Granada Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett

[Kirkman1987]

Well, if Young Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes In The 22nd Century have been brought up, I'll presume that other pastiches are fair game for discussion.

Has anyone else read the Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell novels by Laurie R. King? They're not only entertaining, but also quite compelling as drama. They take place after Holmes' retirement, when he's keeping bees on the Sussex Downs, and he meets a young woman named Mary Russell (she's the narrator of the stories) whom he is surprised to discover possesses intelligence and keen deductive skills. The first book is The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and the whole series gets a high recommendation from me.

There's also a wonderful short story by Neil Gaiman called "A Study In Emerald" to be found in his collection Fragile Things. It's a particularly interesting take on the Holmes mythos--not to mention H.P. Lovecraft's.

And just so we don't get too off-track... BRETT RULES!

I see nothing wrong with getting a little off track, as long as we keep it related to Holmes.

The only Pastiche I've read was The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer. I enjoyed that book greatly, and would like to seek out more sometime. I know Meyer wrote a few more himself. As for the Sherlock Holmes Canon, I just have a paperback edition, but the New Annotated editions look very interesting.

 

[Orintho]

^ Oh definitely. I grew up on Rathbone's Holmes. I have his first two (Hound and Adventures) on DVD (thinking of getting the rest too), and he will always have a place in my heart. Just can't call him definitive anymore

Rathbone did play a very good Holmes. I think people might rate Brett above him is because the TV series was a lot more indepth and intimate versus the classic films that Rathbone made. Plus his Holmes movies would sometimes really deviate. I think a couple were set during WWII, if memory serves.

 

[Marc]

It was somewhat clever of Granada to cope with Brett's illness/death by rewriting a couple of episodes in the final season with Mycroft taking the place of Sherlock. Except that it required altering Mycroft's character, in that he was actually willing to leave the Diogenes Club. And the actor just didn't have Brett's charisma.

It says something about Brett, I suppose, that they were able to recast Watson but just ended the series rather than attempting to recast Holmes.

Wasn't there one also one where Watson where Solo and Holmes appeared right at the end saying "well done Watson".

 

[Christopher]

Wasn't there one also one where Watson where Solo and Holmes appeared right at the end saying "well done Watson".

I think there actually were one or two solo-Watson stories in the Doyle canon. There's also a solo-Holmes story in which Holmes himself narrates, which feels out of character to me since he always scorned the way Watson turned their cases into melodramatic adventure tales rather than scientific treatises, yet here he's doing the very thing he's always scorned. Even though Doyle "hung a lantern on it" by having Holmes comment to the reader about his reluctant realization that this was necessary, it still feels inappropriate.

On the subject of pastiches, I once came across (but didn't read) an interesting one at the library where I used to work. It was by an Indian author, and its narrator was Hurree Chunder Mukherjee from Kipling's Kim. Hurree came upon Holmes during the latter's travels in India in his Sigurdsson persona after he faked his death in "The Final Problem," and became his surrogate Watson for the duration of the book.

 

[S. Gomez]

As for the Sherlock Holmes Canon, I just have a paperback edition, but the New Annotated editions look very interesting.

They're excellent! The scholarship is solid; one of the most entertaining things about it is that it plays The Game, so all throughout the editor makes his own theories as well as outlining the theories of others. And you'll learn a ton not only about Holmesian (or Sherlockian) studies, but also about the Victorian era.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Has anyone else read the Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell novels by Laurie R. King? They're not only entertaining, but also quite compelling as drama. They take place after Holmes' retirement, when he's keeping bees on the Sussex Downs, and he meets a young woman named Mary Russell (she's the narrator of the stories) whom he is surprised to discover possesses intelligence and keen deductive skills. The first book is The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and the whole series gets a high recommendation from me.

Urrk.

I can't really stand them. I read the series through Justice Hall, hoping that I'd enjoy them more, and I never did.

King wasn't especially familiar with the Holmes of the Canon. The Holmes of the Mary Russell novels is basically the Rathbone Holmes, and the Watson is basically the Bruce Watson.

And Russell is a Mary Sue.

