T “The Weald of Kent, Surrey & Sussex”, a site specialising in the people, history and genealogy of the area, can be found a page with a timeline of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, selections from John Dickson Carr’s The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a very interesting interactive family tree: The Weald - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle:

Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard, lived at Windlesham in Crowborough with his second wife Jean Leckie and their family from 1907 until his death in July 1930.

FROM Shelly Shepherd Klaner at the Santa Rosa (California) newspaper The Press Democrat comes an interesting look at two of the current kings of Sherlockian pastiche, Two mystery scribes at home with Holmes - Despite their differences, writers say it’s elementary, dear reader - they were destined to meet:

Arthur Conan Doyle himself couldn’t have foreseen the serendipitous meeting of two Petaluma mystery writers, both of whom use Sherlock Holmes in their new novels.

Michael Kurland and Steve Hockensmith are 30 years apart in age and seemingly as different as Felix and Oscar from “The Odd Couple.”

Kurland sports a list of published books on a canon several pages long; Hockensmith is excited about the release of his first novel.

Kurland used to be a stand-up comic; Hockensmith made his living as an entertainment reporter and even spent a year as the editor of X-Files magazine.

Along the way, Hockensmith, 37, interviewed Kurland, 67, for an article about the longevity of Sherlock Holmes.

The new novels in question are, of course, Michael Kurland’s The Empress of India : A Professor Moriarty Novel and Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range.

thank the many people who have contacted me, wanting to know if I had ever heard the “great Holmes joke,” and so I figure I had better mention it. There are a few versions of this going around, and a few are accompanied by a more erstwhile build-up or a cartoon (although I can’t seem to find them online), but I’ll just link to the version that was finally knocked from first to second place at the UK’s Laugh Lab: Holmes and Watson go camping:

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good dinner and a bottle of wine, they retire for the night, and go to sleep.

Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend. “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

“I see millions and millions of stars, Holmes” replies Watson.

“And what do you deduce from that?”

Read the rest….

HILE many people are familiar with the good Dr. John H. Watson, the beginning of A Study in Scarlet, in which he (briefly) relates some of his war experiences, can leave a number of readers confused. What were in fact quite current events in 1887 are nowadays relegated to historians, and so it was of no little pleasure to come across a site discussing Watson and The Second Anglo-Afghan War 1878-1880:

Watson’s participation in the war follows his being attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as an Assistant Surgeon and finding, by the time he landed at Bombay, the regiment had already been sent to Afghanistan at the outbreak of war. He was packed off to join them at Kandahar and afterwards attached to the Berkshires, accompanying them into the chaos of Maiwand and being wounded there by the bullet from a jezail. Watson’s orderly, ‘Murray’, managed to pull him out of danger to join the retreat, and he was soon recovering at Peshawar before he was able to get home and up to London, looking for lodgings and employment of some kind.

The explanations include a number of interesting tidbits that give a decent background to Watson’s experiences, and also examine whether Watson and his orderly Murray did in fact take part in the battle. Also on the site are timelines, maps, articles, and more, for those interested in what was really happening behind the scenes.

VER at The Glowing Dial, an Old Time Radio fan site offering free downloads, you can download and listen to a special tribute to the Master on radio. With nearly three and a half hours of Holmes culled from Mutual, ABC and the Beeb, as well as a short recording of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this makes a dandy little introduction to the various series that were so popular from the 1940’s to the 1960’s. Note that the sound quality of such old recordings can be quite variable, so be prepared for some static, pops and scratches.

The Glowing Dial tips its magnifying glass to the world’s premier detective, Sherlock Holmes in EPISODE NET 18 (first run between August 22, 2004 and September 11, 2004) of The Glowing Dial, in which we present five different actor pairings of Holmes and Watson plus a special commentary by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “William Fox has the honor to present the world famous author and scientist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” (soundtrack from a short film produced around 1930 or 31 in which Conan Doyle talks about his literary creation, Sherlock Holmes as well as his interest in spiritualism).

[Hear Episode 18]

The Holmes episodes in question are:

• The Case of the Limping Ghost, a 1945 Mutual production with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce
• The Adventure of the Haunted Bagpipes, a 1947 ABC production with Tom Conway (Rathbone’s immediate radio successor) and Nigel Bruce
• The Case of the Cradle That Rocked Itself, a 1947 Mutual production with John Stanley and Alfred Shirley
• The Case of the Six Napoleons, a 1954 BBC production with Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson
• The Adventure of Silver Blaze, a 1962 BBC production with Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley

Be prepared to wait an hour or so for the download, as it’s 47 Mb and server can be a little slow. (I topped out at 10K/s.) For those without high-speed or any patience, you can also listen to it via RealMedia streaming. See the bottom of the page.

For those Rathbone fans among us, you can also catch him reading four Poe stories in the Glowing Dial’s Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe.

LTHOUGH I figure many readers of A Study in Sherlock already know about this, I thought I should be sure to mention it for those newcomers to Holmes who may have missed the original announcement. (This is not to mention, I’ve had a few dozen kindly people send me email about it in the past couple of weeks.)

