Watch ‘Terror by Night’ in your browser

Here’s a really nice, high-quality copy of the Basil Rathbone classic “Terror by Night.” It’s the full film, and both the sound and audio quality are very good. Enjoy!

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Unlocking the appeal of the locked room

From the California Literary Review comes a nice appreciation of the “locked room mystery” genre – even if it does make the intriguing mistake of omitting one of the grand masters of that genre, John Dickson Carr.
Magicians perform their illusions in front of large audiences, however – in the whodunnit we are more often presented with [...]

Dr. House, meet Dr. Watson

Here’s an interesting exploration of the parallels between the Holmes canon and the TV show “House,” which was inspired in part by said canon. I’ve always enjoyed the show, and while I utterly disagree with the writer’s assertion that it is an improvement on the Holmes stories, he makes a few interesting points along the [...]

Review of new Holmes game from, er, MTV

That’s right, because when you think of highly interactive, cerebrally stimulating challenges, you immediately think MTV. Don’t you? Well, either way, the online wing of the channel that once aired music has a largely positive review of “Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.” It netted an 8.3 out of 10.

The voice of the first Holmes

“William Gillette was the aquiline and actual embodiment of Holmes himself. It is too little to say William Gillette resembled Sherlock Holmes … Sherlock Holmes looks exactly like William Gillette.”
Gillette gave more than 1,300 performances as Holmes, and of them only a single audio clip and a handful of photographs remain. Here’s a lovingly [...]

Laurie R. King discusses Russell, Holmes

The delightful Laurie R. King – author of some of the best Holmes pastiches in existence – has given us a few peeks into some interview questions she’s answering for upcoming editions of some of her books.
One question that often comes up is why I’m forever separating Russell from Holmes in their investigations, since most [...]

Watch a Holmes film online, free of charge

Need a way to spend some quality time? Archive.org has a great collection of Holmes films, all of them available for download or online viewing – and since they’re out of copyright, they’re completely free of charge and legal.
1932’s The Sign of Four features Arthur Wontner as Holmes and Ian Hunter (no, not the one [...]

Russell Crowe to play Holmes?

Oh sweet lord, please say this isn’t so … just a few days after learning of a big-screen reinvention of the Great Detective, comes word that he might be played by Russell Crowe.
“Russell is the favourite for the role as it’s felt he’ll give the character the action-man-like qualities the part is going to require. [...]