Category: Sherlock Holmes

EP0734: Sherlock Holmes:The Adventure of the Discordant Bells

A bell ringer is killed mysteriously in the tower of a famous bell.

Original Air Date: November 21, 1948

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EP0729: Sherlock Holmes: The Ancient Queen

Holmes investigates mysterious goings on surrounding the discovery of the mummy of an ancient Egyptian queen.

riginal Air Date: November 14, 1948

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Review: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Sherlock Holmes stars Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes with Jude Law as Watson. Holmes efforts lead to the capture of a cult leader and black magic practitioner named Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) who has been on a killing spree through grotesque human sacrifices. At the same time, Dr. Watson is engaged and Holmes is doing his best to wreck the engagement to keep his much needed assistant at his elbow.

Before Lord Blackwood is executed, he promises Holmes that there will be three deaths that Holmes can’t stop that will change the world and drive Holmes mad. Watson declares Lord Blackwood dead, but then three days later Blackwood’s tomb has been found empty and the promised deaths begin.  Holmes has to unravel the puzzle and is plunged into a world of dark conspiracies and the occult as he searches for the truth. 

Perhaps the best way to describe the movie is to list some of its key deviations from traditional Holmes stories:

  • Holmes uses his fists far more than usual. True enough. In A Study in Scarlet, it does mention that Holmes is an expert boxer, but the thread seems almost to have been forgotten by Doyle in later stories. But in Sherlock Holmes , Holmes has as many martial arts moves as Jackie Chan. However, Guy Ritchie did a good job working Holmes thinking process into his fighting which made it easier to swallow.
  • He and Irene Adler are an item and Adler, rather than being a dancer who gets into a scrape with a Bohemian king, is an international criminal.
  • Holmes’ traditional portrayal as a drug addict is gone. And instead,  in this movie, we find Holmes having to guard against Watson’s gambling habit to make sure Mrs. Hudson gets the rent money.
  • Holmes is intentionally trying to sabotage the engagement of Mary Marston, not so in the books.

There are other differences. Holmes definitely doesn’t act like he lived in the Victorian era for one. Despite these issues, I found myself oddly enjoying the movie. Perhaps, it’s because there’s a long-running tradition of messing around with the character for dramatic portrayals going back to William Gillette who wrote the first dramatic adaptation. He asked permission from Doyle to marry Sherlock Holmes off and was told, “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”

And so it’s been. We’ve had all sorts of Sherlock Holmes films and television shows. There’s been a young Sherlock Holmes movie, there’s been an animated Sherlock Holmes Television series featuring Holmes in the 22nd Century with a robot Dr. Watson. We’ve had stupid Holmes and brilliant Watson movies, and of course our post-modern Holmes over on the BBC. There have been  pastiches that have taken the character in all directions.

Yet, the true Holmes of fiction is well known to most people, so while movies and television can play with Holmes’ character, they can’t really redefine it in the eyes of the public, just as Patrick Stewart’s King of Texas didn’t make anyone thing King Lear was really set in Texas.

Similarly, Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes could best be understood by bringing one of fiction’s greatest heroes to the biggest moneymaking arena there is: The Summer Popcorn movie.  By this account, Sherlock Holmes was a fine film. It was an action packed thriller with plenty of plot twists and engaging story that holds your attention to the end. If there’s any film I’d compare it to, it’d be be the Basil Rathbone vehicle The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes which was a solid action thriller for 1939. Sherlock Holmes show how much more Hollywood has amped up its performance and how much more action audiences demand.

Perhaps, the story’s truest touch was the its portrayal of the close friendship between Holmes and Watson.  While not as warm as the Rathbone-Bruce or Brett-Hardwicke portrayals, or even the Ronald Howard and Howard Marion Crawford performances from the 1954 syndicated Television series,  the Holmes-Watson interplay between Downing and Jude Law was better than the BBC’s vision from Sherlock.

Overall, the results of Robert Downey, Jr. and Direct Guy Ritchie playing with the Sherlock Holmes character turned out surprising well, even if they won’t make me forget Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0  stars.

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EP0719: Sherlock Holmes: The Uddington Witch

A Scottish lord has been murdered. Rumors of a witch seeking revenge on the descendants of witch hunters abound. Holmes and Watson must find the truth.

Original Air Date: October 31, 1948

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EP0714: Sherlock Holmes: The Fabulous Windmill

Sherlock Holmes is brought in when a Dutch dike  inspector disappears under mysterious circumstances.

