Interview with Great Sherlock Holmes Debate 2 organisers MX Publishing – What is the debate? How did it come about? Who is involved? All these questions and more answered. Interview conducted by Ross Foad from ‘No Place Like Holmes‘.
More information at the Great Sherlock Holmes Debate Facebook Page.
“It is completely impossible that all readers will fail to find at least one view that strikes a chord within their mind that says, “of course! That was the real Holmes (or Watson).”
Philip K Jones is one of the most experienced Holmes reviewers in the world and maintains the world’s largest database of pastiches. He was particularly keen to review Sherlock Holmes and The Strangers Room as it contains more than forty short ‘pastiches’ which Phil nicely refers to as ‘moments’ rather than mysteries. This is a fascinating collection that we savoured the first time we read it and we agree with Phil that some of them are an excellent insight into the true Holmes and Watson.
“This is a collection of Sherlockian items that were originally published on the Internet. Some of them have been revised for this publication and some remain in their original forms. In contrast to the usual Sherlockian anthology, this book is an assembly of fragments. Each item is complete and entire, but they mostly catch moments, not stories. Some are complete mysteries, with villains to catch and investigations to be performed, but, mostly, they are visions of Holmes and Watson, along with Mrs. Hudson, Inspector Lestrade and the irregulars at particular moments. Some of these moments are quite important, but that is all they are, moments.
A number of these items center on Christmases, mostly those following Holmes’ return from the Great Hiatus. In general, the entire collection celebrates the change of Holmes into a human being. His boyhood is suggested as lonely and neglected with Mycroft as his only real human contact. His association with Watson is depicted as the source of his growing humanity and these tales seem to capture the moments he sees other people as more than simply data to be integrated into his catalogue of human activities.
Many of the items are authored by the editor, David Ruffle. He confines himself, mostly, to short pieces and to the area of Puns. Two of his creations are presented, both of which easily merit inclusion in any collection of Sherlockian narrative puns, if such can ever be published. Poems are also included. These are strictly outside my areas of expertise, but I do concede that they definitely convey impressions of the individuals they portray.
This collection is definitely not a group of Sherlockian mysteries. Instead, it is a series of more than forty small peeks at Holmes, Watson and the standard Doyle dramatis personae that are not afforded by the Canon. It is possible that readers may dislike or consider some of the views to be silly. It is completely impossible that all readers will fail to find at least one view that strikes a chord within their mind that says, “of course! That was the real Holmes (or Watson).” Further, readers may encounter a few old friends along the way.”
Sherlock Holmes Tales From The Strangers Room is available through all good independent booksellers including Classic Specialities and the Mysterious Bookshop (NY) as as well Amazon and in all electronic formats such as Amazon Kindle.
Following the wonderful review from The Bookbag (see below), The Sherlock Holmes Society of London is next up to review this fascinating book which sees Sherlock Holmes cast as a woman.
“I started this book after an evening out, thinking I would just read a page or two to help me sleep… two hours later I’d read all of it. Margaret Park Bridges knows how to give a reader a good time. Each page beckons you hypnotically towards the next. It’s suspense filled, interesting, fun and, indeed funny to the point of farce on a couple of occasions.” The Bookbag
In the current newsletter from The Society, they agree that despite the controversial storyline, this is a very good book.
“Margaret Park Bridges takes an even more revisionist approach in her novel My Dear Watson (MX Publishing; £9.99/ $18.95/ €12.99). The detective’s secret is disclosed at the very start of the book, and it’ll do no harm to reveal it here: Sherlock Holmes was a woman. It’s not a new idea but it’s handled here with great skill and confidence, and it has a purpose, to account for much of Holmes’s personality as described by Dr Watson.
Visits to the Turkish baths must have posed problems, but there’s no real contradiction here of Watson’s accounts. The woman Holmes lives as a man, and Watson believes her to be a man. Am I convinced? No. Do I accept it while reading the book? Yes, and not only because it’s essential to the story, which is a good one, involving the beautiful daughter of the late James Moriarty.”
