Amy Thomas's Blog, page 5

Arthur & George Episode 3: Recap and Review

The finale episode of Arthur & George brought the series to new heights in almost every area and left me wishing the entire series had been as well-written and tightly-plotted as Episode 3 was.

The story picked up at a perplexing moment, in which Sir Arthur had begun to have serious doubts about Edalji’s innocence and some of the seeming coincidences of the case. By doggedly following the clues, much like Holmes would have done, Doyle and his secretary finally uncovered the truth about a troubled young man and a grudge that had existed since childhood.

The series didn’t follow the narrative to the very end, but text-on-screen assured the viewer that Edalji was fully exonerated and resumed his work as a solicitor. From a character standpoint, Doyle’s forensic victory lightened his emotional load and gave him the impetus to declare his true feelings for Jean Leckie and become engaged to her.

The episode left a few perplexing questions, notably about oddities of Edalji’s life that were never explained. Most of these appear to be casualties of a total series runtime of only a little over two hours, and interested viewers can find answers is Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, on which the show is based.

Overall, Episode 3 dramatically increased my admiration for the series as a whole, and while I still believe the cast deserves the lion’s share of credit for making it all work, the subtlety and coherence of Ed Whitmore’s conclusion deserve a mention as well.

Arthur & George has been an enjoyable, if imperfect, look at a lesser-known event in an author’s life, one that had major historical implications in Britain (the creation of the criminal appeals court). A few more episodes would have fleshed out the details more, but as it stands, a stellar cast put heart and polish into a good script and created a series that will no doubt charm Holmesian audiences for some time to come.

The series is currently available for streaming at PBS.org

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How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Anthology Unboxing!

  

Arthur & George Episode 2 Recap and Review

After last week’s origin story, it was refreshing to go deeper into the Edalji case this week in part two of this three-part series. In my opinion, some of the awkwardness of last week’s script was gone, and the story moved through the investigation a bit more seamlessly. At the same time, the greater focus on details of the story highlighted just how disparate the different plotlines are. The Edalji case and Doyle’s conflicted attraction to Jean Leckie just don’t really connect in any meaningful way. They’re both compelling and well enough written to be involving for the viewer, but they feel like separate anecdotes in a life, not intrinsically connected parts of a cohesive narrative, no matter how hard the series tries to make us believe they are.

The bulk of episode 2 is spent on detective work performed by Doyle and his secretary, and Martin Clunes and Charles Edwards continue to be extremely watchable and often amusing. In particular, the script put lines in Doyle’s mouth that were very close to Holmes’s own words, but to his credit, writer Ed Whitmore managed to escape making the references overly heavy handed.

This week also featured more intense scrutiny of George Edalji himself, who proved to be a potentially sketchier character than he originally appeared. Arsher Ali continues to hold his own, never overplaying the character. At this point, however, he’s still such an enigma that it’s difficult to be terribly emotionally invested in his plight.

Additionally, Episode 2 depicted an excellent confrontation between the cornered Doyle and strong-willed Leckie, who declared her unwillingness to accept his advances until he’s ready to make them on his own without coercion. I’ve read different views of Leckie, not all of them sympathetic, but Hattie Morahan certainly paints a picture of an engaging woman who is one of the most appealing parts of this series.

I’ll reserve judgment until everything plays out in episode three, but at the moment, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, Arthur & George is an interesting mystery adaptation of a historical event that is certainly worth 45 minutes a week. On the other hand, its occasional flirtations with brilliance keep making me wish it had reached just a little bit higher.

Episodes 1-2 are currently available to stream on PBS.org

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How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Arthur & George: Episode 1 Review and Recap

September 6th marked the US premiere of Arthur & George, the miniseries adaptation of Julian Barnes’s novel that details the real-life story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fight to prove the innocence of George Edalji, a man who maintained his innocence of several gruesome crimes for which he had served prison time.

First off, I’m glad to see this story getting airtime. It’s certainly an interesting period of Doyle’s life, and while I don’t want to spoil details of the case, the outcome ended up changing British law. Considering that Holmes mania is holding strong at the moment, it’s a good time for the spotlight to shine on his creator.

