N today’s mobile society, it’s becoming far easier –and perhaps even more desirous– to bring Holmes with you in forms other than those derived from dead trees (as much a fan of dead trees as I am). We’ve already seen here how Old Time Radio shows can be snapped onto your iPod in a matter of minutes, but what about carrying the actual texts digitally?

While there are a number of online services that allow one to use a Palm or other PDA (personal data assistant) to download and read ebooks –that is, “electronic books” for those unfamiliar with the term– these are often rather expensive, with pricing approximately the same as published paper books. In the limited selection of classics available, this seems quite costly indeed, especially given that copyright has elapsed for most of them (there’s therefore no royalties to be paid), and there’s no physical materials or costs to pass long to the consumer.

Well, don’t fret, because many of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be downloaded for free at Blackmask Online : Mystery/Arthur Conan Doyle. They have a variety of formats, including ones that can be opened in Adobe Acrobat, or a regular web browser (the “zipped” archives). But I love this site because of the various mobile formats, and in particular the files readable under Plucker or iSilo on my Palm. All I have to do is download, drag them to my install bucket, hit the button, and a few minutes later, I have dozens of works ready to go.

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ERE there be monsters. Or was that dragons? Hmmm. It could have been turkeys, I guess. Actually, it doesn’t matter very much, because a quick trip to your local video store will bring you all three, in the form of the latest DVD “based upon the masterpiece of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World.” A friend of mine recommended this. I had no idea he hated me so much.

The newfound technology of digital filmmaking is a godsend to young and energetic Orson Welles wannabes, eager to take advantage of a 90% savings off the budget needed for a celluloid masterpiece, and thereby translate their visions into a magnum opus to transcend the ages. Or, then again, it allows every opportunist to hawk their motley wares to those bedazzled by shiny objects. Like DVD covers.

The Asylum is a small production outfit that specialises in digital movie-making, mainly for the direct-to-video market (or so I gather). I’ve heard a number of good things about their low-budget War of the Worlds, which supposedly made up for its lack of high-end special effects with good acting and writing. Very recently, their latest picture, entitled King of the Lost World, depicting a giant ape on its cover (along with the word “King” duly emphasised) was released to stores simultaneously with Peter Jackson’s King Kong to the theatres. Coincidence?

Now, I like to try to find both positives and negatives in almost every film I watch, regardless of the overall quality. Thus, I can find faults with Citizen Kane, and I can find merits to Plan 9 from Outer Space. But, as the supreme diety is my witness, I cannot think of a single thing I liked about this film. Let me summarise, as best I can, in an effort to warn you off this film. Yes, there are spoilers here, but if you watch this film for plot, you will be sorely disappointed anyway.

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NE has to feel a healthy respect for writers of the Sherlock Holmes radio plays. On one hand, if you adapt a story from the Canon, you have plenty of Holmes fans who not only know the story, but have certain expectations of plot, charactisation, and so forth. With a mere twenty-odd minutes, this can be difficult enough. On the other hand, if you choose to create your own plot from scratch, the pressure is on to create a story that’s comparable to those of the Canon (which, granted, is not so great if one chooses The Mazarin Stone as a reference).

This is to say nothing of certain limitations of an audio-only medium, including what I can only refer to as the “Dear Lord, Holmes! He’s got a gun!” challenge: how does one create a visual experience with only dialogue and sound effects? Thankfully, the benefits help offset the difficulties. After all, one doesn’t need a huge budget to recreate, say, the Grimpen Mire and the ancient relics of civilisation upon the moors, but rather a good imagination and a small trunk of sound props.

Today’s Old Time Radio show is a good example of how Boucher and Green took one of the “unpublished” cases of Holmes and turned it into an interesting episode with the help of some clever writing and effects. It’s not perfect, by any means, but if you pay careful attention to how the characters, setting and plot are contructed, you can learn a lot about how things were done in the golden age of radio. There are also a few winks to Sherlockians and fans of detective literature, including Dr. Thorndyke.

