Holmes, James

February 27, 2007 2:37 AM

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, featuring "the largest collection of Holmesian graphics online", a Scholars' Wing featuring essays and articles, pastiche and parodies. Arthur Conan Doyle's champion of logic and reason is the antithesis of the author's spiritualist beliefs. In his will (5.B), Doyle left sums of money to the Spiritualist Alliance of London and the Psychic College stating "...these institutions represent the most important religious movement that this world now holds". His belief in the occult and in particular fairies is surprising, yet somewhat understandable considering the era in which he lived.
posted by sluglicker (8 comments total)

Lotsa great OTR (Old Time Radio) versions of the Holmes stories available online for free

But I kinda like Nero Wolfe, seeing as how he was almost certainly the bastard child of Holmes and Irene Adler.
posted by RavinDave at 3:35 AM on February 27, 2007

These two [1]-[2] new annotated Sherlock Holmes are a must-own if you are even a little bit of a fan. They're wonderful.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 5:03 AM on February 27, 2007

Another interesting Holmes site - lists of characters and other very browsable miscellany. Incidentally, I have a discrete math textbook in which problem #44 of the section on the binomial theorem reads as follows:

You may recall that Professor Moriarty was one of the major villains in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). About him Holmes said, admiringly, "At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem, which has had a European vogue." The final problem in this set is to discover the name of the short story from which the quotation above was taken.

Well, I thought it was cute.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:28 AM on February 27, 2007

At Discovering Sherlock Holmes, you can download or subscribe to reprints of the stories "just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine." (previously)
posted by kirkaracha at 6:10 AM on February 27, 2007

There have been two sets of annotated Sherlock Holmes - the new one i_am_a_Jedi links to, and the original by big-noise 60's Holmesian William S. Baring-Gould. Both are neat, but the new one tries to be up-to-date by including a ton of latter-day fanwankery ("What if Moriarty was a vampire? What if Holmes was immortal? What if they were both immortal vampires and had giant space battles with lasers and also Watson was gay?") that could really have been left out.
posted by ormondsacker at 8:02 AM on February 27, 2007

Also note that Doyle's second-most famous series hero, globe-trotting scientist Professor Challenger, did eventually convert to spiritualism.
posted by ormondsacker at 8:07 AM on February 27, 2007

The incredibily brilliant novel "Photographing Fairies" features Doyle as a more than faintly sinister character. The movie version is not as good, but Doyle is played by Edward Hardwicke, who played Dr. Watson in the recent Granada "Return of Sherlock Holmes" TV series. Some kind of irony there.
posted by Faze at 9:18 AM on February 27, 2007

Fun. I read my way through the complete Holmes when I was a teenager. Don't know if I have the energy to read them all again, but maybe I'll listen to the broadcasts.
posted by serazin at 12:07 AM on February 28, 2007