Sherlock Holmes: The Man, The Myth

Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most famous fictional character in the world, and for good reason. More than a hundred years on, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 60 Holmes stories are still in print and he is the most portrayed human literary character in history. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:10Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:19Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're here to sniff you off the case with our brand new episode on Sherlock Holmes.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Have you ever read any Sherlock Holmes short stories or one of the four novels?

• 1:39Josh Clark?

  You should have started that off with Josh.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Josh.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I have. I've never read the novels, but I've read quite a bit of the short stories.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I didn't know you were a Sherlockian.

• 1:53Josh Clark?

  I'm not. I would not call myself that because if you're a Sherlockian or in the UK Holmesian, you are like one of the original fans of fandom. And I'm, I mean, I'm not there. Like I don't qualify.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  No, okay.

• 2:09Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Well, more than me.

• 2:11Josh Clark?

  So have you read any?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Not a one.

• 2:14Josh Clark?

  Oh, you're missing out. They're really interesting and fun.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, not only that, I haven't really seen any of the stuff either.

• 2:22Josh Clark?

  Um, there's some really good movies out there. Last night, just to brush up, I watched House of Fear.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  Which is based on the short story, The Five Orange Pips. And it's really good. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Rogers and just a straight ahead mid-century black and white Sherlock Holmes mystery that you think of when you think of a Sherlock Holmes movie, or most people do. So they're good. They're really, the movies are generally good. I've seen the worst version, people call the worst version, uh, Holmes and Watson.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Oh, God, you saw that?

• 2:56Josh Clark?

  No, but I watched a clip and I was like, this is not that bad. This is exactly what you'd expect from Will Ferrell and John C. Riley. Like, what were you thinking? It's gonna be like high art or something like that?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I just heard it was zero funny. Not that they were expecting something, you know, posh.

• 3:12Josh Clark?

  Well, the clip I saw was at least one and a half percent funny.

• 3:18Josh Clark?

  It has a half of a star on Rotten Tomatoes.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Uh, all right. Well, let's get into it, because this is a lot.

• 3:23Josh Clark?

  Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Let me just wrap this up.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:27Josh Clark?

  Yes, you should read some of the Holmes stories.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:32Josh Clark?

  Okay, yeah, let's get into it now.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Uh, all right. Well, we're talking about Sherlock Holmes, the infamous, the famous fictional detective. Uh, I learned, I was about to say a lot, but basically everything about this was new to me. So I learned everything. Brand new. I was this day years old when I learned everything. But one of the things that I did, I did not know for sure is that I always thought he was uh, an official like Scotland Yard detective. I did not know that he was an amateur sleuth. And that, uh, maybe he worked, you know, alongside Scotland Yard at times, but I just figured he was part of Scotland Yard.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  No, he is the world's first consulting detective. That's what Arthur Conan Doyle, the author called him. Another term for that is a private eye.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:19Josh Clark?

  So he would work with Scotland Yard sometimes, but most of the time he was several steps ahead of Scotland Yard, whenever they did come in to arrest somebody.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like I mentioned, there were four novels. There were 56 short stories over about a four decade plus period,

• 4:39Speaker 02

  which is a lot of writing. And apparently, and this was in 2012, and he's been in quite a few more adaptations since then. But he's, he's the most frequently portrayed human literary character ever in film and TV.

• 4:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 254 times.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Well, no, way more than that now.

• 4:57Josh Clark?

  Depicted, yes, by 75 actors.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, more than that now.

• 5:02Josh Clark?

  At the, yeah, at the time in 2012, the non-human who'd been most adapted was Dracula, and he only had Sherlock Holmes beat by like a handful.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 5:14Josh Clark?

  So there you go, Sherlock Holmes. Everybody loves to portray him. And that's something we'll try to get to the bottom of here, because what we're talking about is 100 and nearly 50 year old, like detective pulp fiction that has chapters of fans all over the world. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous characters ever written in the history of literature. And people are nuts for him still today. And some people just like, don't get it. And there's, there's something to get, but not everybody can put their finger on it. And we probably won't either, but we'll try.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think I never read it because I just don't read mysteries like that.

