Sleuth-Hound (Season Finale of Beach Reads)

While you were working on this book, out of curiosity, did you come across a movie called Murder by Decree?

No, what is this?

It is a Sherlock Holmes adventure in which Sherlock solves the Whitechapel murders.

And it is genuinely one of the best Sherlock Holmes movies I've ever seen.

Christopher Plummer plays Sherlock Holmes and endows him with a level of compassion that just we never see in Holmes.

It's legitimately an amazing movie directed by Bob Clark.

I highly recommend it.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

There's so many versions of Sherlock Holmes.

And I know like the Conan Doyle estate, you know, they really they like Holmes to kind of be exactly how he was written by Conan Doyle.

And there's an interesting little postscript in Smootown because Adrian Conan Doyle, who was the youngest son of Conan Doyle, took great offense in the in the 1940s when Irving Wallace wrote an essay saying that Joe Bell was the original Sherlock Holmes.

And it was such a weird little fight that broke out between them because Conan Doyle says it.

He outs him in an interview.

There is one surviving footage of Conan Doyle speaking, which is incredible because this is a man who was born in 1859.

And here he is speaking on camera.

And he says in it, you know, Joe Bell was the inspiration.

And he talks about, you know, what that meant to him.

So it was strange that Adrian Conan Doyle took such offense to this.

But there's this fight that breaks out in the press.

And the reason why I added it in a postscript was because in 1993, Conan Doyle's last surviving daughter...

Now, remember, he was born in 1859.

His daughter is still alive in 1993.

Only men can do this, by the way.

So...