This year—as is thankfully the case every year—brought numerous delightful developments in the wide world of Sherlockiana. At times (the nineteen-seventies and the twenty-teens being excellent examples), the decades gift us with full-scale Sherlock Holmes revivals, so many myriad versions coming down the turnpike that they’re all too likely to whizz past us in a blur. A little reflection is needed to take stock of all we have to be grateful for, so here is a by no means complete list of the fresh delights we’ve experienced throughout 2019.
First, the sad news: Warner Brothers announced this year that Sherlock Holmes 3 starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law would be pushed back to a possible release date of 2021. Speaking as a big fan of exploding trees, “Hot”son, and Sherlock wearing egregiously terrible drag, the author is highly disappointed. But it seems still to be percolating even if on the back burner, so fingers crossed that 2020 will bring us more hints from director Guy Ritchie about the direction the third installment will take (we can at the very least assume that Sherlock sheds his clever wallpaper disguise and rises from the dead in an appropriately dramatic and flamboyant manner).
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly’s rambunctious parody film Holmes and Watson may have lacked the grace of some of its comedic predecessors (Without a Clue and They Might Be Giants immediately spring to mind). But it fared magnificently in the awards category nevertheless, and to those like myself for whom all Holmes is good Holmes, credit must be given where due and recognition appreciated. Holmes and Watson garnered six Razzie Award nominations (an indisputably impressive number), and won in an incredible four categories: Worst Picture; Etan Cohen for Worst Director; John C. Reilly for Worst Supporting Actor; and Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel. Heartiest congratulations to the cast and crew!
221B Con, a yearly convention held in Atlanta, Georgia, celebrated its seventh year as one of the best Sherlockian programs in the country, thanks to founders Heather Holloway and Crystal Noll. Numerous other volunteers (including Baker Street Babe Taylor Blumenberg) help to make this giant mechanism tick, and the sheer richness of the programming is part of what makes the weekend so enjoyable. Everything from canonical chronology to cosplay best practices is discussed, veteran Sherlockians enjoying the company of new devotees of all ages, and the attendees are as warm as the Baker Street fireside.
Throughout the year, mystery publisher, editor, and collector Otto Penzler of The Mysterious Bookshop in downtown Manhattan has been selling significant portions of his highly prized rare book collection. As well as first edition copies of such seminal works as Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales (1845), and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930), Mr. Penzler parted with a good many Sherlockian objects of interest. Your author could not afford any of them, but would like to note that they included an inscribed first edition of The Case of the Baker Street Irregular by none other than Anthony Boucher, and all twelve of the Strand Magazine editions that would come to comprise The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Future Christmas gifts of this nature are highly encouraged, and my mailing address will be provided upon request.
CBS’s highly regarded procedural Elementary wrapped up its seventh season this year, and it’s with a heavy heart that I take up my proverbial pen to say goodbye to Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu’s Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson. An unflinching look at sobriety and addiction—as well as unapologetically progressive casting regarding both race and gender—helped to bring the Great Detective and the Good Doctor to a new generation of enthusiasts. Kinder than BBC’s Sherlock (and in some ways more respectful of the original material—there, I said it, and I’m not taking it back either), Elementary not only stood on its own two feet as a modern crime drama, but contained scores of delightful Easter eggs for fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works. Characters like Captain Thomas Gregson (Aidan Quinn), Shinwell Johnson (Nelsan Ellis), Kitty Winter (Ophelia Lovibond), and Ms. Hudson (Candis Cayne) were sharply written and wonderfully memorable, and the series will doubtless stand as a television pillar of Sherlockiana.
2019 brought us a new academic conference, and one that went off without a hitch: the Left Coast Sherlockian Symposium, helmed by director Elinor Gray. It’s marvelous to see more events organized across the country, especially ones of this nature that blend vintage Sherlockian culture with younger scholars discussing fanwork institutions like Yuletide and Archive of Our Own. As a person straddling the line of a “younger” member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and an “older” member of the Baker Street Babes and the fic-writing community, I can vouch for the weekend having been beautifully sensitive, welcoming, thoughtful, current, and dare I even say necessary. Following the tradition of Scintillation of Scholars and 221B Con, one can only hope that Left Coast will become another yearly gathering for which we’ll all eagerly mark our calendars.