• 5:54Josh Clark?

  Well, one of the things that separates him from the mysteries is that he uses deductive reasoning. Like Agatha Christie, it's like, can you guess who it is? Maybe there's a clue or something in there. More often than not, there's really nothing in there that can tell you who did it. With Sherlock Holmes, it might not be in there either, but what he uses is deductive reasoning, where the kind of logic and reasoning he's using, like anybody has that, that potential at faculty. He's just particularly gifted with it. So he's. I don't know. He's like a machine as far as logic goes, but he's also a deeply flawed person in a lot of ways, too. I think that makes him really interesting.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And actually, I need to correct myself. I did Encyclopedia Brown, as I've mentioned before, and that's where that that train ended for me.

• 6:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Was in elementary school.

• 6:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah. But I mean, what a ride it was, right?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  It was pretty great. Watson is his sidekick. We'll talk a lot about him as we go. And the first one was a study in Scarlett in 1887. And I mean, let's go ahead and I guess just talk a little bit about how who Holmes is as a character. He's

• 7:04Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  He's definitely like portrayed as like a genius. He's sometimes can be very sort of flippant and arrogant. He's not very emotional. Watson says, you know, that he has no interest in women and that there's been speculation that Sherlock Holmes is a gay character. He's, I believe Watson described him in A Scandal in Bohemia from 1891 as the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position.

• 7:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which you don't want to do, especially as a gentleman in Victorian England, right?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And a bit of an enigma, right? As far as just kind of personal life.

• 7:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The reason why is because it was not a main driver of the the series

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:51Josh Clark?

  that Conan Doyle wrote. Like, there were allusions to his life outside of his his mysteries. Like, he was well known to have a brother named Mycroft. He was really passionate about boxing and he played the violin. He was also very famous for intravenously injecting cocaine in a 7% solution. And these things were just kind of referred to here or there. Early on, the cocaine was kind of a driver of his character. He was very self obsessed. He was very melancholy. Like, he would shoot cocaine to like, basically get through the tedium of a day because he was so smart, he couldn't possibly do so otherwise. But

• 8:32Josh Clark?

  then, as he developed, he became less of a, well, a cocaine addict and more of a fully fleshed out character who's The point and purpose was to figure out how to solve these mysteries using logic and deduction. And that's what he really became more than anything else.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they've, if you've seen, if you haven't read and you've only seen like movie and TV versions, you've seen a lot more of a character called Irene Adler. Irene Adler is, exists far more in the TV and film side. I believe she was only in one story. So she's been much, much more portrayed on screen as maybe a, maybe a love interest, maybe a,

• 9:15Speaker 02

  what's the word I'm looking for? Sort of like a foil at times. Not quite like a Moriarty level. Professor Moriarty is often the, the main foil and sort of evil criminal mastermind. But Adler definitely exists a lot more in the film and television world.

• 9:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, in the, in the world of Sherlock Holmes fans, they call her the woman. She's the woman who like.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  He called her that.

• 9:39Josh Clark?

  Oh, did he call her that? Okay.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:40Josh Clark?

  So like, she's the one who caught his attention by foiling his, his investigation. Like he figured out what happened, but he didn't catch the criminal and that really caught his attention.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:50Josh Clark?

  Think it'd only been thwarted like four times and she was one of them, right?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:54Josh Clark?

  He's also been like famously diagnosed retroactively with everything from bipolar two disorder, depression, Asperger's syndrome, and he's also commonly given an INTJ personality type from the Myers-Briggs test, which is analytical, logical, and with a strong intuition.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  That seems to fit.

• 10:15Josh Clark?

  It does. So going back out into the, the real world, if you're going to take the Doyleian view of all this stuff, that it's actually fiction written by Arthur Conan Doyle, the whole thing started in 1886, I think, when the first one that you just mentioned, A Study of Scarlet, was published in Breton's Christmas Annual.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  I think it was 87 and I only.

• 10:40Josh Clark?

  Eighty seven.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Correct it because there are Sherlockians and Holmesians.

• 10:44Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:46Josh Clark?

  We should have totally given a COA at the beginning of this, I think.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are going to be minor errors here and there, everyone.