Stanford University is now publishing paper and PDF facsimiles of the original stories of Sherlock Holmes exactly as they appeared in the Strand Magazine, over a century ago, complete with the wonderful illustrations of Sidney Paget. The downloads are free, but if you have a U.S. mailing address (alas! I’m a Canadian!), you can subscribe to this most excellent service and have each one mailed to you as they are printed, free of charge. Once the program ends on April 14th, they will be shipping to international addresses.

Over 12 weeks from January through April 2006, Stanford will be republishing, free of charge, two early Holmes stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Speckled Band”; the nine-part novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles; and the famous “last” encounter between Holmes and Moriarty, “The Final Problem.” If you would like to receive paper facsimiles of the original magazine releases, you may sign up on our website. If you would prefer to download the facsimile as a pdf from the website, each installment will be available on successive Fridays.

Discovering Sherlock Holmes - A Community Reading Project From Stanford University

To date, they’ve published A Scandal in Bohemia [SCAN], The Speckled Band [SPEC], and the first eleven chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles [HOUN], all excellent choices for those who have never read an original Holmes story. I eagerly await April 14th, but in the meantime still become possessed with an insane jealousy whenever I hear of my American friends receiving one of these collectors items….

WO days ago, I received an email from a poor high school student named Veronica who, working on an assignment about detective fiction, followed some links from this site and became terribly bewildered. The issue, specifically, was this: are the Sherlock Holmes tales fictional, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or was Holmes a real person whose exploits were recorded by Watson and passed along to his literary agent, Conan Doyle? Given the links that she followed, I can see where she might have become confused. It all has to do with The Game.

While I’m sure that many scholars will disagree with this definition (because they are scholars, and disagree for a living…), “the Game” is a playful exercise based upon the premise that Sherlock Holmes was real, that Watson recorded and wrote all the tales, and that any blunders in the sacred writings are not actually errors of editing or memory, but rather clues to things that Watson does not relate. The scholar then uses Holmes’ own methods of deduction and observation to come up with inferences and conjectures that suit the text. For example, at no point in the Canon are we actually told what Dr. John H. Watson’s middle initial stands for. However, in the story The Man with the Twisted Lip, his wife says to a visitor,

“It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather that I sent James off to bed?”

Hmmm… James? Why did she call him James? Some Sherlockians have seized upon this to infer the Scottish version of “James” as his middle initial, that being Hamish. Meanwhile, others have said that she called him James because the name John reminded her of Jonathon Small in the horrible ordeal of The Sign of Four. Of course, the other theories are too numerous to mention.

The point of this game therefore lies in clever debate and the exercise of one’s knowledge of the Canon, including the hundreds (or likely, thousands) of pieces written about the texts, most of which play the Game themselves. The ideas and theories proposed can be outlandish indeed –for example, the famous mystery writer Rex Stout (the creator of Nero Wolfe) once proposed that Watson was a woman– but if these fall in line with the text of the Canon, such innovation can be applauded. Or systematically deconstructed, refuted and ridiculed. Or both.

In short, Veronica, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did indeed write the sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes, but sometimes it’s more fun to play make-believe and pretend he didn’t.

have seen a number of books over the years that are –as an academic friend calls such things– “quotefests”, collections of quotations taken from various sources to illuminate a particular subject. Any library of Sherlockian commentary is likely to contain a few of these, and mine is no exception. The first one that comes to mind (and one of the better ones, in my opinion) is The Sherlock Holmes Companion by Michael and Mollie Hardwick. However, many of these books having gone out of print over the years, it’s nice to be able to find one online that I can share with people, and so I was glad to trip across The Whole Art of Detection, written by “Sherlock Holmes” and edited by W. Lambert Gardiner. As you’ve probably deduced by now, this is an online book about Holmes’ observation and deduction, filled with quotations taken from the Canon and sprinkled with a bit of commentary. The name is taken from The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, wherein Holmes says, “At present, I am, as you know, fairly busy, but propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a text-book which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.” (ABBE) The premise here is that Gardiner has found this fabled book:

Taking my cue from Holmes, I will not describe my emotion but simply state the fact that, in the space above the false ceiling, there lay my quarry - the manuscript of The Whole Art of Detection. What follows is a transcription of this wonderful document. I have taken the liberty of adding footnotes to place it in its modern context, trusting that Holmes would have approved since he conceded that even he had little capacity to foresee the future [HOUN].

You can read the entire book online at Scot & Siliclone Books (don’t fret — it’s fairly short). If you’re not famiiar with the abbreviations, don’t forget that you can download my handy-dandy reference card to help you along.

ERIODICALLY, BBC 7 Radio will air a (semi-)new Sherlock Holmes adventure which you can listen to online in their “Listen Again” section, essentially a seven-day archive. So, while you can, visit the BBC 7 - Listen again page to hear Clive Merrison as Sherlock Holmes and Michael Williams as Dr. Waton in Bert Coules’ adaption of the last Holmes adventure:

Sherlock Holmes: His Last Bow
His Last Bow: 1914. The services of a certain bee-keeper are called upon to help his country in her darkest hour.

