The Horror of Sherlock Holmes

So suitable for the British horror studio was Conan Doyle’s, The Hound of the Baskervilles that it could have been written with Hammer Films in mind. Indeed following their success with revamping the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises Hammer turned to the most famous fictional detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes for this movie which was intended to be the first in a new series with Peter Cushing in the title role. Alas the movie didn’t perform as well at the box office as expected and plans for the series were scrapped while Hammer concentrated on more gothic material. Pity really – I would have loved to have seen Hammer tackle The Giant Rat of Sumatra.

The film looks like a Hammer movie – the colour is excellent, garish in places with all that over saturated red and the gothic elements that the studio did so well, are brought out in Doyle’s story like never before. Of course they were always there, even in the original story but Hammer emphasise these parts of the storyline without really altering the original. There are some differences to the original story – Stapleton’s webbed hands for one thing, the tarantula attack for another but these work well within the story and indeed the  webbed hands carried by one line of the Baskerville clan is inspired and is a nice little macabre touch.

Peter Cushing here gives an excellent performance as Sherlock Holmes – the actor was a Sherlockian himself and he brings his knowledge of the character to the role. Andre Morell is a more than suitable Watson. It is also nice to see Christopher Lee playing a romantic lead role and one wonders what would have happened had he played more such roles. He is certainly convincing here. All in all this is a great Sherlock Holmes movie and under the direction of Terence Fisher the ponderous middle section so obvious in most productions of this story moves along at a great pace.

Why wasn’t it a big box office hit then? Well the blame for this lies with Hammer themselves. They promoted the movie as a big horror flick in the style of their successful Dracula and Frankenstein movies, with hardly any mention that this was in fact a Sherlock Holmes movie. The advertising posters suggested a kind of werewolf but when we see the hound on screen it is nothing more than an over sized Great Dane. Movie fans back in the day may have been disappointed – after all, they were going to see a film starring Hammer’s two biggest horror icons with a large slavering hound in the advertising posters and what they got  Sherlock Holmes adventure. A damn thrilling one nonetheless but word of mouth could have harmed the movie after its strong opening weekend. 

Still the movie’s stood the test of time and this is a great version of the much filmed story – it’s also nice to see the current DVD version showing such an impressive looking cut of the movie. The colours are vibrant and the sound booming. It is only a pity that it is a full frame 4.3 version on the UK release when I believe the American market get a true widescreen version.

Peter Cushing would of course go onto play Holmes for the BBC, but his performance as the detective here is perhaps his definitive stab at the part. Christopher Lee also got a stab at playing both Watson and Holmes in future Holmes movies but the less said about them the better.

Sherlock delivers a steaming turd for Christmas

'Is it silly enough for you yet?' Moriarty asks somewhere around the half-way point of the festive edition of the BBC's. Sherlock.

Oh it's gotten more than silly. in fact it's quite daft...yet, somehow it's still compelling.

 Deep down I know it isn't any good but Cumberbatch keeps me glued to the screen. There were good points of course - It was great to see the character in the proper Victorian setting, but as soon as the story got all Inception, jumping back and forth between time frames...well it lost me. Did the events in the episode actually happen? Was it all a drug induced trip for Holmes who has taken his seven per cent solution? Does anyone care?

What started as a traditional Victorian ghost story featuring Sherlock Holmes soon resorted to self referential bollocks, as timelines were torn apart, the promised program was mutated into something mirroring latter day Dr Who. Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss did a great job in bringing Holmes into the modern day but they ain't as clever as they think they are and this episode is an utter car crash. For one thing they cheated the viewer - this was no Victorian era set Sherlock as had been promised.

And for another they presented a real conundrum and then left it unanswered.

 You see, one of us is thick...Either's it's me because I don't understand what
 happened, or it is MoffatGattis for serving up a  steaming turd and calling it Christmas entertainent.

All I can say is I think it was all down to the women libbers. Least, I think that is what happened.

I'm still eager for the next series of Sherlock, but this special will be a lot to get over. I suppose I should watch it again to see if I can better understand it...but what would be the point? Once a steaming turd, always a steaming turd.

