The Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis, one of the oldest Sherlock Holmes societies in the United States, is celebrating its 80th anniversary this September. Today, we talk with leaders Shelly Gage and Mark Walters about their own introductions to Sherlock Holmes, and the remarkable history of the Illustrious Clients. It’s a story that begins with the very young Jerry Williamson, who discovered Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce at the movies, sought out the Canon, and began corresponding with prominent Sherlockians.

You’ll hear about “Immortal Thirteen” who joined their first meeting, and the group’s remarkable tradition of writing and publishing, which continues today. Shelly and Mark give us a fascinating look at how an organization founded in the 1940s has preserved its traditions while adapting to a new generation of Sherlockians — and they invite listeners to join the celebration of the Illustrious Clients’ 80th anniversary on Saturday, September 19, at 6:00 p.m.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the second half of October. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, with his review of the second season of the BBC’s Sherlock series. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a copy of something from the IHOSE vaults for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ ihearofsherlock.com by September 15, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. All listeners are eligible to play.

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• The Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis (Facebook)

• Get in touch with Shelly via email

• Other episodes mentioned on the show:

  • Episode 340: The Six Napoleons of Baltimore (Greg Ruby and Mike McSwiggin)

  • Episode 41: The Woman (Lara Pulver)

• I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere / Trifles Merch Store

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Find all of our relevant links and social accounts at linktr.ee/ihearofsherlock.

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We return to Baltimore and the rich history of one of America’s oldest Sherlock Holmes societies, the Six Napoleons of Baltimore. Greg Ruby and Mike McSwiggin join us to talk about the group’s origins and its upcoming 80th anniversary.

We hear about their first encounters with Sherlock Holmes and then travel back to 1946, when six Baltimore Sherlockians gathered for dinner and founded what would become the Six Napoleons. We also discuss the wonderfully complicated story behind its name, which connects a local Baltimore woman to Napoleon’s family and, of course, to a famous Holmes adventure.

Today, the group continues its traditions of scholarship, trivia, and, above all, fun. We talk about their memorable “inquisition” used to induct new members, its twice-yearly meetings, and its 80th anniversary celebration this September, which features our own Scott Monty as guest speaker.

We also discuss Greg Ruby’s Sherlockians of Baltimore (SOBs), a newer organization that meets quarterly, on Saturdays. It’s a conversation about 80 years of Sherlockian friendship—and a reminder that the game is still very much afoot in Baltimore.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the first half of October. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he begins a review of the BBC’s Sherlock series. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a copy of something from the IHOSE vaults for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ ihearofsherlock.com by August 29, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. All listeners are eligible to play.

Our supporters can listen to the show ad-free and have access to occasional bonus material.

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Join us for the additional conversation. Links to the relevant entries are below, as well as some photos.

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Today we are joined by , creator of the popular Clubland Substack and author of London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious, among other books. Dr. Thévoz offers a fascinating look inside the traditionally secretive world of London’s private clubs—institutions that have long relied on discretion and exclusivity for their survival.

We explore the evolving nature of club life, contrasting the old model of member-owned institutions with today’s for-profit members’ clubs built around brand, networking, and lifestyle. Despite changes in how people work and socialize, Thévoz makes a compelling case that London clubland is not fading but thriving—adapting to modern needs while preserving its essential character.

Our conversation also touches on the club life of Arthur Conan Doyle, whose memberships included the Athenaeum Club, the Reform Club, and the Authors’ Club. We discuss the real-world inspirations behind the Diogenes Club—including Seth’s identification of its most likely historical counterpart.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the second half of September. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he reviews Enola Holmes 3. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a copy of something from the IHOSE vaults for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ ihearofsherlock.com by August 14, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. All listeners are eligible to play.

And if you need some show swag or gift ideas, or if you want to show off your good taste to other Sherlockians, check out our Merch Store, with mugs, notepads and more.

Leave I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; listen to us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Links

• Seth Thévoz’s Clubland Substack

  • Identifying the Diogenes Club in the Sherlock Holmes Stories

  • The Mystery of Dr. Watson’s Club

  • Clubs in Film: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

  • George Birch’s 1890s Clubland

  • Clubland Index

• Seth’s Books:

  • London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious (2025)

  • Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of London Private Members’ Clubs (2022)

  • Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (2018)

• Other episodes mentioned on the show:

  • Episode 335: Brettcon 2

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Find all of our relevant links and social accounts at linktr.ee/ihearofsherlock.

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Your thoughts on the show? Leave a comment below, send us an email (comment AT ihearofsherlock DOT com), call us at 5-1895-221B-5. That’s (518) 952-2125.

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“As I turn over the pages I see my notes” [GOLD]

The pages of the original 60 Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are filled with brief references to cases that Watson never managed to bring before the public eye.

They represent a tantalizing glimpse of more aspects of an already legendary career, providing additional details that not only give us a better sense of Sherlock Holmes the detective, but of Sherlock Holmes the character as well. It’s part of what led many to think of Sherlock Holmes as a real person, alive and practicing his career in late Victorian / early Edwardian London.

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Dr. Watson himself wrote:

“Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin despatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, M.D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine.” [SUSS]

As an homage to Watson’s Tin Box, the great Sherlockian Jay Finley Christ, BSI (“The Final Problem“) once attempted to capture the wonders in verse:

The Old Tin Box

In the vaults of Cox was an old tin box
With Watson’s name on its lid.
What wouldn’t we pay for that box today
And the secret notes there hid?

Old Russian dame, Ricoletti the lame.
The famous aluminum crutch;
For Alicia, the cutter, the parsley in butter,
What would you give for such?

Story of Randall, the Darlington scandal,
The coptic patriarchs.
The opal tiara, the Addleton barrow --
Dollars? or francs? or marks?

The tale of the pinch of Victor Lynch,
The furniture warehouse mob,
The case at the Hague, the murder at Prague
The powderless Margate job.

The giant rat, the cardinal’s hat,
The Patersons (first name Grice),
The cormorant’s bill, the Hammerford will --
We’d take ‘em at any price.

The Phillimore fella who sought an umbrella,
The steamer Friesland (Dutch);
For Col. Carruthers or Atkinson brothers
One never could give too much.

The Vatican case and its cameo face,
The slithering, unknown worm,
The Abergavenny were none too many --
Where is this Cox’s firm?

Oh, wonderful box in the vaults of Cox!
You come with a touch of salt!
But I offer two blocks of the choicest stocks
For the treasure of Cox’s vault.

If you’re interested in learning more about some of the unrecorded cases, we produced a whole series of episodes in our sister podcast . You can find the entire collection here:

Trifles: Unpublished Cases

Browse all Trifles Collections

Trifles

What Is Trifles?

You know the plots, but what about the minutiae…

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4 years ago · 3 likes · Scott Monty

The game’s afoot!

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“As I glanced round I was surprised at the universality of the man’s interests” [3GAR]

We discovered writer and blogger Dennis Simanaitis, a true “Sherlockian in the wild,” whose path to the Great Game developed independently of any local groups. With a background spanning engineering, automotive journalism, and mathematics, Dennis brings a uniquely eclectic perspective to Sherlock Holmes.

