
In 1901, something must have been in the air, for no less than three separate articles appeared, in England, Canada, and the United States, from three unrelated writers, taking Holmes - not the author of the tales - to task for mistakes in his handling of certain cases. As early as The Sign of Four, Conan Doyle reported receiving a letter from a Philadelphia tobacconist requesting a copy of Holmes’s monograph on tobacco ashes. Of course, merchandise abounds as well, ranging from stuffed animals dressed as Holmes and Watson to porcelain figurines, from mugs, teapots, and cookie jars to playing cards, board games, video games, and even action figures.Ĭuriously, the line between fiction and reality blurred almost immediately for Holmes readers. Manga or anime versions of the Detective and the Doctor are very popular in Japan and elsewhere. Hundreds of different comic strips and comic books have portrayed the duo, usually under their own names but often under parodic or fantastic versions, such as Hawkshaw the Detective or a robotic Watson. They come in the form of mysteries, romance, thrillers, science fiction, Westerns, comedy, horror, and even erotica. Milne, and modern, including Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Cornelia Funke, and many, many more. These include works by authors contemporary with the original adventures, such as Mark Twain, Robert Barr, J. Scholars estimate that over 7,000 “pastiches” - stories in the style of the originals - and parodies featuring the duo have been published. Holmes and Watson have not been neglected in other media.
Review sherlock holmes elementary nyt series#
The current CBS-TV series Elementary stars Jonny Lee Miller, who has now appeared as Holmes in more stories than any other actor in history. There have been five English-language television series, as well as Czech and Russian series. To date, well over 200 Sherlock Holmes films and over 700 radio shows have been produced. Holmes was no stranger to radio either, with a recording made in 1930 of an abridged version of Conan Doyle’s play The Speckled Band (starring Gillette, of course). More than 100 additional silent films starring Holmes were produced, and in 1929, Clive Brook played the detective in the early “talkie” titled The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The first serious Holmesian film was the 1905 Vitagraph production entitled Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or, Held for Ransom. Meanwhile, Holmes jumped to another medium. Gillette toured in the role for 30 years, and his visage became the public face of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that when stories began to appear in 1903 in Collier’s in the United States, the American artist Frederic Dorr Steele drew images of Gillette as Holmes. This production, entitled Sherlock Holmes, and starring Gillette in the title role, was an enormous success. In 1899, however, permission was granted to the American actor William Gillette to write a play based on several published stories. Neither Watson nor Conan Doyle had anything to do with either production, and because Rogers had used no material from any published stories, under English law of the day, Conan Doyle had no claim to a share of the profits. A few months later, the first real Sherlock Holmes play, penned by Charles Rogers, was performed in Glasgow and toured extensively for a few years. This did nothing, however, to slake the public’s appetite for more Holmes.Īt nearly the same time that The Strand was informing the public that no more of Watson’s adventures would appear in its pages, Holmes appeared on the London stage, in a one-act burlesque called Under the Clock. With the demise of Holmes, The Strand rushed to fill its pages with imitations - eccentric detectives of every stripe, amusing but mostly long-forgotten today.

By 1893, after 24 stories, Holmes’s career was apparently over: “The Final Problem,” appearing in December 1893, reported that Holmes had perished at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland at the hands of his archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty. The first parody of Holmes, “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes,” appeared in a rival magazine in November 1891, after only five stories had been published in The Strand. Watson appeared in The Strand Magazine these would be followed over the years by 44 more stories and two more novels - and the reading public went wild for the Great Detective and the Good Doctor. The first of a series of 12 short stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. In July 1891, however, an explosion went off that is still felt almost 125 years later. This was followed in 1890 by The Sign of Four, also only a modest success. A very small bombshell, it must be said - the book sold only modestly.

DOROTHY SAYERS, in her classic introduction to the anthology Omnibus of Crime, described the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), as “flung like a bombshell” into the mystery genre.