Not a fan. Sorry. *shrug*

However, all of that said, the book I enjoyed the most was The Moor, which was a decent sequel to Hound of the Baskervilles.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

The only Pastiche I've read was The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer. I enjoyed that book greatly, and would like to seek out more sometime. I know Meyer wrote a few more himself. As for the Sherlock Holmes Canon, I just have a paperback edition, but the New Annotated editions look very interesting.

Meyer wrote two more.

The West End Horror has Holmes palling around with George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Contrary to popular belief, this book does not involve Holmes hunting down Jack-the-Ripper.

About ten years ago Meyer wrote a sequel to The Seven-Percent Solution entitled The Canary Trainer. Holmes has come to Paris during "The Great Hiatus," and he takes up the violin at the Paris Opera House. However, something lurks in the sewers beneath the Opera House, and people report seeing a Phantom.

I enjoyed West End. Canary Trainer less so.

There's a much better Holmes/Phantom crossover in Sam Siciliano's The Angel of the Opera.

Loren D. Estleman wrote two very good crossover pastiches -- Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes are exactly what their titles promise. Of the two, I prefer the former; Estleman does a credible job inserting Holmes into the events of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Holmes and Dracula tangle again in Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes/Dracula File.

Manly Wade Wellman wrote a book called Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds. Nice concept, goofy execution. (Holmes and Mrs. Hudson? Say it ain't so, Joe!)

Holmes battles Jack the Ripper in Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story and Edward B. Hanna's The Whitechapel Horrors. Oh, and in Ellery Queen's A Study in Terror as well. Hanna's book hews the closest to the actual Ripper murders; Queen's book features two of the canonical murder victims, and Dibdin's book is incredibly shocking.

A Canadian small press published a Star Trek/Sherlock Holmes crossover anthology a few years ago, Federation Holmes. Despite having Holmes meet Kirk and Spock, the book has the Enterprise-E on the cover.

Mike Ashley put together an anthology about ten years ago called The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures. It's what the title suggests -- some thirty new stories of Holmes by writers like Michael Moorcock, Stephen Baxter, Peter Tremayne, and others. I'd recommend it.

Larry Millett wrote a series of novels about Sherlock Holmes' adventures in Minnesota. Every couple of months, Holmes would go to Minnesota to solve a crime in the Twin Cities and the surrounding area.

Marvin Kaye's anthologies are generally quite good. The Game Is Afoot is a nice collection of Holmes parodies, pastiches, and scholarly work from the 1800s to the 1990s. Resurrected Holmes is a lot of fun -- it purports to be an anthology of Sherlock Holmes stories written by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, and a dozen more.

Shadows over Baker Street is an anthology of Holmes vs. the Lovecraftian mythos. Peter Cannon's Pulptime covers similar ground. (Cannon also wrote the Wodehouse meets Lovecraft story, "Scream for Jeeves.")

I would love to get my hands on Ellery Queen's The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes from 1943.

Oh, and Adrian Conan Doyle's anthology The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes is pretty good.

 

[AJBryant]

Holmes and Dracula seem made for each other. Fred Saberhagen's "Holmes Dracula File" was particular fun. (It was also part of Saberhagen's Dracula series -- the most enjoyable of which, IMO, was "The Dracula Tape.")


Tony

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Holmes and Dracula seem made for each other. Fred Saberhagen's "Holmes Dracula File" was particular fun. (It was also part of Saberhagen's Dracula series -- the most enjoyable of which, IMO, was "The Dracula Tape.")

I had two problems with The Holmes/Dracula File.

The first was the parallel narration Saberhagen used. Chapters alternated between Watson and Dracula. The problem is that the two plotlines were never in synch, so at a late point in the book events get confusing.

The second was that Saberhagen made Holmes Dracula's nephew, which was something that made me go, "What?" It didn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

Saberhagen wrote a sequel to TH/DF about ten years ago in which Holmes, Watson, and Dracula investigated a case involving Rasputin. Despite the reservations I had with TH/DF, I liked the other book (I'm thinking A Sharpness on the Neck, but I could be mistaken) better.

Another Holmes/Dracula match-up occurs in David Stuart Davies' A Tangled Skein. (Which is one of Doyle's abandoned titles for A Study in Scarlet, by the way.) It involves Dracula and Baskerville Hall.