Sherlock Holmes and the Queen of Diamonds Book Review

Sherlock Holmes and the Queen of Diamonds, a pastiche by David Whitehead and Steve Hayes, two writers well known to the Archive, is now available as a low price Kindle eBook and it's well worth reading and will appeal to not only fans of Sherlock Holmes but  anyone who likes a well written, no nonsense action adventure with a cerebral leaning.


I found it interesting that the authors chose to write this Holmes book in third person, rather than the more usual first person from Watson's POV - After all Conan Doyle used the first person with Watson narrating the story for most of his Holmes adventures. True he did use the third person a couple of times, as well as having Holmes narrating a couple himself but these are oddities and don't stand up there with the best of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures. I asked author David Whitehead why he opted for the third person and he told me that he wrote the novel from an un-produced movie script written by Steve Hayes and that the third person narrative style was the only way to tell the story. After all there are sections of the story that neither Holmes, nor Watson witness. And of course using the third person means that the author(s) don't have to slavishly try to recreate Conan Doyle's own style, which is often a failing with Sherlock Holmes stories by other hands.

The story starts off feeling very much like a traditional Conan Doyle Holmes adventure but there is a major twist around the half way point that I just didn't see coming, and from that point onwards the feel of the book changes and it becomes a roller-coaster action adventure - think Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes but with more substance. The Holmes of this book is very much the deductive genius we know and love but Watson seems often to be a rather useless appendage, likely due to the third person narrative and of course that the main thrust of the story is not the relationship between Holmes and Watson, something intrinsic to the Conan Doyle stories, but rather the relationship between Holmes and a brash American, whose identity I'll leave the reader to discover for themselves.

That said this does indeed feel like a Sherlock Holmes adventure and I was hooked after the first few pages. If you like Sherlock Holmes then you'll enjoy this, but the book will also appeal to those who enjoy a damn good adventure - the kind of book that used to fill the paperback rack in years gone by.

Quite excellent...a story that can quite cleverly fit into the canon without causing any major ripples.

Sherlock Holmes - We deduce some incredible news

It's news that will have Sherlock Holmes fans roaming the moors and salivating like deranged hounds - A nearly 100-year-old silent film version of “Sherlock Holmes” starring famed Holmes thespian and American actor William Gillette has been discovered at the Cinémathèque Française, the French film archive announced Wednesday.


The rediscovered film is the only one Gillette ever appeared in, and is the actor’s only surviving appearance as the Baker Street detective, a role for which he was world-renowned in stage portrayals. It was Gillette who first donned the deerstalker hat that has remained popular through generations of Holmes performers, including the current favorite Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch.

Gillette's portrayal of Holmes is legendary and was even praised by Holmes creator, Conan Doyle himself but until now there has been no way to see Gillette's version of the detective.

“It’s an amazing privilege to work with these reels that have been lost for generations. William Gillette’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ has ranked among the holy grails of lost film and my first glimpse of the footage confirms Gillette’s magnetism. Audiences are going to be blown away when they see the real Sherlock Holmes on screen for the first time.”  Robert Byrne, Film restorer and SFSFF Board President

The nitrate dupe negative of the film, directed by Arthur Berthelet for Essanay Studios in 1916, was discovered in the vaults of the archive a few weeks ago, and is undergoing digital restoration by a partnership of the Cinémathèque Française and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The restored film will premiere at Toute la Mémoire du Monde, the film restoration festival of the Cinémathèque Française, in January 2015, and will see its U.S. debut at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in May 2015.

Sherlock Season 3 - Broadcast date announced

It is now official that the third season of the BBC's Sherlock will start on Christmas Day, and if that wasn't enough good news we've also learned that it will follow the Doctor Who Christmas Special in which kiddie Doctor Matt Smith bows out and the awesome Peter Capaldi takes over the TARDIS controls.

The battle for the  Christmas UK ratings then look assured for the BBC.

Sherlock Season 3 - First Look

This is the first still to be officially released by the BBC for the third season of Sherlock which will air early next year.

Watson sees a ghostly Sherlock walk past

Holmes in their DNA

Arthur Conan Doyle laid down a challenge to all writers when he created Sherlock Holmes - either homage or avoidance. This is likely the reason that Agatha Christie, an Englishwoman, made her detective Poirot a Belgian. He could not have been English because he would have seemed too close to Holmes.