• 10:51Josh Clark?

  Sure. So 1887, the first story comes out, Study in Scarlet. I think it's actually a novel. It was published in this Christmas annual and it didn't take off like a rocket until he started publishing the shorter stories in a magazine called The Strand. And this is at the time that Strand Magazine was the most widely circulated monthly magazine in all of Britain. And it just so happened that Conan Doyle was writing these stories at a time when Britain had suddenly become a lot more literate and they were hungry for new fiction. So he really kind of came in and brought Sherlock Holmes in at just the right time.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so people are reading this thing like crazy. I think they ended up collecting those short stories in, well, a collection called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And like you said, that was where, I mean, I'm sure the novels are great, but he only did four of them. And it's really, it seems like these short stories is where he found, uh, he found a place to sell a lot more stuff. But, or, you know, I guess sell is one way to say it, or write a lot more stuff. Because, you know, it was, they were less than 10,000 words. They were even short for detective short stories at the time. And I think they appealed to younger people quite a bit, from what I have read.

• 12:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because at the time, the younger generation were the, were the ones who had just been educated through the public education system that had just been developed. So they were more likely to be able to read than their parents, just statistically speaking.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they didn't want to read some long novel. They wanted to read a short story.

• 12:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And also, one of the other things too, that Conan Doyle figured out early on, that I think people appreciate because it's so comfortable and familiar, is essentially the same formula for basically every single one of the stories.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, which, I mean, it's like Encyclopedia Brown in any kind of detective story. You're gonna have a client come in, or, you know, it evokes film noir as well. A client comes in, in this case, to the very famous office 221B Baker Street. And the client themselves are gonna be sort of picked apart by Holmes at the beginning. And he's gonna make a lot of deductions about them and then evaluate the case. And then, you know, hit the streets, maybe, maybe in disguise and start doing the investigating, of course, solve the case.

• 13:12Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Capture the bad guy and then explain it all to Watson, Scooby Doo style at the end, uh, which I, I mean, is this? I, I know Holmes wasn't the first, and we'll get into that fictional detective, but is this how that sort of trophy formula started?

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  Yes. Yeah. A hundred percent.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  So none of the first fictional detectives did things like that?

• 13:33Josh Clark?

  No, not in any kind of formula like that, as far as I know. And there were only maybe a dozen that came before him, but they were all just kind of throwing stuff at the fridge to see what stuck. It was Arthur Conan Doyle, who's the one who really figured it all out and just ran with it.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  That's awesome. Uh, they were illustrated by a guy named Sidney Paget. And as far as the, the look of Holmes, um, that was modeled on Paget's brother Walter. And, you know, would just interpret whatever, um, Doyle was writing as far as what he would draw. So in the book, for instance, you know, there's, there's two things, even if you don't know anything about Sherlock Holmes. And in fact, you probably call it the Sherlock Holmes hat and the Sherlock Holmes pipe.

• 14:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  That big curvy, huge bell pipe and then that, uh, deer stalker cap. That's what it's, you know, it's what it technically is, but everyone else just calls it the Sherlock Holmes hat. But in the book, uh, Doyle just says it's a close fitting cloth cap. He doesn't say he wore his deer stalker cap. That was an invention of Sidney Paget.

• 14:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that pipe is called a calabash pipe. And like you said, I mean, like

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Sherlock Holmes.

• 14:41Josh Clark?

  Draw, you, right. You could draw like just a minimalist, um, profile of just those two things. And around the world, people would know exactly who that was.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  It's like the, when Michael Jordan had the Hitler mustache in that TV commercial. And everyone's like, why do you have a Hitler mustache?

• 14:57Josh Clark?

  Right. I totally forgot.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that one's, you can't have that mustache anymore. And he's, no, no, no. I feel like he should have known that.

• 15:04Josh Clark?

  No, you really couldn't. From basically the 1930s onward, it was off the table.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, not even, it's not like he was doing it as an homage.

• 15:13Josh Clark?

  I don't think so.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  But it was definitely like, what world is Michael Jordan living in where he doesn't know that? Just nobody does that. It's funny.

