Thoughts from Dan Andriacco

A big welcome please to this weeks guest blogger, Dan Andriacco with his usual insightful thoughts.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND AMERICA





Sherlock Holmes fans on both sides of the Atlantic understandably reacted with dismay to the news that the American television network CBS plans a new series,
“Elementary,” transferring Holmes not only to the 21st Century (been there, done that) but to New York.
This idea has “dreadful” written all over it.But it did set me to thinking about how Sherlock Holmes’s career has had deep connections to the United States from the beginning. Fully half of A Study in Scarlet is set in Utah, the first of many stories in the Canon with American roots.Perhaps that is why the book was a bit of a hit in the United Sates, attracting the attention of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the publisher of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia. It is well known that Stoddart held a dinner party in London in 1889 at which he commissioned Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde to write novels. And so The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Grey came to be.


A decade later, the American actor William Gillette substantially rewrote a play by Arthur Conan Doyle to create the melodrama Sherlock Holmes. He played the part for 30 years and became the model of Holmes – curved pipe and all – for Frederick Dorr Steele’s illustrations in Collier’s magazine.
Holmes has always been tremendously popular in the United States. Many of the early Holmes scholars were Americans – the likes of Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, Edgar W. Smith, Dr. Julian Wolff, and Ellery Queen. Baker Street Irregulars, of which they were all members, now has scion societies around the world.


The resurgence of Holmes in the 1970s was largely an American phenomenon fueled by the popularity of Nicholas Meyer’s 1974 novel and subsequent film The Seven Per-Cent Solution. A deluge of pastiches followed. In our own day, I’m among those who think the Warner Bros. films starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law are entertaining American action movies that could just as well have given the main characters different names for all the resemblance they bear to the canonical characters.


But guess what? They are bringing new readers to Sherlock Holmes. And that’s a very good thing indeed.
No wonder Sherlock Holmes once said, “I am always glad to meet an American.” But that’s a subject for another blog post.


Dan Andriacco lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He is the author of Baker Street Beat, No Police Like Holmes, and the upcoming Holmes Sweet Holmes. He blogs at:

http://bakerstreetbeat.blogspot.com/