Michael Pointer - The Sherlock Holmes File

[dem bones]

Michael Pointer - The Sherlock Holmes File (David Charles, 1976)

Introduction
The Formation of an Image
'Which of You is Holmes?'
Dogs in the Night-time
'My Friend and Colleague'
The Master of Disguise
Furnished Rooms to Let
In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes

Appendix
Acknowledgements
Index

The Baker Street Irregulars among you will doubtless know this stuff by heart, but for a novice like this one it's a dead handy crash course in all-things Sherlock up to the mid-seventies and, of course, lovely to look at. The presentation is not dissimilar to Peter Haining's mighty Terror! A Pictorial History Of The Pulps except this time the accomplished illustrations have to share the limelight with film stills. As you'd expect, there's plenty from The Strand including reproductions of illustrator Sidney Paget's work for the fourth adventure, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, wherein he interpreted Conan-Doyle's "close-fitting cloth cap" as a deerstalker (i told you you knew all this stuff). The chapter In The Footsteps Of .... documents the Sherlock Holmes Society's eventful, full fancy dress excursion to Switzerland in 1968 to re-enact The Final Problem at the Reichenbach Falls. A cast of what appears to have been hundreds included Michael & Mollie Hardwick, Adrian 'son of' Conan Doyle, Roger & June Lancelyn Green, Barry Norman (covering the event for The Daily M**l), Kim Hong Chul ("the world's only Korean Swiss Yodeller"), A Pathe film crew, Dominique Joos ("a very attractive young blond actress") plus loads of folk with double-barrelled surnames and a Swiss brass band who, tragically, only seemed to know how to play vomit-inducing gumby anthem Yellow Submarine. Not much for horror heads - even the paragraph on A Study In Terror barely touches on the grisly subject matter, though the famous still from the Hammer The Hound Of The Baskervilles of Cecile Stephenson being sucked down into the quicksand is still fun.

[pulphack]

ooh it looks lovely - i had a chum called Derek Hinrich who used to write a lot of stuff about Holmes and Blake for various papers and was a member of the Holmes group with all the dressing up - in fact, for his 80th in 2009 he had a costumed trip to Dartmoor. was he mentioned in that photo, as i think he went on that. one of the sad things about last year was Derek succumbing to pneumonia and heart failure.

[dem bones]

sorry to hear this, Andy. i gather Derek Hinrich was also a huge loss to Sexton Blake research? i've just rechecked and i didn't spot his name in The Sherlock Holmes File, nor does he make the credits as far as my eyes can make out (am i going blind, or are these energy saving light-bulbs nigh on impossible to read by?). As far as the layout goes, my comparison to Haining's Terror is well off: his Dracula Centenary Book would be the more accurate model as both are equally generous with the photographs. Also, many of the articles are expanded from items that first appeared in the Sherlock Holmes Journal if that's any use to you?