Link (almost half-way down the page, and in offered in RealAudio format). These adaptions are top-notch and generally quite faithful to the original stories by Conan Doyle, or as much as possible given the medium and time constraints.

(Thanks to Pauline in the WelcomeHolmes mailing list for the heads-up.)

ELOW is one of the most oft-used depictions of Holmes and Watson. This beautiful illustration by Sidney Paget adorned the original Strand publication of Silver Blaze, and is captioned “Holmes gave me a sketch of the events.”

This is the signature image of Sherlock Holmes burnt indelibly into our minds by popular culture. Anyone wearing a deerstalker is therefore automatically assumed to be playing the role of the great detective, applying logic and observation to the unravelling of some crime.

The problem –and this is one of the most basic “secrets” that an initiate into the world of Holmes must learn– is that the Master rarely wore such a hat, if ever. Why? Well, simply put, a deerstalker (or “fore-and-aft cap”) is something used for country excursions. In Silver Blaze, Holmes and Watson went into the countryside where horses were being bred and trained, and hence it’s appropriate in this illustration. The text actually reads:

And so it happened that an hour or so later I found myself in the corner of a first-class carriage flying along en route for Exeter, while Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, dipped rapidly into the bundle of fresh papers which he had procured at Paddington.

Paget interpretted this cap as a deerstalker. The image of Holmes in deerstalker was further spread through the famous play by –and the popular depictions of– the reknowned Holmes actor William Gillette. Eventually, it became synonomous with the character.

But, since it’s meant for country outings, you’d no more wear such a cap in the middle of London than you would wear a top hat climbing a mountain, or a jester’s cap while on safari. Sorry if this leads to any degree of disallusionment, but look at the bright side: you can now impress your friends with your vast knowledge of Victorian headwear. You’ll be the hit of the party, to be sure.

(And don’t forget that you can read Silver Blaze (SILV), replete with the original illustrations, at the incomparable Camden House.)

R, the singular case of the detective, the mouse, and the washed-up pop star.

Depending on your country of origin, all or part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works on Sherlock Holmes, known affectionately as The Canon, are considered to have had their copyrights expire. For example, in Canada (where I’m based) and in the United Kingdom, as far as I know, all the works are now in the public domain and may be freely downloaded, shared, copied, printed and even sold, a fact which explains all those $2 classic paperbacks at your local mega-bookstore. Most Berne Convention countries have an expiry date of the life of the author plus fifty years, and Doyle passed away in 1930.

In the United States, however, it’s a little different. Several years ago, congressman Sonny Bono (formerly of the 60’s and 70’s duo Sonny and Cher) introduced an act to extend copyright [Wikipedia], an act that was supposedly lobbied for quite heavily by the Disney corporation in order to prevent Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain. Under its terms, no works created after 1923 would enter the public domain until 2019. The practical upshot of this is that the later Holmes stories are still considered protected under US law, even though in most of the world they are not. (Note that these dates seem to vary a little according to each of the sources I’ve read — all other things considered, the Wikipedia entry seems to have the most consistent facts.)

(more…)

HILE my collection of Sherlock Holmes DVDs are well rounded-out with Brett, Rathbone and others, some of the earliest films have always eluded me, and in particular those of Wontner and Owen as the Master Detective. I did find Wontner’s The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes for $1 in the discount bin at a local department megastore beginning with the letter “W” (which shall remain nameless), but all three copies they had were defective, crashing Windows and refusing to be read by either Mac OS X or Linux. And so it was a pleasant surprise to trip across four Wontner and Owen films online in a BitTorrent archive, free for download in several different formats and qualities, including iPod-ready video. (The films actually fell into the public domain years ago.) They can be found in the Mystery section of site called PublicDomainTorrents.com.

The quality is not the greatest, of course –the films were made in the 30’s, and these copies are not taken from the masters– but they’re still a great find for me nevertheless. If you’re interested in downloading some of these little treasures, point your favourite BitTorrent client (I use Azureus) to PDT and catch Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet (1933, and bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the novel), and Wontner in The Sign of Four (1932), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), and Murder at the Baskervilles (1937, a.k.a., Silver Blaze). There are also four of Universal’s Rathbone/Bruce films from the 1940’s, namely Dressed to Kill, Terror by Night, The Woman in Green, and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. You may have noticed the latter four films offered cheaply from many different distributors, and the reason is elementary: no copyrights = no royalties.

Note that getting torrents requires you to have a high-speed connection, and sometimes a lot of patience — the download speed depends on how many other people are downloading and/or sharing the same files. If you’re stuck on dial-up, find the downloads too slow, or the technology of torrents proves intimidating, you can also have them mailed to you as DVDs, AVI files, or even iPod-ready videos, for just a small copying and shipping fee.

If you’re so inclined, you can also convert and burn these files to make your own DVDs. Ah, a weekend project! And don’t forget: VLC is an excellent free player that handles all these media files with aplomb.