Original Air Date: October 24 1948

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EP0709: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of Black Peter

An old sea captain who stole a fortune is found stabbed with a harpoon. The son of the man who the old captain robbed and murdered is quickly suspect by a Holmes protege on the police force, but Holmes believes someone else is behind the plot.

Original Air Date: October 17, 1948

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EP0704: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Guy Fawkes Society

When a man is found dead at Baker Street’s doorstep, Holmes goes undercover to stop a plot again parliament.

Original Air Date: October 10, 1948

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EP0699: Sherlock Holmes: The Frightened Bookkeeper

Sherlock Holmes is on the trail of a bookkeeper accused of killing a blackmailer, but did the bookkeeper do it?

Original Air Date: October 3, 1948

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Book Review: The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles marked Sherlock Holmes return to literature after he was killed off by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Final Problem” eight years previously. Doyle had not yet brought Holmes back to life. This story was set prior to “The Final Problem.”

Sir Henry Baskerville is the heir of his late uncle Charle’s Estate. However, his uncle passed away under mysterious circumstances and one of Sir Charles’ friends, Dr. James Mortimer comes to Holmes to ask for assistance. Local legend is that Sir Charles was killed by a ghostly hound that haunts the moor to avenge the sins of one of the Baskerville ancestors. Mortimer confides to Holmes that he found a hound’s footprint at the scene of the death.

Intrigued, Holmes takes the case, and the case gets more interesting when Holmes spots a man following them inLondonand someone steals one of Sir Henry’s boots. Surprisingly, Holmes doesn’t go to Dartmoor, but sends Watson to investigate and report his finding to Holmes.

Watson find strange goings on: suspicious-acting servants, a dangerous convict on the moor, and of course, the legend of the hound.

This remains perhaps the most oft retold Holmes story and a pioneering mystery story that has been ripped off repeatedly over the years. While its a Holmes story, with Holmes absent from the main action for about half the book, it gives Watson a chance to shine and show his intelligence and resourcefulness.

Despite its popularity, I didn’t enjoy this as much as The Sign of Four. However, this is a matter of taste. Sign of Four was an action packed thriller while Hound of the Baskervilles relied much more on a build up of suspense. This one builds slowly and in a less skillful hand, it would have been easy for The Hound of the Baskervilles to become boring, but Doyle sensibly used Watson’s reports to Holmes and Watson’s diary entries to avoid bogging the story.

Overall, the Hound of the Baskervilles deserves its reputation as a true detective fiction classic.

Rating: 4.75 out of 5.00

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EP0694: Sherlock Holmes: The Bruce Partington Plans

Sherlock Holmes tries to solve the death of a young government official and recover stolen submarine twins.

Original Air Date: September 26, 1948

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EP0689: Sherlock Holmes: Black Guardsman Of Braddock Castle

Sherlock Holmes investigates the death of a nobleman which is tied in to a mysterious ghost who haunts an English castle.

Original Air Date: September 19, 1948

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TV Series Review: Sherlock Series 2

The 2010 First Series of Sherlock introduced a clever re-imagining of what the character of Sherlock Holmes would look and act like if he were born in modern times.  Episodes were based very loosely on original Doyle stories, though they added their own twists.

Series 2 has some of the appeal going, but too often heads off the rails into extreme improbabilities that takes its post-modern approach way too far.

To begin with, the series opener, A Scandal in Belgravia radically changes the character of Irene Adler from a brilliant talented opera singer to a clever sex worker. The episode works fairly well up to the point as she ends up leaving her locked camera phone with Sherlock for safekeeping, attracting the attention of the CIA, who want the contents of the phone.  Sherlock needs to unlock the phone to find the secrets it holds but has to move carefully as he can only make four attempts. But breaking this cypher is beyond him. The battle with Adler has a somewhat satisfying conclusion, despite a few turns that are implausible such as an unbelievable faked death and an ending that was simply impossible.

The episode included an absolutely amazing heart to heart conversation between Holmes and brother and  fellow sociopath Mycroft wonder what it’s like to feel things. Really.  I felt like the conversation was reworked from a vampire movie to apply to a sociopath.