The first episode acts as an origin story, both for Doyle’s world and for the Edalji case itself. Both are presented fairly obscurely, with the viewer thrown into somewhat unconnected events that are later connected and explained. The payoff works well, but this technique does necessitate a certain amount of focus on detail and tolerance for not entirely understanding what is happening at different points.

The case is presented much like a Holmes story (very intentionally, I believe), and more than once, I found myself expecting Holmes or Watson to pop up. Instead, the detecting duo is Doyle himself and his secretary, Alfred Wood, whom Doyle’s son said he thought was the actual model for Watson. Their dynamic is complex. The somewhat arrogant and unpredictable Doyle has Holmes-like moments, but his emotions and inconsistencies are far more prominent than those of his character. In contrast, Wood has the loyalty and steadiness of Watson but also appears to be the more objective of the two at times.

An element that elevates the story further is the focus on Doyle’s personal life, particularly his conflicted feelings about his attraction to Jean Leckie, the woman who had captured his interest toward the end of his wife’s life. Even though everyone in Doyle’s family is aware of and tolerant to the connection, Doyle himself is tormented by what he perceives as possible emotional unfaithfulness (and lack of certainty about his wife’s trust in him, a trust he never physically violated). This emotional touchstone provides a place for the story to go that pushes it beyond deduction and into the realm of a historical biopic.

Evaluating the first episode as a whole, my greatest plaudits go to the cast. Martin Clunes and Charles Edwards form an engaging and amusing duo as Doyle and Wood, and they manage to convey a great deal of history with subtlety. Their wit and conflict give off an amusing buddy cop impression now and then, but it’s never over the top. In contrast, the understated seriousness of Arsher Ali as Edalji introduces an air of mystery but also of pathos. He comes across as a man who has suffered extensively but refuses to be consumed by anger. It’s a somewhat complicated role that doesn’t receive a huge amount of screen time in the first episode, but Ali manages to make Edalji very compelling. No less effective are the other members of the Edalji family, who come across as regular people in an unusual situation. Finally, also of note, is Hattie Morahan as Jean Leckie. Morahan is having quite a  Holmesian year; she also starred alongside Sir Ian McKellen in Mr. Holmes. In Arthur & George, she plays a woman who is attracted to the man Arthur Conan Doyle is, rather than the legend of the writer, and her wit and beauty are engaging. I expect to see her story intensify emotionally in the two remaining episodes, and I know that Morahan is more than up to the task.

I highlighted the cast in particular because I think they’re a big part of why the script worked. I enjoyed parts of it very much, but there were lines and transitions in scenes that I found myself thinking would have worked much less well with less capable performers. The series goes back and forth between the extremely sobering realities of the Edalji case, which concerned particularly disturbing crimes, and the often humorous realities of the life of Doyle as an early celebrity, who was already being compared with Holmes and defined by him. Martin Clunes made the these disparate tones work together, for the most part, but I think it was a challenge. With a runtime of only 45 minutes (at least as it was transmitted in the US), the episode sometimes felt to me like it was shifting in tone quite quickly, with the potential of being emotionally jarring.

Overall, I enjoyed the first episode of Arthur & George very much, and I look forward to seeing its continuation. I recommend it to Holmesians, but also to anyone else who enjoys historical or period dramas.

Episode 1 is currently available at PBS.org

Image credit PBS

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How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Baker Street Babes Ep. 66: Mr. Holmes Reaction

I don’t usually link BSB episodes over here because there are quite a lot of them, but I wanted to give a special shoutout to our most recent one.

Our topic was a general reaction to Mr. Holmes as a film, but, as often happens, that focus jumpstarted several others, some of them unusually deep and experimental for a Holmes podcast.

Among other things, we discussed:

Viewing Holmes as an immortal archetype vs. a mortal man
The open-endedness of Holmes’s story in contrast with other detectives like Poirot
The tendency for writers to give an older Holmes serious issues to confront like dementia and war
Does Holmes actually die in any pastiches? Why are we so hesitant to kill him?
Holmes’s “superhero” or “mythical arc” as a hero who has already cheated death.

I found my fellow Babes’ comments particularly enlightening (and sometimes hilarious) this time around, and I think you will, too.

