Sherlock Holmes and the thoroughly modern affair

The second Guy Ritchie directed Sherlock Holmes movie doesn't hit cinema screens until December, but Warner Brothers have already confirmed that there will be a third movie from the same team. Warner Bros has set Drew Pearce to write Sherlock Holmes 3, continuing the Guy Ritchie-directed series that stars Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law.

The first in the Guy Ritchie Holmes series was a huge success and seemed to please most film fans, but it received mixed reactions from traditionalist Holmes fans who see this new Holmes as too far from Doyle's original character. I enjoyed the movie myself, but I did feel that it more resembled a steam punk influenced Victorian action movie than a Holmes adventure. However the studio, at least, didn't bow down to political correctness and it was refreshing to see Holmes with his trademark pipe, unlike the BBC series, Sherlock which has the detective on nicotine patches. I applaud the makers of the movie in keeping the pipe, especially in these days of tobacco hysteria. At least they didn't make the mistake of the current producers of the James Bond movies. They've taken away Bond's dick and look what's happened to the world's favourite spy! James Bland, anyone! The current screen Bond is indistinguishable from any other screen hero, but at least Holmes in all his incarnations has managed to retain something of the unique character which made him such a success in the first place.

Because the BBC series is superbly entertaining and the pairing of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson, works well, that the series is set in contemporary times doesn't really matter - after all several of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies were contemporary. But at the end of the day the series isn't really Sherlock Holmes, just as Guy Ritchie's movies, entertaining in themselves, are not really Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes though continues to go on and on and as well as the new movie this December and  a second series of Sherlock early next year, the great detective is kept alive in print by new authors taking up the pen left by Doyle and continuing to add to the remarkable evergreen character. Holmes has been presented at one time or another as a boy, a woman and even a dog, fox and mouse. As well as everything else between - I once read a short story in which Sherlock Holmes was a motor car and his assistant was the loyal, Datsun.

So does it really matter how characters like Sherlock Holmes are presented? The variations on the characters and themes may not please the purists, but they might just encourage new readers to try the original canon - and that can only be a good thing.

"There is still more excitement and invention in the original tales than a thousand screen incarnations."

No matter how many actors, how many writers tamper with the creation, Holmes will never die and will always be out there, wearing that deerstalker and puffing on the pipe. The detective is a hard man to kill as even original creator, Conan Doyle discovered when he tried to hurl the detective over those waterfalls that I can't be bothered to Google the correct spelling of.


Hey spelling is so old Holmes...get wiv the program!

Lost Conan Doyle novel to finally see print

Alison Flood reported in the Guardian newspaper of a lost Arthur Conan Doyle novel - The Narrative of John Smith was written when Conan Doyle was 23, and just a few years before the author published his first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. It tells the story of a 50-year-old "opinionated Everyman" confined to his room by gout, laying out his thoughts and views on subjects from religion to war and literature through the conversations he has with his visitors, from a retired army major to a curate.

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Archive book biz

Supermarket giant, Sainsbury is to relaunch its adult book club and also launch a children's book club as part of its increased focus on books. The chain will also increase book display space by 10% in most of its stores up and down the UK.

Russel Brand's sequel to the successful My Bookie Wookie has been pulled from the Autumn lists by Harper Collins. The reason given was that Brand has been tied up in film deals since being sacked from Radio 2 and is unable to complete the book on time. The book is now slated for Autumn 2010.

Big news for overseas fans of the Black Horse Western books who shop with The Book Depository - The company will open a new North American website next month - the same free postage anywhere in the world deal will stand, but it will now be quicker for those outside the UK to get their Black Horse Western titles.

Gollancz's previous Big Black SF titles have done so well that the company are to beef up the list with with new collection from Jack Vance and a collection of non-Conan tales by Robert E. Howard. The latter will be titled Conan's Brethren - no doubt in order to still have the selling power of the barbarian. Stephen Jones will pen the introduction to the stories.

A TRULY LITERARY EVENING

I've been reading about a remarkable dinner party held in August 1889 - The editor of the American magazine, Lippincott's Monthly arranged the evening and besides himself there were three guests. The first was a young doctor who had made several sales to the popular and literary and popular magazines of the day, he went by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle. Secondly there was the Irish poet and Socialite, Oscar Wilde and the third guest was the Irish politician T.P Gill.

Imagine being a fly on the wall that night - what conversations would have wandered around their luxurious food and intoxicating drinks? Cigar, pipe and cigarette smoke would have made spectral shapes in the air perhaps even forming images of masterpieces to come from the two young writers.

The evening was certainly productive and not only for those in attendance but the world in general.

Stoddart secured agreements from both Wilde and Doyle that they would each write a novel for his magazine. At this stage Doyle had already written his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet which had been published to only minor success in Beaton's Christmas Annual. But Wilde on the other hand initially balked at the idea. He had written the odd short story but nothing of novel length.

The result was that Doyle gave us The Sign of Four and Wilde, who had lately been considering the fact that great beauty must age, delivered The Picture of Dorien Gray.

Doyle referred to the dinner party many times over the years - " Wilde's conversation left an indelible mark on my mind. He towered above us all and yet he had the art of seeming to be interested in all we had to say."

After the party Doyle went onto massive fame and fortune but Wilde went on a downward spiral that saw his work praised almost universally but his personal life fell apart. To be homosexual in that day and age was to be an outcast, a pariah from society.

Doyle and Wilde met only once more and Doyle wrote of this later meeting many years later, "He (Wilde) had an air of madness about him. I thought at the time, and still think that the monsterous development that ruined him was pathological. And that a hospice rather than a police court was the place for its consideration."

T.P.Gill on the other hand, never went onto write any stories but did enjoy a long and distinguished career in British politics.