sherlock, which is an international sensation. The Robert Downey Jr. movies also contributed to a revival of interest in Holmes before that. Anecdotal evidence isn’t as good as objective, but it can still be valid. There are Holmes fans that have never actually read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty stories (the Canon)…

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Of Necromancers & Frog Gods – Part One (The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes)

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NECROMANCER GAMES OGL and D20 When Wizards of the Coast rolled out the Open Game License for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, a plethora of third party companies would produce products, leaving players with a seemingly unlimited number of options available for purchase. A few were great, more were terrible and most were in between. That period was known as the d20 boom, which inevitably led to a d20 bust and is explained in depth in Shannon Appelcline’s tremendous, four-volume…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Haining’s The Final Adventures of SH

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There are a LOT of books, fiction and non, about Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle that are worthy of standing alongside the sixty-story Canon of original Holmes tales. Today, we’re going to look at one I particularly like. Barnes and Noble has been reproducing classic works for years and selling them at affordable prices. Their editions are a great way to get folks introduced to the classics. But their output ranges father afield, and my Sherlockian bookshelf includes several…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes, the Police & Scotland Yard

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The most common official police force encountered during Holmes’s sixty cases was Scotland Yard. One can safely say that Doyle’s portrayal of the men of the force was somewhat less than flattering. None ever outsmarted Holmes (though one came pretty close) and most of them are adrift until Holmes reveals all at the end of the story. Scotland Yard was actually the descendant of an earlier police force in London. In 1748, Henry Fielding succeeded Thomas de Veil as Court…

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Future Treasures: The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

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Otto Penzler’s giant anthologies, including the 1,056-page The Vampire Archives, The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, occupy a place of honor in my collection. So I was very excited to see he’s releasing another one next week: The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, one of the biggest collection of Sherlock Holmes stories ever assembled. Arguably no other character in history has been so enduringly popular as Sherlock Holmes. Ever since his first appearance,…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Tying in the BBC Sherlock Special

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Back in July, what seems to be the most popular ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ post appeared here at Black Gate. I looked at what I think went wrong with season three of the BBC’s Sherlock. I included the just-released ninety-second, ‘first look’ video for the upcoming Special, to be aired around Christmas. And I pointed out it seemed to be full of the “Look how clever we are” bits that I lamented in my post. Now, just about…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Frederic Dorr Steele

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Back in July, in a post on Sidney Paget, I wrote “Along with Frederic Dorr Steele, Paget is certainly one of the two most significant illustrators of the great detective.” Having covered Paget, now we look at Dorr Steele. In 1893, Doyle, feeling that writing Holmes stories was holding him back from more important works, did the unthinkable: he killed the world’s most popular detective. In 1902, he revived Holmes for one adventure in his most famous story, The Hound of…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: After the King

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Back in January, I wrote a post on Terry Pratchett’s Cohen the Barbarian. It was primarily based on the short story “The Troll’s Bridge,” which was included in the anthology, After the King. That anthology was subtitled, ‘Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien.’ It included tales by nineteen fantasy and sci-fi authors, ostensibly all told in the style of Tolkien. The more cynical among us might view this as a cheap way to cash in on the Tolkien name (back…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes on Screen

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Holmes enthusiasts have their peculiarities. One of mine is that I enjoy just grabbing Alan Barnes’ Sherlock Holmes on Screen from the shelf and randomly reading about some past tv or film effort starring the great detective. Almost twenty years ago, I couldn’t find a single picture of Ronald Howard’s Holmes on the internet. So I scanned one from a book and that was the basis for HolmesOnScreen.com, which for about a decade, had more info about Holmes television and…

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