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Like many of us, he suggests Dr. John H. Watson is the real chronicler of Holmes’s adventures, with Arthur Conan Doyle serving as Watson’s literary agent. We explore his admiration for classic Holmes adaptations, including the radio scripts of Edith Meiser and performances by actors such as Richard Gordon and John Stanley.

The conversation ranges from Dennis’s early experiences in 1950s Cleveland radio to the origins of his long-running blog. Along the way, we indulge in a bit of imaginative fun: what car might Holmes drive in a high-speed chase across the English countryside? Dennis makes a compelling case for a machine he has actually driven himself. It’s a lively discussion that blends Sherlockian enthusiasm with a lifelong curiosity about technology, storytelling, and the enduring appeal of old-time radio.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the first half of September. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he reviews Enola Holmes 2. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a copy of something from the IHOSE vaults for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ihearofsherlock.com by July 29, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. DST. All listeners are eligible to play.

As a reminder, our supporters can listen to the show ad-free and have access to occasional bonus material. Join us on the platform of your choice (Patreon | Substack).

And if you need some show swag or gift ideas, or if you want to show off your good taste to other Sherlockians, check out our Merch Store, with mugs, notepads and more.

Leave I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; listen to us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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“in league with the thief” [REIG]

Arvind Ethan David is a versatile writer and producer whose career spans theater, television, film, graphic novels, audio, and now his debut novel, The Great Game, a historical thriller set in 1905 London. Blending mystery and suspense, the book marks the return of A. J. Raffles — the famous gentleman thief created by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung.

Born in Malaysia and educated in England, Arvind’s perspective on imperial rivalry, colonialism, and cultural identity is expressed through the eyes of his narrator Balvinder dev Singh, a law student and military veteran who is funding his education in partnership with Raffles. When a brutal Mayfair murder tangles Bunny and Raffles in a widening conspiracy, it attracts the attention of Holmes, Watson, and even Winston Churchill.

Arvind’s career began when he was still a student, adapting Douglas Adams’s novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency as a play. When Adams came to see it, he became a mentor. He has written and produced extensively in television, including Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for Netflix, Anansi Boys for Amazon, and The Garden of Evening Mists for HBO. He has also written seven graphic novels, including an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. Join us as he reflects on his experiences in these different artistic worlds, and on the unique challenges of bringing honored characters to life.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the latter half of August. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he reviews the first Enola Holmes film. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a copy of The Great Game for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ihearofsherlock.com by July 14, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. DST. All listeners are eligible to play.

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As a reminder, our supporters can listen to the show ad-free and have access to occasional bonus material. Join us!

And if you need some show swag or gift ideas, or if you want to show off your good taste to other Sherlockians, check out our Merch Store, with mugs, notepads and more.

Let's go Sherlockian shopping

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“quite to the heart of the matter” [MUSG]

We head to the Gateway City to preview the “Holmes in the Heartland” conference, coming up on July 24–26 in St. Louis. Organizers Rob Nunn, BSI (”Elementary”) and Heather Hinson share the inside scoop on what attendees can expect from this third triennial gathering.

Hosted by The Parallel Case of St. Louis — a BSI scion founded in 1988 — this year’s event centers around the eerie theme of “Sherlock Haunts.” The planning committee’s lineup of eight speakers includes our own Scott Monty, as well as a dealers’ room of Sherlockian treasures from new vendors, and some special events.

You’ll hear Rob and Heather discuss some of the weekend’s highlights, including a nearby screening of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. There’s excitement, too, around their new venue: The Cheshire, a British-themed boutique inn with Tudor architecture, country manor decor, and rooms dedicated to legendary British authors.

There’s also a raffle for a stay in the hotel’s exclusive Sherlock Holmes Suite. When we recorded, the conference was practically sold out, with 80 attendees expecting a memorable weekend.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the first half of August. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he reviews a cult classic. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with something from the IHOSE vaults for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ihearofsherlock.com by June 30, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. DST. All listeners are eligible to play.

As a reminder, our supporters can listen to the show ad-free and have access to occasional bonus material. Join us on the platform of your choice (Patreon | Substack).

And if you need some show swag or gift ideas, or if you want to show off your good taste to other Sherlockians, check out our Merch Store, with mugs, notepads and more.

Leave I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; listen to us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Links

• Holmes in the Heartland

• The Parallel Case of St. Louis

• The Cheshire Inn

• I Bet You’re Wondering How I Got Here by Heather Hinson

• The Asylum's "Sherlock Holmes" Is Unique

• Other episodes mentioned on the show:

  • Episode 266: Holmes in the Heartland

• I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere / Trifles Merch Store

Explore more here.

Find all of our relevant links and social accounts at linktr.ee/ihearofsherlock.

And would you consider leaving us a rating and or a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the player of your choice? It would help other Sherlockians find us.

Your thoughts on the show? Leave a comment below, send us an email (comment AT ihearofsherlock DOT com), call us at 5-1895-221B-5. That’s (518) 952-2125.

“But the money, Mr. Holmes, the money!” [COPP]

When a film’s unexpected and runaway success leads to a franchise, it becomes difficult to disengage from the momentum. Arthur Conan Doyle found this out when The Strand Magazine, not to be robbed of more Sherlock Holmes stories following the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles, bid $25,000 for six new Sherlock Holmes stories, or $30,000 for eight, or $45,000 for a set of thirteen and a promise of £100 per thousand words. (Source: Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle by Daniel Stashower, 1999)

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Buoyed by the success of the two previous entries in the Enola Holmes series, Netflix has announced that Enola Holmes 3 arrives on July 1, 2026, providing an enticing trailer.

The official summary sets the stage with characteristic economy: “Adventure chases detective Enola Holmes to Malta, where personal and professional dreams collide on a case more tangled and treacherous than any she has faced before.” Sun-soaked Mediterranean intrigue, then — though the franchise’s signature charm has always been less about the geography of its cases and more about the particular geography of its protagonist’s interior life.

The Facts

Millie Bobby Brown returns as Enola alongside Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, Sam Claflin as Mycroft, and Helena Bonham Carter as their mother Eudoria. Himesh Patel, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, and Louis Partridge complete the principal cast. Partridge’s Lord Tewkesbury figures rather prominently in the new chapter: wedding bells are ringing for Enola and Tewkesbury, as Netflix’s first-look images confirm the engagement has progressed toward the altar.

The film is loosely based on Nancy Springer’s young adult book series The Enola Holmes Mysteries. Philip Barantini takes the directing reins from Harry Bradbeer, who helmed the first two films. Jack Thorne returns to write the screenplay. The film runs 105 minutes and was produced by Legendary Pictures and PCMA Productions.

Related:

Don’t miss our interview with Enola Holmes author Nancy Springer on Episode 200:

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A Darker Turn

Those expecting more of the breezy, fourth-wall-breaking energy of the first two films should prepare for a shift in tone. Barantini has compared the sequel to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — that telling moment when a beloved franchise acknowledges that its audience has grown up and that the story must grow with them.

Brown herself described Enola as stepping into a version of herself that “feels much more defined but still evolving,” noting that “she’s built something for herself, which is amazing, but she’s also questioning what she wants next.”

