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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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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: 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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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock (Doctor) Who?

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock (Doctor) Who?

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Baker_PipeThe BBC recently held a ‘Best of Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Poll’ and Tom Baker came out number one. This is a bit surprising, as he roamed in the Tardis from 1974 to 1981, which was over three decades ago. And less relevant but still of note is that the Doctor never really broke big in America until David Tenant took on the role.

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Roger Moore starred in the TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York. It’s not quite as bad as it might appear, though John Huston was woefully miscast as Moriarty.

After Baker gave the Doctor up for regeneration, the BBC approached him and asked what project he would like to do next with his popularity still soaring. Baker immediately replied, “Sherlock Holmes,” and traded his scarf for a deerstalker.

With England’s most iconic actor (sorry, Roger Moore) to play England’s most iconic character (sorry, James Bond), only the biggest Holmes story would do. Though that’s not the smartest choice to showcase Holmes.

The BBC hadn’t tackled The Hound of the Baskervilles since Peter Cushing’s second attempt at it for his 1968 television series (a role he secured after failed attempts to land Robert Stephens and Eric Porter). There had been an American TV version in 1972 starring a dull Stewart Granger with Bernard Fox as yet another doofus Watson who mumbled his lines.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Eille Norwood: the Silent Detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Eille Norwood: the Silent Detective

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Norwood and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Stoll Pictures Annual Dinner

This may shock you, but there were on-screen Sherlock Holmes before Benedict Cumberbatch! And for you old-time fans, even before Robert Downey Jr. Really! The first great movie Holmes comes from the silent film era. And he shared a last name with another actor who would give arguably the greatest portrayal of the world’s first private consulting detective.

William Gillette had come to personify Sherlock Holmes through repeated performances of his stage play in the U.S. and Europe. His 1916 film version certainly helped as well, but was not a critical part of his success. Anthony Edward Brett would become the first great movie Holmes, though he would achieve it as Eille Norwood.

Born in 1861, Norwood was primarily a stage actor in England when he landed the role that would make him famous throughout the U.K..

In 1921, a British film company named Stoll decided to film a series of shorts based on Doyle’s stories. For the next two years, they would produce forty-five of the twenty-minute films, along with two longer ones. Doyle’s short stories fit the twenty-minute length quite well and Stoll wasn’t forced to add inauthentic filler to them.

The first fifteen, chosen randomly from among Doyle’s stories, were called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That same year, the first version of what would be the most famous film title in the Canon was made, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Maurice Elvey directed all sixteen films. That same year, Elvey made a romantic drama called The Fruitful Vine. The lead was played by a young man named Basil Rathbone. How about that?

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Playing the Game With the Master Blackmailer

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Playing the Game With the Master Blackmailer

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Milverton_SP1Far more than with any other character, Sherlock Holmes has been treated as if he had really lived. It’s not just that people believe in the character as they read the story. That’s usually the case in good fiction.

But there are hundreds of books that treat Holmes and Watson as if they were alive. Speculation about Holmes abounds. No other character’s life is explored in such detail, expounded upon and speculated about.

This treating Holmes (and Watson) as if he were a real person is called, ‘Playing the Game.’ And there’s no shortage of Holmes fans that have done it in new stories and scholarly writings about the great detective. An example of my own follows.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of my favorites stories of the sixty that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes.

If you haven’t read it before, I strongly suggest you do so before reading the rest of this post. It won’t take you very long. The fifty-six short stories are quick reads.

Milverton is a master blackmailer. No one is better at it. Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that Milverton is the worst man in London. For someone who seemingly knew about every type of depravity and ruffian in the city, that is quite a statement.

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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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