'It would be interesting to place Poirot and Holmes in the same room and see who is the smartest.' Crime writer, Val McDermid.

Another detective who can be seen as an early son of Holes was Jules Maigret created by George Simenon who featured in some seventy five novels between 1931 and 1972. Sexton Blake was another who actually appeared in a staggering  4000 stories by more than 200 different writers, and even lived in an house on Baker Street.

The list of Holmes-alikes goes on an on and it can be argued that any fictional detective created since Holmes first walked the mean streets of Baker Street owes much to the pipe smoking, drug addicted intellectual sleuth with the hawk like nose and piercing eyes.

Sexton Blake

And whilst the modern crop of superstar fictional sleuths, charters like Ian Rankin's Rebus or Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne may on the surface seem far removed from Sherlock Holmes, it is doubtful that they would have existed in the first place were it not for Holmes. And both Ian Rankin and Mark Billingham have expressed a great admiration for Conan Doyle's remarkable creation. Indeed even authors who have never read Doyle but are influenced by other crime writers are by default taking from Doyle and Holmes since so much of him runs through the entire DNA of crime fiction.

Holmes may have not been the first fictional detective but he was and remains the most influential.

Sherlock Holmes and the flogging a dead horse adventure

It was Conan Doyle himself who left the doors open for so many other hands to take a stab at his iconic creation, Sherlock Holmes. It was in the story, Thor Bridge in which Watson states -

"Somewhere in the vaults of bank of Cox and Com., at Charing Cross, there is a travel worn and battered tin dispatch box with my name painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine."

This confirmed that there was a long list of unpublished Sherlock Holmes stories in the vaults and it is to this well that writers other than Doyle have ventured from time to time. But it was actually long before Doyle wrote Thor Bridge that other writers started to use his creation, or at least variations of such - Sexton Blake for instance lived in Baker Street and so similar to Holmes was he that Blake's often been called the poor man's Sherlock Holmes. It seems Doyle in a sense created modern detective fiction and the Golden Age was filled with variations on Holmes who were either fat, tall, Belgian or even blind, but no matter how successful many of these creations became they could never escape the long shadow of Sherlock Holmes.

Later we had the phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes by hands other than Doyle with the author's own son, Adrian Conan Doyle  even getting in on the act - in a joint effort with John Dickson Carr  he  wrote twelve Sherlock Holmes short stories, that were published under the title The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes in 1954. But Doyle Jnr. is only one name on a list of authors that include the likes of Colin Dexter, Paul Cornell,. Neil Gaimen, Stephen King and Dorothy L. Sayers. The list goes on and on and there is  a comprehensive list of Holmes by other hands at the Wiki page HERE.

Holmes is very much in the public domain and the character is fair game for any writer who wants to venture into Doyle's rich world, and it is with this knowledge that I have been writing a Holmes story. I wanted to write something of the length Doyle would have produced for the Strand Magazine and I'm kinda' pleased with my effort. What am I going to do with my story? Well, it was written for fun and I've decided to publish it here on The Archive over the Christmas period.

Good or bad I'll let you lot decide when I post The Curious Flogging a Dead Horse Adventure...

The Adventure of the not very good TV show

I've just watched episode six of the CBS modern day take on Sherlock Holmes, and I'm finding myself with mixed feelings on the TV show. Firstly I really like Jonny Lee Miller's take on Sherlock Holmes but I'm finding the show lightweight and am having trouble with Watson being recast as a woman. I don't think I'll continue to follow the show for much longer which is a shame because Miller is, to my mind, a better modern day Sherlock than Benedict Cumberbatch - the problem is that the BBC Sherlock series is so much better than this American version.

Elementary though is finding an audience and gaining much praise, so maybe it's just me and my fuddy duddy ideas but I don't find this to be a Sherlock Holmes series at all, and more a detective - will they/wont they show with a lead character who just happens to be named Sherlock Holmes. In this sixth episode Holmes investigated a plane crash that turned out to be a murder and a sabotage, and as with the previous episodes he seems to jump to his deductions out of nowhere. That cleared up the detective part of the story while the Watson/Holmes relationship was taken care of by Watson talking to an old friend of Sherlock's who had spent time with Holmes when he was still abusing drugs. The episode ends with Watson telling Holmes that she knows about Irene - this of course is a reference to Irene Adler, THE WOMAN, as Holmes refers to her.