Download: The Notorious Canary Trainer, episode 176 from Mutual’s The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, original aired 1945/04/23, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. (See the Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Log of the series.)

AST weekend, I received an email from a college-age friend of mine wondering if he should spend what little money he had on Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, or, well… eat. To which I replied: “There are plenty of places to find semi-edible sustenance, from the mushrooms under rotten logs to the bins behind restaurants. And you’re still young enough to recover from short-term malnutrition.”

A little poking around for opinions which mean far more than my own yielded the following review in the UK Guardian: A four-pipe poseur.

As a single reference work designed to bring Baring-Gould’s original annotated edition up to date, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes seems unlikely to be superseded for some time. There is no more comprehensive repository of arcane Sherlockiana to be found in one place. Yet the curious situation remains that the more information one stores up about the detective, the less one actually seems to know. No amount of erudite commentary can alter the fact that Holmes remains an unfathomable enigma, as much a product of the information Conan Doyle withheld as the tenuous clues to his character he actually put down.

Amazon.com has a pretty good price right now, certainly better than the prices at my regional megastore. And remember, Dan: it is possible to live off no-name peanut butter, Mr. Noodles, and a dandelion/fern shoot salad (from the nearest park or ditch, of course), at least for three months or so. You can even make coffee by dry-roasting the dandelion roots. Just spring for an orange if the teeth get too loose.

flamboyant tip o’ the deerstalker goes to Peter E. Blau of the most excellent Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press for pointing us to a listing of Holmes-related websites entitled, appropriately enough, Sherlockian Resources on the Internet: A Survey - by John Bergquist, BSI:

“Data! data! data!” [Holmes] cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” (COPP) The Sherlockian Web surfer of today has more data at his or her disposal than even the Master could have assimilated. Whether one is interested in pursuing serious research, seeking out rare books or memorabilia, or keeping up with the doings of other Sherlockians, the World Wide Web provides vast stores of information. This modest survey attempts to help one pick out a few choice strands to follow.

Link

HERE comes a time in the life of every Sherlock Holmes fan that I call “the Grand Disillusionment,” coinciding with that moment when one learns about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his pursuit of Spiritualism. How could the creator of the world’s greatest thinking and reasoning machine –the one whose mottos include the need for data before theory, and “no ghosts need apply”– be taken in by a faddish movement dedicated to the discovery of what lay beyond the visible world, which proposed that knowledge was passed from the dead to the living via seances, and which was populated by charlatans and hucksters of every variety, employing gimmicks, fake photography, ingenious mechanical devices and scary voices in the dark to hook those eager to believe (and to pay)? How could this manly model of chivalry and good sense spend the last decades of his life –a time when most writers’ skills are keenist– championing such flaky ideas and promises using “evidence” such as photographs of spirits and fairies that a modern, more cynical eye can easily perceive as simplistic hoaxes?

It is at this point that many Holmes fans lose respect for Doyle and even walk away from the stories, for many readers have a deep-seated need to link the author with the work that they enjoy, and in this case, it can be difficult to reconcile the two. Even at the time, many readers grew tired and disillusioned by Doyle’s vehement championship of his cause.

This illustration by Bernard Partridge originally appeared in Punch Magazine, May 12, 1926. Doyle had mentioned more than once that he believed the popularity of Holmes was taking away from his more “serious” work. (Although in the latter years of his life, he reconsidered this opinion.) Here is the author, head in the clouds and shackled to the Great Detective. The accompanying poem reads (in part):

Your own creation, that great sleuth
Who spent his life in chasing Truth –
How does he view your late defiance
(O Arthur!) of the laws of science?

He disapproves your strange vagaries,
Your spooks and photographs of fairies;
And holds you foot-cuffed when you’re fain
To navigate the vast inane.

But, like many of the cases of his detective, what seems readily apparent at first can be quite deceiving in the bright light of the the full story.

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