The problem with pastiche of something of that is the best ever example of its kind is that it will always disappoint. In the sense that it won't live up to the original at its best. That is certainly what I have found with Sherlock Holmes pastiche in general, having read several anthologies of such.
So making a reprint anthology and drawing from the huge number overall is probably a better strategy – and also give it an angle so that there is some of more general interest than 'how good a copy is this?' In this case, a fantasy or sf slant to the tales, a lot of the time.
A 3.38 average overall, so a decent book.
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 01 The Doctor's Case – Stephen King
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 02 The Horror of the Many Faces – Tim Lebbon
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 03 The Case of the Bloodless Sock – Anne Perry
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 04 The Adventure of the Other Detective – Bradley H. Sinor
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 05 A Scandal in Montreal – Edward Hoch
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 06 The Adventure of the Field Theorems – Vonda N. McIntyre
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 07 The Adventure of the Death-Fetch – Darrell Schweitzer
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 08 The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland – Mary Robinette Kowal
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 09 The Adventure of the Mummy’s Curse – H. Paul Jeffers
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 10 The Things That Shall Come Upon Them – Barbara Roden
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 11 Murder to Music – Anthony Burgess
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 12 The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor – Stephen Baxter
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 13 Mrs Hudson's Case – Laurie R. King
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 14 The Singular Habits of Wasps – Geoffrey Landis
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 15 The Affair of the Forty-Sixth Birthday – Amy Myers
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 16 The Specter of Tullyfane Abbey – Peter Tremayne
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 17 The Vale of the White Horse – Sharyn McCrumb
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 18 The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger – Michael Moorcock
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 19 The Adventure of the Lost World – Dominic Green
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 20 The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece – Barbara Hambly
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 21 Dynamics of a Hanging – Tony Pi
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 22 Merridew of Abominable Memory – Chris Roberson
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 23 Commonplaces – Naomi Novik
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 24 The Adventure of the Pirates of Devil's Cape – Rob Rogers
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 25 The Adventure of the Green Skull – Mark Valentine
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 26 The Human Mystery – Tanith Lee
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 27 A Study in Emerald – Neil Gaiman
Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes : 28 You See But You Do Not Observe – Robert J. Sawyer
Watson works one out ahead of the master, but they have to decide what to do with the criminals.
3.5 out of 5
Bee double Holmes.
3.5 out of 5
Moriarty Hunt.
3 out of 5
Many worlds Watson.
3 out of 5
With The Woman, kid and other woman.
3.5 out of 5
Doyle too whack for Holmes.
3.5 out of 5
Bad Idol.
3.5 out of 5
Family execution.
3 out of 5
Inheritance death.
3 out of 5
Sherlock Holmes and Flaxman Low team-up.
3.5 out of 5
Note hammering.
3 out of 5
Heavy moon dust.
3 out of 5
Just a wee little trap.
3 out of 5
Holmes, Watson, Wells and Ripper aliens.
4 out of 5
Royal assassin removal.
3 out of 5
Young Moriarty Stoker.
3.5 out of 5
Hermaphrodite heredity case.
3 out of 5
Fellini silver stabbing.
3.5 out of 5
'There do not seem to be any dinosaurs in the vicinity, Holmes.'
4 out of 5
Carnaki Yog-Sothoth.
3.5 out of 5
Dodgson dead Doyle drop.
3 out of 5
Flashback mentalist.
3 out of 5
Adler sojourn.
3.5 out of 5
Albino alligator Siamese twin double duel shootout.
4 out of 5
Match Dead.
3 out of 5
White fox heart plot.
3.5 out of 5
Old One vaudeville and some monstrous advertising.
4 out of 5
Sherlock's Schrodinger's Fermi.
3.5 out of 5
3.5 out of 5
In the film, as in the books, both Holmes and Watson know their way around a fight and their skills are frequently tested. Holmes is a skilled martial artist; this propensity links him with both the star and director of “Sherlock Holmes,” as Downey and Ritchie have practiced martial arts for years, and worked together to create Holmes’s distinct fighting style. “Doyle called it Baritsu in the novels, which is tied to a 19th-century hybrid of jujitsu that is actually called Bartitsu, created by Edward William Barton-Wright,” Downey explains. “Jujitsu is Guy’s chosen martial art. Mine is Wing Chun Kung Fu. So, we developed our own combination of martial arts styles for the movie.”
