You Can Go Holmes Again

According to literary legend, today would be “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes’ 157th birthday. Since The Rap Sheet has commemorated this date in previous years, I’ll refrain from going on at length about the subject. Instead, I would just like to offer what might be termed a “highlights reel” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Granada Television series that, between 1984 and 1994, adapted many of author Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes yarns for the small screen.

Although I’ve been won over by BBC One’s Sherlock, a still-new updating of Conan Doyle’s famous characters and tales, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, when I am in a mood to re-enter Holmes’ classic world--the Victorian age of hansom cabs, gaslighted thoroughfares, street urchins, and calabash pipes--it’s either to the books or Granada’s series that I turn. Jeremy Brett seemed to have been made for the eccentric, often-spiky Sherlock role, and both men who portrayed Dr. John H. Watson--David Burke and, later, Edward Hardwicke--provided excellent, down-to-earth balance against Brett’s nervous-energy-driven sleuth.

Just watching this rousing trailer below makes me want to abandon work and settle in for another showing of the Granada films.



Should all of this put you in mind to further celebrate Holmes’ alleged birthday, then heed this new notice in In Reference to Murder:

This Friday, January 7, from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, [Laurie R.] King and [Leslie S.] Klinger will take part in a book-signing event at The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, an event capping off the weeklong celebration of Sherlock Holmes’ birthday and held in conjunction with the Baker Street Irregulars’ annual banquet.

But wait--there's more! Graham Moore will be on hand to sign copies of his best-selling mystery The Sherlockian, and publisher/Mysterious Bookshop owner Otto Penzler will also be at the party signing copies of his newly-released Sherlockian book, Bohemian Souls.

It’s only too bad I cannot be in Manhattan this week.