• 15:20Josh Clark?

  So just one thing real quick for the Sherlockians and the Holmesians. I saw that it is contested that Walter, Sidney's brother, was the model. Apparently Sidney claimed he wasn't.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:31Josh Clark?

  Everyone says that he was. So maybe Sidney Paget was just a pathological liar.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Maybe. I mean, I'd have to see a picture of Walter to, you know, to know for sure.

• 15:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a really good way to put two and two together. I think very Holmesian in your approach.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Elementary.

• 15:49Josh Clark?

  You want to take a break and come back?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, good timing. We'll be back right after this.

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• 19:19Speaker 02

  By the way, we're back and I said elementary. Apparently that wasn't something Doyle wrote. That came from one of the movies, right?

• 19:26Josh Clark?

  The movies are the first stage play, one of the two.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Oh, maybe it's a stage play, yeah.

• 19:31Josh Clark?

  I think the closest he wrote was exactly My Dear Watson. So close.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not knocking Doyle, but Elementary is so much, that's way catchier.

• 19:40Josh Clark?

  For sure. So, the, the, the books themselves, or the stories themselves are meant to be accounts of the cases of Sherlock Holmes that were written by his sidekick, friend, and roommate, John Hamish Watson. He's a doctor.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Doctor John?

• 19:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah. That's, that was his sidekick.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:02Josh Clark?

  So, was that the one who was about spending the night together? Uh, yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  I don't know much of Doctor John. I do know that he was the inspiration for the Muppet Band, right?

• 20:17Josh Clark?

  Oh, no. Okay, that's a different one.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  No, okay.

• 20:20Josh Clark?

  I think that was Doctor Hook in the medicine show I was just doing. Doctor John is awesome. I saw him open for Cyndi Lauper once.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 20:27Josh Clark?

  That was quite a combination.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  It really is.

• 20:30Josh Clark?

  No, this is a different Doctor John. This is Doctor John Watson, sidekick to Sherlock Holmes, and he supposedly is the one who's narrating and recounting all of these things.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and right away, right off the bat, he is sort of picked apart and deduced by Holmes when they first meet. Watson was an army medic that was wounded at the Battle of Maywand in Afghanistan, and Holmes picks this up, and Watson is like, oh my God, who is this guy? Like, I can't believe this dude has nailed this facet of my life right away.

• 21:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was the first of many, many, many times Watson would be astonished by Holmes' deductive reasoning skills.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he's kind of the heart, right? Like, apparently Holmes isn't the most likeable guy, but Watson really brings the sort of heart to it.

• 21:19Josh Clark?

  Yes, absolutely. He's, uh, he's, he's warm. He's empathetic. He, he's just much, it's, it's basically like you and me, right? Like you're the heart, you're the approachable guy. You're the folksy one. I'm the one that's got this general, please don't touch me vibe. It's a, it's a bit like that. I'm not putting myself on the same level as Sherlock Holmes, but in that sense, I feel like we resemble the two.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's just because you don't want people to touch you, please, you know? You can buy it honestly.

• 21:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. It's not like a put on or anything. I really don't want to be touched.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  So we mentioned that there were fictional detectives before. We don't have to really go through, but there were like 13 that preceded him, but Holmes is really the one that, um, that came along, like you said, and used this, um, scientific reasoning and, and, and powers of deduction. And it wasn't just some dumb blundering criminal.

• 22:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  That kind of gives themself away and we'll, we'll get into, you know, sort of why, but it's because Doyle himself was medically trained and super on the, just in the know about what was going on with modern policing and forensics and stuff like that.

• 22:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And, and so because of that, he was able to like really razzle dazzle his audience. Like it's stuff that is just totally commonplace to us. It's cutting edge of the time, like, um, collecting blood samples, analyzing like dust and dirt and stuff like that to figure out where it came from. Looking at handwriting, using microscopes, fingerprinting. All these things were like brand spanking new. In some cases where his audience wouldn't have even heard of or thought about this stuff. Sherlock Holmes is employing these techniques. And in the one, on the one hand, it is very razzle dazzle, like just as cutting edge as possible at the time. But on the other hand, too.

