“You evidently don’t know me” (FINA): The Many On-Screen Incarnations of Moriarty

I started thinking about this topic when everyone was a little preoccupied discussing other things. I found that I didn’t want to talk about those things, but I wanted to talk about Moriarty. Again. I’ve written about the character before, but now seems like a good time to revisit the conversation. Let’s talk about Professor Moriarty and Mr. Moriarty, James Moriarty and Jim Moriarty and No-First-Name-Given Moriarty, Moriarty in the 19th century and in the 21st, a Moriarty colluding with Nazis and one who wears a crown. Let’s talk about the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid and a treatise on the binomial theorem. Let’s talk about the spider and his web, the virus in the hard drive. Let’s talk about the many faces of the Napoleon of Crime.

And there have been so many faces, and so many words written about a character that appears in comparatively little source material. Moriarty is only directly mentioned in two of the original stories: “The Final Problem,” and “The Valley of Fear,” and is mentioned reminiscently in five others: "The Empty House,”  “The Norwood Builder," "The Missing Three-Quarter," "The Illustrious Client," and "His Last Bow." When thinking in terms of words allotted in the Canon, Moriarty is a minor character – but a minor character in the way of Inspector Lestrade, Irene Adler (ick) or Mycroft Holmes. He looms large and casts a long shadow. That is to say, he is not minor at all.

The breadth and variety of on-screen Moriartys speak to the complexities of the character. No truly minor character would invite such panoply of interpretation. While many adaptations have characteristics that overlap – threads that are common throughout the web – each has a unique distinction that sets it apart.

Granada Television’s Sherlock Holmes: Professor Moriarty (Eric Porter)
Eric Porter was a Moriarty straight of the Canon if there ever was one. Such was the case with so many things in the Granada series, of course. In appearance, he was very nearly the epitome of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s description:

He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his puckered eyes.

Where Porter deviates from the original, of course, is in terms of screen time. According to Granada’s producer, Michael Cox: “…[Moriarty’s] one good scene and fight to the death gives him only four minutes and funeral.” To expand Porter’s role beyond that “four minutes and funeral,” Moriarty was included in the plot of Granada’s version of “The Red-headed League,” even though the Professor plays no role in the original story. At the end of the episode, it’s revealed that Professor Moriarty was the mastermind behind John Clay’s attempted bank robbery, and the Professor is obviously less than pleased to discover that he has been foiled by Sherlock Holmes. In addition, Granada’s version of “The Final Problem” included a subplot in which Moriarty has stolen the Mona Lisa, and is endeavoring to execute a complicated conspiracy of art forgery and extortion – only to be thwarted by Sherlock Holmes. Again. Footage featuring Porter from “The Final Problem” is also used in “The Empty House” (1986) and “The Devil’s Foot” (1988), which creates the reminiscent sense of the Professor that is present in the Canon.

The Rathbone-Bruce Films: Professor Moriarty (Lionel Atwill, Henry Daniell, George Zucco)
Over the course of their fourteen Sherlock Holmes films between 1939 and 1946, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce would work with three different Moriartys – and the actors would all appear in other roles in the franchise. The first was George Zucco in the 1939 film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. According to Alan Barnes, author of Sherlock Holmes on Screen, “The most measured of crazies, [George] Zucco’s Moriarty makes a significant impression, enjoying another standout scene in which he dares the bullied Dawes to let slip a razor while shaving him: ‘You’re a coward, Dawes. If you weren’t a coward you’d have cut my throat long ago…’” (21). Zucco would return to the franchise in the 1943 film, Sherlock Holmes in Washington, not as Moriarty, but as the less memorable villain, Heinrich Hinkel, a Nazi spy. He left his indelible mark on the character, however, in that many future Moriartys either returned to or borrowed from Zucco’s performance in some way.

Lionel Atwill first appeared in the Rathbone-Bruce films as Dr. James Mortimer in the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. He would go on to play Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942). According to Atwill in a 1933 interview with Motion Picture magazine, "See, one side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man. The other side, the other profile, is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but the lusts and dark passions. It all depends on which side of my face is turned toward you—or the camera. It all depends on which side faces the moon at the ebb of the tide.” With such personal awareness, perhaps Atwill was the most equipped to capture the dual nature of Moriarty – the academic and the criminal, the genius and the madman.

