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Sherlock Holmes has had such enduring appeal because he embodied the strengths, the complexities and the contradictions of the late-Victorian age. For he is not one man but at least three men in one, three different archetypes of masculinity, each vying for dominance, and each capable of being emphasized in performance. First and most obviously, he is a rational man, the epitome of the Victorian era of scientific discovery and invention, of
The importance of films in the cultural and social life of both Britain and the United States has long been recognized. Although radio survived in Britain more or less intact, by 1960 it too had taken second place to television as the prime domestic medium. This book begins by analysing the very different relationships between cinema and radio that emerged in Britain and the United States. It moves on to examine the ways in which cinema adapted radio programmes in the fields of comedy and detective fiction and then how radio dramatized films. When radio first took off in the United States in the late 1920s, it was regarded by the film industry as a rival, something to keep people at home and away from the cinema. But during the 1930s, Hollywood began to appreciate the value of radio in publicizing and promoting its films. The British broadcasting service was set up in 1922 with a monopoly and finance from a licence fee following negotiations between the Post Office, which controlled the air waves, and the radio industry, which manufactured the equipment. Radio in wartime was informational and inspirational. It provided news, entertainment, and propaganda. The book concludes with a look in detail at the ways in which the two media have dealt with three popular fictional characters, the
INTRODUCTION By the time Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to Dr Joseph Bell in 1892, Sherlock Holmes’s fame as the world’s first consulting detective was already established. Bell was famous in his own right among the medical community for being a skilled surgeon and a professor based at Scotland’s Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. A champion of the medical profession, he had taught Doyle 1 and employed him as his outpatient clerk in 1878. Through this relationship, Bell influenced the creation of Holmes, a sentiment Doyle
Sherlock Holmes’s association with an abstracted, instrumental and superior gaze has suggested to critics the presence of a specifically masculine intellect, one which is contrasted, in the tales, with images of feminine irrationality. 1 Joseph A. Kestner in Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity .; Conan Doyle, and Cultural History (1997) suggests that rationality was
William Blake (1757–1827), the second to interpret a familiar Sherlock Holmes short story. These are different, contrasted uses, one requiring reading a lyric poem in all its intensity, the second showing how understanding popular narrative, written as entertainment, requires psychoanalysis, which, in turn makes valuable the close reading of a large-circulation text. Both discussions invoke some Freudian concepts
or offices. Their architecture made it easy for commentators to characterise them as alien to the working-class communities around them and thus representative of a different set of values. An oft-quoted passage comes from a Sherlock Holmes short story, in which Holmes and Watson look down on London from a train viaduct: Holmes: Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea. Watson: The Board schools
discuss Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes) from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, roughly covering the beginnings of the genre, classic detective fiction, and early hard-boiled detective fiction. These are Edgar Allan Poe (with his amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin). Jacques Futrelle (Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen), Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot), and Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe). In these, the detective and the chess-player encode anxieties about intelligence, the social order, the self, and the other. They exhibit the chess-player at its most
: Bill Condon’s Mr Holmes (2015) and Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing , series 1, episode 1 (1999) Historical writing as a narrative in Mr Holmes Since White describes the research phase of history as indistinguishable from that of a detective, I begin with a recent Sherlock Holmes film. Mr Holmes is the story of Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) in his latter years when he retires to the countryside to attend to his beehives. Although no longer available to solve crimes, Holmes is haunted by his last case, one he has been struggling to write
their arches has been as a backdrop to working-class urban neighbourhoods, most famously in the opening credits of Coronation Street. Indeed, with Granada Studios having had a long-standing presence in Castlefield – the place where railway viaducts dominate most spectacularly – one can argue that the perpetration of industrial and railway landscapes as sites of lurid, urban twilight zones has constantly been reinforced for the sake of convenience. Why not have Sherlock Holmes chasing a suspect along the shadowy canals beneath the railways in Castlefield? After all
helpful to move more squarely into the realm of detective fiction, albeit nearer the end of the nineteenth century, with a comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing. Tattoos appear only sparingly in the Sherlock Holmes opus, although their use provides a definitive mark of identification. In A study in scarlet ( 1887 ), for example, a tattoo is the obvious sign missed by Watson in the midst of one of Holmes’s dazzling displays of method. In this case, the mark allows the detective to identify a sergeant of the marines from across the street. In the later well