I'll tune in next week to see where the writers are going to take this storyline, but I'm not expecting anything great.

Elementary new episodes ordered

CBS's Elementary has been so successful that the studio have ordered another block of episodes, increasing the first season from the 13 episodes already filmed to a full run of 22.

“Ready or not, here we come!” tweeted the show’s jubilant writers (via @ELEMENTARYStaff) the same evening, following the announcement.

The American Sherlock Holmes update, starring British actor Jonny Lee Miller, was initially commissioned as a 13-part series but outstanding ratings in the US made it an easy decision for the network to extend the run. Elementary is the number two-rated series of the season so far, with the most recent ratings figures showing an average audience of over 14 million in its Thursday 10pm slot.

Controversial due to its arrival hot on the heels of Sherlock, the BBC’s own modern-day take on the great detective, Elementary sees Miller's Holmes, a recovering addict, move to New York where he teams up with Lucy Liu’s female companion Dr Joan Watson. 

Elementary episode three

After three episodes I don't think the show is a patch on the BBC's Sherlock, but I am starting to prefer Jonny Lee Miller performance as Holmes to that given by Benedict Cumberbatch. Miller's recovering drug addict, is a Holmes who truly lives on his nerves and there is a brilliance to the way he plays the character. I don't really like the concept of Watson being a woman and although the producers claim there will be no romance between the two, their relationship does seem to be heading that way - how could it not? The more the two characters get to know each other and the stronger the relationship gets between them, then the sexual tension will inevitably come to the fore.

The storyline this week was a strong one - it starts out with a child abduction in 2005.The assailant leaves behind a bouquet of balloons for his parents exclaiming “thank you” on each and every one of them.

Fast forward to the present and yet another girl has been abducted, sending Holmes into a sleepless frenzy, as we witness a race against time to save this latest child.There are a couple of twists in this episode, which I won't reveal here as many people may still be waiting to catch up with the show, but I will say that out of the three episodes so far I think this is my favourite.

I'm starting to warm to the show and although I think the BBC's Sherlock is better, I do think that with Miller's excellent  performance they may eventually surpass it. Though the weak point is bound to be the fact that Watson is female. I've got this feeling that the show will eventually concentrate on a romance between the two characters and the deducing may be pushed aside in favour of seducing.

 Ahh well, only time can tell and for now, at least, I'm happy to go with the show.

Elementary episode 2

Jonny Lee Miller's performance is still superb, even more manic this week but it's such a pity that Elementary is such a poor relation to the BBC's Sherlock. I think this show would have been better if it had not been related to Sherlock Holmes at all - as a standalone crime drama it may have been a massive hit but it suffers alongside the inevitable comparison with the superior modern day Sherlock Holmes. Casting Dr Watson as a woman is a big mistake, and already we have had the sparring between her and Holmes with Holmes even appearing jealous of her ex-boyfriend in this episode.

The storyline this week used a coma to create a spin on the impossible murder scenario and it did it quite well, but the relationship between Holmes and this hot Watson got in the way, with sub-plots introduced to build sexual tension between the pair. One thing I do like about this series is that the storylines are mostly unrelated to the original Doyle canon, which the BBC show so cleverly updates, with only a few references thrown in her and there. One gets the feeling that the writers do not know the canon as well as the writers of the BBC show, but this is one of the few strengths since this is not Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes but rather a grittier take on the Moonlighting scenario, with two characters who just happen to be named Holmes and Watson.

The show took a dip in the ratings stateside for the second episode, and it will be a pity if it doesn't go past the first season because it has many good points - Miller's performance is the strongest feature and if we do get episodes featuring the Doyle characters, Moriarty and Irene Adler then this series could become essential viewing.

Elementary Pilot episode

There were things I liked about the new US series, Elementary, which may or may not be a rip-off of the BBC's far superior Sherlock, but at the end of the day it came across as a poor take on the currently trendy Sherlock Holmes in a modern day setting concept. 

