Discussion Post: The Final Problem
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Final Problem and the chosen topic is The Reaction to Holmes’ Death (and His Return).
A few facts:
🏔 In 1891 Doyle wrote to his mother and said, in passing, “I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” She wrote back and said “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!”...
But while visiting Switzerland that year, Doyle was already location-scouting… As early as 1892 he went walking among the clifflike ice-towers of the Findelen glacier near Zermatt, and discussed the impending character assassination in the abstract with his fellow walkers, one of whom argued against it earnestly but without making a dent in Doyle’s resolve. In 1893 he visited the Reichenbach Falls for the first time, and there he made his decision. “It was a terrible place, and one I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him.” [Diane Duane, on her blog]
🏔 ...in 1893 almost no one knew what Doyle was planning to do to his creation at the Reichenbach Falls (this despite the news having been sneaked in… Tit-Bits the previous month: possibly the readers dismissed the news as impossible). [Diane Duane, on her blog]
🏔 The public responded with a massive uproar that amazed everybody, especially Doyle… Thousands of people wrote Doyle directly, begging him to reverse Holmes’s death… The death of the world’s first consulting detective was taken up by the wire services and reported all over the world as front-page news. Obituaries for Holmes appeared everywhere. Petitions were signed and “Keep Holmes Alive” clubs were formed…
Doyle resisted the pressure as best he could, thinking it would surely taper off after a while. But it was unrelenting, continuing for years… [Diane Duane, on her blog]
🏔 Legend has it that young men throughout London wore black mourning crêpes on their hats or around their arms for the month of Holmes’ death, though that has recently been questioned. (Some Holmes aficionados have suggested the story could have been an exaggeration perpetuated by Conan Doyle’s son in interviews.) [Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, on BBC Worldwide]
🏔 In a letter in the Winter 2006 BSJ, Philip Bergem reported on his own research into primary sources, such as The Times, The Bookman, The Strand Magazine, and the John Bennett Shaw archives. He found no contemporary mention of black mourning bands. The earliest appearance that Bergem could identify was in John Dickson Carr's The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. He suggests that Adrian Conan Doyle may have foisted the tale upon Carr as part of his paternal myth-making.
I have also looked at The Star, the largest-circulation London evening paper at the time, plus some memoirs and autobiographies. Again, no evidence surfaced of black mourning bands. [Peter Calamai, in the Baker Street Journal]
🏔 According to one possibly apocryphal story, a lady attacked him with her umbrella when she met him in the street; another picketed his house in protest. [Issue 12 of Sherlock Holmes on the Stanford University website]
🏔 "Not since the death of Dickens's Little Nell 52 years earlier," wrote Russell Miller [author of The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle (2009)], "had a fictional character's demise unleashed such an outpouring of public grief and outrage ... The Strand lost 20,000 subscribers, and furious letters poured into their offices by the sackload, many abusing Conan Doyle, others pleading with Newnes [publisher of The Strand] to deny the report and promise more stories. One lady reader called Conan Doyle "a brute", another allegedly swatted him with her handbag. The Prince of Wales was said to be particularly anguished..." [Quoted on the Independent website]
🏔 ...the Americans thought the story [that is, FINA] must be a fake… [Naxos Records]
🏔 The Strand... nearly went under. Forever after, The Strand's staff referred to Holmes's death as "the dreadful event." [Issue 12 of Sherlock Holmes on the Stanford University website]
🏔 The Strand, likely dismayed at losing their star revenue source, announced that:
The news of the death of Sherlock Holmes has been received with most widespread regret, and readers have implored us to use our influence with Mr Conan Doyle to prevent the tragedy being consummated. We can only reply that we pleaded for his life in the most urgent, earnest and constant manner. Like hundreds of correspondents, we feel as if we have lost an old friend whom we could ill spare. Mr Doyle’s feeling was that he did not desire Sherlock to outstay his welcome, and that the public had had enough of him. This is not our opinion, nor is it the opinion of the public; but it is, we regret to say, Mr Doyle’s. [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
🏔 The editors of Tit-Bits, a popular weekly, wrote on January 6, 1894: The news of the death of Sherlock Holmes has been received with the most widespread regret, and readers have implored us to use our influence with Mr Conan Doyle to prevent the tragedy being consummated […]. We can only reply that we pleaded for his life in the most urgent, earnest, and constant manner. Like hundreds of correspondents, we feel as if we had lost an old friend whom we could ill spare. (Qtd. in Green xi) [Full reference: Green, Richard Lancelyn. Introduction. The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Quoted by Rebecca McLaughlin in her thesis A Study in Sherlock: Revisiting the Relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.]