Finally, Henry Daniell (who had previously appeared in the franchise in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) as Sir Alfred Lloyd, and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) as William Easter), starred as Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green (1945). Daniell’s take on the infamous Napoleon of Crime was Basil Rathbone’s favorite of the fourteen films. “There were other Moriartys,” Rathbone wrote in his autobiography In and Out of Character, “but none so delectably dangerous.” It is, of course, Daniell’s iconic scene in The Woman in Green, where Moriarty ominously ascends the staircase to meet Sherlock Holmes, which was borrowed for the 2012 episode of BBC’s Sherlock, “The Reichenbach Fall.”

Sherlock Holmes – A Game of Shadows: Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris)

The Moriarty of the Guy Ritchie films began – appropriately enough – in shadow, never actually appearing on screen in the first film, Sherlock Holmes (2009). The Professor kept to dark corners, with only a glove or hat brim visible. Voiced by Ed Tolputt, the shadowy figure wasn’t even explicitly identified as Moriarty until the end of the movie.

However for the 2011 film, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Jared Harris was cast as Moriarty (ultimately going on to dub over Tolputt’s dialogue in the first film) and a new adaptation came into full form. Harris’s Moriarty is shades of George Zucco’s interpretation in terms of malevolence and single-minded ruthlessness. And he is, without question, Holmes’s equal in terms of intelligence. “Come now,” he says to Sherlock Holmes. “You really think you're the only one who can play this game?” Contrary to other interpretations, Harris’s Moriarty is set on a global domination that previous incarnations had not been – at least not to the scale seen in the film. World war – that’s his goal – and he’s not all that particular about how it comes to pass. As he says, “You see, hidden within the unconscious, there is an insatiable desire for conflict. So, you're not fighting me, so much as you are the human condition. All I want to do is own the bullets and the bandages.”

In his approach to the character of Professor Moriarty, Harris said: “I didn’t want to do the bad-guy monologue, and I didn’t want to say anything unless there was a really good reason for it...I think that [Moriarty] doesn’t have that morality chip that other people have. He just looks at things and says, ‘If I can do it and it can be done, then why not?’”

BBC’s Sherlock: Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott)
The BBC’s recent Sherlock Christmas special, “The Abominable Bride,” inspired a lot of conversation, but it also inspired this post. I’ve always had an affinity for Andrew Scott’s interpretation of Moriarty, as it is fascinating to watch the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) differences between an actor playing a James Moriarty and not a Jim Moriarty – which is what Andrew Scott is doing. Scott’s Moriarty is malevolent and villainous, which are features that should be considered fairly standard for the character. He’s also intelligent in the same way that a boiling pot is considered hot. He’s intelligent until something upsets the balance and tips him over into frenetic insanity. After all, he once famously proclaimed that he would turn a contact into shoes if they disappointed him. And therein is the difference between a James Moriarty and a Jim Moriarty, between a Professor Moriarty and a Mr. Moriarty.

Transplanting Andrew Scott’s Moriarty into the 19th century no more transforms him into Professor Moriarty than putting him a waistcoat. Nevertheless, there are still some similarities. After all, Scott’s Moriarty says to Holmes, “Shall we go over together? It has to be together, doesn't it? At the end it's always just you and me!” The bit of dialogue is somewhat reminiscent of George Zucco’s Moriarty, who once commented, “Always Holmes until the end.” It’s a sentiment that is perhaps the thesis statement for the pair’s entire relationship.

Elementary: Jamie Moriarty (Natalie Dormer)
Says Joan Watson, "There is no Irene. There is only Moriarty, and Moriarty is never going to change.” Jamie Moriarty began on CBS’s Elementary as Irene Adler, a former lover of Sherlock Holmes’s thought brutally murdered. She reappears – very much alive – in the first season episode, “Risk Management,” and Holmes believes that she has been Moriarty’s prisoner.