Notes: The episode is not spoiler-free and contains many spoilers for Mr. Holmes. The BSB podcast frequently contains strong language. Listen at your own risk.

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How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Review: Mr. Holmes

A slight trick of the mind makes for a great experience in the cinema.

Last year, the Baker Street Babes interviewed Mitch Cullin, author of the recently-published novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, still one of the most unusual Sherlock Holmes novels in existence. We enjoyed the novel and Cullin’s company, so we were thrilled when the film version of the book was announced (with a probably-wise title change to make the subject clear to filmgoers). I don’t live in a huge city, so my cinemas only just got the film, and to my delight, I finally had a chance to see it.

I’ve thought a lot about how to approach this review because Mr. Holmes is not a traditional Holmes film, and it doesn’t tell a traditional Holmes story. It’s nothing like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, but it has an equally vast amount of contrast with everything that’s come before it in the Holmesian world.

I think I’ll just dive in with my favorite thing about the story: Mr. Holmes is for people who live with Sherlock Holmes on a daily basis. Films like Guy Ritchie’s versions or TV’s Sherlock and Elementary may be nontraditional in some ways, but they’re all written and produced with casual viewers in mind. Each one, in its way, periodically reintroduces the viewer to exactly who this Holmes chap is and what he’s supposed to be good at doing.

Mr. Holmes is, I would argue, not really for the casual viewer. It’s for the person who has lived with and loved Holmes long enough that he’s become not just a guy we’ve heard about once, but a part of our lives, an archetype within our imaginations who helps us understand the world and ourselves, a figure who, to us, goes beyond one traditional story format.

I can’t imagine Mr. Holmes being made even ten years ago, and if someone had chanced it, I highly doubt it would have been successful. But the world has changed, and many of us have embraced Holmes and interpreted him and re-interpreted him over and over for our times.

I am thankful to Mitch Cullin, Sir Ian McKellen, BBC Films, and Miramax for realizing that Holmes no longer has to stay in a box where he puts on a deerstalker, peers through glass, and solves a case (not to say that I don’t enjoy traditional stories and adaptations–they’re great). Writers have known this for a long time, but finally, someone dared to depict something new for us on screen.

The Sherlock we meet in Mr. Holmes is 93, retired, and preparing, quite obviously, for the end of his life. The myth of who he is has grown up around him, to the point that he can go to the cinema and see films about himself. The contrast of legend with reality serves to humanize the man Sir Ian portrays with such compassion and understanding.

I said above that the film isn’t a traditional mystery, but it does contain cases–three, to be exact. Perhaps it sounds strange to say that a film with three entire mysteries in it isn’t about mystery at all, but believe me, it’s true.

Or, rather, the real mystery that weaves through all the others and makes the film profound is the question of what is truly important in life and how we judge our actions and view the lasting legacies of ourselves and others. It’s about becoming whole.

If this doesn’t sound like a fast-paced thriller of a theme, it shouldn’t. The movie is slow-paced and jumps to three different places and times (with deft enough direction that it’s not confusing). Most of it concerns the internal workings of a tired 93-year-old mind. The magic is found in the slow untangling of the truth that sometimes, when logic fails, deeper truths of worth and love grow stronger.

Mr. Holmes is a poetic exploration. It asks a lot of questions and gives few answers, but the experience of the journey is a remarkably beautiful one. Cullin has said that he used the character of Holmes to explore his own close relative’s experience of aging and mind failure, and the marriage of concepts is seamless–it’s obvious the writer has intimate knowledge of the struggles of the aging mind, but Holmes never loses his essential Holmesness in the story.

There’s a great deal of sadness in Mr. Holmes, but there’s also hope–hope found in the eyes of a wise child who chooses to unsentimentally carry on the legacy of an old man, and hope in the idea that even the most set-in-his-ways person can learn and grow until the very last moment of life.

I’ll end on a personal note. Last year, my grandmother passed away after a long battle with dementia. Mr. Holmes reminded me of her, specifically of the strange contrast that happens when a soul begins to lose specific facts only to gain glimpses of glory.