From a social standpoint, “Scandal in Belgravia” represented a serious downgrade of Adler both in terms of character and mental acumen.  Stephen Moffatt insists that he’s defined the characters accurately and that they both “are clearly defined as deranged – it’s love among the mad. He’s a psychopath, so is she.” I would challenge anyone to read, “Scandal in Bohemia” and come away with the conclusion that Irene Adler was a psychopath.This was Moffat’s decision to play to today’s audiences and it had little to do with the way Doyle originally told the story.

Rating: B

The Hounds of  Baskerville

This updating of The House of the Baskervilles to modern day best captured what made Series 1 work well. The story took the basic plot and put a modern day spin on it. A young man named Henry Knight believes his father was murdered by a giant hound more than twenty years previously and that it occurred as a result of government experiments occurring at Baskerville.

Holmes and Watson get into the government facility using Mycroft identification to bypass security and gather a few quick points that make Henry’s father’s theories seem plausible. Then Sherlock actually goes out on the moor at night with Henry and encounters the H.O.U.N.D. and finds himself gripped by true terror.

The mystery is cleverly done and as it turns out, there are two parts to the mystery: the first being what caused Henry’s death and the second is what’s behind all these other sightings of the Hound.  Watson plays a prominent role in each. The solution is off the wall, but certainly not out of bounds for this type of story.

Rating: A

The Reichenbach Fall  begins promisingly enough when Holmes begins to rise to fame by solving a series of celebrated cases beginning with recovering a stolen painting of The Reichenbach Falls (where Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893). At the same time, Moriarty breaks into the case containing the crown jewels, opens the vault of the Bank of England, and  unlocks the doors of Pentonville Prison simultaneously. Moriarty is arrested and then acquitted by threatening all the jurors.

He then proceeds with a plan to discredit Holmes after a visit to Baker Street and assassins move in all around Holmes. Holmes solves the mystery of two kidnapped children of the Ambassador to the U.S. and then the wheels start to fall off.  Because the kidnapped girl screams when she sees Sherlock, Sgt. Sally Donovan reaches the astonishing solution that Sherlock must have done it as he was the only one who could have solved the case and he did it all on the basis of one footprint. Of course, she doesn’t add that it also included analyzing all the elements present in that footprint which was far more complex.

The story then turns to Moriarty’s attempts to discredit Holmes capped off by the allegation that there was no Moriarty but that Holmes had hired an actor to play the part and that Holmes faked all of his cases. This blew the mind of some reviewers who praised the piece, mine was unblown after about twenty seconds when I thought, “Hired him with what?” Holmes did not have the money to pull off this fraud, so the whole thing was beyond ridiculous. If not for the police buying the story and Holmes’ response, this would have been an interesting farce about media sensationalism.

As for the ending, Emily Perrin wrote a piece for Tor.com in which she explained how “The Empire Strikes Back” ruined many sequels which tried to copy Empire’s formula. This may be the case with The Dark Knight and the first in the case study may be Sherlock, Season 2. 

The bright spot of this episode was Martin Freeman.  He turned in a solid performance as Dr. Watson, the only character who didn’t seem to lose his  mind in the midst of this episode.
One question raised by this episode and never really answered is why Holmes fights “on the side of the angels.” And its never answered.” In the “The Final Problem,” Holmes risks death to challenge Moriarty because he planned to rid England of Moriarty’s influence. Holmes declares, “In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side. ” These considerations don’t seem to figure in for the post-modern Holmes. So it remains an unsatisfying question.

Overall, I’d give this episode a C.  From here on out, I’d say my review becomes spoiler-laden, so be advised.

The ending has Holmes and Moriarty atop a high building where Moriarty informs Holmes that the key to hacking any system that assassins thought Holmes possessed didn’t exist. He’d used paidconfederates to achieve his criminal trifecta. He then gives Holmes the choice of jumping off the building in order to complete the disgrace narrative or Watson, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson will all be shot by assassins. Holmes figures out that he can extract the information from Moriarty to call off the attacks. However, Moriarty thwarts this by shooting himself in the head.

Why would he commit such a dramatic suicide?  Because ” Some men just want to watch the world burn. ” Then Holmes, rather than looking for alternatives such as using an ever-present cell phone to contact Lestrade and warn him, plunges to his death to save his friends, but before doing that, he calls Watson and tells him that the newspaper accounts were correct and that he faked everything including doing research to find out about Dr. Watson. In post-modern stories,  sacrifice of life is not enough. Rather, a hero must sacrifice his reputation to feed the cynicism of the masses. so Holmes does so.

