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 on Feb 27, 2007 - 8 comments

Sherlock Holmes on Stage & Screen is a gallery of almost every significant actor who has ever played the great detective. Among their ranks are William Gillette, who was able to build himself a castle in Connecticut with the proceeds from his Holmes portrayal; Charlton Heston, who enacted a version of The Sign of Four onstage; Jeremy Brett, the superlative television Holmes; and, of course, Basil Rathbone, the South African actor whose name became synonymous with the role.
posted by Iridic on Sep 25, 2006 - 21 comments

Discovering Sherlock Holmes. From January through April 2006, Stanford University will be republishing a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, "just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine." (These pages have images of some of the original covers.) You can subscribe to receive paper facsimiles of the original magazine by mail or be notified when the PDFs are published online. The project is a followup to their Discovering Dickens project, which republished Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and Hard Times. [via MonkeyFilter]
posted by kirkaracha on Nov 20, 2005 - 19 comments

The Deadly Necklace. The current issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating story about Richard Lancelyn Green, a preeminent Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes scholar who died under mysterious circumstances in March. At the time of his death, Green had been looking into the provinence of an archive of Conan Doyle’s papers [reprint of a NYTimes article], which he believed (perhaps wrongly) had been stolen, and he'd hinted that there had been threats to his life. Soon afterward, he was found garroted by a shoelace in his room. The magazine does not provide the article online, but does offer this Q&A with the author. I cannot recommend it highly enough, but to get you started while you're still at work, here's some more about Green's death from a Holmes message board; a discussion of the curse of Conan Doyle, which holds that Holmes scholars can meet an untimely end; and info on Doyle's belief in the supernatural.
posted by owenville on Dec 9, 2004 - 13 comments

"If this was Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, there would be a national outcry". Thousands of personal papers belonging to Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, fetched $1.7 million at an auction Wednesday, with many items sold to private U.S. collectors. The auction was a great disappointment to scholars who had hoped the papers would be donated to a public institution. The archive also became entwined in a mystery worthy of Conan Doyle's fictional detective: the bizarre death of a leading Holmes scholar. Lancelyn Green, 50, was found dead in his bed on March 27, garroted with a shoelace tightened by a wooden spoon, and surrounded by stuffed toys. (more inside)
posted by matteo on May 19, 2004 - 11 comments