She was, of course, no such thing. Irene Adler was merely a cover for Jamie Moriarty – a criminal mastermind. Like other Moriartys before her, she is ruthless, coolly calculating, and possessed of a brilliant intellect. As she tells Sherlock Holmes, “My first instinct was to kill you. Quietly. Discreetly. But then, the more I learned about you, the more curious I became. Here, at last, seemed to be a mind that... that rivaled my own, something too complicated and too beautiful to destroy... at least without further analysis.”

However, as I’ve commented briefly elsewhere, what sets Dormer’s Moriarty apart is not her gender, but her triumphs. Jamie Moriarty succeeded where other Moriartys (and Adlers) had not – in actually, genuinely deceiving Sherlock Holmes. He is so thrown by her deception and the revelation of her true character that Watson is concerned that Holmes may relapse into his old drug habits.

Dormer had hinted at the dual nature of her character in a May 2013 interview: “The cool thing about Irene Adler is you don’t really know who she is or where she comes from… If you look into the novels or the incarnations of her — she’s a bit of a con woman, a bit of a wily one herself, so she has an accent, but you can’t quite place it, so I [thought], if I can do some kind of general American accent that is like, ‘What is that? Where is she from?’”

Moriarty has many faces – young and old, male and female, some a little more intelligent than others, some a little more unhinged than others. Nevertheless, if all roads lead to Baker Street, all incarnations still lead to Moriarty. For Sherlock Holmes, at the end it’s always Moriarty. Always Moriarty, until the end.

Sources:

• Barnes, Alan. Sherlock Holmes on Screen: The Complete Film and TV History. London: Titan Books, 2011. Print.
• Cox, Michael. A Study in Celluloid: A Producer’s Account of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Indianapolis: Gasogene Books, 2011. Print.
• Gettell, Oliver. “‘Sherlock Holmes’: Jared Harris pulls Moriarty out of the shadows.” Los Angeles Times. Dec. 2011. n. pag. Web. 24 January 2013.
• Lash, Jolie. “Natalie Dormer Talks Irene Adler ‘Elementary’ Guest Arc, Play Margaery in ‘Game of Thrones.” Access Hollywood, 16 May 2013. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.

Sherlock Holmes on Screen: “A Study in Scarlet” (1968)

[BBC Drama; Peter Cushing, Nigel Stock]

“As a character, Holmes is very precisely defined; an actor approaching the role plays it successfully only if he plays it by Conan Doyle’s rules.  Peter Cushing, in most respects, is all wrong for the part (though it’s his likeness that currently graces the sign for the Sherlock Holmes pub in London), captured the fantastical elements perfectly, bounding up in the middle of conversations to chase after his own bolting thoughts” (Lloyd Rose, “100 Years of Sherlock Holmes”).

“Peter Cushing is the best Sherlock Holmes of all time.”

I’ve got one eye on my telephone, and one eyebrow raised in what I hope is a look of elegant bemusement, rather than one of gawky confusion.  My mother-in-law is on the other end of the line, and that’s how she greeted me when I picked up her call.  She never says hello, or asks how I am, but she’s treated me like a member of the family since I first walked into her life, holding her eldest son’s hand and looking petrified of his gigantic Irish clan, so I know I’m fairly lucky as far as mothers-in-law go.

“I’m sorry, Mom.  Could you say that again?”

“I said,” she repeats exasperatedly.  “That Peter Cushing is the best Sherlock Holmes of all time, in my opinion."

I didn’t even know she had an opinion, and when I ask her to elaborate, she giggles and goes on about Peter Cushing’s more…tangible…characteristics, in a way that I’m fairly certain is going to traumatize me for life if I allow it to go on much longer.  She closes the conversation by asking if I’ve ever really appreciated the nuances of Cushing’s performance in the original Star Wars film, and when I finally hang up the telephone, I immediately begin digging through my liquor cabinet for something that will help me erase the last five minutes of my life.

