Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes

Did You Know?

• The board game 221B Baker Street was first developed in 1975.
• Three Sherlock Holmes comic strip adaptations have appeared in American newspapers, the first running from 1930 to 1931.
• In January 2004, the BBC posted five new Sherlock Holmes short stories on their Cult website, with audio readings by Andrew Sachs and Hannah Gordon.

Film

Sherlock Holmes is estimated to be the most prolific screen character in cinema history. The first known film featuring Holmes is Sherlock Holmes Baffled, a one-reel film under a minute long, made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1900. A 1905 Vitagraph film, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom, featured H. Kyrle Bellew and J. Barney Sherry in unlisted roles; the identification of Maurice Costello as Holmes in that film is disputed.

Between 1908 and 1911, the Danish Nordisk Film Company produced thirteen one- and two-reel silent films, of which only Sherlock Holmes i Bondefangerkløer (1910) survives. Viggo Larsen originally played Holmes, with Otto Lagoni, Einar Zangenberg, Lauritz Olsen, and Alwin Neuss also taking the role. In 1911, the American Biograph company produced eleven short comedies with Mack Sennett as Holmes. Universal released A Study in Scarlet in 1914, starring Francis Ford as Holmes, with his brother John Ford (credited as Jack Ford) believed to have played Watson.

Harry Arthur Saintsbury reprised his stage role as Holmes in the 1916 film The Valley of Fear. The Stoll Pictures company produced forty-seven two-reelers between 1921 and 1923, all starring Eille Norwood as Holmes and Hubert Willis as Watson. John Barrymore played Holmes in a 1922 Goldwyn film, Sherlock Holmes, with Roland Young as Watson and William Powell in his first screen appearance. Clive Brook portrayed Holmes three times: The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929), Paramount on Parade (1930), and Sherlock Holmes (1932). Reginald Owen, who played Watson in the latter film, portrayed Holmes the following year in A Study in Scarlet.

Radio

Writer, actress, and producer Edith Meiser was largely responsible for first bringing Holmes to American radio listeners. She helped sell the show to NBC and found a sponsor, writing for the 1930–1936 series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The first show she adapted was The Adventure of the Speckled Band, broadcast on October 20, 1930, with William Gillette in the lead. For most of the series, Richard Gordon played Holmes and Leigh Lovel played Watson.

Orson Welles played Holmes in an adaptation of a William Gillette play broadcast in September 1938 on The Mercury Theater on the Air on CBS Radio. Meiser also wrote for The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce after their appearance in the 1939 film The Hound of the Baskervilles. NBC's Red and Blue networks carried the series until 1942, after which Dennis Green and Anthony Boucher wrote the shows. The Mutual Broadcasting System ran the series until 1947; Rathbone left in 1946 and was replaced by Tom Conway, with Nigel Bruce remaining for another season.

Later pairings included John Stanley as Holmes and Alfred Shirley as Watson in 1947–48, and Stanley with George Spelvin (a pseudonym for Wendell Holmes) in 1948–49. John Gielgud played Holmes for BBC radio in the 1950s, with Ralph Richardson as Watson; Orson Welles appeared as Professor Moriarty in The Adventure of the Final Problem.

Stage

The first actor known to have played Holmes on stage is Charles Brookfield, appearing in November 1893 at the Royal Court Theatre in Under the Clock, a musical parody written with Seymour Hicks, who played Watson. William Gillette wrote, directed, and starred in a popular play titled Sherlock Holmes in seven Broadway productions from 1899 to 1930. Gillette's Holmes, dressed in a deerstalker hat and Inverness cape and smoking a large curved calabash pipe, contributed much to the popular image of the character, though the deerstalker appears only occasionally in Paget's original illustrations and the calabash pipe was an artistic choice not reflecting Holmes's preference for harsh tobaccos.

Harry Arthur Saintsbury played Holmes in Gillette's play more than 1,400 times in the first twenty years of the 20th century. Later revivals of this production featured John Wood, John Neville, Patrick Horgan, Robert Stephens, and Leonard Nimoy; Frank Langella played Holmes in a 1981 HBO production. Holmes is tangentially referred to in an unfinished 1905 play by L. Frank Baum and Emerson Hough called The King of Gee-Whiz. In Langdon McCormick's 1905 play The Burglar and the Lady, Holmes is pitted against the fictional criminal A. J. Raffles without permission from either Doyle or Hornung.

Doyle himself authored The Speckled Band, a 1910 play in three acts adapted from his 1892 short story, casting H. A. Saintsbury in the lead; it premiered on 4 June 1910 at the Adelphi Theatre.

Television

Television incarnations of Sherlock Holmes have ranged from direct adaptations to new stories set in the present day or future. Possibly the earliest television appearance was the 1951 British pilot The Man Who Disappeared, based in part on The Man with the Twisted Lip, starring John Longden as Holmes and Campbell Singer as Watson; it survives on film. The same year saw a six-episode BBC miniseries, Sherlock Holmes, starring Alan Wheatley as Holmes and Raymond Francis as Watson, broadcast live without recordings.

In 1954, the first American adaptation, Sherlock Holmes, was produced by Sheldon Reynolds in Paris, starring Ronald Howard as Holmes and Howard Marion-Crawford as Watson. In the 1960s, a BBC TV series starred Douglas Wilmer and Nigel Stock; Peter Cushing, who had played Holmes in the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, later took over from Wilmer. The 24-part series Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1979–1980) starred Geoffrey Whitehead as Holmes and Donald Pickering as Watson.

In 1982, Granada Television aired Young Sherlock: The Mystery of the Manor House, starring Guy Henry as Holmes. Also in 1982, the BBC produced an adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles with Tom Baker as Holmes. Jeremy Brett starred in a Granada Television adaptation from 1984 to 1994, with David Burke and later Edward Hardwicke as Watson; all but 18 of the Conan Doyle stories were filmed before Brett's death in 1995. Brett and Hardwicke reprised their roles in a 1988–89 West End stage play, The Secret of Sherlock Holmes. An animated series, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, brought Holmes into the future.