The Case Files of Sherlock Holmes (2009) self-identifies as ‘Watson’s scrapbook’ (Adams,

2009). The original Sherlock Holmes stories (1887-1927) written by Arthur Conan Doyle,

were ‘Watson’s accounts of Holmes’s endeavours based on the notes he took during the

investigations and the evidence’ (Adams, 2009). Adam’s book compiles fictional evidence of

the well-known cases to add a new element to the famous stories. My project aims to do the

same by taking the stories and working them into a fictional news source. I adopted the title

‘Strand’ from the original publication of the short stories, ‘The Strand Magazine (1891–

1950), one of the first monthly magazines of light literature’ (Britannica). Adapting five of

the short stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891-1892) collection into

articles, was my homage to the creation and reproduction of the beloved characters and

stories as seen over the years, in movies, theatre, TV, poems, and books such as Moriarty

(2014) by Anthony Horowitz.

Vincent Starrett’s sonnet, 221B (1942) eclipses the notion of the timelessness of

Sherlock Holmes:

‘Here dwell together still two men of note

Who never lived and so can never die;’ (Lines 1-2)

A Sherlock Holmes exhibition at the Museum of London in 2015 similarly used the quote as

their tagline, ‘The man who never lived and will never die’. The phrase is a very poignant

way of summing up the endurance of Sherlock Holmes and the phenomena surrounding him.

Originally, I was unsure about whether to design and write the news articles in line with the

late nineteenth style of the time or modernise my design. However, ‘Holmes is an

extraordinary invention because he is more than a creature of his time.’ (Mount, 2010), hence

the popularity of modernised versions of the detective in BBC Sherlock (2010-present) and

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Elementary (2012-present). Timelessness soon became the focal point for my project because

Sherlock Holmes is without time, ‘his genius and mystery can be transferred to any age.’

(Mount, 2010). As P.D. James famously stated, ‘he is of his age but, curiously, also of ours,

and this too may be part of his lasting appeal.’ (James, 2009). My aim with the project then

became to mix the contemporary with the past, as well as fiction with reality.

I adopted the Strand title to further embed these articles with the stories and history,

as an ‘in-world’ news source. This similarly links to a term called ‘personality’ whereby hints

of real events or people can be identified within fiction. In this case, it’s the fictional world of

Sherlock, the reality of where it was published, and small details I added recognisable to a

Sherlock fan. Doyle adopted this marketing tactic in A Scandal in Bohemia (1891), the public

could recognise the Bohemian King as being a reference to the Prince of Wales, but there was

still enough ambiguity to skew whether or not it was solely fictional, or based on the real

man.

I changed the term ‘Magazine’ to ‘Gazette’ to be more accommodating to the news

article form. I used ‘Gazette’ as it was a popular term at the time that ‘denoted a periodical

publication giving an account of current events.’ (Tréguer, 2016) It’s important to note the

difference between magazines (what will be referred to as periodicals; any publication

published at regular intervals) and newspapers. ‘Whereas newspapers are focused around a

very delimited notion of the present […] a periodical—despite also being predicated on the

notion of the moment—tends to provide apparatus that is oriented to its continuing relevance

in the future.’ (NCSE, quoted in King, p.4) Similarly, newspapers were published with a wide

readership in mind while some magazines, for example, Blackwood’s Magazine (1817-1980)

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had a very specific, limiting readership in mind, that of the upper-class gentleman. Moreover,

there is a ‘vagueness of the term “newspaper” (King, p.5) because ‘“news” are events of

recent recurrence, [and] what is recent is relative’ (Mitchell, quoted in King, p.5) while ‘the

weekly periodical included time-sensitive content (however recent or old that “news” might

be) along with the kind of literary miscellany associated with magazines. (King, p.5). This

further contributes to the relevance and poignancy of the project because ‘many important

titles, such as […] the Strand Magazine extend beyond the boundaries of the nineteenth

century.’ (King, p.3) The Strand’s contents are timeless, and of the literary persuasion;

translating the stories into a newspaper form incorporates the concept of timelessness with

the current nature of news sources, and Sherlock Holmes is still, very much so, current.

