Sherlock Holmes

David MacGregor

Description

Sherlock Holmes: The Hero With a Thousand Faces ambitiously takes on the task of explaining the continued popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective over the course of three centuries. In plays, films, TV shows, and other media, one generation after another has reimagined Holmes as a romantic hero, action hero, gentleman hero, recovering drug addict, weeping social crusader, high-functioning sociopath, and so on. In essence, Sherlock Holmes has become the blank slate upon which we write the heroic formula that best suits our time and place.Volume One looks at the social and cultural environment in which Sherlock Holmes came to fame. Victorian novelists like Anthony Trollope and William Thackeray had pointedly written "novels without a hero," because in their minds any well-ordered and well-mannered society would have no need for heroes or heroic behavior. Unfortunately, this was at odds with a reality in which criminals like Jack the Ripper stalked the streets and people didn't trust the police, who were generally regarded as corrupt and incompetent.Into this gap stepped the world's first consulting detective, an amateur reasoner of some repute by the name of Sherlock Holmes, who shot to fame in the pages of The Strand Magazine in 1891. When Conan Doyle proceeded to kill Holmes off in 1893, it was American playwright, director, and actor William Gillette who brought the character back to life in his 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, creating a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with his romantic version of Holmes, and cementing his place as the definitive Sherlock Holmes until the late 1930s.By that point, Sherlock Holmes had developed a cult following who facetiously maintained that Holmes was a real person, formed clubs like The Baker Street Irregulars, and introduced the idea of cosplay to the embryonic world of fandom. These well-educated fanboys subsequently became the self-assigned protectors of Sherlock Holmes, anxious that their version of the character not be besmirched or defamed in any way.In spite of this, there was considerable besmirching and defaming to be seen in the early silent films featuring Sherlock Holmes, which effectively turned him into an action hero due to the lack of sound. When sound films took the industry by storm in the late 1920s, there were a numbers of pretenders who reached for the Sherlock Holmes crown, including Clive Brook, Reginald Owen, and Raymond Massey, but it took more than a decade before a new definitive Sherlock Holmes would be crowned in 1939 in the person of Basil Rathbone.

Sujets

• Historical fiction
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781787056503
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Sherlock Holmes: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Volume 1
David MacGregor




Published in 2021 by
MX Publishing
www.mxpublishing.com
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2021 David MacGregor
The right of David MacGregor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
The views and opinions expressed herein belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MX Publishing or Andrews UK Limited.







For all fans of Sherlock Holmes—Past, Present, and Future



Acknowledgements
Proper acknowledgements begin, of course, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for creating the timeless character of Sherlock Holmes. From there, acknowledgements extend to the countless number of people who have contributed to the universe of Sherlock Holmes over the years. Whether their efforts were creative, scholarly, or simply devoted to keeping the Sherlockian flame burning, they all form part of a far-reaching and multifaceted world. The more time and effort that I put into this book, the more I realized how much I didn’t know, and the more my appreciation grew for anyone and everyone who has contributed to the cultural juggernaut that is Sherlock Holmes.
More specifically, my thanks go to Howard Ostrom and Richard Ryan for reading the text and suggesting various corrections and adjustments. Scott Monty, of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere podcast fame (not to mention a flâneur of note), was also gracious enough to share his expertise, and the esteemed Roger Johnson kindly took the time to write a foreword that I want to frame and put on the wall of my study. My brother, Iain MacGregor, and good friend Peter Morris were shanghaied into proofreading duty and spared me the ignominy of misspelling Harry Reems and Sheridan Le Fanu (two gentlemen who would be surprised to find their names occupying the same sentence). Doubtless, given the scope of the material, there are issues that will be ferreted out by attentive readers, but those miscues are mine and mine alone.
The multitalented Hope Shangle came to my rescue with her photo manipulation skills and internet savvy, thus earning my gratitude, respect, and the occasional bribe with baked goods, and thanks also go to Steve Emecz and the team at MX Publishing for their enthusiastic response to the manuscript and expressing their desire to publish it.
Finally, my thanks to everyone associated with The Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan. Let me explain. For some time now, I had assembled bits and pieces of this book, but had successfully avoided doing the work necessary to pull it together as a cohesive text. Then, in 2018, the Purple Rose produced my play, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Elusive Ear . Audience response was so positive that the theatre commissioned me to write two more plays— Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Fallen Soufflé and Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Ghost Machine . Watching the creative team involved in the production of these plays was incredibly inspiring. Thanks to the costumes, the set, the sound and lighting, the direction and prop design, and the incredible actors who brought their “A” game night after night, audiences were transported back to Victorian London and the rooms of Sherlock Holmes.
In essence, I got to see in person just how much people love Sherlock Holmes. That is what set me on the path of double-checking names and dates, rewatching films and TV episodes, and finishing this book. Is it for everyone? Unlikely. No doubt my love for minutiae and quirky little asides intrude more than they should. But if someone, somewhere, reads this book in a cosy armchair on a dark and stormy night, or on a beach beneath a blazing tropical sun, and it reminds them of how and why they love Sherlock Holmes, that’s more than enough for me. When all is said and done, I consider myself fortunate to have been able to contribute this little rivulet to the roaring Niagara that is Sherlock Holmes.