• 23:10Josh Clark?

  He's, he's basically, he's using science. He's using rational science and the scientific method and applying it to solve any problem. And that was very much like part of pop culture at the time. This was prior to World War I, where we showed like just how horrible science can go, where everybody was all about science. Science can solve any single problem. And Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of that.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Um, we should tick through a few more of Holmes's sort of superpowers.

• 23:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  As written by Doyle. Uh, this is a pretty fun one. That he could, he could tell what a, a man did for a living by his fingernails, by his coat sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser knees, by the calluses of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuff. He was a safe cracker and a lock picker. Uh, apparently could, um, tell the difference between 140 different types of tobacco ash.

• 24:04Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  And, uh, 42 different bike tire treads.

• 24:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah. He's like, this is Virginia Slim.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's pretty fun though. Like a pretty fun thing to write, like a, a, someone with almost superhuman. I mean, the people have made the case that he's sort of the first, uh, superhero in a way.

• 24:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. And, um, but he's, again, he's not, he's a human person.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:27Josh Clark?

  You know what I mean? Like he is a genius.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  So was Batman. Yeah.

• 24:30Josh Clark?

  He does have, right. Yes, it is true. And I think that kind of makes Batman more accessible than say Spider-Man.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Uh, well Spider-Man was real too.

• 24:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but he was bitten by a radioactive spider.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Oh, I see what you mean. Sure.

• 24:41Josh Clark?

  Batman came again, came, came across his, his powers through.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Vast wealth.

• 24:47Josh Clark?

  Technology generally.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:48Josh Clark?

  And enormous wealth for sure. But one of the things that, that Holmes was famous for too, Chuck, is, is he, he was able to hone in so fully on catching somebody because he, he was very selective about the knowledge he took on. Um, in some cases, he was just ignorant about stuff that anybody walking around would know about.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:12Josh Clark?

  There was a time where, in one of the stories where, um, Dr. Watson is explaining to him that the earth travels around the sun. And Sherlock Holmes is like, not only do I not know that, I'm going to forget it now because I'm I'm very carefully curate the information that goes into my mind because I only want the stuff in there that's going to help me solve cases.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:32Josh Clark?

  I would suggest that that actually could maybe come in handy with shadows and

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 25:36Josh Clark?

  Chi- time changes and stuff like that, but maybe not. Maybe he didn't need that.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  You would have been a good Watson, actually Sherlock.

• 25:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  If you think about it and he's like, no, no, no, no, no.

• 25:46Josh Clark?

  I feel like I really would have annoyed Sherlock Holmes if I had been a sidekick.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Oh, we both would have. Um, so he's, he's generally, um, trying to do the right thing. Um, he's trying to catch the bad guy. Uh, he's trying to, to aid the desperate, uh, for the most part. He protects England, um, from corruption. He's, there was, it was a time where, and Doyle wrote this into the stories, where there were some just sort of notorious failures of the police, um, not catching Jack the Ripper being one of them.

• 26:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Uh, and so he would like, he would compensate for those failures. Uh, and you know, even though he didn't have like, maybe the best personality, he was, he was all about business and all about getting it done.

• 26:26Josh Clark?

  And he was a Victorian gentleman, so he was an upholder of the social order and social hierarchies. He, he knew how to navigate that stuff, but at the same time, he was also a critic of them. Like he saw very clearly just how arbitrary and capricious, uh, the social hierarchies in Great Britain were and are, and he criticized them personally to himself. He made no effort or action to make any changes to them. He just saw them for what they were, which was fraudulent and harmful typically.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Um, we should probably talk a little bit more about Doyle. Uh, he was from Edinburgh, a town that we have performed live in, one of the great towns in Scotland.

• 27:07Josh Clark?

  One of the great towns in the world.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I should have broadened that out. It was amazing.

• 27:12Josh Clark?

