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(non-BBC-Sherlock) Holmes-related Miscellany


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Here's the place for all those Holmes-related tidbits.  (But please note that items relating specifically to the BBC program Sherlock belong in the thread "'Sherlock' articles & other miscellany.")

 

 

15 CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT SHERLOCK HOLMES

 

http://mentalfloss.com/article/63985/15-curious-facts-about-sherlock-holmes-and-sherlockian-subculture?utm_content=bufferf3494&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Edited by Carol the Dabbler
Added more clarification to top line.
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There didn't seem to be a more appropriate thread, so I made one!

 

P.S.:  Gotta love that one Holmes-society name:  the Seventeen Steppes of Kyrgyzstan!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, there's some of the BBC Sherlock mentioned as well as Cumberbatch but also a whole lot of Jeremy Brett.

 

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/30/the_televisual_sherlock_the_role_that_made_benedict_cumberbatch_a_star_drove_another_actor_insane/

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  • 2 months later...

Talk about fan-club meetings -- Anderson never even dreamed of anything this elaborate!

 

The curious case of the Sherlock pilgrims

 

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Emma Thompson wants to be the first woman to play Sherlock Holmes?  Well, good luck with that.

 

https://twitter.com/HowardOstrom/status/637018692048580609

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  • 2 weeks later...

Also interesting that, as of yesterday, Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning British monarch in history.

 

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I was really amazed to read that the third-longest-reigning British monarch was -- dear old George the Third!

 

(Judging by what I've heard from Alex's relatives in Wales, he wasn't terribly popular on his own side of the Atlantic either.)

 

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  • 1 month later...
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Looks like it's cross-platform again, like Crimes and Punishment was (phew - means I don't have to wrestle the XBox controller from my husband's grasp :D). Thanks for the news - I quite liked Crimes and Punishment (that we're-not-calling-it-thus-but-it's-totally-a-mind-palace system was great), so really looking forward to this :smile:.

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  • 5 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I was watching 'The Murder Detectives', part 3 of a 3-part documentary series on Channel 4 on Tuesday I think it was. It followed a Bristol police department through a young man's stabbing, all the way through the process of finding suspects, charging and eventual trial.

 

I couldn't help noticing that the symbol on the ribbon of all the police dept's lanyards was a little white Sherlock (deerstalker and pipe) silhouette against a blue background :)

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  • 4 weeks later...

That was so sweet.  :cry:

 

Could have done without quite so much of that nice music, but was nevertheless able to understand enough of the dialog to follow the flow of things.

 

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  • 1 month later...

I've been "Mom-sitting" lately, and often read some of my late father's assorted books while settling down for the evenings.  I came across the following brief chapter in Alexander Woollcott's essay collection, Long, Long Ago (copyright 1943):

 

THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS

 

To F. Yeats-Brown, the old Bengal Lancer, we are all indebted for some knowledge of how, in April, five-and-thirty years ago, Abdul-Hamid the Damned spent his last night as Caliph of Islam, Lord, as he liked to put it, of Two Continents and Two oceans, he whom Gladstone had dubbed the Great Assassin knew on that night that already the obstreperous Young Turks, twenty thousand strong, were starting toward him from Salonika.  He could only issue a statement breathing his somewhat belated passion for constitutional government and then await another daylight.  This was no easy prospect, for his own unrest infected the entire palace.  The pigeons in the imperial dovecotes, numerous as the Young Turks, were all a-twitter.  The parakeets were on edge.  Even the zebras seemed to know the jig was up.  Though he bathed daily in milk and never forgot to rouge his saffron cheeks, Abdul-Hamid looked all of his sixty-six years.  His concubines, of whom in that house of a thousand divans he had, through the force of tradition, acquired rather more than he any longer remembered what to do with, were themselves having the vapors.  And anyway, if he must somehow while away the time until dawn, he would need a more potent anodyne.  Happily this was provided by the linguists at the press bureau, for in the nick of time there came dawdling into Constantinople from London a recent issue of the Strand Magazine, and they all worked like beavers on a translation from is pages.  I suspect it was the issue distinguished in the minds of collectors by the first publication of the magnificent story called "The Bruce-Partington Plans."  Thus it befell that the Great Assassin spent his last night as Sultan sitting with a shawl pulled over his poor old knees while his Chamberlain deferentially read aloud to him the newest story about Sherlock Holmes.

