Search Results for: public life of sherlock holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Let’s Talk About The Dying Detective

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Last week I wrote about the season four opener of BBC’s Sherlock, which was an improvement on season three and the abysmal Abominable Bride. But the second episode was yet another huge disappointment, so I’m not going to bother with a negative post about it. However, I’m going to talk about the Canonical story it was based on. It’s no huge surprise that The Lying Detective was based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale, “The Dying Detective.” As far as that…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock is Back With “The Six Thatchers”

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Season three of BBC’s Sherlock was an absolute train wreck, destroying what had been a great show. Then The Abominable Bride took the long-awaited Victorian-Era Cumberbatch/Freeman episode and turned it into some stupid psychological modern day shlock involving the dead, giggling Moriarty. So, season four finally arrived, just shy of three years since season three ended. And you know what? The Six Thatchers wasn’t a disaster. It wasn’t up to the standards of the first two seasons, but it was…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: George Mann’s Holmes

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Last week I wrote about two Titan Books novels from James Lovegrove. I mentioned that there are two distinct lines of Holmes pastiches from Titan (actually, there are other books that don’t fall in either category, such as Kareem Abdul Jabaar’s Mycroft Holmes novel). The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes started as reprints and added new books into the mix and are generally more traditional stories. The other features more elements of horror, steampunk and/or the supernatural and George Mann’s…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks & Nightmares

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In the early 1900’s, Maurice Leblanc had his French detective, Arsene Lupin, face off with Herlock Sholmes. I think you know who he’s battling – spelling disregarded. 1965’s A Study in Terror sent Holmes after Jack the Ripper on movie screens and in 1988, and Sax Rohmer biographer Clay Van Ash brought Holmes and Fu Manchu together in Ten Years Beyond Baker Street. Crossovers have become more and more popular over the years. James Lovegrove currently has Holmes interacting with…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Holmes Christmas Carol

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A Holmes Christmas Carol – By Bob Byrne It is with a certain sense of misgiving that I relate the following tale, which took place during the Christmas season of 1902. I had moved out of our Baker Street lodgings earlier that year, having married only a few months before that most festive of holidays. I now had rooms in Queen Anne Street and was quite busy with my flourishing medical practice. A newly married man, I once again found…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Field Bazaar

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In December of 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rather unceremoniously tossed Sherlock Holmes off of a ledge at the Reichenbach Falls, stunning (and angering) the great detective’s legion of fans. Doyle, who famously said that Holmes “kept him from better things” (meaning, the more important, much less popular works that Doyle really wanted to write), insisted that he was done with Holmes and that was that. Of course, from August 1901 through September of 1902, The Strand Magazine serialized the…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cool and Lam are Back!!!!

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Erle Stanley Gardner is best known as the creator of Perry Mason. Mason, of course, was the famous lawyer portrayed almost three hundred times (!!!) by Raymond Burr, spanning three decades of television. But Gardner was a prolific pulpster who wrote far, far more than just Mason stories. For example, his Ed Jenkins was one of the early hard boiled detectives appearing in Black Mask. And under the name of A.A. Fair, he wrote twenty-nine thoroughly entertaining novels about the…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Get Hard Cased (with Charles Ardai)

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Charles Ardai co-founded the internet company, Juno. That success gave him the opportunity to start his own publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, which both reprints forgotten pulp novels and also publishes new novels in the genre. The roster of Hard Case Crime authors is beyond impressive: Lawrence Block, Max Allen Collins, Lester Dent, Erle Stanley Gardner, Stephen King, Wade Miller. Richard Stark, Donald Westlake and many more. Hard Case Crime has found several “lost” books by some big names, including…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Scarlet Claw

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We’re back with more Basil Rathbone again this week. Of course, you read last week’s essay about Sherlock Holmes & the Secret Weapon. This week, it’s a look at The Scarlet Claw, which seems to be considered the best of the Universal films (though it’s not my favorite). First, let me mention the restorations done for the Rathbone films. The UCLA Film and Television Archive has restored over 700 movies and television shows, including all 14 of the Rathbone/Bruce films….

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Basil Rathbone & The Secret Weapon

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It’s reported that in early 1939, movie mogul Daryl Zanuck was at a party when a friend suggested that someone should make movies out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective stories. Zanuck liked the idea, but wondered aloud who should play Holmes. The friend, writer Gene Markey, replied “Basil Rathbone” without hesitation. He then added that Nigel Bruce would make a perfect Watson. Shortly thereafter, the duo began filming The Hound of the Baskervilles, followed quickly by The Adventures…

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