Peter Cushing starred as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s 1968 television series, which included, amongst other things, adaptations of “The Greek Interpreter,” “The Naval Treaty,” and a two-part episode of The Hound of the Baskervilles (Cushing had also starred in the Hammer Films version of the same story in 1959, opposite Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville).  He replaced Douglas Wilmer as Sherlock Holmes, who appeared in the pilot episode and the series episodes running throughout 1965.  The actor also returned as the Great Detective in 1984’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death,” and starred as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Great Houdini” (1976).  Early in its run, the 1968 series presented a televised version of A Study in Scarlet, which is worth examining.

A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story, published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual.  The novel is the world’s introduction to its first consulting detective, and is arranged in a two-part plot, including a lengthy flashback to the American West and a community of Mormons (“The Country of Saints”).  Of all the canon stories, STUD seems to be one of the least frequently adapted for the screen.  However, perhaps is more accurate to say that it is one of the least frequently adapted well or completely.  The plot never seems to make it onto the screen in its entirety, and something is usually left on the cutting room floor—whether it’s Holmes and Watson’s introduction ("You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.") or the American narrative.  In fact, the 1933 film adaptation, starring Reginald Owen, only shares its name with the novel, and the plot bears no resemblance at all to the original story (producers were only able to purchase the rights to the title).  Conversely, the 2010 modern adaptation, “A Study in Pink,” includes many of the stories major elements, including the introduction at St. Bart’s, the scribbled word “RACHE,” and the cab driver and his two pills, but the American subplot is entirely omitted.

Cushing’s version of STUD, which starred Nigel Stock (who had played opposite Douglas Wilmer) as Dr. Watson, is not a perfect, line-for-line adaptation either (for example, Holmes and Watson are already comfortably ensconced as flatmates at the beginning), but there are details that are thoughtfully and carefully rendered, which show respect for a legacy in its entirety—a consideration for package, rather than just pieces.  According to David Stuart Davies, author of Starring Sherlock Holmes: A Century of the Master Detective on Screen, “…Cushing’s portrayal of Holmes was praised, and indeed his devotion to the character and attention to detail were invaluable…” (91). For example, upon arriving at Lauriston Gardens, Cushing’s Holmes examines a corpse without thought for propriety or squeamishness, manipulating the body, and bending close to the dead man’s mouth for the tell-tale smell of poison.  It is an accurate rendition of the passage from STUD:

“…his nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling, pressing, unbuttoning, examining, while his eyes wore the same far-away expression which I have already remarked upon. So swiftly was the examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with which it was conducted.”

www.seanax.com

At the conclusion of the same scene, Holmes pauses to write notes on his cuffs, in a wonderful homage to period and place that the audience might miss if they blink.  The attention to detail in regards to costuming was also Cushing’s doing.  According to Davies:

“Cushing requested that the costumes for the series replicated those shown in the Paget illustrations.  The BBC agreed, and in doing so exploded the myth of Holmes’s Inverness cape…The color of Holmes’s dressing gowns as stated in the stories was also copied: the purple, the grey and the famous ‘mouse-colored’ one” (91).

Also of note here are George A. Cooper and William Lucas in their portrayals of Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade, respectively.  The men practically trample over each other to share each bit of information and discovery, their words running together as they stare accusingly at each other.  These inspectors are every inch Holmes’s description: “They have their knives into one another, too. They are as jealous as a pair of professional beauties.”  Even the Irregulars are present in this adaptation, in a scene that is faithfully rendered, including Holmes’s militaristic command of the gang of street urchins, and Holmes’s request that: “In future you shall send up Wiggins alone to report, and the rest of you must wait in the street.”

As Lloyd Rose states, Peter Cushing should be all wrong for the role of Sherlock Holmes.  He was fair-haired, and nearly 60-years-old at the time of filming STUD, when in the original text, Sherlock Holmes would have been in his late twenties.  And although he was nearly six-feet-tall, Cushing sometimes managed to appear far shorter in scenes (perhaps due to his much vaunted costuming, and poorly-chosen camera angles).  But Cushing’s performance was energetic and driven, much like Holmes himself, with respect to a body of work and the arch of a story, and he treated the series as a whole, rather than individual episodes.  Though Cushing once famously said, “…he would rather sweep Paddington Station for a living than go through the experience [of being Sherlock Holmes] again,” he left a distinct and defined fingerprint on the character, traces of which are evident in later interpretations.