  I had, there's only like two towns in Scotland.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Oh, come on. We were on such a good path there. He trained to become a doctor, so he had medical training and it looks like he worked as a sort of ship doctor on some, like a whaling vessel and a cargo steamer in West Africa. And he was always a, you know, a good and talented writer. And apparently while he was, you know, not getting his medical practice going to the degree where he could sustain himself financially, he wrote this very first story. He sold it for three pounds to a periodical. And the only, well, seemingly the only reason he got his first novel, A Study in Scarlet, published was because the wife of a publisher at Ward Lock and Company was like, you gotta

• 27:59Speaker 02

  publish this guy's novel. It's like, it's really good.

• 28:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And they're like, we'll give you 25 pounds for it. It was about, I think 200 pounds today, maybe? I'm not sure. I did the conversion, but I can't read my own handwriting. And they were the ones who published that Breton's Christmas Annual. So that's where it first popped up. But after it started to get more and more popular, when they appeared in Strand Magazine, he started to be able to command a little more money. So he sold a dozen to Strand Magazine for a thousand pounds, which today would be about 110,000 pounds or 150,000 US dollars. And there's a thing that, that he's fairly well known for. He wrote Sherlock Holmes stories, eventually almost against his will, for money.

• 28:42Josh Clark?

  He considered himself a much better writer than a writer of pulp crime fiction.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:50Josh Clark?

  And he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories because he, he essentially needed money all the time, even though he was making gobs of it.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it seemed like, it's not, I don't think he like hated his legacy, but it definitely seemed like everything I read, he was like, you know, I'm writing these other books too, and all everyone cares about are these Sherlock Holmes books.

• 29:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  He, I mean, this is a little fun fact. He wrote the original book, The Lost World.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Uh, which is also a film in 1925 and Michael Crichton directly paid homage with his own novel, The Lost World.

• 29:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  And it's basically, I mean, it's not the same plot, but it's, it deals with people going to a, a place in South America where there are prehistoric, you know, animals living.

• 29:36Josh Clark?

  Yes. And Arthur Conan Doyle was the first person who wrote, hang on to your butts.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Well, apparently Crichton was inspired to bring back Malcolm. I think he killed off Malcolm and brought him back to life.

• 29:48Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  And that was also, and I don't know if it was an homage, but more of like, well, hey, Doyle did it with Holmes, so I can do it with Malcolm.

• 29:56Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes at one point unsuccessfully, it turned out. And the reason why, he had a quote, he said that, "I've had such an overdose of Holmes that I feel towards him as I do toward paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day." That's how, that's how, I was just sick of, of Sherlock Holmes, he was, that it was like eating too much foie gras, which I can imagine is not a very comfortable sensation.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  No, I'll have none of it. Thank you. Uh, one thing we talked about Doyle before in other podcasts, I think when we did episodes on like spiritualism and séances and things. That was kind of one of his, aside from writing these books, he was very well known for being into spiritualism. After his son died in 1918, he would go to séances and try to, you know, make contact with his son, which is super sad to think about. I know that we definitely talked about him when we mentioned the, um, the photograph that supposedly showed real fairies. Uh, from Elsie Wright, Girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. And Doyle famously was like, no, this is totally real, everybody.

• 31:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the Cottingham fairies. Remember we billed a whole episode around the one thing that should have just been a short stuff?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. We've done that before.

• 31:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So it was really surprising and shocking to Doyle's friends, his fans, like this is the opposite of what Sherlock Holmes would do, you know, get into spiritualism. But he was tenacious, like he was a true believer and he was friends with Harry Houdini. And they were an odd pair because Houdini was a voracious skeptic. He couldn't stand mediums. He liked to unmask mediums and Conan Doyle would support them by going to them. And he, Conan Doyle, thought Houdini had supernatural powers despite Houdini saying like, no, these are all tricks.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:49Josh Clark?

  Like, I'm just doing these, I'm not going to tell you how I did it, but these are tricks. Please believe me. And Doyle would be like, yeah, I can read between the lines. You have supernatural powers.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Did you just wink at me?

• 32:01Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  It's like Castanza.

