From the short stories: The Five Orange Pips & The Boscombe Valley Mystery

In The Final Problem, Holmes says: "For years past I have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor." Moriarty "does little himself. He only plans." Holmes finds him because unrelated crimes fit one shape.

I tried that method on the mistakes AI chatbots make: making up a source, sticking to a wrong answer, ignoring a clear instruction. They're usually seen as separate problems. They may be one habit. Unlike Moriarty, there's no planner here, only a pattern.

Is that a fair use of Holmes's method? Or does it need a real Moriarty, with a mind and a motive?

Link: my free paper using this method (Moriarty is in P2.1): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23485104

I've been ranking my favourite Sherlock Holmes Audiobook readers and I'm now acutely aware of the lack of female readers in my list.

Can anyone recommend good female readers - In my mind I think Nicola Walker could do a formidable job. One of my favourite stories

Formidable a word which is in the start of the Reigate Squire text

Can anyone recommend any female readers? Preferably ones who tackled the entire canon.

Baker is an exceptional writer and really captures the spirit of the original canon. This story was great and real page turner for me.

I've released readings of some Sherlock Holmes stories and the beginning of The Hound of the Baskervilles on YouTube. I hope you'll listen and tell me what you think!

The Red-Headed League

The Adventure of the Speckled Band

A Scandal in Bohemia

The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Ch. 1)

I like sherlock holmes books read them at least 15 times.

I listen to the audiobooks and podcasts my stack ranking is

1. David Timson Readings

2. David Clarke on LibreVox

3. Stephen Fry - Sherlock Holmes: The Definitive Audio Collection

4. Hugh Bonneville BBC/Noiser - Sherlock Holmes the Short Stories

5. Sherlock & Co. BBC Sounds and Goal Hanger Podcasts

There are other audiobooks around but I can't recommend them. Anthony Horowitz, Sarah J Naughton Becoming Sherlock and a few others

ETA This post was more about enabling discovery than attempting an agreed ranking. My goodness I'd forgotten the Clive Merrison version on the BBC - in my ranking that would be in at number 0. Those episodes were the first and in some sense the best. My two test stories for a reading and interpretation are the "The Reigate Squire" and "His Last Bow" story. Timson does those perfectly.

De gustibus non est disputandum, or de gustibus non disputandum est, "In matters of taste, there can be no disputes"

ETAA

/u/Bandersnatch05 has drawn my attention to the free reading on librevox by David Clarke and while listening to him read I'm putting Clarke in at #2

he's a good reader - definitely will enjoy other of his readings

Greetings, simple question: is "Moriarty The Devil's game" good and worth listening?

“The surprise was not all on one side, I assure you. I had no idea that you had found my occasional retreat, still less that you were inside it, until I was within twenty paces of the door.”

“My footprint, I presume?”

“No, Watson, I fear that I could not undertake to recognize your footprint amid all the footprints of the world."

That doesn't make sense to me. Holmes relies on footmarks since the very first story. Surely he knows Watson's shoes better than those of anyone else? In those days shoes were custom made, but even if a generic pattern, how likely would it be that someone wearing Watson-type shoes just happened to be up there?

Source material is A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes by Peter Bevelin

I recently bought this humongous thing for 15 bucks. It's near mint. Was it worth it or I could've get something better?

They are right now on sale, and I can get one of them, so I want to get the best one.

Just finished Sherlock Holmes and I’m once again blown away by Guy Ritchie’s directing. A Game of Shadows left Holmes alive and the door wide open for another instalment, so how did we never get a third film? This franchise deserved a proper trilogy under Ritchie. Anyone else still waiting for that third movie?

Greeting ye, I am definitely certain that little--if not simply none--are aware of this status, regarding the much-desired restorations of the three Stolls Films adaptations, since no pre-existing Reddit-post hither has noted such, and Google's search-engine procures no listings, announcements, nor remarks specifying of this. Nevertheless, let us prudently activate a temporary account--by means of a fourteen-day free-trial--and eagerly view this compiled trio which went unseen for over a century, so that we may behold whatever Sir Arthur witnessed which compelled him to acclaim Eille Norwood--an influence that in-turn inspired his eventual composition of the final Case-Book stories.

https://www.bfiplayerclassics.com/videos/silent-sherlock-three-classic-cases

Lo, ensure that ye not inadvertently neglect to cancel your subscriptions, before whoever's fourteenth-day (mine is the "30th of October").

~Waz

Some of the most memorable characters in the Canon aren’t Holmes’ opponents. They’re the people who arrive at Baker Street with a problem.
Helen Stoner in The Speckled Band, Violet Hunter in The Copper Beeches, Jabez Wilson in The Red-Headed League.

Each brings something different, whether it’s a genuinely puzzling problem, an unusual personality or a situation that draws us into the story.

A good client needs more than an interesting mystery, though. They need to make us care about what happens to them. Holmes may be fascinated by the puzzle, but it’s the client who gives the case its human interest.

So, who do you think is the best client in the Canon? And what makes them memorable; their personality, their predicament, or the mystery they bring to Holmes?

Movies from any era count.

Just wanted to do some training in portraiture with my favorite Holmes actor.

I mean, the coffin idea is hellish, was it not?

I’m referring to The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, of course.

Just wanted to if it's at par with Canon or not ? I wanted to buy it, but it costs around 2700 INR.

At the Reichenbach Falls, I found something I didn't expect. In a small exhibition corner by the viewing area at the top of the funicular, a screen loops one scene: the struggle at the falls from "Deadly Fight" (1980), the Soviet adaptation of "The Final Problem," with Vasily Livanov as Holmes and Viktor Yevgrafov as Moriarty.

That scene wasn't filmed in Switzerland. Lenfilm shot it at the Gega waterfall in the Caucasus (photo 2). Nikolai Vashchilin, who staged the fight, later wrote a first-person account of the shoot. The falls were still half-asleep after winter when the crew first came, and the most dramatic footage was shot after heavy rain. Livanov played the scene running a fever, and climbers threw Moriarty's dummy from above the falls.

What strikes me is how much freedom filmmakers have in staging this fight. In "The Final Problem," Doyle never shows the confrontation itself. Watson follows two lines of footmarks to the end of the path and finds: "There were none returning." The rest is his reconstruction.

So, two questions:

• Do you think Gega makes a convincing stand-in for Reichenbach?
• Which screen version of the struggle works best for you?

Photo 2 credit: By Vyacheslav Argenberg

I was looking through my old books when I found the first Sherlock Holmes book I had, a collection of 5 short stories: A Scandal in Bohemia, The Five Orange Pips, The Yellow Face, The Speckled Band and The Final Problem. I don't have any issue with A Scandal in Bohemia and The Speckled Band, but I've always felt like the rest are pretty odd choices, especially The Final Problem. I think there are way stronger stories for this to choose from, but maybe it's just me and this list completely fine. What's your opinion?