As efficient as he is at neutralizing an enemy in the course of his work, Holmes is also known to blow off steam in a boxing ring at a working class pub called the Punch Bowl. Here, in front a raucous crowd, Holmes takes on a massive boxer named McMurdo, played by David Garrick, in a brutal bare-knuckle fight which showcases the detective’s prowess and physical strength.
“The bare-knuckle boxing ring is the only place where Holmes doesn’t think,” says Downey. “But even there he does think; he thinks about how to win the fight, but doesn’t think about all of these ongoing concerns of life. Interpersonal relations don’t enter into it. It’s just you and your opponent.”
“The Punch Bowl is where Holmes goes to hone his skill, to make mistakes, and test out techniques against very powerful opponents,” comments fight consultant Eric Oram, who for years has trained with Downey in Wing Chun Kung Fu and helped prepare the actor for the fight sequences. “He starts by using the least amount of force in the first half of the fight. It’s only after his opponent crosses the line that he wants to teach him a lesson.”
More out of necessity than choice, Watson too knows his way around a street fight, though he is more of a brawler compared to the fluid combat style of Holmes. “Watson is used to the up-close-and-personal fight-for-your-life stuff,” Downey attests. “He has a much more accessible but no less effective style than Holmes. As a matter of fact, there are often times when Holmes over thinks in order to come up with the best deduction, where Watson will just strike with any tool that’s handy.”
“Watson is a war veteran and used to thinking on his feet,” says stunt coordinator Franklin Henson. “He can throw a wild punch in reaction, and, like a street fighter, he’ll use whatever it takes–his head, knees or elbows–to bring an opponent down.”
Law relished participating in the fight sequences. “When you’re in the hands of someone like Guy, who shoots with such a unique eye, you know you’re not shooting a standard fight scene,” says the actor. “He’s always looking for a new way to reveal the story behind the fight, and he knows exactly what he wants. So it’s good fun.”
Director of photography Philippe Rousselot utilized lighting and camera to make the textures palpable and the fights a truly physical experience. “Guy wants the film to feel to the viewer as if you’re there,” Rousselot states. “A good example is the Punch Bowl fight. It was crucial to bring in every detail, from a miniscule drop of sweat to the effect of each blow on the opponent’s body to the sea of movement and tussling in the crowd.”
Ritchie also used these sequences to deconstruct Holmes’s thinking over the course of a fight. He and Rousselot accomplished this moment-by-moment technique using a high-speed digital camera called the Phantom, which creates an ultra-slow motion effect. “The Phantom takes one second of filming and strings it out over 40 or 50 seconds,” says the director. “The camera takes in a great deal of information in a very short period of time, which is the perfect lens through which to illustrate how Holmes’s mind operates. He is able to condense an enormous amount of information into a fraction of a second.”
For a key action sequence–on a multi-story set representing the half-constructed Tower Bridge–Ritchie rehearsed extensively with the actors, along with Oram and Henson, as well as fight coordinator Richard R. Ryan. “We worked very closely with quite a big stunt team,” notes co-producer Steve Clark-Hall. “They knew Robert’s capabilities, which are considerable, and were able to play to his strengths. Pulling off this degree of high intensity action in these stunt sequences was quite a team effort.”
Ritchie sought a strategic blend of rehearsal and spontaneity to ensure the chaos of fighting was reflected in the sequences. “I made the creative decision to make the film gritty, so I didn’t want things to be too choreographed,” he says. “We discussed everything, but we also made sure to leave room for improvisation. I didn’t want it to look too perfect.”
This sensibility appealed to Rachel McAdams, who had extensive stunt work in the Tower Bridge sequence. “Guy liked to keep things messy and keep the truth within this fantastical world,” she notes. “There’s always the temptation to get too refined when dealing with this period, but Guy made sure it was also rough and tumble and modernized. Doing this movie with Guy taught me to be really quick on my feet and precise, yet always open and flexible.”
Of course, humor was an important ingredient in the action and found its way into all the action scenes. “There needed to be moments of levity and other moments of gravity,” Ritchie offers. “So the funny bits got funnier and the darker bits got darker as we went along.”
FROM 221B BAKER STREET TO THE HEIGHTS OF TOWER BRIDGE:
PIECING TOGETHER SHERLOCK HOLMES’S LONDON
“Are you aware that is the first combination of bascule and suspension bridge?
What an industrious empire!”
In creating a tangible feel of Sherlock Holmes’s London, Guy Ritchie wanted to portray a city at the crossroads between the past and a newly dawning future–an expansive and gritty place with bold new architecture being layered over the old. “As the center of the Industrial Revolution, London really was throbbing with enthusiasm and creative energy,” Ritchie observes. “Tower Bridge was being built, one of the many very ambitious things the Victorians were undertaking at the time.”