🏔 ...Conan Doyle… put some physical distance between himself and the British public, retreating to the Continent with his family. But the outcry inevitably reached him, and he later wrote, “I was amazed at the concern expressed by the public. They say that a man is never properly appreciated until he is dead, and the general protest against my summary execution of Holmes taught me how many and how numerous were his friends. ‘You brute’ was the beginning of the letter of remonstrance which one lady sent me, and I expect she spoke for others beside herself. I heard of many who wept. I fear I was utterly callous myself.” [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
🏔 ...Conan Doyle had every reason to be shocked by the torrent of vitriol. Fans simply did not do this before then… Readers typically accepted what went on in their favourite books, then moved on. Now they were beginning to take their popular culture personally, and to expect their favourite works to conform to certain expectations. They seemed to actually expect a reciprocal relationship with the works they loved… Sherlock Holmes’ avid readers helped to create the very modern practice of fandom…
Holmes fans were truly the emerging middle-class, the exact sort of group whose tastes would be denigrated by snooty critics as populist for more than a century to come. They were the ones priced out of concerts, the ones who had to wait for the cheaper versions of popular novels. Historian David Payne describes them as “largely the lower-middle and middle-middle classes of the cities, the non-intellectual, non-public school, hardworking, rising… people – the first true mass moderns.” [Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, on BBC Worldwide]
🏔 “Poor Holmes is dead and damned,” [ACD] wrote later. “I couldn’t revive him if I would (at least not for years), for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do toward pate de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.” Three years later, in a speech at the Author’s Club in London, he said that, “I have been blamed for doing that gentleman to death, but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defense, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.” [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
🏔 ...what Doyle wouldn’t do, other writers did. The flood of sequels, pastiches, and imitations began even while Doyle was alive. We’d probably call it fan fiction today, though that word hadn’t been invented at the time… [Anastasia Klimchynskaya, on Den of Geek]
🏔 In 1901 Sherlock Holmes reappeared in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Conan Doyle needed a strong central character for his ghostly novel. Why invent one when he already had that in Holmes? However Conan Doyle made it clear that Holmes was not alive. This story took place before the incident at Reichenbach Falls. The public’s response was phenomenal. The Hound of the Baskervilles was also first published in The Strand. The magazine’s circulation rose by thirty thousand overnight. [Conan Doyle Info]
🏔 ...the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles was the thin end of the wedge. In the spring of 1903 the American magazine Collier’s made Doyle an offer he could not refuse. If he would bring back his hero from his watery grave they would pay $25,000 for six stories, or $30,000 for eight, or $45,000 for 13. These sums were for the American rights only, and The Strand joined forces, offered him a further £100 for every 1000 words for the English rights. With some cynicism, and a terseness that echoed his diary entry of 10 years earlier, Conan Doyle sent a postcard to his agent: ‘Very Well. A.C.D.’