The Enola Holmes franchise has, perhaps more than it is given credit for, done something quietly remarkable: it has taken one of literature’s most celebrated figures of pure logic and reason and asked what it might mean if that same gift of observation were housed in someone for whom Victorian society had arranged a rather different set of expectations. Enola doesn’t just solve cases. She insists, persistently and with considerable style, on embracing her unique talents and being seen. She is a Holmes, after all.

In “The Greek Interpreter,” Holmes told Watson:

“I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”

Enola Holmes, in three films now, has taken that dictum to heart — and then, characteristically, gone her own way with it.

Watch the trailer:

Enola Holmes 3 premieres on Netflix, July 1, 2026.

Image credits: John Wilson / Netflix

“as famous among crooks... as he is unknown to the public” [VALL]

By all estimations, Sherlock Holmes is the most-portrayed literary character ever. Appearing in more than 250 films with his trusted friend and colleague Dr. Watson (who himself has had his own series), we frequently see Holmes face off against his archnemesis, Professor Moriarty.

But until now, the professor has never gotten his own series. As Holmes himself exclaimed in “The Final Problem”:

“Aye, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!”

That wonder is coming to an end.

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Fremantle and Archery Pictures have announced Moriarty (working title), a new original crime drama series built around the man Sherlock Holmes called “the Napoleon of crime” — Professor James Moriarty. The announcement, made on May 28, positions the project as “a modern reinvention of the crime procedural, based on the most famous villain in all of detective fiction.”

The series will be written by Chris Cornwell (A Discovery of Witches, Strike Back) and Oliver Lansley (Where’s Wanda?, Flack). Archery Pictures and Fremantle will co-produce, with Fremantle handling global sales. No network or streaming platform is attached as of yet.

The Premise

The show’s concept has a pleasing irony to it. In the canonical stories, Holmes famously deduces Moriarty as the unseen organizing intelligence behind London’s criminal world — he tells Watson:

“He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city... He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”

This new series updates the double life of professor / master criminal and moves it out of London. The official synopsis reads:

James Moriarty is a Professor of Criminal Psychology at Durham University but leads a secret double life as the mastermind behind every crime of sophistication in the North of England. When a rival criminal begins an assault on his underground empire, Moriarty will have only one choice: to join the police as a consultant, using the law as a weapon to dismantle his foe while keeping his true identity hidden from the police. Paired with Detective Imogen Burrows, a stoic Yorkshire detective, they’ll form a fearsome team, but Moriarty will soon realise that the real threat isn’t the rival criminal faction he’s dismantling, but Imogen’s increasingly perceptive suspicions…

The update from mathematics to criminal psychology is a neat one. Doyle’s Moriarty holds a mathematical chair at “one of our smaller universities” before dark rumors force his resignation, and his academic cover as a retired army coach gives Holmes the occasion for that famous put-down: “ex-Professor Moriarty...the retiring mathematical coach.”

The new version swaps the subject matter while keeping a similar structure: the professor who should be above suspicion, the criminal genius hidden in plain academic sight.

The procedural concept — because what would a modern Sherlockian series be without being reimagined as a standard police procedural? — is Moriarty embedded in a police consultancy against his will, with a sharp-eyed detective partner threatening to unravel everything. It also echoes the dynamic Holmes himself describes in The Valley of Fear, where he compares Moriarty to Jonathan Wild, the eighteenth-century criminal mastermind who controlled London’s underworld while maintaining a veneer of respectability:

“The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.”

The Production Team

Archery Pictures was founded in 2014 by producer Kris Thykier, whose credits include Operation Mincemeat, Netflix’s Fate: The Winx Saga, and the Bradley Cooper comedy Is This Thing On? Thykier expressed enthusiasm for the project:

“We are thrilled to be working with Fremantle to bring to life the original and character driven spin off from the Sherlock Holmes universe that Chris Cornwell has created. Moriarty will show audiences what it takes to be a criminal genius, combining genre thrills with a playful, dark, and thrilling dive into the psychology of villainy.”

Rebecca Dundon, SVP Scripted Content at Fremantle, added:

“We’ve been looking for a project to work with Archery on for a while and when Kris brought this to us, we instantly saw huge potential for a commercial, returning franchise that brings to life one of the more allusive characters in the Sherlock world: Moriarty. It’s exciting to collaborate with Kris and the team at Archery to bring a premium, propulsive, contemporary drama to screen that will not only be clever and hooky, but also give us a fresh spin on the procedural crime format with an unconventionally brilliant protagonist at the heart who will constantly surprise and frustrate viewers in a highly entertaining manner!”

Fremantle’s interest in a “commercial, returning franchise” signals ambition beyond a limited series. The partnership with Archery is one of several creative collaborations Fremantle has forged, alongside deals with the likes of Kristen Stewart’s Nevermind Pictures, Emma Stone and Dave McCary’s Fruit Tree, and Rachel Weisz and Polly Stokes’ Astral Projection.

Casting and the Shadows of Recent Moriartys

No casting has been announced, but the role has inevitably invited comparisons to previous screen incarnations. Andrew Scott’s portrayal in the BBC’s Sherlock — manic, mercurial, disturbingly likeable — remains the most culturally vivid recent version. Others to have taken on the role include Ralph Fiennes, Jared Harris, Eric Porter, and, in Prime Video’s current Young Sherlock, Dónal Finn.

(See entries from Deadline and AV Club, if you dare.)

A Crowded Field

The announcement lands in a moment of notable Sherlockian abundance on television. Young Sherlock on Prime Video recently earned a second-season renewal. The CW’s Sherlock and Daughter is expected back for a second season. CBS’s Watson, which put Morris Chestnut in the doctor’s chair after Holmes’s death, was cancelled earlier this year. This is, of course, after 154 episodes of Elementary from 2012–2019.

As AV Club notes, all of those shows had their own Moriartys (Moriarties?) — but this will be the first time in the modern television era that the Professor himself gets top billing.

The Moriarty of the stories appears surprisingly sparingly in the original 60 stories. His most significant appearances are in “The Final Problem”, where Holmes describes him at length to Watson and they face each other at Reichenbach; The Valley of Fear, a prequel in which Holmes explains Moriarty’s criminal network to Inspector MacDonald; and the flashbacks in “The Empty House” and two others where he is discussed in retrospect. (Do you know which stories?)

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The relative scarcity of canonical Moriarty — compared to his enormous cultural footprint — has always left room for imaginative expansion. A man of good birth and excellent education, compelled by a “criminal strain” in his blood that his extraordinary intelligence only amplifies, who builds the most sophisticated criminal organization in Europe while maintaining an aura of complete respectability: Doyle sketched him in broad, brilliant strokes and left the canvas largely blank.

Someone has finally taken him up on it.

We at IHOSE Media have naturally taken up the topic over the years. Here are some worthy episodes and articles about Professor Moriarty worth exploring

Articles:

• Moriarty, John Gardiner’s Last Book, Is Available

• Moriarty: The Devil’s Game Is Now Available on Audible

• Horowitz’s Moriarty Is an Ingenious Thriller

Episodes:

• Episode 245: Moriarty’s Game — an interview with show creator and writer Charles Kindinger

• Episode 265: Ken Ludwig’s Moriarty — an interview with the playwright and Ashely Polasek, executive director of the Ken Ludwig Company, on his latest play

• Trifles Episode 160 - Army Coaches

• Trifles Episode 219 - Moriarty’s Mathematics

• Trifles Episode 472 - Professor Moriarty

• Trifles Episode 481 - Mr. Moriarty

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“the affair which you have commemorated” [MUSG]

We welcome back Gus and Luke Holwerda, hosts of The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast, along with their producer, David Youell, to discuss Brettcon 2: The Return. Scheduled for September 19, 2026, at the Dancehouse Theatre in Manchester, this second conference in the series continues to celebrate the 40th anniversary of legendary Granada Television series and the incomparable Jeremy Brett.