Firstly the good points - I thought Jonny Lee Miller's performance was excellent and I really enjoyed his OCD Sherlock Holmes, and...one second thoughts that was all I liked about the show. Mind you there was an effective scene where Watson observes that Holmes doesn't have any mirrors in his flat and wonders if this is so he can't see his own flaws and demons with those oh so perceptive eyes.

And the bad points - Having Doctor Watson as a woman, I thought, was cheesy and can only lead to a will they/won't they dynamic to the show if it lasts past the first season,which I seriously doubt. I also found it odd that the show looked so British - Irish pubs, stuffy Opera patrons and no cool car chases, when surely the biggest aspect of the show should have been the modern day New York setting.  I was looking forward to an American Sherlock and instead all I got was a sub-standard riff on the BBC's current hot property.

If things don't improve then I think the show will plunge into the abyss of bad television.

Remember

(C) Phil Cornell

The 82nd anniversary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's death falls today.


 He passed away on 07 July 1930, aged 71.

The great Sherlock Holmes debate

Seems this is an event that many London based Archive readers will enjoy:

The first two Great Sherlock Holmes Debates resulted in tens of millions of fan pages across the internet and the third debate will once again bring together the top actors, directors, historians, bloggers and commentators in the Sherlock Holmes world.

The UK Great Sherlock Holmes Debate III takes place on Saturday 4th August
12-2pm in London and on the web.

The  Sherlock Holmes Week will be a key event to raise awareness for Save Undershaw's fundraising campaign.

The theme for this debate is: "Which is the best Sherlock Holmes story?"

The agenda for the debate:

1. Save Undershaw, the story so far - and the challenge ahead.

2. The best Sherlock Holmes short story from the canon.

3. The best of the four novels from the canon.

4. Open debate - What makes a good adaptation/pastiche?

Similar to last time, we will be hosting the live element of the debate in
central London with the wonderful video skills of Ross Foad (opportunity for
1-2-1 interviews.) if you would like to come in person, or you can dial in
over the web.

We will run another fan competition via Facebook page for 10 fans to take
part live like last time.

Steve Emecz

Managing Director

MX Publishing

www.mxpublishing.co.uk <http://www.mxpublishing.co.uk/>

Skype: steveemecz

Mobile: 0044(0)7837-550025

Email: steve@mxpublishing.co.uk

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I didn't catch this one on its cinema release but waited for the DVD, and I feel exactly the same about this one as I did about the first movie - it's not really Sherlock Holmes but it is a fun Victorian set action movie. There were times when the action came so thick and fast that I wasn't quite sure what was happening but Robert Downey is always watchable and the movie kept my interest for the most part. It's the kind of movie where you don't really have to pay attention because it jumps about all over the place and makes no structural sense. We travel quickly from one set piece to another with what went on in-between being largely inconsequential.

Visually the film looks superb and the chemistry between the two leads in spot on, but I don't know how many more films could be made in this series before its becomes tiresome. It was basically a repeat of the first movie and all the stylistic elements that director Guy Ritchie likes so much were present and correct - the slow motion fight scenes, the swooping camera work the dark locations and the camp highjinks. And you don't get much camper than this one - at one point you get Holmes prancing about in womens' undergarments and in another we have a naked Stephen Fry.  Downey also seems to be playing the subtext that Holmes is in love with Watson and resents inclusion of a wife into Watson's life.

 And to be perfectly honest this is not the kind of movie I usually watch but the Sherlock Holmes name dragged me in. And in a sense this could have been Starksey and Hutch in a Victorian setting, or even on times Laurel and Hardy, and there is little of Conan Doyle's Holmes in this movie. It's ironic but the film is in the correct Victorian setting and yet the BBC's modern day Sherlock contains more Holmes than this movie.

Still it's daft enough and loud enough to pass a couple of hours, but films like this are going to have to up the ante now that movies like The Avengers (the superheroes not the terrible version of John Steed's adventures)are proving that big budget action movies don't have to be dumb, and can make some kind of narrative sense.

To sum up it's okay but indistinguishable from a hundred other action flicks and it's most certainly not Sherlock Holmes.

Hammer's Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

So suitable for the British horror studio was Conan Doyle's, The Hound of the Baskervilles that it could have been written with Hammer Films in mind. Indeed following their success with revamping the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises Hammer turned to the most famous fictional detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes for this movie which was intended to be the first in a new series with Peter Cushing in the title role. Alas the movie didn't perform as well at the box office as expected and plans for the series were scrapped while Hammer concentrated on more gothic material. Pity really - I would have loved to have seen Hammer tackle The Giant Rat of Sumatra.