But a nervous Conan Doyle wrote to his mother: ‘Will they take to Holmes?’ It had been 10 years… He need not have feared. The public was feverish in its anticipation of the ‘return’ of their hero. When the series began in The Strand in 1903, one lady at the time wrote: ‘The scenes at the railway bookstalls were worse than anything I ever saw at a bargain sale…’ The queues outside the magazine’s offices stretched the length of Southampton Street. In America, handbills announced ecstatically: ‘Sherlock Holmes Returns!!’ The Strand showed typical English reserve: ‘The news of his death was received with regret as at the loss of a personal friend. Fortunately the news… turns out to be erroneous.’ [Naxos Records]
🏔 The public devoured them, but for many, and perhaps for Conan Doyle himself, something had been lost at the Reichenbach Falls. He wrote later, “Some have thought there was a falling off in the stories, and the criticism was neatly expressed by a Cornish boatman who said to me, ‘I think, sir, when Holmes fell over that cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.’” [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
Some useful resources:
One Fixed Point: “Sherlock,” Sherlock Holmes, and the British Imagination By Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions.
Holmes sweet Holmes: Literature's greatest sleuth On the Independent website.
The Complete Short Stories and Novels That is, information about each individual novel and short story. On Naxos Records.
Issue 12 : The Final Problem On the Stanford University website.
The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, the Death of Sherlock Holmes and How the World Took It) On Diane Duane's weblog.
A Reader Challenge & Prize A Baker Street Journal competition from 2013, asking readers to produce evidence that people actually wore black armbands after Holmes’ death.
How Sherlock Holmes changed the world By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, on the BBC Worldwide website.
Sherlock Holmes: the original fandom By Anastasia Klimchynskaya, on Den of Geek.
The Death of Sherlock Holmes On Conan Doyle Info.
A Study in Sherlock: Revisiting the Relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson By Rebecca McLaughlin. Concentrates on Sherlock but does give some information on the reaction of the original readers to Holmes’ death.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Specifically, a look at the Reichenbach Falls, on The Victorian Web.
Fan Friction By Emily Nussbaum, on The New Yorker website.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking On the PBS website. (I’ve included this link purely for its brief quotation from The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Martin Booth.)
The Hound of the Baskervilles By Richard Jones, on The Jack the Ripper Tour website.
The Late Sherlock Holmes A cutting about Holmes’ death - halfway between being a review of FINA and being a news story. I saw the cutting on Pinterest (though the link will take you to just the image itself on a new tab), and it apparently came via Twitter. It is labelled: from the December 14, 1893 edition of the Western Mail, the late Sherlock Holmes…
The Ghost of Sherlock Holmes A humorous music hall song: written and composed by Richard Morton & H.C. Barry, 1894.
Back to His Native Strand By P.G. Wodehouse, appeared in Punch, May 27, 1903. Humorous poem about Holmes’ return.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
Next week, as it’s Christmas, there won’t be a discussion post but please don’t forget to pop by the comm and get involved with Mrs. Hudson’s Problem Page and Poetry Corner!
(PS Also because it’s Christmas, I will be out today indulging in my Victorian cosplay of ‘impoverished but respectable shopgirl’. I should be back from work and commenting by early evening UK time ^^)
A few facts:
🏔 In 1891 Doyle wrote to his mother and said, in passing, “I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” She wrote back and said “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!”...
