Sherlock Holmes and heredity. "It is a hereditary matter..."

JAMA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 196 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. F. Musto
Keyword(s):  
Sherlock Holmes

Time Lost, Time Regained: Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Private Life ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Part Structure ◽  
Lost Time

This article discusses Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which, though not enthusiastically received by audiences at the time, has subsequently become a work highly valued by critics and cineastes. Radically cut from its original four-part structure by the studio, it has come to be perceived as a film about loss. This relates both to its themes – suppressed love, the vanished world of Holmes and Watson – and to the history of the film itself, whose missing episodes exist only in fragmentary form. The first part of the essay looks at the ways in which the film constructs an image of Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephen), with a focus on the question of his sexuality, while the second part turns to the ways in which the film became an ‘obsession’ for one writer in particular, the novelist Jonathan Coe.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Wilde Crimes: The Art of Murder and Decadent (Homo)Sexuality in Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde Series

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Susanne Gruss
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
The Real ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Historical Detail

Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde novels (2007–12) appropriate Wilde for a neo-Victorian crime series in which the sharp-witted aestheticist serves as a detective à la Sherlock Holmes. This article explores Brandreth's art of adapting Wilde (both the man and the works) and English decadent culture on several levels. The novels can, of course, be read as traditional crime mysteries: while readers follow Wilde as detective, they are simultaneously prompted to decipher the ‘truth’ of biographical and cultural/historical detail. At the same time, the mysteries revolve around Wilde's scandalous (homo)sexuality and thus his masculinity. The novels remain curiously cautious when it comes to the depiction of Wilde as homosexual: all novels showcase Wilde's marriage, Constance's virtues, and Oscar's love for his children, and the real ‘Somdomites’ are the murderers he pursues. By portraying these criminals and their crimes, the novels evade the less comfortable, transgressive aspects of Wilde's sexuality and help to reduce him to a thoroughly amusing decadent suitable for a general reading public. Brandreth's novels can therefore be read as a decidedly conservative account of Wilde's masculinity for the market of neo-Victorian fiction.

A Study in Four Colours: The Case of the Chameleon Detective

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
First Episode ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literary Characters

Sherlock Holmes, one of the world's most famous detectives, is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in the process of adaptation, be it cinematic or literary, and I propose calling him a cultural chameleon: regardless of the palette and colour against which he is positioned – warm (scarlet and pink), cold (emerald), or black – he remains a brilliant sleuth. This paper compares four titles and four colours: A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first of the long-running series of texts by Doyle, and three instances of Holmes's adaptability to twenty-first century standards and expectations: ‘A Study in Emerald’ (2003), an award-winning short story by Neil Gaiman, ‘A Study in Pink’ (2010), the first episode of the BBC series Sherlock, and ‘A Study in Black’ (2012–13), a part of the Watson and Holmes comics series. Each background highlights different aspects of the detective's personality, but also sheds light on his approach to crime and criminals.

Mobility, Interrupted

Transfers ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 170-176
Author(s):  
Deborah Breen
Keyword(s):  
Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (UK and USA, 2011, Warner Bros. Pictures, Directed by Guy Ritchie. Screenplay Kieran Mulroney and Michele Mulroney. With Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Jared Harris, Noomi Rapace).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document