And also I like having something to discuss with my mother-in-law; though we disagree and lock horns, it’s all in fun, and everyone has a good time.  Except for my husband, who turns a just marvelous shade of pistachio green whenever I mention his mother’s fervent crush.  I suppose it just leaves him a little unsettled, though I can’t imagine why. 

oOo

On June 27, a new blog contest will be starting up, so make sure you check back here for details on how to win! 

Sources:

• Rose, Lloyd. “100 Years of Sherlock Holmes.” Murder in Baker Street (September 2002), 248.

• Stuart Davies, David. Starring Sherlock Holmes: A Century of the Master Detective on Screen (January 2006), 91.

Some Thoughts on Setting: St. Bartholomew’s Hospital

“St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, known popularly as ‘Barts’ or ‘Bart’s,’ was founded in 1123 by—legend has it—Rahere, a jester at Henry I’s court.  Having taken ill in Rome, Rahere prayed on the banks of Tiber, on the island of St. Bartholomew, that he might recover in time to die on his native soil.  St. Bartholomew appeared to him a vision, commanding him to return to London and build a church and a hospital in his name.  By 1896, the hospital had grown to 678 beds, treating some 6,500 in-patients and 16,000 out-patients annually.”

—From “A Study in Scarlet,” page 16, in “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes,” edited by Leslie Klinger

All great heroes have an origin story.  They cannot exist in a vacuum; their journeys must have a starting point.  And Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are no exception.  Most readers know the story of Holmes and Watson’s first meeting, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presents to us in A Study in Scarlet.  And more recently, some talented writers have been revisiting and rewriting that source material, in the form of the comic book: “Sherlock Holmes: Year One,” which re-imagines Watson as a twenty-something police surgeon (sans mustache, but still an ex-soldier), who meets a likewise youthful Sherlock Holmes for the first time at (naturally) a crime scene.  This adaptation includes some new, intriguing back-story for the Great Detective, and Holmes and Watson’s youthfulness lends new color and spirit to their adventures.

But Holmes and Watson didn’t meet at a crime scene.  They met at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College on January 1, 1881.  The story is as a familiar as an old coat: Dr. Watson, newly returned from Afghanistan, injured and ill, finds himself living beyond his means in a London hotel; he meets “young Stamford,” an old acquaintance, at the Criterion Bar, where the Doctor tells him about his need for affordable lodgings; Stamford, surprisingly, has met another fellow that very day in need of a roommate, and he takes Dr. Watson to the chemical laboratories at St. Bart’s to meet him.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

But St. Bart’s is an important location, perhaps one of the most important in the canon—outside of 221B Baker Street.  By having the two men meet at the hospital, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says quite a bit, intentionally or not.  He certainly could have shoehorned them into a meeting at a restaurant, a park, or even one of their current lodgings; but instead, we have “young Stamford,” who leads Watson to Holmes, like Virgil leading Dante to Beatrice.  By having Holmes and Watson meet for the first time at St. Bart’s, we not only get a glimpse of the men that they will become, but also the men that they might have been, and, most importantly, the men they already are.

Stamford has no idea what Sherlock Holmes does in the chemical labs, or even what his course of study might be, but he takes Dr. Watson to see this odd fellow anyway.  According to the Doctor:

“This was a lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work” (STUD).

Alone, and bent over his work—these are our first impressions of Sherlock Holmes, and the ones that will color our interpretations of him eternally.  Impressions that are further enforced by his first spoken words: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”  In this instance, he is speaking of his hemoglobin test, but we see many variations on this moment throughout the canon—the moment of realization and discovery unique unto Sherlock Holmes—which he marks in various ways, ranging from unsettling laughter to dramatic disclosures.  From his first appearance, before his first word, the reader knows Sherlock Holmes to be a man driven by the pursuit of knowledge, and consumed by his work.  Although Watson seems to believe that Holmes is addressing Stamford as he describes his new discovery, there is the underlying implication that, at the moment, Holmes would have told anyone and anything about his breakthrough—a Bunsen burner, the cleaning lady, a particularly nice chair.  The solitary chemist of St. Bart’s is clearly in search of an audience.