Mycroft and Sherlock: the Empty Birdcage by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse was released in September of this year, and only further served to varnish their reputation for outstanding historical fiction. In an impressively researched prequel set in 1873, Mycroft attempts to wrangle a brilliant but obnoxious teenage Sherlock as the brothers scramble to solve the Fire Four Eleven serial murders at the behest of the Queen. Fans of the series will be gratified that Mycroft’s best friend from his Trinidadian days, Cyrus Douglas, remains a major character, as does his love interest, the aspiring doctor Ai Lin. The style throughout is impeccable, and tracing Mycroft Holmes’s journey from virile young bachelor to sedentary brain in a jar remains as riveting as ever.
It’s as easy as playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon as it is to identify most professional actors’ ties to Sherlock Holmes-themed stage and screen productions, since Sherlock Holmes was already ubiquitous during the era when film was invented (Sherlock Holmes Baffled, a 30-second Mutascope piece, was shot in 1900 and featured in arcade slot machines for individual viewing). But actor Freddie Jones sadly passed in 2019 at the age of 91, and was notable for appearing in two important Sherlockian productions: in Stephen Spielberg’s groundbreaking Young Sherlock Holmes, and later in Jeremy Brett’s beloved Granada television series. He will be missed.
Plentiful debate has been devoted (Sir Arthur himself joined the fray) to which selections represent the very best of the 60 canonical Sherlock Holmes stories. But this year, Dr. Ashley Polasek released the outstanding Being Sherlock: a Sherlockian’s Stroll Through the Best Sherlock Holmes Stories. This is no mere compendium of high-quality cases; Dr. Polasek includes witty commentary, fascinating context, illustrations and photographs, and contemporary criticism. The Wall Street Journal recommends it as a Christmas treat for the mystery lover, and the author heartily agrees. Any completist would covet this volume for the erudite introductions to the mysteries alone.
Author, director, and novelist Nicholas Meyer is best known in our circle for his outstanding pastiche The Seven Per Cent Solution, which helped to spark a resurgence of Sherlockian enthusiasm in 1974. As physically painful as it remains to see Sherlock Holmes dressed in the nineteen-seventies incarnation of the classic deerstalker-and-cape uniform, the novel was excellent, and the film sparked a great deal of welcome copycat Doylean material. This year, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols marked Meyer’s return to pastiche following his later offerings, The West End Horror and The Canary Trainer. It received outstanding reviews from Library Journal, Bookpage, and the New York Journal of Books, and features an older Holmes and Watson helping Mycroft to expose a sinister political conspiracy in 1905, an adventure that takes them across Europe via the Orient Express.
In what amounted to a marvelous year in pastiche publication, three female authors of note (among others!) produced new works. First, Bonnie MacBird’s excellent series of classically-styled pastiches continued with The Devil’s Due, plunging the reader back into her world of immaculate London atmosphere and beautifully pitched Holmes-Watson banter. Next, Sherry Thomas released her fourth installment of the Charlotte Holmes/Lady Sherlock chronicles, The Art of Theft. Feminist takes on Sherlock Holmes are always welcome, and Thomas does an outstanding job of remaining period-appropriate while writing a brilliant mind hampered by gender biases.
Finally, perennial Sherlockian favorite Laurie R. King’s much-anticipated latest in the outstanding Mary Russell series, Island of the Mad, came out in paperback. With Bedlam and Venice as the vividly drawn settings, and the brilliant husband and wife team of Russell and Holmes on the case, fans of King’s previous novels will find that age doth not wither nor custom stale her infinite capacity for creative plot twists and poignant domesticity. Pithy remarks at the expense of fascism prove timely, and all of these titles make for vastly entertaining winter reading.