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Following the success of their first conference in 2025, they reflect on the extraordinary sense of community the event inspired, bringing together fans from around the world with actors and crew members who shared memories of Jeremy Brett — a brilliant actor, and an admired and generous human being whose presence still resonates.

We discuss Brettcon 2’s star-studded lineup, which includes actor Michael Siberry, BAFTA-winning costume designer Esther Dean, actor and stuntman Kiran Shah, and an exclusive for IHOSE of a very special pair of guests. From screenings of classic episodes to displays of original, unseen costumes, it’s a salute to the artistry and community that defined the Granada era.

Beyond the main event, Gus, Luke and David also discuss the weekend extravaganza that takes fans into the heart of the show’s production history, including a Friday meal at the former Granada Studios back lot, the original site of Baker Street. And they highlight the charitable mission at the heart of Brettcon, with all proceeds benefiting the mental health charity MindUK, in honor of Jeremy’s own journey.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the second half of July. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he reviews a cult classic from the 1970s. Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a copy of something from the vaults for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ihearofsherlock.com by June 14, 2026 at 11:59 a.m. EDT. All listeners are eligible to play.

Leave I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; listen to us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Links

• The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast

• Brettcon 2: The Return

• Other episodes mentioned on the show:

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“a man of good birth and excellent education” [FINA]

On May 22, 1859, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born. And it is still celebrated by Sherlockians and Doyleans around the world, who, at the very least, pause to honor the man who created Sherlock Holmes.

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Hopping on that trend on May 22, 2006 — 20 years ago today — Google presented one of its famous “Google Doodles” to honor his Conan Doyle and his famous creation. (Technically it was launched the evening before, but it was up all day on the 22nd).

This was before the Google Doodle became a near-daily thing.

There are scores of reasons to honor Sir Arthur every day, since his name is still associated not only with the immortal Sherlock Holmes, but the likes of Brigadier Gerard, Professor Challenger, poetry, politics, speeches, divorce law reform, the defense of the wrongly-accused, his friendship with Harry Houdini, his avid love of many sports, spiritualism, and much more.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur! Thank you for the eternal gift of Sherlock Holmes.

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“I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends”
[FINA]

This special emergency episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere serves as a tribute to actor David Burke, the first performer to play Dr. Watson in the Granada television series, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 91.

Burt is away, but Scott is joined by Gus and Luke Holwerda, co-hosts and creators of The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast. Ironically, we had recorded a regular episode with Gus and Luke earlier this week, but upon the news of David’s passing, we pre-empted that show.

Gus and Luke share their personal reminiscences about David, stemming from their visit to David’s home, revealing how nervous he was at that meeting. We analyze Burke’s unique portrayal, highlighting the many deeply human qualities he brought to the role in the 13 episodes in which he starred with Jeremy Brett, laying the groundwork for a well-rounded, three-dimensional Watson

And we share and comment on a number of clips from those episodes. Listen to hear if a favorite scene of yours comes up and if you name the episodes from which they’re drawn before we do.

Leave I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; listen to us wherever you listen to podcasts

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“the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask”
[3GAR]

There are actors who play Dr. Watson, and there are actors who understand him. David Burke — who originated the role of John H. Watson opposite Jeremy Brett in Granada Television’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — was one of the rarest of the latter. We have learned that he passed away in recent days, as confirmed by his family.

In the thirteen episodes he gave us between 1984 and 1985, he did not so much inhabit the good doctor as quietly rescue him from forty years of cinematic condescension. For a generation of viewers raised on Nigel Bruce’s harrumphing, hand-wringing Watson — lovable, certainly, but irredeemably the butt of the joke — Burke’s arrival was nothing short of a corrective.

Here, at last, was the Watson Conan Doyle had actually written: an Army surgeon who had seen Maiwand, a man of action who carried his service revolver and knew how to use it, a physician of professional competence, and — perhaps most importantly — an intelligent, observant, fully grown human being whom Sherlock Holmes would actually have chosen as his friend.

Reinventing the Doctor

Producer Michael Cox, in his book A Study in Celluloid, set out the brief plainly. Watson, in his eyes, was not the genius Holmes was, but he was nevertheless “intelligent, brave, efficient, loyal and devoted” — a worthy companion for the great detective, who would certainly not have tolerated a fool at his side. The 77-page production bible known as the Baker Street File, which Brett kept like scripture, demanded a fidelity to the Canon that earlier productions had been too lazy or too commercial to attempt.

Burke had the equipment to meet that standard. Liverpool-born, RADA-trained, and a classical stage actor of long standing, he came to Baker Street with the same Shakespearean grounding Brett did. The chemistry was immediate. Both men shared a near-religious devotion to the Canon (Burke was known to carry his copy of the stories around the set and gently nudge cast and crew toward “the spirit of the thing”). Both shared a wicked, schoolboy sense of humor that became inside-joke folklore for those who worked with them.

What Burke brought, and what is so easy to undervalue, is texture. Watch his Watson during a Holmes deduction. He is not a man waiting to be amazed; he is a man thinking. The amazement, when it comes, is real because the thought process beneath it is real. His Watson interrupts Holmes when Holmes is wrong. His Watson rolls his eyes — affectionately, and just briefly enough to register — when Holmes is being insufferable. His Watson winces when the cocaine bottle appears. He is a doctor, and he never stops being one.

In “The Crooked Man,” Burke gets one of those exchanges that captures the entire dynamic of the partnership. Holmes asks if he remembers the story of King David and Uriah, suggesting Watson look it up in the first or second Book of Samuel:

“You’re quite right, Holmes. Second Book of Samuel, Chapter 11, verses 14-17. You appear to have looked it up yourself since we returned home from Aldershot.”

“How did you know?”

“You used this bill from our meal at Waterloo as a bookmark, did you not?”

“Ex-cellent, Watson.”

“Elementary, my dear Holmes.”

The line itself is fine. Burke’s reading of it — sly, dry, gently triumphant — is what made it a small classic. That is a Watson who has known Holmes long enough to recognize the bluff, and who is just self-amused enough to call him on it.

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Counting the Words

One of the most-told Burke anecdotes among Sherlockians — confirmed in his own interviews — concerned The Speckled Band. Frustrated, as any actor would be, by the inherent thinness of the Watson role on the page, Burke once sat down and counted his lines in the script. The total came to forty-three words. That episode would be more than fifty minutes long.

What Burke and the production team did about that arithmetic problem is the secret history of the early Granada series. The scriptwriters, on Cox’s instructions, set about restoring to Watson the moments Conan Doyle had given him and that decades of adaptation had silently surrendered. And Burke, working scene by scene with Brett, added the rest in the only place it could be added: in the small, silent acting — a look, a hand on a sleeve, a reaction shot.