The design of the project was inspired by one design from the late nineteenth century,

an 1891 clipping of a newspaper entitled The Standard (1827-1900) (Appendix A). I used

parchment paper as the background to give the appearance of an old, worn paper that marks

so many old copies of newspapers. I incorporated ‘Old English Text’ for the font title,

mimicking the use of it in The Standard and, similarly, created a bar underneath that includes

the issue number, date, and price as depicted. The date and issue numbers I used are the real

counterparts of each story’s original publication in The Strand. I subsequently added a

roundel in the bottom right-hand corner of each page, a detail The Strand utilised to write the

issue and volume number (Appendix B). The modernity aspect of the project is in the

language and voice the articles are written with. Furthermore, in regard to layout, the text is

justified, and each paragraph indented to mimic the form of a newspaper.

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On a similar note, I wanted my project to be multifaceted as the stories are in their

countless adaptations. A Scandal in Bohemia and The Red-headed League (1891) are the first

two stories of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and so I chose those two to introduce

Sherlock Holmes as the unknown detective and work towards The Strand, and thus the

public, knowing of him, similar to how he gained popularity over time. Furthermore, I had to

choose cases that would be newsworthy to add to the realism, and wanted those with variety,

settling on; a blackmail case involving royalty in A Scandal in Bohemia, a known criminal

and bank robbery in The Red-headed League (1891), a murder in The Boscombe Valley

Mystery (1891), a triple homicide and racist organisation in The Five Orange Pips (1891),

and finally, an act of filicide in The Speckled Band (1892).

A few smaller details I added were the use of mistaking Sherlock in the first article as

‘Sherrinford’, a nod to the original name Doyle was going to use for the detective. I’ve used

Doyle’s name as the reporter’s name to pay homage to his history with Sherlock. Doyle grew

to hate his creation, in a letter to his mother he wrote, ‘I think of slaying Holmes […] &

winding him up for good & all. He takes my mind from better things.’ (Doyle, 1891). He

eventually did kill Holmes in The Final Problem, (1893) but resurrected the detective in The

Empty House (1903). The detail aims to represent that, no matter what world, Doyle was

always meant to write about, Sherlock Holmes.

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Appendix

Appendix A

Sourced from British Library Newspapers (19th century British Newspapers)

The Standard (London, England), Monday, July 13, 1891; pg. [1]; Issue 20909. British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800-1900.

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Appendix B

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Bibliography

Adams, Guy, Thompson, Lee, The Case Files of Sherlock Holmes, Andre Deutsch, 2009.

Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Race Point Publishing, 2013.

Gatiss, Mark, Moffat, Steven, BBC Sherlock, BBC, Hartswood Films, Series 1-4, 2010-present.

George Unwin, David H. Tucker and others, History of Publishing; The 19th century and the start of mass circulation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2019, Web, Accessed on 27 April 2019. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/Magazine-publishing#ref398343)

Horowitz, Anthony, Moriarty, Orion Books, 2015.

James, P.D, Talking about Detective Fiction, The Bodleian Library, 2009.

King, Andrew, Easley, Alexis, Morton, John, The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-century British Periodicals and Newspapers, Routledge, 2016, p.1-5.

Ritchie, Guy, Sherlock Holmes, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009.

Lellenberg, Jon, Stashower, Foley, Charles, Arthur Conan Doyle: A life in letters, HarperCollins, 2008.

Mount, Harry, Why the riveting Sherlock Holmes stories have endured, Telegraph, 2010, Web, Accessed on 23 April 2019. (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/7911226/Why-the-riveting-Sherloc k-Holmes-stories-have-endured.html)

The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia, 2019, Web, Accessed on 23 April 2019. (https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Strand_Magazine)

The British Library Newspapers, The Standard, 1891, Web, Accessed on 27 April 2019, The Standard (London, England), Monday, July 13, 1891; pg. [1]; Issue 20909. British Library Newspapers, Part II: 1800-1900.

Tréguer, Pascal, The Curious History of the word ‘Gazette’, World Histories, 2016, Web, Accessed on 28 April 2019. (https://wordhistories.net/2016/10/21/gazette/)

Werner, Alex, Sherlock Holmes: The man who never lived and will never die, Museum of London, 2 March 2015 14:00.

Wilder, Billy, Private life of Sherlock Holmes, Metro Goldwyn.

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