There was also Scarlet in Gaslight, a four-issue comics miniseries that's been collected a couple of times. Moriarty gets involved with Dracula, and the story puts a new spin on the events at Reichenbach Falls.

 

[Corran Horn]

I very much enjoyed this series. I have a few of the DVDs.

 

[ToddPence]

I always thought that the best, most faithful Holmes adaptation was the BBC radio series with Clive Merrison and Michael Williams. That is, until they made a seriously wrong-headed decision on how to end the series which severely violated the continuity of the canon in the final episode, "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman".

 

[McCoy]

^ Oh definitely. I grew up on Rathbone's Holmes. I have his first two (Hound and Adventures) on DVD (thinking of getting the rest too), and he will always have a place in my heart. Just can't call him definitive anymore

Rathbone did play a very good Holmes. I think people might rate Brett above him is because the TV series was a lot more indepth and intimate versus the classic films that Rathbone made. Plus his Holmes movies would sometimes really deviate. I think a couple were set during WWII, if memory serves.

Of the 14 Rathbone films of the 40s, a dozen were set in modern (WWII) times. The two I currently own were the only ones set in Victorian times. The setting changed when the movies switched from Fox to Universal.

As for the Sherlock Holmes Canon, I just have a paperback edition, but the New Annotated editions look very interesting.

They're excellent! The scholarship is solid; one of the most entertaining things about it is that it plays The Game, so all throughout the editor makes his own theories as well as outlining the theories of others. And you'll learn a ton not only about Holmesian (or Sherlockian) studies, but also about the Victorian era.

I have the original annotated set, by William S. Baring-Gould. I've had it since I was a kid, and it's one of my prized possessions.

 

[Christopher]

]
Of the 14 Rathbone films of the 40s, a dozen were set in modern (WWII) times. The two I currently own were the only ones set in Victorian times. The setting changed when the movies switched from Fox to Universal.

I don't suppose there was any attempt to explain the half-century jump?

 

[McCoy]

You would be correct, sir.

Perhaps they thought it was elementary.

Actually, the real-world explanation is war propaganda. The character was popular, and a strong British symbol. They believed setting him during current events fighting the Nazis would be a morale booster.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

]
Of the 14 Rathbone films of the 40s, a dozen were set in modern (WWII) times. The two I currently own were the only ones set in Victorian times. The setting changed when the movies switched from Fox to Universal.

I don't suppose there was any attempt to explain the half-century jump?

No, there's not.

I've wondered if, when the Rathbone series moved to Universal, the decision to "jump" to the contemporary 1940's was so that the Rathbone settings would match up with the contemporary settings of Universal's previous Holmes, Arthur Wontner, who overlapped Rathbone's Hound. I suppose you could look at Rathbone as having two series of films, and his second series (the ones at Universal) were like the Roger Moore James Bond films -- a recast and continuation of the previous Universal series.

There was some thought at Universal to doing a film that had Holmes battle the Universal Monsters. Hammer Films considered it as well during the 1960's. And the planned sequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Sherlock Holmes and the Vengeance of Dracula -- never came to be.

 

[diankra]

On the subject of updated Holmes, there was a rather nice contemporary-set Radio 4 series around 1984 called Second Holmes - though it should really have been Third Holmes, as it was about Holmes and Watson's grandsons, the McGuffin being that, late in life, Holmes had decided that detection was too important to be left to the police, and forced himself to produce an heir. Two generations on though, the last thing Stamford Holmes wants to be involved with is detection, so the current Watson is always having to manouevre him into it.
Only ran for one six episode series, but Peter Egan and Jeremy Nicholas worked well as Holmes and Watson, and the entire thing was a nice pastiche of the original stories (Watson is always drawing parallels with Sherlock's cases, and hence missing the wood for the trees). Ther's a chance it might turn up on BBC Radio 7 sometime soon, as I mentioned it to a friend who's one of their producer/selectors, and he was checking out rights and clearances for a possible repeat.

 

[Christopher]

There was some thought at Universal to doing a film that had Holmes battle the Universal Monsters.