“The film is set when the British Empire is at its height,” adds Robert Downey Jr. “There was a sense of being on the cusp of the modern age, with a real interest in technological developments.”
The directive on all levels of design was to be at once authentic and grounded in the reality of the times while also creating a fresh look for Holmes’s world. “That was the key to this film,” says costume designer Jenny Beavan. “My instruction was to avoid the infamous deerstalker hat that has become emblematic of the old Holmes,” she continues, noting that the deerstalker hat did not come from Conan Doyle’s words but from an early illustration of one of the stories. “Our Holmes has a rumpled, scruffy look. You get the sense that he throws his clothes on the floor when he’s done with them and picks anything out of the pile when he gets dressed. For example, he wears a dinner jacket for the meal with Watson and his fiancee Mary but gets the shirt and cravat just slightly wrong. There’s a bit of a vintage store feel to his clothes.”
“In the books, as in the film, we know that Holmes can spend weeks at a time holed up in his rooms, lying on the sofa, doing nothing,” comments Wigram. “If so, chances are he’d look a bit of a mess. He’s something of a Bohemian, so we took a more unconventional, romantic view for his wardrobe. We imagined he’d dress more like an artist or a poet than a businessman or gentleman of the era–I was thinking along the lines of the Rolling Stones in their Victorian phase,” he smiles.
In stark contrast to Holmes, Watson’s wardrobe is neat and smart, pristine and highly groomed. As a former soldier who has recently returned from the war in Afghanistan, his dress code is defined by his military background. “Thick Harris tweeds give Watson a solidity, a man-of-the-Earth look,” says Beavan. “His three-piece suits are in browns and blues and he dons a square crown bowler, which is very proper and masculine and felt very Watson-like.”
Irene Adler’s costumes were particularly detailed, as well. For Irene, Beavan took authentic 19th-century costumes and gave them a twist. “The cutting and patterns are contemporary to the era, but I decided to use accents of strong colors–shocking pinks and blues–to lift them,” Beavan explains.
She also dressed Irene in some softer colors, such as the blue suit with black lace blouse in the Punch Bowl scenes, and a practical Donegal tweed suit for when she goes on the run. Fabrics for Irene’s dresses included duchess satin shaped into highly sculptural swirls and twists, and silk velvet. One of Beavan’s most inventive creations was Irene’s coat which splits to accommodate the bustle on the dress and features large sleeves to conceal weapons. She also has a number of hats, including two small bowlers.
To show Irene’s softer side, as well as her international style, Beavan created a beautiful silk kimono in shades of mauve and gold. “I was fortunate to find the perfect material in my own shop,” she recalls. “It was a silk damask with a slight floral weave. What made the material really striking was when we dyed it, the pattern separated, giving it a lot of dimension.”
The jewelry worn by Rachel McAdams’s character, Irene Adler, and Kelly Reilly’s Mary Morstan were not costume jewelry reproductions, but rare and priceless antique jewelry pieces provided by Martin Travis of Symbolic & Chase, located on Old Bond Street in London. Among the pieces chosen from their private collection were a 47-carat fancy yellow diamond, which, in the story, Irene purloined from a prince; a 19th-century spinel diamond pendant, also worn by Irene; and a 19th-century diamond necklace, worn by Mary, which Holmes correctly assesses she borrowed from her employer.
“The costumes were phenomenal,” McAdams declares. “It was great just to take in all the details, which give you answers to some of your own questions about your character. I could see what kind of jewelry Irene wore and the perfume she wears. And the clothes themselves were all so beautiful. The details and the time and painstaking energy people put into them were remarkable.”
Production designer Sarah Greenwood likewise parted from traditional depictions of Victorian England to reflect Ritchie’s vision. “This movie is funny, it’s visceral, it’s fast-paced and it’s energetic,” she says. “Our mandate from the beginning was to always keep those elements in mind in our design process.”
Greenwood worked with her team to create sets that looked and felt completely authentic. “Holmes is eccentric enough without being surrounded by fantastical sets,” she says. “That said, we could stretch the design a little. Really, it’s about encapsulating the period and using the environment to help tell the story.”
The overriding challenge for the production designer and her team was the tremendous scope of the film. “We go from the gutter to the grandeur of the Houses of Parliament, to the shipyard in Chatham Docks to the creepiness of the crypts, to the intimacy of Holmes’s rooms,” Greenwood describes.