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How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Largest Anthology Ever

I’m thrilled to announce my participation in a new anthology project that will contain the most new Holmes stories of any collection that has ever been published. The previous record was 30; this book will contain 60 new and traditional Sherlock Holmes tales, among them my new story entitled “The Adventure of the Traveling Orchestra.” I’m joined by fellow Baker Street Babe Lyndsay Faye and many other acclaimed Holmesian authors. The anthology’s proceeds will go to assist the renovation of Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s home.

Check out this Radio Times article about the project to learn more. To my surprise and delight, Lyndsay and I are both mentioned.

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How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Post-Post-Modern Holmes

This past weekend brought a strange and wonderful gift to fans of Sherlock Holmes, the first clip of Sherlock’s Christmas Special, an episode set entirely in the Victorian period.

Click here to see it.

Most reactions to the footage that I’ve encountered have been positive, including my own. There’s something charming about seeing the versions of Holmes, Watson, and Mrs. Hudson that we’ve come to love in the modern era suddenly swanning about in Victorian London.

But there’s something weird about it, too. Suddenly, it’s not 2015 Sherlock Holmes who feels like the AU of a Victorian original; it’s Victorian Holmes who feels like a period AU of a modern character. I realize I’m getting very meta here, but I’m trying to describe the slightly strange feeling I had when the clip came out. For once, I think, I had the experience of fans who met Holmes first in the BBC version (or Elementary) and then went back and met the original.

I’d like to say I gleaned a whole bunch of Sherlockian wisdom from this, but I really didn’t. What sticks out to me is the overarching truth that Holmes is a character universal in time and place. It really doesn’t matter where you put him; he’s still Holmes. I sometimes wonder exactly where we might be headed with him, now that the “Holmes renaissance” is giving way to something else–an era where Holmes mania is less of a fad but more of a cultural staple. I’m not very worried, though. What Benedict Cumberbatch in a deerstalker reminded me of this weekend is the fact that Holmes isn’t going anywhere, and he’s not changing into a different person. As he once said about his friend John Watson, he’s a fixed point, no matter how much the age around him changes.

Oh, and I can’t wait for Christmas.

How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

Being Watson: Appreciating the Genius of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This past Saturday, I finished writing a story I’ve been working on for several weeks, a Sherlock Holmes short story that will become part of an anthology to be published later this year. The challenge of the project is that the stories have to be completely traditional mysteries in Watson’s voice.

For those who may be unfamiliar with my books, Watson’s voice is not something I normally write, In fact, I never write it. My novels, while traditional in setting and characters and running alongside the canon, include the perspectives of Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes. Watson appears as a character, but his perspective isn’t the focus.

I took on the anthology project as a personal challenge, something new to build my authorial muscles. I did it; I wrote a completely traditional Sherlock Holmes mystery in Dr. Watson’s voice; those who have read it for editing purposes have enjoyed it, and I’m excited to share it with lovers of traditional stories.

I’m still wiping the sweat from my weary brow. The story took me longer to write and was far more difficult than I ever would have expected. Ultimately, I gained a new perspective on the challenges that traditional story writers face and a new appreciation for the incomparable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Here are some reasons why:

1) The Narrator versus the Main Character Issue–There’s a reason that Sherlock Holmes famously says he would be lost without his Boswell. Like Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, the Holmes stories are about the man in the name, not the narrator (though, of course, both are also about a relationship). Normally, when I’m writing my own books, I know that I will periodically reach a section where I can explore Holmes’s point of view. Writing as Watson, I was limited both in what Watson knows and what Holmes is allowed to show. I found myself, at times, needing to excise Watson inserting his thoughts where Doyle’s Watson never would have. I also found that I had to be careful not to have Holmes be overly obvious about what he knows before it would be logical for him to do so, since his point of view is not a direct part of the narrative.

2) The Secondhand Discovery Issue–Sometimes, both in the original stories and in the ones that come after them, Holmes and Watson make a discovery at the same time. Often, however, Watson is the secondhand discoverer of information Holmes already knows. This makes the pacing and plotting of a traditional story an intricate exercise in keeping things straight. Watson needs to be writing about the actions of a man who is often at least a few steps ahead of him, while maintaining the integrity of his own knowledge level. In other words, a huge part of what makes traditional stories interesting is that Holmes and Watson don’t have the same brain, and they are not usually able to have long conversations about exactly what Holmes knows the moment he knows it. As a result, for a writer, this means maintaining a narrative voice that is in a slightly different place in the story than the man he’s constantly writing about.