My Dear Watson is available from all good bookstores worldwide including Amazon USA, Amazon UK, and in all good formats including Kindle, Nook, iBooks (iPad/iPhone),
“This professor is the sort of teacher who makes learning a pleasure.”
Marino Alvarez’s A Professor Reflects on Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating collection of essays and writings about Sherlock Holmes. In their current newsletter, The Sherlock Holmes Society of London reviews this new book.
“The title of A Professor Reflects on Sherlock Holmes by Marino C Alvarez (MX Publishing; £9.99/ $16.95/ €12.99) deliberately echoes that of A Doctor Enjoys Sherlock Holmes by Edward J Van Liere. The twelve
essays make you think, but they also entertain you.
Dr Alvarez compares the writing styles of Watson and Holmes, but stresses that only the reader can say which was the better storyteller. He considers Holmes’s potential as a teacher and as an academic. He distinguishes between the logical and the empirical.
In the second section, Dr Alvarez follows Holmes to Meiringen and the Reichenbach Falls, and then visits Trinity College, Oxford, preceding the Society’s time there by a month. This professor is the sort of teacher who makes learning a pleasure. I’m sorry our visits didn’t coincide!”
A Professor Reflects On Sherlock Holmes is available through all good bookstores including Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Barnes and Noble USA with advanced copies available from The Mysterious Bookshop and Classic Specialities.
“one of the most prolific and intelligent writers in the field”
In the current edition of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London newsletter appears the review of Matthew Elliot’s collection of radio play on Sherlock Holmes.
“Sherlock Holmes first appeared on radio eighty-one years ago, and audio dramas far outnumber television plays or films. The Further Adventures on BBC Radio 4 appears to have finished, but a series of the same name continues in America. Jim French’s production The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes began syndication in 1998.
M J Elliott contributed his first script in 2003 and is now one of the most prolific and intelligent writers in the field. If you’ve ever listened to a radio play and asked yourself, ‘How did they do that?’ – or even, ‘Why did they do that?’ – you’ll love Sherlock Holmes on the Air (MX Publishing; £14.99/ $22.95/ €16.99), a satisfyingly chunky volume containing eight of Matthew Elliott’s best scripts for The Further Adventures plus ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and ‘The Empty House’ from The Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the parallel series of dramatisations from the Canon, which has been Mr Elliott’s sole domain since he began it in 2005.”
Sherlock Holmes On The Air is available from all good bookstores including Waterstones UK, Amazon UK, Amazon USA, and Barnes and Noble USA.
This is a very exciting post…my publisher is sponsoring a debate over who is contributing most to the wonderful legacy of Sherlock Holmes, the Warner Brothers movies by Guy Ritchie starring Robert Downey, Jr, and Jude Law, or the BBC series Sherlock, starring that British guy, Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson.
In addition, there will be in total 10 fan places in the debate, two of which have been awarded already (one per week) to fans in the USA and Japan. The list of confirmed participants is wonderful – from the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, to Sherlockology, The Baker Street Babes to I Hear of Sherlock, lots of actors, writers, directors and of course Holmes authors.
Bob Crew is a former International Correspondent for The Times and spent a lifetime in journalism specialising in international and business affairs.
In this extraordinary and delightfully surprising book about the 60-year television history of Queen Elizabeth II, there are stars of television, television satire, entertainment, film, the art world, sport, pop music, politics and television science, including the following, all of whom relate to Bob Crew’s fascinating social and television royal history, in one way or other : Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell, Boris Yeltsin, Logie Baird, Michael Faraday, the Beatles, John Lennon, Julian Lennon, Paul McCartney, Heather Mills, Spike Milligan, John Cleese, Peter Cook, The Pythons, Barry Humphries, David Frost, David Beckham, Vinny Jones, Simon Cowell, Cheryl Cole, Ant and Dec, Piers Morgan, David Attenborough, Eamonn Andrews, Barbara Kelly, Shakespeare, Princess Diana, Dodi Fayyad, Prince William and Prince Harry, Prince Charles and Camilla, Princess Anne, Helen Mirren, Jacques Cousteau, Andrew Marr, John Humphrys, John McEnroe, David Dimbleby and Richard Dimbleby to mention but a few.