This tremendous scope was achieved using a combination of authentic locations, specially adapted sets in the UK, and CGI. Later, production would move to New York City for soundstage work on some of the film’s more elaborate interior sets.
“Guy is used to getting out and shooting on location and has become very efficient at it,” says Clark-Hall. “You get a lot from being out on the streets. It’s tougher in a lot of respects, the control on the locations and all that. But you’re able to achieve so much in terms of sheer scale on location, especially in a big city like London with so much built-in history.”
The filmmakers used locations in London, Liverpool and Manchester to recreate what London would have looked like at the end of the 19th century. “It was quite a big challenge because Sarah was looking for big-scale areas around the Thames, the old city and Parliament. It turned out to be very tough because there are so many modern developments,” Clark-Hall recalls. “So, we shot in Liverpool and Manchester, as well as London, and were able to patch together all these details to create our Victorian London.”
“The locations on this film are a bit amazing,” Law states. “I was born and raised here and we went to places I’ve never been or even seen–really beautiful Victorian and Edwardian cobbled corners of London, Manchester and Liverpool. I learned so much about my home country over the course of this shoot.”
In the film, Holmes and Watson traverse through every echelon of London culture–from the gritty and industrial to the formal and opulent. The film commences within the depths of the 12th-century church of St. Bartholomew the Great, where Holmes and Watson close in on Blackwood to stop him from a brutal ritual sacrifice of a young woman. Other distinguished British structures used by the production included St. Paul’s Cathedral; the Reform Club, one of the city’s oldest and most famous private clubs (Conan Doyle was even a member); the Old Naval College in Greenwich; Somerset House overlooking the Thames; and Brompton Cemetery in Kensington, where a sole witness to Blackwood’s resurrection makes his startling claim.
One of the most ambitious set pieces–a chase through an operating 19th-century slaughterhouse–took place within a disused warehouse in London’s East End, where Greenwood and her team constructed a believable and brutal maze of moving machinery. The set was replete with blades, saws, and huge hooks hung from chain belts throughout the structure.
In the course of their investigation, Holmes and Watson find themselves in a makeshift laboratory where Blackwood’s operative, Luke Reordan, played by Oran Gurel, conducts ingenious but mystifying experiments. A building in London’s Spitalfields was transformed into a physical representation of Reordan’s tortured mind, with scrawled notes and biblical Latin and Hebrew notations pinned to the wall, crucifixes and pagan charms hanging from the ceiling, and dissected frogs and rats littering the surfaces.
“There’s a method to the chaos of Reordan’s lab, but it takes someone like Holmes to figure it out,” says Greenwood. “I didn’t want the lab to look too fantastical, like something from Jules Verne. It was about making sure everything looked real.”
An epic fight and chase that begins in Reordan’s lab spills over to a working dock, where a massive ship is in the midst of construction. In the course of this face-off, Holmes and Watson confront Blackwood’s giant-sized cohort Dredger, played by actor and professional wrestler Robert Maillet.
This major set was constructed at Chatham Historical Docks, outside London. The construction crew built the left half of the full-scale ship that, once assembled, spanned 230-feet-long by 15-feet-high, with a 15-foot section in the middle at full height of 30 feet. The ship would then be extended in height using computer-generated images in post production.
The ship pre-build took five weeks, then another five weeks at the Chatham location to put the jigsaw together. Greenwood’s team worked closely with the special effects department, who were creating collapsing walkways, juddering platforms and breakaway wooden tree trunks onsite for use during the sequence.
Once production wrapped in the UK, the team crossed the Atlantic to shoot on soundstages at the Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. Inside the cavernous space, three key sets were built: the attic of the Punch Bowl, the interior of Sherlock Holmes’s living quarters at 221B Baker Street, and a portion of London’s famed Tower Bridge as it appeared while under construction in 1890.
The attic room above the Punch Bowl, where Holmes participates in bare-knuckle boxing matches, is a small and dingy space where Holmes meditates as he works to decipher the mystery surrounding Lord Blackwood. Greenwood explored with the director the kinds of imagery that would emanate from Holmes’s study of Blackwood’s spiritualism. “We’ve had a lot of symbolism, and a lot of imagery to do with the Temple of Four Orders, which is the secret sect that Blackwood uses in his plot,” she explains.