But while visiting Switzerland that year, Doyle was already location-scouting… As early as 1892 he went walking among the clifflike ice-towers of the Findelen glacier near Zermatt, and discussed the impending character assassination in the abstract with his fellow walkers, one of whom argued against it earnestly but without making a dent in Doyle’s resolve. In 1893 he visited the Reichenbach Falls for the first time, and there he made his decision. “It was a terrible place, and one I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him.” [Diane Duane, on her blog]
🏔 ...in 1893 almost no one knew what Doyle was planning to do to his creation at the Reichenbach Falls (this despite the news having been sneaked in… Tit-Bits the previous month: possibly the readers dismissed the news as impossible). [Diane Duane, on her blog]
🏔 The public responded with a massive uproar that amazed everybody, especially Doyle… Thousands of people wrote Doyle directly, begging him to reverse Holmes’s death… The death of the world’s first consulting detective was taken up by the wire services and reported all over the world as front-page news. Obituaries for Holmes appeared everywhere. Petitions were signed and “Keep Holmes Alive” clubs were formed…
Doyle resisted the pressure as best he could, thinking it would surely taper off after a while. But it was unrelenting, continuing for years… [Diane Duane, on her blog]
🏔 Legend has it that young men throughout London wore black mourning crêpes on their hats or around their arms for the month of Holmes’ death, though that has recently been questioned. (Some Holmes aficionados have suggested the story could have been an exaggeration perpetuated by Conan Doyle’s son in interviews.) [Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, on BBC Worldwide]
🏔 In a letter in the Winter 2006 BSJ, Philip Bergem reported on his own research into primary sources, such as The Times, The Bookman, The Strand Magazine, and the John Bennett Shaw archives. He found no contemporary mention of black mourning bands. The earliest appearance that Bergem could identify was in John Dickson Carr's The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. He suggests that Adrian Conan Doyle may have foisted the tale upon Carr as part of his paternal myth-making.
I have also looked at The Star, the largest-circulation London evening paper at the time, plus some memoirs and autobiographies. Again, no evidence surfaced of black mourning bands. [Peter Calamai, in the Baker Street Journal]
🏔 According to one possibly apocryphal story, a lady attacked him with her umbrella when she met him in the street; another picketed his house in protest. [Issue 12 of Sherlock Holmes on the Stanford University website]
🏔 "Not since the death of Dickens's Little Nell 52 years earlier," wrote Russell Miller [author of The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle (2009)], "had a fictional character's demise unleashed such an outpouring of public grief and outrage ... The Strand lost 20,000 subscribers, and furious letters poured into their offices by the sackload, many abusing Conan Doyle, others pleading with Newnes [publisher of The Strand] to deny the report and promise more stories. One lady reader called Conan Doyle "a brute", another allegedly swatted him with her handbag. The Prince of Wales was said to be particularly anguished..." [Quoted on the Independent website]
🏔 ...the Americans thought the story [that is, FINA] must be a fake… [Naxos Records]
🏔 The Strand... nearly went under. Forever after, The Strand's staff referred to Holmes's death as "the dreadful event." [Issue 12 of Sherlock Holmes on the Stanford University website]
🏔 The Strand, likely dismayed at losing their star revenue source, announced that:
The news of the death of Sherlock Holmes has been received with most widespread regret, and readers have implored us to use our influence with Mr Conan Doyle to prevent the tragedy being consummated. We can only reply that we pleaded for his life in the most urgent, earnest and constant manner. Like hundreds of correspondents, we feel as if we have lost an old friend whom we could ill spare. Mr Doyle’s feeling was that he did not desire Sherlock to outstay his welcome, and that the public had had enough of him. This is not our opinion, nor is it the opinion of the public; but it is, we regret to say, Mr Doyle’s. [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
🏔 The editors of Tit-Bits, a popular weekly, wrote on January 6, 1894: The news of the death of Sherlock Holmes has been received with the most widespread regret, and readers have implored us to use our influence with Mr Conan Doyle to prevent the tragedy being consummated […]. We can only reply that we pleaded for his life in the most urgent, earnest, and constant manner. Like hundreds of correspondents, we feel as if we had lost an old friend whom we could ill spare. (Qtd. in Green xi) [Full reference: Green, Richard Lancelyn. Introduction. The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Quoted by Rebecca McLaughlin in her thesis A Study in Sherlock: Revisiting the Relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.]
