Indeed, my novel has a glossary and a couple of appendices simply because of the amount of music terminology in general, and organ terminology in particular. And it's not even science fiction.
It's strange to think of it this way.
Well, the Holmes stories were nominally set some years in the past, since Watson was supposedly recounting them in retrospect, presumably years after the parties involved would have been harmed by the disclosure. Yet the scientific and forensic methods Holmes used were ahead of their time, not yet widely adopted by police and in some cases not even invented yet (such as a method for identifying blood as human vs. animal), so in their day, the stories were borderline science fiction.
But yes, Holmes was seen as a contemporary character, which is why nearly every screen adaptation of Holmes in the first half of the 20th century was set in the present day, except for the silent film of the William Gillette stage play and the first two Rathbone-Bruce movies. (Although, confusingly, the Rathbone-Bruce radio series that ran contemporaneously with the present-day Rathbone-Bruce movies from Universal was set in Victorian times, with what must have been a very elderly Dr. Watson recounting their long-ago adventures to the show's narrator every week, with the occasional break to gush about how great their sponsor's wine was.) It was only from the '50s onward that Holmes was routinely portrayed onscreen as a period figure, a streak that wasn't broken until Sherlock (and then Elementary, Miss Sherlock, Watson, and who knows what else).
It would be challenging to rework a story whose premise/solution depended on incomplete or since-debunked beliefs, inferior technology, etc. I guess that's why a lot of those Holmes radio shows say "this episode was suggested by a detail in the Holmes story _____" instead of directly adapting a particular story beat for beat.
More likely there are only 56 short stories and 4 novels, so a weekly radio show would run out of episodes pretty soon if it did direct adaptations. Plus prose and radio are different media with different strengths, so some stories might be harder to adapt than others -- and of course, many might be too long or too short to fit the running time. Plus, of course, writers like to write, not just copy. An adaptation is an opportunity to be creative and find a fresh way to tell a story.
Tubi has the 1954 Holmes TV series with Ronald Howard and H. Marion Crawford, the first and only American Holmes TV series until Elementary. It's pretty authentic to the characters, but only a few of its episodes are adaptations of Doyle stories. The first episode starts out as a faithful adaptation of Holmes and Watson's first meeting in A Study in Scarlet, but then segues into an original, shorter mystery.
We have the DVDs. They're fun to watch. 
Check out the latest adaptation of Father Brown. You can find it on BritBox, Hoopla, and Kanopy.
It's still historical fiction, but it's historical fiction done at a different period of time than the original stories. And it does this with actors that will stay for a bit and then leave. It's done very well and expands upon the material, rather than every episode being an adaptation of a story.
Father Brown (2013 TV series) - Wikipedia
An example of doing this poorly was the Father Dowling Mysteries:
Father Dowling Mysteries - Wikipedia
It was an attempt to both modernize Father Brown and Americanize the material. It was far less successful.
Yes, this is one of the things that bothers me when people complain that War of the Worlds adaptations are being unfaithful when they update the setting. Wells wasn't writing a period piece about aliens invading the Earth; Wells was writing a story about what would happen if aliens invaded your country, the most powerful country on Earth. For all its faults, this is one thing the Spielberg film gets exactly right. The most "faithful" WotW adaptation is set at the time of production.
Excellent point. Too many people think fidelity is about the surface rather than the substance. Unfortunately, that's often because many people never think about a story beyond the surface level.
On the novel front, I've noticed that some modern-day Holmes pastiches tend to milk the historical setting and play up the Victorian atmosphere and trappings more than the original Conan Doyle stories do -- because, of course, he wasn't trying to evoke some bygone era. He was just setting his stories in the world of his (then) readers.
Mind you, you can argue that modern Holmes authors are writing for a very different audience, one for whom the original stories are now period pieces, and whom may also require more description and exposition about how things looked and worked back then.
I'm suddenly reminded of Peter Jackson's King Kong, which felt obliged to explain the Great Depression to modern moviegoers, whereas the original 1933 movie could safely expect audiences of the time to understand at once why Ann Darrow is broke and stealing an apple at the beginning of the film . . . .
Mind you, you can argue that modern Holmes authors are writing for a very different audience, one for whom the original stories are now period pieces, and whom may also require more description and exposition about how things looked and worked back then.
I'm suddenly reminded of Peter Jackson's King Kong, which felt obliged to explain the Great Depression to modern moviegoers, whereas the original 1933 movie could safely expect audiences of the time to understand at once why Ann Darrow is broke and stealing an apple at the beginning of the film . . . .