The team created one of the most important sets in the interior of Holmes’s rooms at 221B Baker Street, within a flat he shares with Watson and their landlady, Mrs. Hudson, played by Geraldine James. “It’s Mrs. Hudson’s room, decorated maybe twenty, thirty years ago, so it’s become slightly tatty since Holmes moved in,” Greenwood describes. “It’s not a conventional Victorian parlor at all; it’s the antithesis of that. Holmes has come in and has completely messed it up.”
Period furniture, drapery and a multitude of items found in flea markets, antique stores and rental houses were shipped from England to New York to decorate the inside of the Baker Street residence. “We brought all of the props here from England because British Victorian is very different from American Victorian,” set decorator Katie Spencer says. “It has a certain style and is very hard to get.”
In its clutter and chaos the apartment reveals both Conan Doyle’s depiction of Holmes’s disorganized personal habits and the detective’s brilliant, complex mind. “Everything is supposed to represent his journeys, his travels, his inquisitive nature into the human condition and the human anatomy, chemistry, and photography…frankly, anything that’s worthy of Holmes’s interest,” explains Ritchie.
Dog-eared books, newspapers, paintings from the Near East, unpaid bills, maps of Britain, anatomical drawings, Oriental carpets and a tiger skin rug, and half-eaten food from forgotten meals, not to mention Watson’s rather tolerant dog, Gladstone, can all be found in Holmes’s living quarters. In keeping with his profession, there are also wigs, mustaches and false noses for disguises, and a padded post for Holmes’s martial arts practice.
“It’s just minutia, but to him it’s really engaging,” Downey explains. “It’s those touches that really help you feel comfortable on this set. The reality of his job is that it entails long amounts of time spent in isolation, but when he’s not stimulated, it’s a fate worse than death. So, hopefully Baker Street embodies everything it takes for him not to be bored to death.”
“It was great to have an actor like Robert who cares about his environment, who will use the props in a way we didn’t imagine,” says Katie Spencer. “Something Robert very much wanted was that everything was here for a reason, as opposed to just being decoration.”
Greenwood, Spencer and the design team also placed numerous “Easter eggs” on the set, which Sherlock Holmes aficionados will recognize from the stories of Conan Doyle, including lemon juice that Holmes uses for secret writing, a glass-covered diorama of bee hives, and an area for Holmes’s phrenology studies, another popular area of interest among the educated classes during this period. “There are so many Doyle-isms in this film,” says Robert Downey Jr. “We’ve infused the film quite a lot with them, not just in the set design, but also in the script.”
Watson’s office, also housed in Baker Street and constructed on the stage, was far more ordered than Holmes’s, with the doctor’s diplomas lining the wall, along with patrician paintings, candlesticks in the shape of swords, and medical accoutrements all neatly displayed.
The sets built on the stage were not all interiors. By far the largest set was the setting for the climactic fight sequence in the film: Tower Bridge. Now an iconic symbol of London, Tower Bridge took its name and the design of its twin 200-foot towers from the Tower of London, which is situated at the northern end of the eight-hundred foot-long bridge. In 1890, Tower Bridge was only half-built, its steel frame and walkways still open to the elements, creating a visually fascinating and unpredictable setting for the film’s final clash.
The Tower Bridge set was built against a green screen background, which the visual effects team would later fill in with huge vistas of 1890 London and the River Thames. “With modern-day technology, we were able to really recreate London as a character,” says Wigram. “It will feel like a real place. We had an incredible team, and we hopefully built a period London that we’ve never seen before on film.”
“Guy knows London very well and that means he isn’t too reverential about it,” Mark Strong asserts. “Even though the film has a very specific time and place, Guy brought his own vision of the city, which gives it an incredible energy. I think it’s a stroke of genius bringing together Sherlock Holmes and Guy Ritchie. Guy brought something so new and dynamic to the mix.”
The final design element was the music of Hans Zimmer to accompany and enhance the drama, playfulness, action and intrigue. “It was such a joy to work with Guy to capture the different tones of the worlds Holmes and Watson navigate, ranging from the halls of Parliament to a bare-knuckle boxing ring to the shadowy crypts beneath a cathedral,” comments Zimmer, who was working with Ritchie for the first time. “This story has so many textures and personalities, that it really gave us the opportunity to create a diverse language of music for the film.”
Ritchie offers, “Hans and I are very much on the same page about taking a fresh approach to the music. The music has taken on its own identity and become a significant part of the creative process in giving ‘Sherlock Holmes’ a contemporary feel.”
Silver concludes, “We set out to make a movie that would resonate with fans of Holmes and bring the Holmes style of adventure to a whole new generation. And I think everyone delivered magnificently. It’s a fantastic, wild ride.”
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