Seeing Sherlock Holmes in the setting of St. Bart’s is also a reminder of the man he might have been.  Stamford describes him as “a first-class chemist,” and Holmes’s hemoglobin discovery seems to verify this assertion.  [Note: Of course, a Sherlock Holmes story is nothing without debate and disagreement.  See, for instance, Remsen Ten Eyck Schenk’s article “Baker Street Fables,” in which he argues that Holmes’s discovery must have been invalid, or it would still have been used today.]  It is not so difficult to imagine Sherlock Holmes as a chemist—the profession would have certainly provided him with enough pretty little problems and complex scientific puzzles to keep his brain occupied for the rest of his days.  But it would have been sedentary, solitary work.  What need does a chemist have of an audience, or of a chase?  So Sherlock Holmes is no mere chemist then, which he already knows when Stamford and his companion walk through the door.

Additionally, by meeting at St. Bart’s, the reader is reminded that Watson is, first and foremost, a doctor.  St. Bart’s is his alma mater.  Watson remained a doctor all of his life, although his practice was frequently neglected for long intervals while he ran after London’s only consulting detective.  A meeting at St. Bart’s reminds us of the ordinary life he could have chosen, with normal hours and a peaceful, quiet house—no strange violin concertos in the middle of the night, no unannounced visits from sinister guests.  As he says in The Sign of Four, “…a tranquil English home in the midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us;” a peaceful home would be a natural, reasonable desire for a man who had been ill, a man who be so long away from familiar country.  But then Sherlock Holmes says to him, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” and suddenly St. Bart’s fades away into the background, to the place it should be relegated, in the past. 

Because St. Bart’s is Dr. Watson’s past, not his present or his future.  He hasn’t been a student in a very long time, and he’ll always be a doctor, but more recently he has been a soldier.  War is what he currently knows, and perhaps that is why London is so alien to him, why he is so antagonistic in his description of the city: “…London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained” (STUD).

The Doctor is so intensely angry at London; it’s as if it has disappointed him in some way or offended him personally.  “Most people blunder around this city and all they see are streets and shops and cars.  But when you walk with Sherlock Holmes, you see the battlefield,” a recent incarnation of Mycroft Holmes says about his younger brother.  Before Watson met Sherlock Holmes, he had lost the battlefield.  But he gets it back.  Dr. Watson actually makes a very neat little journey in those few paragraphs: he is lead by an old acquaintance to a place from his past, to meet a man who reminds him of who is presently, but is also offering him an extraordinary future.

In 2010, the BBC adaptation “Sherlock” re-imagined the first meeting between Holmes and Watson in a 21st century setting.  Holmes and Watson still meet at St. Bart’s, in the labs; Watson still weary from the battlefield, and Holmes bent over a beaker with a pipette in his hand.  Stamford is still the corner—a smirking, knowing guide—perhaps wondering if he’s done the Doctor a terrible disservice.  There is far more electronic buzzing and digital beeping than there would have been in 1881.  Holmes asks for the use of a mobile phone, and then says to the Doctor, “Afghanistan or Iraq?”  But he’s still able to read Watson from the way he carries himself, the color of his skin, and the state of his possessions (a smartphone, rather than a pocket watch).  Holmes is still mind-bogglingly observant and Watson is still unerringly loyal and long-suffering (now there are body parts in the refrigerator and not cigars in the coal-scuttle).  They are still Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.  And their story still began in the shadow of St. Bart’s.

oOo

Thank you to everyone who entered the recent blog contest, and for sharing your reasons why you read Sherlock Holmes.  Congratulations to Jenny Teo, who was the winner of the “Better Holmes & Gardens Prize Package,” which included a copy of The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, by Paul D. Gilbert, and a copy of the soundtrack to Granada Television’s “Sherlock Holmes” series, starring Jeremy Brett, David Burke, and Edward Hardwicke, with music by Patrick Gowers.

Check back here on April 25 for a new contest and prizes.