Watch the climax of “The Speckled Band.” When the speckled band reveals itself, Watson is at Holmes’s side with his pistol cocked, exactly where Conan Doyle puts him:

“It means that it is all over,” Holmes answered. “And perhaps, after all, it is for the best. Take your pistol, and we will enter Dr. Roylott’s room.”

Burke plays the moment not as a frightened bystander to be rescued but as Holmes’s professional partner. The two men move into Roylott’s room together. That is the Watson of the Canon, and Burke was the first Watson on screen to insist on it.

A Friendship Made Visible

The most famous moment Burke never got to play is the one from “The Three Garridebs” that every Watson actor secretly wants — the moment when Killer Evans’s bullet grazes Watson’s leg, and Holmes’s mask cracks:

“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say that you are not hurt!”

It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

Granada did not adapt “The Three Garridebs” until the Hardwicke era, and the great revelation scene fell to the second Watson. But it is worth saying clearly: the reason the moment lands on screen at all — the reason any modern viewer can read those lines and believe that Holmes might genuinely fall apart at the prospect of losing his friend — is that the relationship had been built in 1984, by Brett and Burke, from the ground up.

They are the foundation. Hardwicke, with characteristic grace, knew this and said so.

The other moment Burke did not get to play — but for which he prepared all those Conan Doyle scenes that came before — is, of course, the post-Reichenbach reunion. Granada’s “The Final Problem” was Burke’s last episode.

He plays Watson exactly as Conan Doyle wrote him: a man whose “intimate relations” with Holmes have softened with marriage and practice, who is summoned back to the side of a paler, thinner friend in mortal danger, who agrees without hesitation to flee with him to the Continent, and who — in the cruelest deception in the Canon — is lured away from his friend’s side by a forged letter about a dying Englishwoman.

When Burke’s Watson runs back up that path and finds only the Alpine-stock and the silver cigarette case, the screen carries the weight of what Conan Doyle gave us on the page:

“It was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and sick... I stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed with the horror of the thing.”

That Brett’s Holmes had a Watson worth grieving over — and a friendship worth a viewer’s grief — was Burke’s gift to the entire series that followed.

The Decision to Leave

What happened next is, by now, part of Sherlockian folklore. Burke’s wife, the actress Anna Calder-Marshall, had been raising their young son Tom largely on her own while David was in Manchester filming. When the Royal Shakespeare Company offered to engage them both at Stratford, the choice — for Burke, with characteristic clarity about priorities — was not a difficult one. Family came first.

He admitted later, in a letter to Michael Cox quoted in A Study in Celluloid, that he had been frustrated with how little the role of Watson asked of him, however much the writers had tried to expand it. The forty-three words of “The Speckled Band” were not, in the end, a problem that could be entirely solved within the form. Stratford, by contrast, offered him Hector in Troilus and Cressida, V.V. Bessemenov in Gorky’s Philistines, and the chance to work alongside his wife. He took it.

But before he left, Burke did the Granada production — and Brett, and Sherlockians everywhere — one final and inestimable kindness. He recommended his friend Edward Hardwicke as his successor. As Brett later put it, with what one suspects was complete sincerity: “This miracle occurred.”

Hardwicke was so determined to honor what Burke had built that he reportedly worried about the height difference between himself and his predecessor, lest viewers feel the join. The torch passed cleanly, and Granada’s Watson — Burke’s Watson — survived the change.

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Beyond Baker Street

It is a small injustice that David Burke is known to the wider world primarily for thirteen hours of television in 1984-85. He had a career of remarkable range before, during, and after Baker Street.

He had, in fact, met Sherlock Holmes once before — in 1965, when he played the villainous Sir George Burnwell in the BBC’s “The Beryl Coronet,” opposite Douglas Wilmer’s Holmes.1 (One imagines him appreciating the symmetry years later.)

In 1983 — just before joining Granada — Burke delivered a study in cold, calculating menace as a young Joseph Stalin in the final two episodes of Reilly, Ace of Spies, opposite Sam Neill. It is a chilling performance: the authority that comes not from volume but from absolute stillness, the sense of a mind perpetually filing and sorting.

His stage work, sustained over a half-century, took him through the National Theatre, the Royal Lyceum Company, and the RSC, in repertoire that included Othello, Hector in Troilus and Cressida, Kent in King Lear, the Reverend John Hale in The Crucible, Claudius and the Ghost in Hamlet, John of Gaunt in Richard II opposite Ralph Fiennes, Simonides in Pericles, and a long National Theatre season including Closer, The Invention of Love, and Oklahoma!.

His most celebrated stage role came in 1998, when he originated the part of Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre — a part he played for nearly three years, and which led to the genuinely delightful 2000 book he wrote with Frayn, Celia’s Secret: An Investigation (published in the United States as The Copenhagen Papers).

The book records a particular Burke quality fans of the Granada series will recognize: an irrepressible streak of mischief. Burke and his friends had fabricated a small parcel of “lost” wartime German documents and sent them to Frayn in the middle of Copenhagen‘s run, just to see what would happen. What followed — Frayn’s slow descent into uncertain belief and back again — became the book.

He played William Morris in The Love School (1975); Pvt. Mulvaney in The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling; roles in The Guardians, Armchair Thriller, Random Quest, MI-5, Midsomer Murders, Dalziel and Pascoe, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (alongside his son Tom), and The Woman in Black (2012). He recorded Naxos audiobooks of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He returned to Dr. Watson once more, for the 1995 documentary Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective, and in 2007 presented a chapter of Elementary My Dear Viewer: The Shackles of Sherlock Holmes.

He was the father of the splendid actor Tom Burke (The Souvenir, Strike, Furiosa), whom David and Anna chose Stratford in order to raise. By any measure, that gamble paid off.

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A Gentleman to His Fans

What has come through most powerfully in recent years, as Burke has spoken publicly about his Granada days, is the simple decency of the man. The Sherlockians of Evidentia Channel shared, in 2019, the gracious hand-written letter Burke had sent them in response to a fan note — an answer that ran across two pages, in his own hand, addressing their questions and thanking them for their interest.2 “Times have changed,” they observed at the time, and indeed they have; there are not many people of any kind, let alone working actors, who answer fan letters by hand and at length in the 21st century.

The crowning Sherlockian fan engagement of Burke’s later life was undoubtedly his 2022 interview with Gus and Luke Holwerda of The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast, released as “David Burke: A Sherlockian Conversation” (iTunes | YouTube) on September 20 of that year. Joined by Anna Calder-Marshall, he spoke at length about playing Watson, his friendship with Brett, and the decision to leave.

Listeners and commenters spoke of how thoughtful, gentle, and self-effacing he was — surprised, even charmed, by the affection of a fan community that had grown across forty years. (He was, by one listener’s account, “nervous” about doing the conversation at all — imagine that, after the career he had had.)

The Holwerdas later spent an entire follow-up episode (iTunes | YouTube) reporting on the “magical day” they spent in person with David and Anna in England. For those who have not yet listened, we recommend both episodes warmly — they are exactly the sort of generous, careful Sherlockian record-making that we hope will outlive all of us.