🏔 ...Conan Doyle… put some physical distance between himself and the British public, retreating to the Continent with his family. But the outcry inevitably reached him, and he later wrote, “I was amazed at the concern expressed by the public. They say that a man is never properly appreciated until he is dead, and the general protest against my summary execution of Holmes taught me how many and how numerous were his friends. ‘You brute’ was the beginning of the letter of remonstrance which one lady sent me, and I expect she spoke for others beside herself. I heard of many who wept. I fear I was utterly callous myself.” [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
🏔 ...Conan Doyle had every reason to be shocked by the torrent of vitriol. Fans simply did not do this before then… Readers typically accepted what went on in their favourite books, then moved on. Now they were beginning to take their popular culture personally, and to expect their favourite works to conform to certain expectations. They seemed to actually expect a reciprocal relationship with the works they loved… Sherlock Holmes’ avid readers helped to create the very modern practice of fandom…
Holmes fans were truly the emerging middle-class, the exact sort of group whose tastes would be denigrated by snooty critics as populist for more than a century to come. They were the ones priced out of concerts, the ones who had to wait for the cheaper versions of popular novels. Historian David Payne describes them as “largely the lower-middle and middle-middle classes of the cities, the non-intellectual, non-public school, hardworking, rising… people – the first true mass moderns.” [Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, on BBC Worldwide]
🏔 “Poor Holmes is dead and damned,” [ACD] wrote later. “I couldn’t revive him if I would (at least not for years), for I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do toward pate de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.” Three years later, in a speech at the Author’s Club in London, he said that, “I have been blamed for doing that gentleman to death, but I hold that it was not murder, but justifiable homicide in self-defense, since, if I had not killed him, he would certainly have killed me.” [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
🏔 ...what Doyle wouldn’t do, other writers did. The flood of sequels, pastiches, and imitations began even while Doyle was alive. We’d probably call it fan fiction today, though that word hadn’t been invented at the time… [Anastasia Klimchynskaya, on Den of Geek]
🏔 In 1901 Sherlock Holmes reappeared in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Conan Doyle needed a strong central character for his ghostly novel. Why invent one when he already had that in Holmes? However Conan Doyle made it clear that Holmes was not alive. This story took place before the incident at Reichenbach Falls. The public’s response was phenomenal. The Hound of the Baskervilles was also first published in The Strand. The magazine’s circulation rose by thirty thousand overnight. [Conan Doyle Info]
🏔 ...the publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles was the thin end of the wedge. In the spring of 1903 the American magazine Collier’s made Doyle an offer he could not refuse. If he would bring back his hero from his watery grave they would pay $25,000 for six stories, or $30,000 for eight, or $45,000 for 13. These sums were for the American rights only, and The Strand joined forces, offered him a further £100 for every 1000 words for the English rights. With some cynicism, and a terseness that echoed his diary entry of 10 years earlier, Conan Doyle sent a postcard to his agent: ‘Very Well. A.C.D.’
But a nervous Conan Doyle wrote to his mother: ‘Will they take to Holmes?’ It had been 10 years… He need not have feared. The public was feverish in its anticipation of the ‘return’ of their hero. When the series began in The Strand in 1903, one lady at the time wrote: ‘The scenes at the railway bookstalls were worse than anything I ever saw at a bargain sale…’ The queues outside the magazine’s offices stretched the length of Southampton Street. In America, handbills announced ecstatically: ‘Sherlock Holmes Returns!!’ The Strand showed typical English reserve: ‘The news of his death was received with regret as at the loss of a personal friend. Fortunately the news… turns out to be erroneous.’ [Naxos Records]
🏔 The public devoured them, but for many, and perhaps for Conan Doyle himself, something had been lost at the Reichenbach Falls. He wrote later, “Some have thought there was a falling off in the stories, and the criticism was neatly expressed by a Cornish boatman who said to me, ‘I think, sir, when Holmes fell over that cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.’” [Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions]
Some useful resources:
One Fixed Point: “Sherlock,” Sherlock Holmes, and the British Imagination By Elizabeth Minkel, on The Millions.
Holmes sweet Holmes: Literature's greatest sleuth On the Independent website.