Foreword
Sherlock Holmes: A Detective for All Seasons
Long years ago, certain literary pundits declared that everything that could be written about Sherlock Holmes had already been written. In 1951, Dorothy L. Sayers declined an invitation to join the nascent Sherlock Holmes Society of London, saying, “I feel that Holmes-worship has been a good deal overdone of late…” Like Sayers, S. C. Roberts had been a leading member of the short-lived pre-war Sherlock Holmes Society, founded simultaneously with the Baker Street Irregulars, and his response too was less than enthusiastic; in particular, he said: “Nor do I favour the proposed journal. The Baker Street Journal , published in New York, seems to me to contain a lot of rubbish and I think it could be virtually impossible to preserve a high literary standard.”
Later that same year, Roberts had second thoughts: he accepted the new Society’s invitation to become its first President, and in 1953 his masterly Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany was published, proving—as if proof were needed—that there was still much to be written about the great detective, and written to a gratifyingly high standard. Inevitably, two learned periodicals have been to the fore with shorter pieces: the venerable Baker Street Journal and its slightly younger friendly rival The Sherlock Holmes Journal , the project about which Roberts had expressed such doubts.
Important, well-written books have continued to be appear, matching such early classics as Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes , T. S. Blakeney’s Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction? and O. F. Grazebrook’s Studies in Sherlock Holmes . A particular favourite of mine is My Dear Holmes: A Study in Sherlock by Gavin Brend, published in 1951, the year of the first great Sherlock Holmes exhibition, held at Abbey House, the block occupying the site of the only house that ever legitimately bore the address 221 Baker Street. It was also, of course, and not coincidentally, the year in which the Sherlock Holmes Society of London was born.
Towards the end of the decade came Michael Harrison’s In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes , the first notable guide for the Holmesian traveller, and James Edward Holroyd’s delightful, discursive Baker Street By-Ways . In 1962 we welcomed The Sherlock Holmes Companion by Michael and Molly Hardwick, and five years later The Annotated Sherlock Holmes was published, to the delight of many readers, and the bewilderment of a few literary snobs. After several essays and a “biography” of the great detective that owed more to his own romantic imagination than to Arthur Conan Doyle, this was William S. Baring-Gould’s magnum opus . The Annotated was immediately recognised as an essential work for the Holmes devotee, and, sadly, it was published posthumously.
More excellent books followed in the 1970s. D. Martin Dakin’s survey of all sixty tales in A Sherlock Holmes Commentary is both enlightening and entertaining, though few, I fancy, will agree with his conclusion that most of the stories in The Case-Book are “spurious”! Sherlock Holmes Detected: The Problem of the Long Stories by Ian McQueen, as the subtitle suggests, concentrates mostly, though not entirely, on A Study in Scarlet , The Sign of Four , The Hound of the Baskervilles , and The Valley of Fear .
Sherlock Holmes, Esq., and John H. Watson, M.D. : An Encyclopaedia of Their Affairs by Orlando Park, published in 1962, was the first notable reference work of its kind, but it was eclipsed fifteen years later by Jack Tracy’s The Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana: A Universal Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes and His Biographer John H. Watson, M.D. , which is a “must have,” especially for those who want to understand the world in which the detective and the doctor lived.
Two similarly-titled books were published in the early 1980s. Donald A. Redmond’s researches into names in the stories—not just “Holmes” and “Watson”—inspired him to write Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources . Names are also significant in A Study in Surmise: The Making of Sherlock Holmes by Michael Harrison, who demonstrated that the first Holmes story, written in 1886, shares several curious details with the disappearance five years before of Urban Napoleon Stanger, a successful East End baker—enough to suggest that Conan Doyle remembered the Stanger case when he wrote A Study in Scarlet . (“Stanger” certainly suggests “Stangerson,” and “Sherlock” seems to echo the name of a private detective engaged to investigate Stanger’s disappearance, one Wendel Scherer.)
These are all books that I would recommend to anyone with a real interest in the chronicles of Sherlock Holmes. A list of every relevant title would itself require a large tome, of course—and that arrived in 1974 as The World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson: A Classified and Annotated List of Materials Relating to Their Lives and Adventures , in which Ronald Burt De Waal catalogued books, essays, manuscripts, cartoon strips, and more besides. A companion volume, The Universal Sherlock Holmes , appeared in 1980, and in 1994 came The Universal Sherlock Holmes , four volumes, incorporating the contents of the first two, plus everything gathere