He also contributed the foreword to Maureen Whittaker’s Jeremy Brett: Playing a Part (MX Publishing), Whittaker’s performance biography of Brett — a final professional act of love for the man with whom he had shared 221B Baker Street.

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Together Again

David Burke was the Watson we had been waiting for without knowing it. He showed us — for the first time in the modern era of screen Sherlock Holmes — what Conan Doyle’s Doctor actually looked like when he was played whole: intelligent, capable, tender, occasionally exasperated, deeply loyal, deeply moral, deeply present. He laid down the foundation on which Edward Hardwicke would build for nine more years and forty more episodes, and on which every Watson actor since has been measured.

Jeremy Brett left us in 1995. Edward Hardwicke crossed the Reichenbach in 2011. Michael Cox followed in 2014. The remembrance we wrote for Hardwicke at the time ended with the hope that he might stand on the terrace with his Holmes.3

Now that David Burke joins them, the terrace is full — and we have, for the first time in many years, the complete Granada stars assembled, just out of sight, perhaps talking quietly about their wonderful adventures on and off set.

Until then, we have Burke’s 13 episodes, still in regular rotation. We have his hand-written letters. We have his audiobooks and his Frayn collaboration. We have his podcast conversation. We have a son of his appearing in prestige dramas on television.

And we have, above all, the doctor he gave back to us — a Watson who is no longer the joke, who is once again the friend.

We tip our deerstalkers, raise a glass of brandy from the tantalus, and offer our heartfelt thanks.

“Excellent!” I cried.

“Elementary,” said he.

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David Burke’s “Sherlockian Conversation” with The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast can be heard at sherlockpodcast.com. His Watson lives on through the thirteen episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-85), still in regular rotation on BritBox and DVD.

A Gallery of David Burke as Watson

“give my little impersonations your kindly praise” [MAZA]

Even though Sherlock Holmes holds the record as the literary figure most portrayed on film, it is shocking when we lose an actor who has played the role. The death of Michael Pennington (IMDb) at the age of 82, announced this weekend, takes one such impersonator from us.

His obituary in The Telegraph notes he was “acclaimed for its intelligence and flawless diction”, which one would hope from the founder (with Michael Bogdanov) of the English Shakespeare Company, the author of ten books on his craft, and over a half-century of stage work that any actor would envy.

But Sherlockians recall Pennington for a more particular distinction. In the span of six years, he played both halves of the most legendary archrivalry in literature: Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. Few actors have stood on both sides of the abyss at Reichenbach. Fewer still have done so with his pedigree.

The 80s Sherlock Holmes Renaissance

To understand how Pennington landed in Baker Street at all, you have to understand the strange weather of the 1980s. Sherlock Holmes had never quite gone away (he never does), but the decade brought an extraordinary convergence. The Holmes stories had passed into the public domain in Britain in 1980, fifty years after Conan Doyle’s death, and a pair of producers, Sy Weintraub and Otto Plaschkes, seized on the opportunity, signing Ian Richardson for a planned six-film series. Only two were filmed before Granada’s rival production scared the rest off the field — The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, both in 1983 — but Richardson’s urbane, mischievous Holmes set a high bar for the decade.

That rival was, of course, the production at Granada Television in Manchester, where Jeremy Brett began in 1984 what would become the most exhaustive and, for many of us, the definitive screen treatment of the Canon. Brett’s Holmes was a force of nature — sharp, mercurial, and pitched at a key the role had never quite been pitched at before. By 1986, the Granada series was hitting its stride with its own The Return of Sherlock Holmes season, the very title resonating with the centenary that loomed.

For 1887 was the year Sherlock Holmes first appeared print, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, in a story called A Study in Scarlet. The hundredth anniversary did not pass unnoticed: scion societies held celebrations, publishers commissioned new editions, the BBC and broadcasters worldwide commemorated, and producers on both sides of the Atlantic angled for a piece of the moment. It was into this fizzing centenary year that an American TV movie called The Return of Sherlock Holmes (with a sly nod toward both the centenary and the Granada series) arrived on CBS, on January 10, 1987.

A Holmes Out of Time

The premise was the stuff that gives more traditional Sherlockians hives. A Boston private investigator, Jane Watson (played by Margaret Colin), great-granddaughter of the good doctor, discovers in her ancestral estate a cryogenic capsule containing one Sherlock Holmes — placed there in suspended animation after an attempt on his life by a previously unsuspected brother of Professor Moriarty, who had infected him with bubonic plague.

Thawed, cured, and dragged into the late twentieth century, Holmes is hauled off to America to help Jane with a case that draws (loosely) on The Sign of Four: a man named Small, a woman named Morstan, and a long line of grudges.

It is, frankly, a weak premise. It was also a backdoor pilot for a series that never came. The script is uneven, the science is silly, and the second-act tour of suburban America with Holmes marveling at copy machines is exactly what you fear it might be.

And yet Pennington plays Holmes straight: alert, courtly, baffled but never broken, allowing the comedy to come from the world’s strangeness rather than from any softening of the man. His Holmes is tall, ascetic, slightly melancholy, and uncannily watchful. He looks, in fact, the way Holmes is supposed to look.

Reviews at the time were mixed (the New York Times harrumphed about a “felonious assault on the memory of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective”), but the IMDb reviews speak for themselves: more than one of them notes regret that the proposed series was never picked up. The chemistry with Colin worked, and the picture has a small but real cult following.

For those who haven’t seen it, or who’d like to revisit:

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From Holmes to the Napoleon of Crime

The TV movie wasn’t Pennington’s only contribution to the Sherlockian entertainment world, though. In November 1992, BBC Radio 4 broadcast its long-running, faithful, story-by-story dramatization of the Canon with Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams as Watson, an ensemble that would in time produce the only complete radio adaptation of all sixty stories in the Canon.

The story that month was “The Final Problem,” and for the role of Professor James Moriarty, the producers cast Michael Pennington. He returned to the part for “The Adventure of the Empty House,” broadcast in February 1993.

Related Episodes:

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There is a particular pleasure in this casting. Pennington’s Holmes had been a man of warmth beneath the surface; his Moriarty, in voice alone, was something else — a dry, scholarly, unforgiving intellect. The voice is what does it on the radio, and Pennington’s voice was one of the great instruments of the British stage: deep, deliberate, with that famous “flawless diction” the Telegraph singled out.

Listen to Pennington as Moriarty:

He could, when he wanted, make a line of verse sound like a knife being drawn. As Moriarty, he made the famous interview at Baker Street feel exactly as it ought to feel: two enormous minds taking each other’s measure, and one of them appalled at what he sees.

Few actors have played both halves of this rivalry. Orson Welles played Holmes in the 1938 radio adaptation of William Gillette’s play and Moriarty in the 1954 radio version of “The Final Problem,” opposite John Gielgud. And Anthony Higgins played the title role in 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993) and the professor who became Moriarty in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).

Pennington’s Non-Sherlockian Career

None of this, of course, is what Michael Pennington was famous for. He was famous, in Britain, for Shakespeare. He had joined the Royal Shakespeare Company straight out of Trinity College, Cambridge, having never having attended drama school, and he stayed loosely in the company’s orbit for the rest of his career, an Honorary Associate Artist by the end. His Hamlet at the RSC in 1980 was the role for which he turned down The French Lieutenant’s Woman, opposite Meryl Streep. He said simply: “I realised I couldn’t let Hamlet go. It is one of the prizes.”