Of course, Holmes was alive by the end of the episode. Earlier, he’d met with a forensic scientist, asked for her help, and then the camera cut away. If she gave him a pill that would help him survive a 100 foot drop and bleeding out on the pavement, they ought to sell it in drugstores.

As one reviewer on IMDB put it, “….the saddest part was that was I wasn’t even surprised he lived through that ordeal. That is what this series is about….giving you ‘surprises’ that you never expected…. because said surprises are totally unrealistic.” We can only hope that in Season 3, with Moriarty and the death of Holmes out of their system, that the series moves closer to reality.

Overall series 2 rating: B-

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EP0684: Sherlcok Holmes: The Unwelcome Ambassador

Sherlock Holmes is hired to look into a case involving a new ambassador to England. However, Holmes quickly finds the new ambassador dead.

Original Air Date: September 12, 1948

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Book Review: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Continuing on the success of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs offers up some more fantastic classic mysteries but also a few signs of Doyle burning out on the Holmes series.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is available for free download on Amazon and other sites.

The American version of the Memoirs includes eleven stories:

“Silver Blaze”
“The Adventure of the Yellow Face”
“The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk”
“The Adventure of the Gloria Scott”
“The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”
“The Adventure of the Reigate Squire”
“The Adventure of the Crooked Man”
“The Adventure of the Resident Patient”
“The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”
“The Adventure of the Naval Treaty”
“The Final Problem”

On the positive side there’s “The Silver Blaze” which was one of G.K. Chesterton’s favorite Holmes stories which is perfectly constructed.  “The Reigate Squire” shows Holmes at his craftiest as he has to solve the murder of a country while ailing. The “Resident Patient” allowed Holmes to show his cleverness even if a freak storm was called in to actually take care of justice. “The Navel Treaty” is the longest story in the collection and a completely satisfying story as we’re presented with a fascinating whodunit and a startling conclusion. “The Crooked Man” is a classic case of a false charge brought about by confusion and reminded me a little bit of “The Sign of Four.”

On the down side, I had to admit some disappointment with the end to “The Greek Interpreter.” Of course, this may have been because I saw the Grenada TV version first which “fixed” the ending. The “Yellow Face” was a somewhat slow story that’s been rarely adapted.

Beyond that, there s also a sense that Doyle was beginning to tire of the character.  “The Stockbroker’s Clerk” would have been a fine story had it not been a basic rehashing of “The Red Headed League.” Two stories were told to Watson by Holmes entirely without any actual action occurring in both “The Gloria Scott” and “The Musgrave Ritual.” While both stories were good, I missed Watson in them.

Of course, the styling of these entries with fits with the title and it brought home to me one of the appeals of Sherlock Holmes.  The story was not written in traditional fiction style but as Memoirs of Doctor Watson. It’s a point that can be missed because this device has been used so many times since and often not very well, but Watson’s writings sounded so true to life that we really don’t treat Holmes as a fictional character at all, if you see the way Holmes is quoted, it is rarely quoted as coming from a novel. No wonder that 58% of Britons believe Sherlock Holmes was a real historical character.

That brings us to “The Final Problem” a story that has never adapted well to other media without serious tweaks.  Even Grenada Television’s version looked absolutely silly when Holmes and Moriarty fought over the falls. A production may borrow from parts of Final Problem particularly as it relates to Moriarty, but the plot itself has serious problems not the least of which is the difficulty of making the fight look convincing.

Holmes flees London and then across the Continent to get away from Moriarty. The story rubs me as  simply wrong as you have a detective fleeing a criminal. While Holmes’ justification for the chase the first three days was to avoid messing up the prosecution of Moriarty’s gang. After the gang was apprehended and Holmes remained free, continuing to run from Moriarty into the heart of Switzerland was unnecessary.

Of course, this was Doyle’s attempt to free himself from demands for more Holmes’ stories by killing the character off.  What surprised me was that Doyle manages a remarkably poignant ending to the story with Watson, in effect, eulogizing Holmes,  and bringing out aspects of his character that are often overlooked. It was actually quite beautiful writing with which Watson bid farewell to his dear friend.

Overall, while it’s not quite as good as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs holds its own as a great classic short story collection.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.0

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EP0679: Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger

Holmes investigates a case of treachery and death at the circus.

Original Air Date: June 20, 1948

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