• 32:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but he was just, he was just, yeah, that was a great one. But he was just, it was just his thing and he could not be persuaded out of believing in spiritualism.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  There's also been a lot of, you know, ideas over his history about who, like who he was based on. Was there a real Sherlock Holmes? The name itself comes from American Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Because again, Doyle was a trained as a doctor, so I guess that was just a homage on his part.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  There's a historian named Angela Buckley that claims it was a Victorian police officer named Jerome Camannata that inspired him, but Doyle himself says, no, the inspiration was a guy that taught me in medical school. He was my third year instructor of clinical surgery. His name was Dr. Joseph Bell. And he had this sort of party trick that he would do in lectures and stuff, where he would sort of demonstrate, I almost said Doyle, Holmes-like qualities of deducing things from little mundane details about, about somebody.

• 33:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like where someone had been, whether they were a sailor. If they smoked, apparently, very famously, he once said, "Madam, I would ask you to reveal your pipe." And everyone gasped as this old lady showed her pipe, and that was clearly the root of her problem. And he just deduced it from a lower lip ulcer and a little bit, a little scar on her cheek. He could do that with everybody. So that part of Holmes is definitely from Joseph Bell. I mean, like you said, he said as much. But Angela Buckley has a pretty good claim that Jerome Camenata inspired him, too. If you look into Camenata, he would use disguises. He was doing police work that now today is just part of police work. At the time, he was the only one on the Manchester force who was doing this stuff.

• 33:57Josh Clark?

  So it was probably an amalgamation of a bunch of different people, all combined with Doyle's command of science, cutting-edge science at the time.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I mean, on that note, we've talked about how he was using all of these sort of modern things to inspire the stories. It actually happened the other way as well, which is super cool. Like, there were real investigators that were doing things that they found that Holmes did in the novels. And, I mean, that's super cool. It wasn't, they, they knew that there was sound science behind it. So there was, I think there was a French criminologist named Edmund Locard, who, who basically was like, "Yeah, I, I like do a lot of the stuff that Sherlock Holmes does in his books because it's super smart and a good way to catch somebody."

• 34:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and there's also this instance of life imitating art that showed up in the story, "The Problem of Thor Bridge." And in the story, the, I guess, the victim takes their own life by shooting themselves with a gun that's tied to a rock with a short rope. And they shoot themselves over, on a bridge over a waterway, so that as they fall to the ground, the gun is pulled down into the water, and it looks like it was a homicide so their family can collect insurance. Well, there's no less than two people out there who seem to have been directly inspired by this story in real life, did the same. Same thing. And it turns out that it gets even more twisted because Arthur Conan Doyle

• 35:28Josh Clark?

  probably got his idea for the problem with Thor Bridge from a case that was written about by Austrian criminologist Hans Gross in 1893, where this this thing actually happened. So you have a case of life imitating art imitating life.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and Gross is another one of those who was like picking up stuff from the novels to use in everyday work. Like you mentioned dust, like gathering dust in packets. And Locard was telling like the police, the policeman on his staff, like, hey, you should read these, you guys should read these books.

• 36:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like Arthur Conan Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes, was the first to basically say, we need to not contaminate crime scenes. They need to be preserved as they are when we come upon them. This is before cops were even doing that, like, cutting edge cops were even doing it. Like, he was just laying down some amazing stuff.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Should we take another break?

• 36:21Josh Clark?

  After me saying something like, he was laying down some amazing stuff, I feel like it's, yeah, we need to.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 36:39Josh Clark?

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• 37:41Josh Clark?

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• 38:18Josh Clark?

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• 38:34Josh Clark?

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• 39:54Josh Clark?

  So we're back Chuck and even Conan Doyle was surprised by how popular his character was and he couldn't quite figure out why. He just assumed it was a distraction from everyday life. Other people have said it probably also has a lot to do with the short story form, the fact that they pretty like action starts taking place pretty quickly. But at the same time, a lot of the stories start out with Watson and Sherlock Holmes hanging out in their sitting room and there's like a fire burning or it's just like, like Conan Doyle adds just enough detail here or there to really kind of make it engrossing, but then it takes off. And like we said, it follows that formula. So there's a comforting

• 40:38Josh Clark?

  familiarity to the whole thing that a lot of people make point to is like, this is why it's endured for so long.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a cozy quality?

• 40:47Josh Clark?