Two years after that, he played Posthumus in the BBC Cymbeline; the year before Return of Sherlock Holmes, he played Oedipus on the BBC. In 1986 he and Bogdanov founded the English Shakespeare Company, whose seven-play Wars of the Roses cycle toured the world, with Pennington taking Richard II, Prince Hal, Henry V, and Jack Cade.

He was nominated for four Olivier Awards across his career — the first for Mercutio in 1976, the most recent for Antigonus in Kenneth Branagh’s 2015 Winter’s Tale with Judi Dench. At 70, he played King Lear in Brooklyn to ecstatic American notices; the New York Times’ Ben Brantley called it “devastating.”

In 2020, in the first weeks of lockdown, he played Prospero in a tiny studio production at the Jermyn Street Theatre — the last great Shakespearean role he had not yet attempted — and the reviewer for the Telegraph noted that “the great globe itself” speech, in his “hypnotically sonorous delivery,” acquired “a charge of almost unbearable poignancy.”

He toured for decades with his one-man Chekhov show; he wrote a book about it; he wrote three Shakespeare user’s guides, a memoir, a book about Lear in Brooklyn, and a book about being an actor called Let Me Play the Lion Too.

He played Jung opposite David Suchet in the BBC’s 1984 Freud. And he was, to a generation of children, the Imperial officer who tells Darth Vader the Emperor is on his way down: Moff Jerjerrod in Return of the Jedi, a part he was good-natured about and slightly bemused by, since he never quite escaped fans asking after it at the stage door.

With Pennington’s dual roles in the Sherlockian world, it would be easy to mention the Reichenbach or him being “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.” Perhaps a more fitting valedictory message to the actor who chose Hamlet over Hollywood and gave half a century to the classics, is a Shakespearean line:

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“Three years had certainly not smoothed the asperities of his temper” [EMPT]

Of all the periods in the Canon that have tantalized Sherlockians, there are two that consistently are intriguing, the first of which is Sherlock Holmes’s formative years. The now-classic film Young Sherlock Holmes and the more recent series Young Sherlock have taken on this period with gusto.

The other period is the Great Hiatus — those mysterious years between Holmes’s plunge over the Reichenbach Falls on May 4, 1891, and his startling reappearance in Watson’s consulting room in the spring of 1894. Conan Doyle gave us only the briefest sketch of Holmes’s wanderings to Tibet, Persia, Mecca, and Khartoum. The rest has been left to our imaginations — and has proven to be fertile ground for scholars, pasticheurs, and screenwriters alike.

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The latest entry in this venerable tradition comes from a Swiss-German-Belgian co-production titled The Death of Sherlock Holmes (working title), which began filming this spring and is slated for a 2027 premiere.

A Cast and Crew of Note

Rafe Spall (Under Salt Marsh, Trying) takes up the deerstalker — or whatever passes for one in his amnesiac state — alongside Deleila Piasko (The Exposure, Transatlantic).

The series is the brainchild of Claudia Bluemhuber (Fallen, Robin and the Hoods), André Küttel (Needle Park Baby, Die Beschatter), and Pierre Monnard (Needle Park Baby, Winter Palace), with Küttel and Simone Schmid (Die Beschatter) handling the scripts. Monnard and Bluemhuber share directing duties.

Producer Silver Reel, fresh off a 2025 International Emmy win for the YA series Fallen, is steering the project alongside Sky Switzerland, SRF, ARD Degeto, and Umedia. Sphere Abacus is handling international distribution, while Sky has acquired exclusive U.K. and Ireland broadcast rights.

According to SRF, filming will take place in Switzerland, South Tyrol, and Bavaria.1

What Happened After Reichenbach?

Here is where the premise gets interesting for those of us who have spent considerable time pondering the Hiatus. Set against what the producers describe as the “majestic and merciless” Swiss Alps, the story opens with an Englishman pulled barely alive from an icy mountain stream by a local woman named Alma and her young son Franz. When the village doctor turns up murdered, suspicion falls on the boy — leaving the amnesiac stranger as his only ally.

The man remembers nothing of his past. But flashes of razor-sharp deduction begin to surface, betraying a hidden history. As fragments of memory return, he must reckon with a question that no Sherlockian will find suspenseful in the slightest, but which our hero apparently must work out for himself: who is he, really?

What begins as an isolated Alpine mystery widens into a far-reaching conspiracy, inching him toward the legendary name he may once have borne. It is, in essence, the Great Hiatus told as a memory-loss thriller, with the Holmes compelled to deduce his own identity.

A Crowded Field and a Welcome Addition

SRF notes that there are more than 250 Sherlock Holmes screen productions — making him the most-portrayed literary character in cinema history.2 Adding another television series to that already groaning shelf might seem redundant, particularly at this time, but the Hiatus has always been fertile ground precisely because Conan Doyle left it so sparsely filled in.

From Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution to Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary and Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk, writers have repeatedly returned to the question of where Holmes went and what he did.

What sets this production apart is its geography. Filming in the very Alps where Conan Doyle dispatched his hero — and where Sherlockians have made annual pilgrimages to Meiringen and the Reichenbach Falls for decades (the most recent by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London having just concluded) — promises an authenticity of setting that no soundstage can replicate.

Whether the storytelling rises to the level of the locations, we shall have to wait until 2027 to discover.

For now, we will be following with great interest. As Holmes himself observed upon his return:

“My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.”

We trust you will be affected by this latest addition to the canon of the Sherlockian screen.

“Would you care to try it?“ [SIGN]

Christopher Morley (1890 – 1957) was, in his time, a well-known and well-regarded writer whose career spanned journalism, novels, essays, poems, and plays. He was born on May 5, 1890, which explains why we mention him now.

For Sherlock Holmes fans, he held an even more important role: he was the founder of the Baker Street Irregulars — the literary society dedicated to keeping green the memory of Sherlock Holmes.

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This was not the only club he founded, but it is the only club that outlasted him. To read his essay “On Belonging to Clubs” (1949), it was clear that he preferred his clubs small and chummy, and was happy to be free of the responsibility of running one:

And still, poor soul, I had this morbid hanker for inventing clubs. Surely the most innocent impulse of my life was my boyish passion for the corn of Conan Doyle. I invented something called the Baker Street Irregulars; a simple group of a dozen devotees who met, Dutch1, to discuss what amused them. It was taken up by that resonant sounding board Woollcott2, and then by Life magazine. The quiet speakeasy where we met3 was trampled into covercharge by runners and readers and their dames. Our scrapbook of minutes was stolen by some biblioklept; our simple punchinello (Christ Cella) died of ambitious hypertension. Truly, men in Clubs have an urge toward Deficit, Damnation and Death. Now the scholarly group of Baker Street find themselves swaddled, or saddled, with a publishing business, an annual meeting, and a province of pulp. They have about 30 scionist branches whose letters have to be answered. But not by me.

That same year, in a letter to the BSI’s leader, Edgar W. Smith, Morley included a poem that bore witness to his unabashed love of the works of Holmes’s creator:

Te Deum Laudanum

What opiate can best abate
Anxiety and toil?
Not aspirins, nor treble gins,
Nor love, nor mineral oil—
My only drug is a good long slug
Of tincture of Conan Doyle.

