I ought to dislike the new CBS TV series, “Elementary” more than I do. Conan Doyle’s immortal character has recently been brilliantly updated by the BBC in the series “Sherlock,” which extracted the soul of the character with exacting precision and inlaid him in the 21st Century with barely a seam showing. This American version (starring Jonny Lee Miller) is far more ham-fisted. It takes an attitude to the source material closer to that of the recent Robert Downey films (which I did not like),…
While literally thousands of fictional characters have fallen by the wayside over the past century, Sherlock Holmes remains imperishable. Well, why, exactly? Author Michael Dirda explains the appeal of genre fiction in his new book, "On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling." Dirda's attractive little volume manages to range far beyond Sherlock Holmes or even Conan Doyle. The book is a paean to imaginative literature and the profound impact it has over the span of readers' lives, from childhood into older age. TAC's…
By Mike Gray One purported purpose of fiction seems to be an attempt to understand the human experience through stories. Science fiction has always been highly equipped to handle this problem by viewing culture and individuals through the lens of technology or fantastical concepts. Explaining life as we know it, or might one day live it, is certainly the task of all good science fiction. Similarly, the stories and enduring character of Sherlock Holmes provide a lens through which the human experience can be explained.…
By Mike Gray The Revenge of the Hound — by Michael Hardwick — Villard Books — 1987 — Hardcover — 310 pages It is Coronation Summer 1902, and there has been such a lull in criminal activity that Sherlock Holmes is thinking about retiring. The fact that Dr. Watson has become engaged to a young American heiress also plays no small part in Holmes’s thinking—without his “Boswell,” The Great Detective’s ego is threatened as well. But soon come reports of a spectral hound haunting, not…
Short Fiction The Quiet Man by Maurice Walsh [The short story that inspired John Ford's classic film staring John Wayne] “Shawn Kelvin, a blithe young lad of 20, went to the States to seek his fortune. And 15 years thereafter he returned to his native Kerry, his blitheness sobered and his youth dried to the core, and whether he had made his fortune or whether he had not no one could be knowing for certain. For he was a quiet man, not given to talking…
by Mike Gray Copyright laws are a gray area, with courts sometimes offering contradictory rulings here and there. Rumor hath it that Disney Corp. (sometimes derisively referenced as “Team Rodent”), seeing the coming expiration of their copyrights, chipped in a few million here and there to their lawyers to persuade government to extend them into perpetuity—can’t have Mickey Mouse making money for some other entity, don’t you know. The result has been a major distortion of what copyrights were intended for. Just the other day…
I was prepared to dislike the new BBC series Sherlock, broadcast on PBS, but to my surprise I quite liked it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is surely one of the most fascinating characters in modern fiction, having inspired countless imitations, societies of fans who pretend he is real (and some people who really believed he was a real-life person), and numerous literary pastiches and stage and screen adaptations. He is just real enough to fascinate, and just unreal enough to provide room for audiences to use their imaginations in understanding him. With so much Holmes-work having been done over the decades since his first…
Would G. K. Chesterton have liked Robert Downey Jr.’s depiction of the great detective in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes? A Chesterton admirer suggests the answer is yes.
Neil Gaiman, in his obituary of the obscure SF author, described R.A. Lafferty, pictured above in a portion of his personal library, as “a genius, an oddball, a madman.” He “never fit,” Gaiman wrote, “ as an sf writer as a fabulist or as a horror writer, although his work was sold as such and he won the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. He was a genre in himself, and a Lafferty story is unlike any story by anybody else: tall tales from the Irish…
The new film Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie, has done very well indeed at the U.S. and global box offices since its December 25 release, and it has evoked much dispute between Holmes purists and Holmes evangelists. Here are opinions from two very different mystery fiction aficionados.
I know that purists will hate Guy Ritchie’s forthcoming Sherlock Holmes, which recasts the great detective as a cartoonish action hero, but it looks like great fun nonetheless. Judge for yourself whether you’re interested in this film by the mind behind Snatch, RocknRolla, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, as the HD trailer is now available for your viewing pleasure:
Two new Sherlock Holmes film adaptations are taking very different approaches to the classic detective series.
Two very entertaining detective-film series are on display tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies. The day starts with the best Sherlock Holmes of the cinema (in my view), Basil Rathbone, starring in four Universal Sherlock Holmes films broadcast on TCM tomorrow morning from 6:00 EST until 11:00. Co-starring Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, most of the Universal Sherlock Holmes films were set during then-contemporary times—during and just after World War II—and often included aspects of the war in their plots, as in Sherlock Holmes and the…
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