The film looks like a Hammer movie - the colour is excellent, garish in places with all that over saturated red and the gothic elements that the studio did so well, are brought out in Doyle's story like never before. Of course they were always there, even in the original story but Hammer emphasise these parts of the storyline without really altering the original. There are some differences to the original story - Stapleton's webbed hands for one thing, the tarantula attack for another but these work well within the story and indeed the  webbed hands carried by one line of the Baskerville clan is inspired and is a nice little macabre touch.

Peter Cushing here gives an excellent performance as Sherlock Holmes - the actor was a Sherlockian himself and he brings his knowledge of the character to the role. Andre Morell is a more than suitable Watson. It is also nice to see Christopher Lee playing a romantic lead role and one wonders what would have happened had he played more such roles. He is certainly convincing here. All in all this is a great Sherlock Holmes movie and under the direction of Terence Fisher the ponderous middle section so obvious in most productions of this story moves along at a great pace.

Why wasn't it a big box office hit then? Well the blame for this lies with Hammer themselves. They promoted the movie as a big horror flick in the style of their successful Dracula and Frankenstein movies, with hardly any mention that this was in fact a Sherlock Holmes movie. The advertising posters suggested a kind of werewolf but when we see the hound on screen it is nothing more than an over sized Great Dane. Movie fans back in the day may have been disappointed - after all, they were going to see a film starring Hammer's two biggest horror icons with a large slavering hound in the advertising posters and what they got  Sherlock Holmes adventure. A damn thrilling one nonetheless but word of mouth could have harmed the movie after its strong opening weekend.  SEE THE ORIGINAL CINEMA TRAILER EMBEDDED BELOW TO SEE HOW THE FILM WAS MARKETED.


Still the movie's stood the test of time and this is a great version of the much filmed story - it's also nice to see the current DVD version showing such an impressive looking cut of the movie. The colours are vibrant and the sound booming. It is only a pity that it is a full frame 4.3 version on the UK release when I believe the American market get a true widescreen version.

Peter Cushing would of course go onto play Holmes for the BBC, but his performance as the detective here is perhaps his definitive stab at the part. Christopher Lee also got a stab at playing both Watson and Holmes in future Holmes movies but the less said about them the better.

Sherlock Holmes and The Tangled Skein by David Stuart Davies

For a moment this book threw me as very early in the narrative Holmes complains about current foreign policy which seemed odd when Watson famously stated in, A Study In Scarlet, that the great detective's knowledge of politics was feeble.

"Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know nothing."

Was this a case of the author getting his subject wrong?  Surely not - after all David Stuart Davies is a renowned Sherlockian! But then when I thought about it I realised that Doyle himself had hardly been consistent on the subject of Holmes' political leanings or lack of - Doyle himself was a political animal who threw his weight behind varied campaigns, and he was not averse to using the Holmes stories to make a political point.This is most evident in His Last Bow (1917) which is a blatant piece of anti German propaganda. Mind you we were at war with the Bosch at this point.

And so when I stopped worrying about that point I was able to get into the story and in no time at all the author had transported me back to Doyle's universe. I found the style to be an admirable facsimile of Doyle's own narrative style, but by merging the universes of two vastly different authors and introducing Stoker's Dracula into the mix I found the book to be somewhat alien to real Sherlock Holmes. To be fair it's a riveting, well written tale but I found it difficult to take the Holmes V Dracula storyline seriously and to be honest I found it ridiculous.

The book comes doubled with The Shadow of the Rat which takes its influence from a reference in the Doyle story, The Adventure of The Sussex Vampire  - "Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson, ... It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared." The Rat was also mentioned by Nigel Bruce as Watson in the movies, The Spider Woman and Pursuit to Algiers.


The Giant Rat, whatever it was, is part of the Holmes universe whilst Dracula is not -  so maybe I'll enjoy that one a little more.

 To sum up then a well written book by an author who knows his Holmes inside out, but for me the mish-mash with Stoker just didn't work.