The Baker Street Irregulars now have about 300 members worldwide, an annual gathering that lasts some four days, a publishing imprint, and have produced The Baker Street Journal quarterly since 1946.

And to think, we have Morley to thank for all of this…

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“It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen” [FINA]1

Find yourself anywhere online today and you’ll come across the phrase or hashtag “May the Fourth be with you.” But it’s not a date recognized only by fans of Star Wars.

For anyone who has read “The Final Problem,”2 the date of May 4 is less celebratory than melancholy, as that’s the short story in which Sherlock Holmes confronts his archenemy Professor Moriarty (who we’ve inexplicably never heard of up until this point in the Canon) and both of them tumble off the cliff into the Reichenbach Falls.

Sherlockian Road Trip

As you may recall, after Holmes appeared in Watson’s consulting-room and recounted his interaction with Moriarty, the two fled to the Continent, eventually landing in Switzerland:

It was upon the 3rd of May that we reached the little village of detour, where we put up at the Englischer Hof, then kept by Peter Steiler the elder. Our landlord was an intelligent man, and spoke excellent English, having served for three years as waiter at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. At his advice, upon the afternoon of the 4th we set off together with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui. We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about half-way up the hill, without making a small detour to see them.

It was here that Conan Doyle chose the final resting place for Sherlock Holmes - a rest that was intended to be eternal but that we now know lasted nearly a decade. The description of the Reichenbach Falls is a fitting one for the epic struggle of good versus evil that took place later in the story:

It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening, coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upwards, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.

Watson Gets Fooled

And after Watson was lured back to the Englischer Hof with the story of a patient in need (good old Watson!), he returned to the falls to find a note from Sherlock Holmes along with his alpenstock and silver cigarette case. He was led to conclude that that inevitable happened:

An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation.

But aside from the colorful descriptions of both the setting and the action, this story above many others shows Watson’s emotional side. Over the course of two short years, readers had gotten to know Holmes and Watson through 12 stories that made up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and 11 stories that comprised The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (as well as the previously published A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four). That’s less than half of what would eventually become the entire Canon of 60 stories — stories that would be published over the course of the following 35 or so years.

For Watson as well as for the readers, that’s an intense run of stories — tales that fill us with wonder as we’ve been learning about the habits, eccentricities, limits and capabilities of the most intriguing detective that the world has ever known.

Is it any wonder then that his sudden and tragic loss affected us so deeply?

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Spoiler Alert

When a story opens with that kind of line, the reader has a sense of what they’re in for. We’ll never forget reading that line for the first time and feeling a little stab in the gut. The modern equivalent would be exclaiming, “Wait — what?”

Imagine Watson’s realization that this would be the case. He describes is first reaction:

“It was the sight of that alpenstock which turned me cold and sick...I stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed with the horror of the thing.”

Even Holmes understood how his untimely departure would affect his friend, writing in his farewell note,

“I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you.”

The Public Reaction

The pain was palpable to readers at the time. There is an apocryphal legend that grown men in London wore black armbands in a demonstration of mourning. We have yet to see any definitive evidence of this occurrence (and the Baker Street Journal once offered a bounty for anyone who could prove it).

But it rings true to the spirit of what happened at the time, which was an outpouring of grief over the loss of a literary character. Letters flowed to The Strand Magazine and to Arthur Conan Doyle himself, one even beginning “You brute!”

At least modern readers don’t have to wait eight years for Holmes to reappear in The Hound of the Baskervilles or ten years for the first of the stories that would make up The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Can you imagine what it must have been like to have to put Holmes to rest in one’s mind and to blindly wait to see if he would ever reappear?

We’re fortunate that the public outcry (and, let’s face it, a hefty payday) convinced Conan Doyle to take up his pen once more to provide us with such rich and wonderful stories to fill our desires, fuel our imagination and enrich our friendships. While May 4 may seem one for us to mourn, we’re fortunate that, as Watson observed upon Holmes’s return in “The Empty House,”

“once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”

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May the Fourth Be With You

One of the things that we enjoy about the Sherlock Holmes stories and those devotees who follow it, is the ability to weave in so many of life’s other interests. If you’ve got another hobby or passion, odds are you’ll find a way to incorporate it into your love of Sherlock Holmes.

Over the years, we’ve met Sherlockians who are also interested in horse racing, railroads, P.G. Wodehouse, pin collecting, the Titanic, antiques, handwriting analysis, coin and stamp collecting, woodworking, needlepoint, jewelry making, wine, pipe collecting, music, period firearms, Victorian attire — the list goes on and on.

Really, there’s no limit to the connections we can make between our interests, if we’re passionate enough about them.

So it was with little surprise — but with great amusement — that we looked at the above photo sent by a colleague of the individual who is a Holmes Trooper.

We couldn’t help but think:

“May the force be with you, old chap.”

The Star Wars / Sherlock Holmes Connection(s)

Star Wars and Sherlock Holmes. Hmm. There are seemingly endless possibilities

Well, if you consider that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee appeared in the George Lucas series — albeit Cushing never made it past the first film (in carbon form, at least) and Lee managed to do damage in the final trilogy — and are actors who have portrayed Sherlock Holmes, there’s your connection.

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Of course, the more astute among you will remember that Lee also portrayed Sir Henry Baskerville in Hammer’s 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. And he holds the distinction of being the only actor to portray Holmes and his stately brother Mycroft, whom he played in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Challenge

Here’s an interesting challenge: can you go through the Star Wars universe and find connections between that cast and the Sherlock Holmes universe?

Drop a comment below.

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The game’s afoot!

The Sherlock Holmes Society of London marks its 75th anniversary in 2026, and today we talk with coordinator Ashley Mayo about the year-long celebration, and his deep-rooted connection to the world of Baker Street. Ashley gives us a grand tour of the 2026 program, including Victorian-costumed pilgrimages in the Swiss Alps, a special event at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios, a weekend symposium at the University of Cambridge, and much more.

You’ll also hear about his introduction to the Society at the landmark 1987 centenary dinner for A Study in Scarlet, and how his passion for Sherlockian scholarship led to the creation of “The Scrapbook,” a digital archive that provides easy access to decades of articles from the Society’s Journal, organized by case and theme.

Our “Learned Societies” segment kicks off with Sherlockian society activities coming up in the first half of July. Then, it’s a new edition of “Examining the Pictures,” with the film critic, journalist, and author Christian Monggaard, BSI, as he reviews Sherlock, Jr.

Finally, the Canonical Couplet quiz will test your Sherlock Holmes knowledge, with a set of Sherlock Holmes Society of London coasters for the winner. Send your answer to comment @ihearofsherlock.com by May 14, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. All listeners are eligible to play.

Leave I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; listen to us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Links

• The Sherlock Holmes Society of London

• The Canon and the Journal — A Scrapbook

• Other links:

  • The Learned Societies: Sherlockian Calendar

• I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere / Trifles Merch Store

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Your thoughts on the show? Leave a comment below, send us an email (comment AT ihearofsherlock DOT com), call us at 5-1895-221B-5. That’s (518) 952-2125.

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