3) The Watson is No Idiot Issue–John Watson is not stupid. This is a fact, borne out by his actions in many of Doyle’s stories. He is, however, not the deductive reasoning expert that Sherlock Holmes is. As a result, barring unusual situations, he needs to be firmly in the dark about certain facts that are relatively easy for Holmes to grasp. For a writer, this means having to think like Sherlock Holmes. Stay with me for a second. What I mean is this: if a writer writes a deduction for Holmes that is overly simple, but Watson doesn’t get it automatically, Watson looks stupid, which is a bad result. In order for Watson to take his rightful place as audience stand-in and conductor of light, his deductive abilities need to look average compared to Holmes’s abilities seeming brilliant. This means the writer of a traditional Holmes story has the burden of coming up with something brilliant enough to seem like an average person wouldn’t get it right away. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Ask me how I know…

The above are just a few of the challenges inherent in writing the traditional Holmes and Watson dynamic of the original Sherlock Holmes canon. My own attempts to navigate them made me marvel, in a totally new way, at how easy Doyle made it look. That’s the true mark of genius, isn’t it?

How to purchase my Sherlock Holmes novels:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.

With His Boots On: A Tribute to Sir Christopher Lee

I awoke this morning to news of a most unwelcome kind, that of the passing of Sir Christopher Lee. Given that he had reached the age of 93, it’s impossible to say that Sir Christopher passed away before his time, but somehow it still feels true.

Born in 1922, Christopher Lee, long before the Sir was added, had a childhood that sounds like something from a far-bygone time. Born to a Gibson-era beautiful mother, who was the subject of painting and sculpture by notable artists, and a father who was a veteran of the Boer War and World War I, he grew up with a mostly privileged upbringing that included a few roles in school plays.

The true legend of Sir Christopher, at least as we have now come to know it,  begins during World War II, where he was attached to the Special Operations Executive and worked as an intelligence operative. In characteristic fashion, he declined until his death to talk about his work, but a now-famous special feature on one of Sir Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films reveals that Lee knew the exact sound a person makes when he’s stabbed in the back. As usual, there’s just enough revelation and mystery to the tale to keep us guessing about the true nature of his wartime activities.

Lee’s acting career began in the late 1940s upon his return from war and his realization of his disinclination to office work or teaching. His accomplishments and accolades in the years following almost defy belief. He appeared in Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet; he became a horror film legend as Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula; he played a Bond villain; he did whatever else he wanted to do, and he did it well, thank you very much. Along the way came American acclaim and glittering recognition, including the honors that eventually led to his knighthood.

Sir Christopher entranced a new generation of fans with his iconic roles in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings franchises, but Sherlock Holmes fans will, undoubtedly, always remember him as the man who played Sir Henry Baskerville, Sherlock Holmes, and, most notably, Mycroft Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. His portrayal of the elder Holmes brother as an intelligent, mysterious, and very involved part of the narrative continues to influence portrayals of Mycroft to this day. Notably, best-selling author Laurie R. King and Sherlock showrunners Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss cite it as a major influence, and countless other authors and adaptors echo them.

Few people live long enough to see themselves become legends in their own lifetimes, and on the rare occasion that it happens, even fewer manage to keep from being made into something both more and less than human at the same time. Sir Christopher Lee was a lot of things–spy, actor, heavy metal musician, and international celebrity. What he never stopped being was eager–to work, to learn, and to try new things. He passed away with an “Upcoming Projects” section on the Internet Movie Database that is still populated with titles. According to The Guardian, he’d signed on to a new film a month before his death. That’s who Sir Christopher Lee was, a man who never lost his human passion for doing the things he loved, the things he was so good at doing that they entranced the world.

He will be missed.

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How to purchase my novels of Sherlock Holmes:

(Book 1) The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 2) The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities – and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

(Book 3) The Detective The Woman and The Silent Hive is available from all good bookstores including   Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstones UK, and for free shipping worldwide from Book Depository. In ebook format it is in Amazon Kindle.