News — sherlock holmes society of london

Sherlock Holmes Society of London “The Shoso-in Bulletin, published in English between 1991 and 2004, was the most truly international Holmesian periodical of all. It was founded by our distinguished Japanese member Hirayama Yuichi, whose own contributions alone justified the Bulletin’s existence. East Wind Coming: A Sherlockian Study Book by Yuichi Hirayama and John Hall gathers twenty-eight of Dr Hirayama’s essays, from The Shoso-in Bulletin, The Baker Street Journal, The Ritual and elsewhere, along with four written jointly with a leading English Holmesian, John Hall. Yuichi has discovered, in a Japanese detection manual of 1940, the simple means by which Holmes determined the direction Herr Heidegger’s bicycle travelled on the moor. In...

"The Story and the Scripts Behind No Place Like Holmes: Select Episode Scripts From The Hit Sherlock Holmes Web Drama Comedy by Ross K Foad. MX Publishing. 2012. 252pp. At www.nplh.co.uk/ you’ll find No Place Like Holmes, a series of comedy-dramas written and directed by Ross K Foad (who also plays Sherlock Holmes), based on the premise that Holmes and Watson were frozen in a time-spell by the demonic Hugo Baskerville, emerging eventually in the year 2010. We witness them, as the website says, fighting both evil masterminds and modern appliances. The films — thirteen so far, plus three Mary Morstan Mysteries, two reminiscences from the...

"The essays collected in Watson Is Not an Idiot: An Opinionated Tour of the Sherlock Holmes Canon by Eddy Webb (MX Publishing; www.mxpublishing.co.uk) were originally posted on Mr Webb’s blog at http://eddyfate.com. They are necessarily opinionated, as they must be; they’re also intelligent, incisive and well-written. The nearest equivalent to Watson Is Not an Idiot is probably Martin Dakin’s Sherlock Holmes Commentary, but Mr Webb takes the line throughout that the chronicles of Sherlock Holmes are fiction, written by Arthur Conan Doyle. His book can help us appreciate just what is good in the stories, what isn’t, and why they still appeal when so much contemporary work is forgotten. It...

"Back in March I was sceptical when I learned of a play that was about tour the north-west: “Somewhere between the fact and the fiction Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest creation stole the soul of Jeremy Brett, the actor who would become the embodiment of the Baker Street Sleuth. The Curse of Sherlock Holmes follows Jeremy as he fights for his sanity… his life.” I don’t know how it came across in performance, but the published script by Dhanil Ali (MX Publishing, 2013) is thought provoking and dramatic, without being unnecessarily sensational. Since the protagonist is Jeremy Brett, however, the disclaimer: “All...

"The Amateur Executioner: Enoch Hale Meets Sherlock Holmes by Dan Andriacco and Kieran McMullen. MX Publishing. 2013. 180 pp. Enoch Hale, a native Bostonian, is a reporter for London’s Central News Syndicate (where, in 1920, Horace Harker is still a familiar figure, though far from revered) and a friend of Chief Inspector Wiggins of Scotland Yard. As it becomes evident that the apparent suicide of a Music Hall artiste was only the first of a series of murders by hanging, Hale’s determination to find the link between the victims is variously helped and hindered by a cast of remarkable characters that includes...