 

Wherefore, I think it may well be that his perturbed spirit hovered over a coffeehouse in the Fatuous Forties when, on a gusty night not long before Christmas, there met there and dined together certain raffish fellows having this in common with Abdul the Damned, that they were all brothers in the Baker Street Irregulars.  Topped for the occasion with a plaid hunting cap, your conscientious correspondent repaired to the secret assemblage in one of our town's few surviving hansoms, jogging along, through the best New York could do in the way of a dun-colored fog, with the disquieting notion that he was being followed.  This baseless apprehension was born of a letter from a medico in Kansas City, warning me that my hansom would be trailed through the night by a heavily veiled lady in a four-wheeler.

 

But if Dr. Clendening failed to arrive, heavily veiled or otherwise, the faithful were out in full force.  Trampling down a negligible opposition, Christopher Morley [presumably this one, rather than the actor] was elected Gasogene and the post of Tantalus went to that strangely literate Harvard man, Earle Wallbridge.  Elmer Davis firmly read aloud what is known, I believe, as "a paper," to the visible edification of Gene Tunney, who was making what I feel sure was his first appearance as an Irregular.  But the dinner turned from a mere befuddled hope into a great occasion at that precise moment when, after a slight commotion in the wings caused by all the waiters trying at once to help him out of his wraprascal, there entered -- vague, abstracted, changeless, and inexpressibly charming -- an enchanting blend of slinking gazelle and Roman Senator, William Gillette, as ever was.  At the sight of this, his most famous model, Frederic Dorr Steele wept softly into his souffle and none of us, I think, remained unmoved.

 

Dear me suzz, it must have been toward the close of the nineties that the ineluctably gadfly, Charles Frohman, goaded Mr. Gillette into making a play out of Dr. Doyle's already famous stories, which the actor himself had not, up to that time, had a chance to examine.  Therefore, he was obligated to devote all of three weeks to the task of turning them into a play.  This much of that play's history may have accounted for the slightly guilty look with which he listened the other night while Vincent Starrett rose to argue, from indices furnished by the ash of a Trichinopoly cigar and certain allusions in the record of the Gloria Scott case, that, wherever Mycroft Holmes may have gone to school, Sherlock had surely studied at Cambridge rather than at Oxford.  Suspecting me, with unerring justice, of an ignorance as profound as his own in these Baker Street niceties, Mr. Gillette confided to my delighted ear the story of the tramp who, a-prowl in the Louvre, was terrified by the sight of that lovely mutilee, the Venus of Milo, "Let's get out of here," the tramp whispered hoarsely to his companion, "or they'll say we did it."

 

In addition to Dr. Clendening's, and, of course, that of Abdul the Damned, there was another vacant chair which troubled me.  I could have wished that Mr. Gillette might have brought with him and read aloud to us an unpublished piece of his called "The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes," a one-act sketch which he first played at a benefit here and later put on at the Duke of York's in London as a curtain-raiser for his own "Clarice."  This sketch make much of Billy, the buttons at Mrs. Hudson's, who is best remembered because he had the curtain in the second act of the longer play.  Surely you remember how the minions of Professor Moriarty tried to capture Billy and how, with his uniform torn to shreds, he escaped their dastardly clutches.  Can't you still hear him clattering up the Baker Street stairs and see the toothsome grin with which he assented heartily when Sherlock Holmes, in of his rare expansive moments, announced, as the curtain fell, that he was a good boy?  Casting about him for a cockney boy who might act this part at the Duke of York's, Mr. Gillette settled upon a little, frightened, underfed sixteen-year-old comedian who had been playing the part in a provincial touring company, and who had gone big, they said, in Doncaster.

 

I kept thinking the other night that it might have been possible to have had him with us.  At least he was in this country at the time.  He has done well here.  His name is Charles Spencer Chaplin.

 

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OK, that's the whole thing now, hopefully with no glaring typos.

 

That one essay is actually a collection of Holmes-related anecdotes with a number of minor interesting points.  Interesting, for example, that Charlie Chaplin apparently did not (as sometimes reported) originate the role of Billy, though he was indeed one of the earliest actors to play that part.

 

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