The Hound of the Baskervilles - BBC Radio Four version - REVIEW

"Learn now my sons the tale of the coming of the hound of the Baskervilles"

So begins this audio dramatization that runs for almost two hours and was part of BBC Radio 4's program to record the entire Conan Doyle/Holmes canon. They did it too and this recording was, I believe, the last of the original canon to be recorded - BBC Radio 4 made history here as the only broadcaster to record the entire canon with the same pairing of Holmes and Watson. Chief writer on the project was Bert Coules and he was the man responsible for dramatising Holmes' most famous adventure as presented here on these discs.

Clive Merrison plays Holmes and Michael Williams is Watson but the supporting cast are equally impressive - we have Donald Sinden as Charles Baskerville and Oscar Winner Judi Dench (she was married to Michael Williams until his tragic death from cancer in 2001) is Mrs Hudson. As this is an audio presentation the voices are all important and the rest of the cast are all experienced voice actors and provide excellent support to the chief players.

Holmes and Watson

The audio drama works well and is a real movie for the ears - it's even structured something like a movie with flashbacks cutting into the early scenes, which outline the legend of the hound. These flashbacks presented in the fashion of a reading by Charles Baskerville work well and at no point is the listener confused as to what is happening. One moment we are at 221B with Holmes and Watson discussing the walking stick a client left behind and the next we are firmly in the 17th century witnessing the crimes carried out by Hugo Baskerville, described as a cruel and Godless man.The latter are played out in a violent opening scene that drips with atmosphere and reminded me of the Hammer Films' version of the tale. Of course we are seeing the production on a true 3D screen, a mental screen which displays the desolate massiveness of Dartmoor far more effectively than even IMAX can - the blood positively gushes when the hound tears out Hugo Baskerville's throat.

The play is available for download as well as on a double CD, and it was the CD which I listened to having found it for the bargain price of £3.99 in a local bookstore. In this age of digital downloads it is becoming more and more common to find such bargains in the CD format - I guess no one wants the inconvenience of lugging around the heavy digital discs.  Personally I'm old school and I'd rather have the physical product even if I do rip it to my hard drive and then file the discs away.

Writer Bert Coules and the BBC have done an excellent job in bringing the story to life - the production values are of the highest quality as is to be expected from Radio Four, and the sound-scape really brings the story to life.

The age of reason

All of the Sherlock Holmes material on the Archive lately has left me pondering on how much of the appeal of Holmes comes from his Victorian era. It wouldn't seem that important to the character since there have been many versions set in the present day that have been successful - the latest being the BBC's excellent Sherlock, but no matter how good the various incarnations of Holmes have been his true haunts are the Victorian mean streets... or are they?

The first Holmes story came out in 1887 but Doyle would continue writing about the character well into the Edwardian age. And in many ways it was this period in which the modern age started - the 1890's saw great scientific and cultural changes and Holmes was there, riding on the wave of the new fangled age. By the 1890's Queen Victoria was a recluse and it was the Prince of Wales and his Princess who were the public face of the Royals - bustles were out and having a good time with frivolity was in. That was if you had the money  and at the other end of the spectrum the working classes were facing great upheaval and change themselves. The Labour party started in 1893 and for the first time the working man had a political voice, it's a pity the Labour Party of today don't hold the same values. It was also during 1893 that Ghandi started his first civil disobedience protests in India and women were given the vote in New Zealand.

The original Sherlock Holmes, that is Doyle's Holmes lived in a fast changing world - in 1892 Thomas Edison produced his two way telegraph and during the previous year he had started showing moving pictures and in 1893 he would open his first movie studio in New Jersey. 1891 also saw the invention  of the diesel engine and the first escalator was installed at Coney Island. Coca Cola was first sold in bottles in 1894.  In 1890 Francis Galton published his book Finger Prints which was undoubtedly of interest to Conan Doyle and the world's first fingerprint bureau was established during this decade.

By the time Doyle wrote his last Sherlock Holmes story in 1927 we were firmly in the modern world, striving to put a world war behind us and still thinking of it as, the war to end all wars. How wrong we were. Holmes however continues to thrive and it doesn't matter where he is placed, what era for when done well he still retains the elements that made Doyle such a genius of populist entertainment.

Long live Sherlock Holmes