In order to experience such a book the way the original readers did, you'd have to put yourself in their place. Changing the setting bypasses the need to be informed about the historical context. If your world is nothing like theirs and hasn't been for some time (socially, technologically, politically), something is lost in translation.
So, has anyone done a post-Jazz-Age adaptation of The Great Gatsby set in the production’s own era? For all the 1920s specifics, I feel like the plot would translate pretty well, class concerns very much included.
And if I ever do that, or if I ever have, please call me on it, and make me either defend my actions/words, or apologize for them.
Hey, I liked Father Dowling. I really liked Tracy Nelson's streetwise nun, "Sister Steve," and I liked Tom Bosley in anything he did, and all of the supporting cast (I'd liked James Stephens ever since I first saw him as James Hart in the Showtime-produced second season of The Paper Chase). And if Father Dowling was a ripoff of Father Brown, then blame Ralph McInerny, because he really did write Father Dowling books, quite a few of them, between 1977 (over a decade before the series debuted) and 2009.
Last edited:
The text of War of the Worlds thankfully does not get updated to be set in whatever year you're reading it, and along those lines I would still like to see a well-done, "closer to the book" adaptation of it some day. I'm not just interested in the central premise, I'm interested in the setting. The world and people that no longer exists.
I wouldn't say it would ever be wrong to do that; I just think "faithfulness" is the wrong attribute to claim for it!
Around the time the text went into the public domain in the UK, there were several period audio adaptations of it, from the BBC, Big Finish, and Sherwood Studios. I didn't love any of them, but listening to all three was an interesting way of triangulating what people care about in the novel.
It boils down to there being two ways (at minimum) to approach a story -- to examine it from a distance as an artifact of its period, or to try to recreate how it would have been experienced as a contemporary story by its original audience. And neither approach is wrong. A difference does not require picking a winner. There's value in both approaches, so it's good to have both options. The value of adaptations is that they adapt, they change, and so they allow multiple different perspectives.
The only approach that I would regard as "wrong" is one that is done with no respect for the original.
I love what Wendy Carlos did with Bach. My favorite Beatles albums are both covers: Bach on Abbey Road, by pianist John Bayless, and The Off-White Album, by the Hampton String Quartet. On the other hand, I can't stand what Walter Murphy did with Beethoven, and likewise for the whole "Hooked On . . ." series.
I'm told that Gary Wolf, the author of Who Censored Roger Rabbit actually prefers Disney's version of the story to his own original, and having read the original (which he himself retconned as a nightmare), I agree with him. On the other hand, I won't reiterate my well-known contempt for "revisionist Oz."
I love what Wendy Carlos did with Bach. My favorite Beatles albums are both covers: Bach on Abbey Road, by pianist John Bayless, and The Off-White Album, by the Hampton String Quartet. On the other hand, I can't stand what Walter Murphy did with Beethoven, and likewise for the whole "Hooked On . . ." series.
I'm told that Gary Wolf, the author of Who Censored Roger Rabbit actually prefers Disney's version of the story to his own original, and having read the original (which he himself retconned as a nightmare), I agree with him. On the other hand, I won't reiterate my well-known contempt for "revisionist Oz."
I dunno, I think even that can work in some cases. I mean, one example is Minority Report, which I'll be reviewing soon on my Patreon (along with the short-lived sequel TV series).
The original Philip K. Dick novelette "The Minority Report" is, quite frankly, morally reprehensible. The psychic Precogs are treated with grotesque ableism, as subhuman slaves who are never more than a plot device, and though the novelette pays lip service to questioning the ethics of throwing people in prison for predicted crimes that they're prevented from actually committing, the protagonist ends up deciding that, okay, it's fine to do that after all, and he commits murder to preserve that system. Basically the story only cares about giving its protagonist a puzzle to solve and ignores the disturbing ethical ramifications. The movie rejects that and takes the opposite approach; the Precogs are sympathetic characters in need of rescue, and it's the villain who commits murder to preserve the system and the hero who recognizes its immorality and tears it down.
Creativity is a dialogue with the past. Adaptations -- and original works, really -- are created in conversation with earlier works, commenting on and reacting to them. Sometimes that dialogue expresses agreement, bringing out new aspects of the same ideas, but sometimes a new work is a critique of earlier works, and that's a valid form of artistic dialogue as well. There's no guarantee it will work, of course, but there's no guarantee it won't. Per Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, but it's that other 10% that makes the attempt worthwhile. Anything can work in the right context, or in the hands of a sufficiently gifted creator. Some of the most memorable and worthwhile creations are things that nobody thought would work. So nothing should be ruled out.
Last edited:
Similar threads