Ooh, that would've been cool -- Rathbone vs. Karloff, Lugosi, and/or Chaney. Just leave Abbott and Costello out of it...

 

[ClayinCA]

The only Pastiche I've read was The Seven Percent Solution by Nicholas Meyer. I enjoyed that book greatly, and would like to seek out more sometime. I know Meyer wrote a few more himself. As for the Sherlock Holmes Canon, I just have a paperback edition, but the New Annotated editions look very interesting.

Meyer wrote two more.

The West End Horror has Holmes palling around with George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Contrary to popular belief, this book does not involve Holmes hunting down Jack-the-Ripper.

About ten years ago Meyer wrote a sequel to The Seven-Percent Solution entitled The Canary Trainer. Holmes has come to Paris during "The Great Hiatus," and he takes up the violin at the Paris Opera House. However, something lurks in the sewers beneath the Opera House, and people report seeing a Phantom.

I enjoyed West End. Canary Trainer less so.

There's a much better Holmes/Phantom crossover in Sam Siciliano's The Angel of the Opera.

Loren D. Estleman wrote two very good crossover pastiches -- Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes are exactly what their titles promise. Of the two, I prefer the former; Estleman does a credible job inserting Holmes into the events of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Holmes and Dracula tangle again in Fred Saberhagen's The Holmes/Dracula File.

Manly Wade Wellman wrote a book called Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds. Nice concept, goofy execution. (Holmes and Mrs. Hudson? Say it ain't so, Joe!)

Holmes battles Jack the Ripper in Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story and Edward B. Hanna's The Whitechapel Horrors. Oh, and in Ellery Queen's A Study in Terror as well. Hanna's book hews the closest to the actual Ripper murders; Queen's book features two of the canonical murder victims, and Dibdin's book is incredibly shocking.

A Canadian small press published a Star Trek/Sherlock Holmes crossover anthology a few years ago, Federation Holmes. Despite having Holmes meet Kirk and Spock, the book has the Enterprise-E on the cover.

Mike Ashley put together an anthology about ten years ago called The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures. It's what the title suggests -- some thirty new stories of Holmes by writers like Michael Moorcock, Stephen Baxter, Peter Tremayne, and others. I'd recommend it.

Larry Millett wrote a series of novels about Sherlock Holmes' adventures in Minnesota. Every couple of months, Holmes would go to Minnesota to solve a crime in the Twin Cities and the surrounding area.

Marvin Kaye's anthologies are generally quite good. The Game Is Afoot is a nice collection of Holmes parodies, pastiches, and scholarly work from the 1800s to the 1990s. Resurrected Holmes is a lot of fun -- it purports to be an anthology of Sherlock Holmes stories written by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, and a dozen more.

Shadows over Baker Street is an anthology of Holmes vs. the Lovecraftian mythos. Peter Cannon's Pulptime covers similar ground. (Cannon also wrote the Wodehouse meets Lovecraft story, "Scream for Jeeves.")

I would love to get my hands on Ellery Queen's The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes from 1943.

Oh, and Adrian Conan Doyle's anthology The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes is pretty good.

There's also a really good Sherlock Holmes/Doctor Who crossover novel, All-Consuming Fire, which was done as part of Virgin Books' Doctor Who: The New Adventures range. Written by Andy Lane, it involves Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor teaming up with Holmes and Watson, with cameos from Mycroft Holmes and

Spoiler: All-Consuming Fire

the eldest Holmes brother, Sherrinford.

It's a great read, though unfortunately out-of-print. Holmes also appears in the fiftieth New Adventures novel, Happy Endings, by Paul Cornell.

 

[S. Gomez]

(Sorry for the bump.)

I've started listening to the 1950s BBC radio plays with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. They're quite fun, and fairly faithful (judging from the two-and-a-half episodes of my experience). The actors are quite good, to be expected from such names, although it is a little difficult actually picturing them in the roles: I mean, when you hear Gielgud's voice you naturally see his face, and I could never quite see his face as Sherlock Holmes.

 

[Kail]

I have the complete collection of the Basil Rathbone radio shows. They are really good. In fact, I'd say they are just as good if not better than the movies. Any one else listen to them?