The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lycett
Review by
Paul M. Chapman
Andrew Lycett is a well-known figure in the world of Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes studies for his groundbreaking biography Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, published in 2007. He was the first biographer to benefit from the release of the primary source material made available by the sale of the Conan Doyle archive at Christie’s in May 2004, much of which had been under a legal embargo since the early 1970s. Consequently his book was able to present a more rounded picture than most of his predecessors, even those who had been granted (guarded) access to the archive before it was arbitrarily closed to researchers by Adrian Conan Doyle in the 1960s.
Lycett
followed Conan Doyle with Conan Doyle's Wide World – a collection
of Doyle's travel writing – in 2020. He has now produced The Worlds of
Sherlock Holmes: The Inspiration Behind the World's Greatest Detective, an
attractive picture book in the tradition of such titles as Allen Eyles’s Sherlock
Holmes: A Centenary Celebration (1986), Martin Fido’s The World of
Sherlock Holmes (1998) and Bruce Wexler’s The Mysterious World of
Sherlock Holmes (2008).
According
to the publisher’s blurb, Andrew Lycett has recently worked as historical
consultant on the forthcoming BBC television documentary series Killing
Sherlock: Lucy Worsley on the Case of Conan Doyle, and although this book
is not an official tie-in publication, its release is clearly timed to
coincide. It is certainly a very attractive volume, well-designed, with an
excellent selection of images; some familiar, some less so. The accompanying
text is arranged along thematic lines, such as ‘A Sherlockian Sense of Place’,
‘Britain and the Wider World’, ‘Watching the Detectives’ and ‘Stage and Screen
Representations’. These attempt to cross-fertilise the actual and fictional
worlds of Sherlock Holmes – domestic, professional, artistic and political – with
the pervasive and lasting cultural afterlives of Holmes and his creator into
the twenty-first century.
Lycett has many interesting and pertinent points to make, but is somewhat hampered by the book’s format, which is both limited and over-ambitious in its scope. There is little room for subtext and subtlety beneath the desire to inform, including the necessity to re-tread some well-worn paths.
There are
promising diversions from the usual route in the sections entitled ‘Getting
into Print’, ‘Art in the Blood’ and ‘A Few Athletic Tastes’, but they cry out
for expansion, and are placed, confusingly, after the ‘Stage and Screen’
section. The latter would have been more fittingly paired with ‘Staying the
Course’, which brings the story up to date and examines the increasingly
diverse world of fandom and the problems this can present to a long-established
literary estate.
Lycett has
had his own issues with the Conan Doyle estate – which he blisteringly
chronicled in the ‘Afterword’ to Conan Doyle, and subtly weaves into his
argument here:
‘Over
the past 100 years or so, scholars, fans and publishers of various kinds have
vied with the Conan Doyle estate to ensure that Sherlock Holmes remains a
subject of fascination.’
Note that
confrontational ‘vied with’. And then there is this pointedly double-edged
comment on the estate’s motivations:
‘By
such benchmarks, the Conan Doyle estate has been reasonable in both its
interpretation of the law, which hinges on the definition of ‘Fair Use’, and in
its reading of the current social climate. It seems to have made a distinction
between writings, usually books, which make their way onto cinema screens,
whose audiences come into millions (with commensurate financial returns), and
fan fiction, which is often published on websites and read by a handful of
people.’
Sadly,
such sparks do not typify the book, whose picture-oriented format serves to
cramp Lycett’s style and overshadow his text. The easy flow of his Conan
Doyle is here too often supplanted by a prose which is stilted and
repetitive.
More seriously, there are also a number of factual errors, some of which are unacceptably elementary, and smack of an editorial carelessness that does disservice to both author and reader. These include:
‘Piccadilly
Circus and the Criterion, where Holmes and Watson first met.’ (p.18)
‘Irene Adler, the woman who threatened to blackmail the King of Bohemia in A Study in Scarlet.’ (p.57) The King was actually threatened, as the title would suggest, in 'A Scandal in Bohemia'.
Pop cultural references are equally subject to error:
A Study in Terror was not a Hammer production, as stated on p.130 (an understandable mistake, at least.)
Sheldon Reynolds was a film producer, not director, as stated on p.185. He made a series of television Sherlock Holmes films starring Ronald Howard in the 1950s, not ‘a series of Sherlock Holmes films starring Ron Howard for television in the 1970s’!
The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes is clearly aimed more at the general reader and the neophyte than the established Holmes aficionado and was presumably produced to a tight schedule. For such a fine and attractive book, written by a demonstrably knowledgeable author with much to say, a greater attention to detail would have earned it a ready place as a cornerstone of the modern Holmesian library. A revised edition still could.
Paul M. Chapman
November 2023
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