Search Results for: Sherlock Holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Back to the Television

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So, episode 98 of Elementary aired weekend before last. That, of course, is the modern day Sherlock Holmes show, set in New York City, featuring Johnny Lee Miller as the brilliant, socially challenged detective, and Lucy Liu as a female Doctor Watson. The show, which began in 2012, just kicked off season five. Meanwhile, on January 1 of 2017, BBC’s Sherlock FINALLY airs season four. Set in modern day London, it has launched Benedict Cumberbatch to superstardom and also escalated…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Bogart’s The Caine Mutiny

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I’m fortunate in that the powers that be at Black Gate let me roam way off topic once in a while. The fantasy stuff isn’t really a stretch, since that’s at the heart of Black Gate itself. Other times, I’m just talking about something I really like. Such as, say, Humphrey Bogart. The first two posts (The Return of Doctor X and The Maltese Falcon) about the greatest actor of all time actually fit within the Black Gate milieu. The third…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes & Watson (more from Otto Penzler’s SH Library)

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(Third in a series of posts about the nine-volume Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library) So, I’ve done a post on Vincent Starrett’s two books in Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library. And a second post looked at the two books from James Edward Holroyd. So, that covers four of the nine tiles in this series. As I wrote in the Starrett post: “Bear in mind, every bit of anything you ever wanted to know wasn’t available on the internet back when…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: RPGing is Story Telling

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As I recall, I began playing Dungeons and Dragons at the very end of 1st Edition. Most of my early memories are of playing AD&D and that’s still my favorite Role Playing Game (RPG) system. My buddy Chris and I used to ride our bikes to Hobbyland and he would get a shiny new TSR module, while I grabbed a color-bled, paper-bound supplement from Judges Guild. I had read Moorcock and Lieber by then (though I didn’t get to Tolkien…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Back to Otto Penzler’s SH Library

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(Second in a series of posts about the nine-volume Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library) A couple of weeks ago, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes looked at Vincent Starrett’s two entries in Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library series. Another author provided two entries for the series: James Edward Holroyd. Holroyd helped establish the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1951, the original London Sherlock Holmes Society having been disbanded some years earlier. He was also the first editor of the…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

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Lester Dent was a prolific pulp author, best remembered for creating the adventure hero, Doc Savage. And speaking of Doc Savage, there is currently a Shane Black film project to star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as The Man of Bronze. Hopefully it will introduce Savage and Dent to a new generation. The Doc Savage stories were published under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, which is a reason Dent’s name isn’t as well-remembered as it should be. Dent cranked out 159…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett on the Great Detective

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Otto Penzler is a larger than life name in the mystery field. He is the man behind New York City’s ‘Mysterious Bookstore’ as well as the Mysterious Press (Nero Wolfe’s current imprint!). He’s a true mystery maven. You can read about his recent The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories here.  From 1993 through 1995, under the Otto Penzler Books imprint, he reissued nine hard-to-find works of Sherlockiana. The Otto Penzler Sherlock Holmes Library consists of the following books, originally published between…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dungeon! – A New Kind of Board Game

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TSR’s Dungeon! came out in 1975, just one year after Gary Gygax revolutionized gaming with Dungeons and Dragons. The ground-breaking board game is still an excellent introduction to fantasy gaming over forty years later. The board represents a dungeon, divided into six areas (representing levels) of varying difficulty, differentiated by color.  There are monster and treasure cards for level and the harder the level, the tougher the monsters and of course, the greater the treasures. The character classes have been changed over…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Musical Fairy Tale – Mt. Vernon and Fairway

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I’m fortunate in that my boss here at Black Gate lets me wander afield from Sherlock Holmes and mystery-related topics. Now, I think I’ve managed to nominally stay within the milieu of Black Gate,  though my Humphrey Bogart – George Raft post might have stretched things a bit (I’ve got a reasonable argument ready!). So, for example, I haven’t written anything (yet…) about my hero, Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson. Today I’m going to stretch the rubber band a ways….

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Arsenic and Old Lace

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In Brooklyn during World War II, a pair of black widows were luring men to their deaths. They preyed upon older, lonely men without family or close friends. With a “Room for rent” sign hanging in the front window of their idyllic-looking home, they fed arsenic-laced wine to their victims. A male relative who lived with them buried the bodies in the basement, with no one the wiser. The women were in fact little old ladies: think Aunt Bee as…

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