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  the game’s Afoot the private Life of Sherlock Holmes Women are not to be trusted; not the best of them—a twinkle in the eye, and the arsenic in the soup. —Robert Stephens as Sherlock Holmes in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like Agatha Christie, was one of the foremost writers of classic British detective stories. Conan Doyle’s armchair sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, can find the solution to any mystery with his ingenious faculties of deduction. But Conan Doyle’s stories are not merely exercises in puzzle solving; he portrays his hero’s encounters with the evils of society in a vivid and compelling fashion. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859; he was educated in a Jesuit school and at Edinburgh University, where he earned his medical degree in 1885. He decided to augment his meager income as a doctor by trying his hand at writing detective stories. The character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Joseph Bell, a physician who taught Conan Doyle in medical school. Bell employed his astute powers of deduction to diagnose patients’ ailments and even infer details of their past lives.1 Conan Doyle said that he created his fictional detective with similar powers of deduction, “to treat crime as Dr. Bell treated diseases.” Holmes became the world’s first consulting detective, a genius at unraveling the threads of a mystery.2 William Gillette wrote a play, Sherlock Holmes (1899), in which the playwright played Holmes on tour for three decades. It was Gillette who coined the celebrated phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” The first important Sherlock Holmes on film was John Barrymore, who starred in Albert Parker’s silent film version of Gillette’s play in 1922. Although some exteriors were shot in London, the film is too faithful to the Gillette original, with some Some LIke It WILder  scenes seeming stage bound. Still, critics thought that Barrymore had captured Holmes, as when he fixes the villain with a penetrating, hawklike stare. Gillette’s play was revived on Broadway in 1974 in a production that I saw at the Broadhurst Theatre. Robert Stephens, who would play the title role in Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, also starred in the revival in New York.3 But the best-known interpreter of the Holmes character was Basil Rathbone, who played the detective in fourteen films between 1939 and 1946. Rathbone told me in correspondence in 1966 that the first film in which he played Holmes was also the best: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), directed by Sidney Lanfield. At that film’s end, Holmes says, “I’ve had a strenuous day; oh, Watson, the needle!” No screen hero had ever made such a daring and nonchalant confession to drug addiction. Not until Wilder’s film thirty-one years later would Holmes indulge his drug habit on-screen. Between the release of Lanfield’s film and the release of Wilder’s, Geoffrey Shurlock had, on December 11, 1956, announced that, “in keeping with present-day conditions ,” his office was rescinding the ban on illegal drugs as a subject for films.4 So Wilder was free to treat Holmes as an addict. Wilder set his movie in the Victorian era, the period in which Conan Doyle wrote his stories of the great detective. In their original screenplay, Wilder and Diamond devised new adventures for Holmes, none of which were derived directly from the Conan Doyle stories. “I didn’t want merely to do a remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Wilder said. He did not incorporate any one story into his scenario; he borrowed from two stories for the cases he invented for his movie, using these two stories as points of departure. Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1905) deals with Colonel Valentine Walters’s theft of the secret blueprints of a submarine from the British navy office. Walters attempts to sell the plans to a German espionage agent. This story inspired the episode in Wilder’s picture that revolves around Britain’s secret efforts to perfect a submarine for wartime use.5 Queen Victoria is mentioned in the original story,6 but she makes an actual appearance in Wilder’s film. In the picture, Queen Victoria “rejects the use of a submarine as a warship” and calls a halt to the development of the submarine for wartime use. Bernard Dick comments that this is Wilder...

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