This is not your usual bog-standard Diamond Jubilee book – duplicating the same old story as all the duplicating others – on the contrary it really is a stand-alone Diamond Jubilee book that is uniquely and refreshingly different, with a broad brush, and something for everybody in its pages. This really is a ‘party at the palace’ book in more ways than one. Bob Crew has assembled a huge and colourful cast of characters with which to tell his story, a goodly number of whom he has known and/or had occasion to work with.
Also included is a wonderful chapter on Queen Elizabeth’s pictures through history on stamps – including many beautiful examples of stamps from around the world.
Britain’s Television Queen is available from all good bookstores including Amazon UK
My last review was devoted to Ruffle’s novella, “Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Horror.” However, his book contains plenty more. Let’s have a look, shall we?
Watson is to cricket as George Will is to baseball. For him, the sport is the embodiment of everything that is good about the British Empire: “honour, an inherent sense of duty and fair play,” as he declares in “Horror.” So when famed Australian batsman Victor Trumper shows up at 221B, asking Holmes to look into a kidnapping threat, he’s both shocked and eager to help. “The Trumper Affiar” (previously published as an e-pub on Amazon) is a solid story, written along more traditional lines than “Horror.” Ruffle provides accurate historical details, both in the setting and characters (actual cricket players), and his end notes are a nice touch for history aficionados. Holmes and Watson are also nicely in character and we’re treated…
View original post 466 more words
To truly engage with any story, the reader has to like or at least care about the central character. This is something which I have always found difficult about the original Empty House.
I had followed as the earlier stories took me through the many adventures Watson had experienced since meeting his eccentric friend in the lab at St Barts. I had come to learn through his words that Sherlock Holmes was not simply a thinking machine but also possessed a great heart. I truly believed that he cared deeply for Watson and trusted him above all others. But then along comes the Empty House and these beliefs are thrown into doubt.
I find it hard to like Holmes in the Empty House. At the centre of the story is a massive lie and we learn that rather than trust Watson with the most important secret of all, Holmes turns…
View original post 713 more words
When his last book won the 2011 Howlett Award (Shelock Holmes Book of The Year) it was always going to be tough for Alistair Duncan to meet expectations with his next one. Thankfully he does that, and more, in arguably one of the best books ever written on Conan Doyle. An Entirely New Country went down so well with co-creator of BBC’s Sherlock, Mark Gatiss that he agreed to provide the foreword.The Sherlock Holmes Society of London has now reviewed the book in their latest newsletter and they agree to the importance of the book. Holmes fans have fed back that in addition to being historically significant the book is also an excellent read.
“Alistair Duncan’s Eliminate the Impossible was a very good start, and Close to Holmes confirmed him as a truly important writer in our field. In The Norwood Author he illuminated, as no previous biographer had, an essential period in the life of Conan Doyle, when Sherlock Holmes leapt to international fame – and his creator killed him. Now An Entirely New Country: Arthur Conan Doyle, Undershaw and the Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes throws light on the drama of the years that followed, when Conan Doyle and his family lived in Undershaw, the house he’d had built at Hindhead, where conditions were favourable for his invalid wife Louise. Hindhead was also the centre of an informal community of writers and artists.
During the Undershaw years Conan Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He served as a field surgeon in the Boer War and wrote a full history of the conflict. He adopted the cause of the wrongly convicted George Edalji. He was knighted. And he fell in love with Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife. Today, Undershaw is in a sad state, empty and threatened by inappropriate ‘development’. It’s fitting that the foreword to this admirable book was written by Mark Gatiss, the Patron of the Undershaw Preservation Trust. See www.saveundershaw.com“
An Entirely New Country is available through all good bookstores including Amazon USA, Amazon UK, The Mysterious Bookshop (New York), Classic Specialities and in a simply stunning Kindle version that includes the dozens of photos in all their digital glory. If you are lucky enough to have a Kindle Fire we can report back that the colour photos come out really well on it.
Mxpublishing's Blog 