The Complete Short Stories and Novels That is, information about each individual novel and short story. On Naxos Records.
Issue 12 : The Final Problem On the Stanford University website.
The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, the Death of Sherlock Holmes and How the World Took It) On Diane Duane's weblog.
A Reader Challenge & Prize A Baker Street Journal competition from 2013, asking readers to produce evidence that people actually wore black armbands after Holmes’ death.
How Sherlock Holmes changed the world By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, on the BBC Worldwide website.
Sherlock Holmes: the original fandom By Anastasia Klimchynskaya, on Den of Geek.
The Death of Sherlock Holmes On Conan Doyle Info.
A Study in Sherlock: Revisiting the Relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson By Rebecca McLaughlin. Concentrates on Sherlock but does give some information on the reaction of the original readers to Holmes’ death.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Specifically, a look at the Reichenbach Falls, on The Victorian Web.
Fan Friction By Emily Nussbaum, on The New Yorker website.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking On the PBS website. (I’ve included this link purely for its brief quotation from The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Martin Booth.)
The Hound of the Baskervilles By Richard Jones, on The Jack the Ripper Tour website.
The Late Sherlock Holmes A cutting about Holmes’ death - halfway between being a review of FINA and being a news story. I saw the cutting on Pinterest (though the link will take you to just the image itself on a new tab), and it apparently came via Twitter. It is labelled: from the December 14, 1893 edition of the Western Mail, the late Sherlock Holmes…
The Ghost of Sherlock Holmes A humorous music hall song: written and composed by Richard Morton & H.C. Barry, 1894.
Back to His Native Strand By P.G. Wodehouse, appeared in Punch, May 27, 1903. Humorous poem about Holmes’ return.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
Next week, as it’s Christmas, there won’t be a discussion post but please don’t forget to pop by the comm and get involved with Mrs. Hudson’s Problem Page and Poetry Corner!
(PS Also because it’s Christmas, I will be out today indulging in my Victorian cosplay of ‘impoverished but respectable shopgirl’. I should be back from work and commenting by early evening UK time ^^)
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no subject
Date: 2016-12-18 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-18 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-27 05:38 pm (UTC)...and do you know what's going on with the Strand and Tit-Bits both (being quoted as) using exactly the same sentences to discuss this? I'm having trouble finding primary/archive sources for either publication, so I can't (yet) take the question back any farther than what you've cited here.
btw, David Stuart Davies' The Death and Life of Sherlock Holmes, starring Roger Llewellyn, is a one-man play that covers a lot of this material: Conan Doyle being DONE, the letters with his mother, the distress of his editors, the uproar with the fans, that 'one last spin' with Hound... With the additional twist that bringing Moriarty into being simply to push him off a cliff is, shall we say, ambitious. (And pushing them both off a cliff is even moreso!)
Big Finish recorded it a few years back.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-27 11:32 pm (UTC)Anyway: do you know what's going on with the Strand and Tit-Bits both (being quoted as) using exactly the same sentences to discuss this? Well, Tit-bits and The Strand were both published by George Newnes, so it perhaps isn't that odd that the same statement should be used in both magazines... Or maybe the reference to the statement being in Tit-bits is simply wrong? I don't know, I have to say. I found very little online in general for this whole topic unfortunately.
I had a listen to the trailer for The Death and Life of Sherlock Holmes - all sounds very intriguing ^_^ Can I make a rec of my own? The book Adventures in the Strand (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adventures-Strand-Arthur-Conan-Magazine/dp/0712309845) by Mike Ashley. A look at ACD's work for and relationship with The Strand. It leaves you with a renewed appreciation of ACD as a writer - the man really was something special.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-28 02:56 am (UTC)Thank you for the rec! I'm guessing it'd also be handy as background for a certain kind of New Russian Holmes story. And yay, it looks relatively easy for me to lay hands on. (Not right away, though; I've got a few other history books in the queue to read/not!read.)