  Yes, cozy mystery kind of thing, but then it branches out into the world of Victorian London.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  So like you said, he was surprised because I'm not only surprised at like, hey, people are really liking this, but that just wasn't a thing there. That kind of fandom wasn't a thing. It was probably the first time that there were groups of people getting together and like talking about this stuff and forming like fan groups. Maybe the first fan fiction, as it turns out, J. M. Barry, who was a contemporary, obviously the creator of Peter Pan, in 1891 anonymously wrote My Evening with Sherlock Holmes, which is sort of the first fanfic perhaps.

• 41:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that was kind of a good example of how he changed fandom or created fandom, where readers stopped just kind of passively consuming stuff and started being like, there's a, there's a parasocial exchange going on here. Like, we own you, you belong to us, give us more. You know what George R. R. Martin went through when he hadn't finished that last, that last book? Like, that was essentially Arthur Conan Doyle's fault.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like you said earlier, when he tried to kill, or well, not tried, when he killed him off, uh, there was a revolt. Uh, there were um, 20,000 Strand subscribers who canceled their subscriptions. They would write these, you know, hateful, angry letters, uh, of the, of the time. It wouldn't be like the hateful, angry letter you would get today.

• 42:15Josh Clark?

  No.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Uh, I think one of them started with "You brute!", which is, you know, that's pretty, pretty tough language for back then.

• 42:22Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Uh, and then, so he, he needed money. And so he was like, "All right, I guess I need to write another one of these things." So, uh, he published, uh, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was, uh, sort of a prequel. It wasn't bringing him back from the dead just yet. It was Holmes before he died. Um, he finally resurrected him in, uh, The Adventure of the Empty House in 1903, and just said, he, he faked his death.

• 42:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and everybody was like, "Fine, we don't care. I'm glad you brought him back."

• 42:54Speaker 02

  He could have said it was magic and they would have been like, "Okay, fine."

• 42:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and he, but he came back with it, just a classic, right off the cuff. The Hound, Hound of the Baskervilles is probably the most well-known Sherlock Holmes case, and it's just a really well-written book, and it's been adapted into movie after movie after movie, apparently.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  More than 20 of them, I think.

• 43:13Josh Clark?

  Oh, really? I'm surprised it's actually not more. Um, there was one called Der Hund von Baskerville, and that was a favorite of Hitler's, who's now made two appearances in the Sherlock Holmes episode. Did not expect that.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  No.

• 43:26Josh Clark?

  But part of this whole thing that we kind of, I mentioned Doylean interpretation, um, earlier. There's this thing that's a part of being a Sherlock Holmes fan. Again, in North America, they're called Sherlockians. In the UK, they're called Holmesians. And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan, there's a really good chance that you treat this whole thing as if these are real accounts of real-life historical happenings that, that are the cases of a real-life detective named Sherlock Holmes, and that these were written by real-life doctor and friend to Holmes, John Watson, and that Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson's literary, um, agent, and that they, it just goes from there. And it's really important to remember.

• 44:11Josh Clark?

  You don't just completely take leave of your senses when you become a Sherlock Holmes fan. This is all tongue in cheek. It's all whimsical, but the way that they treat it is very serious and they use like actual like literary analysis and genealogy and all this stuff to basically tease out as much information as they can about the real life Holmes and real life Watson. And they call the whole thing the grand game and it's definitely a cornerstone of being a Sherlock Holmes fan.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's super cool. And I think the sort of origins of that were in 1911 when a guy named Ronald Knox wrote a spoof textual analysis. And he would, you know, that's where it became, he would say things like sacred writings and that's when the official canon was born. And like you said, that lives on today with the grand game. And specifically the biggest group, I mean, there's, there's plenty of groups. There's no shortage. I'm sure there's one in your town. Unless, you know, you live in like the tiniest town imaginable, there's probably a Sherlock Holmes group there you could get together with. But the most famous one is called the Baker Street Irregulars out of New York. It is an invitation only group. It was founded in 1934. And it seems like, you know, it's pretty hard to

• 45:25Speaker 02

  get in. Isaac Asimov was in, FDR was in there. I believe the one in England is called the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.

• 45:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  And they just, they get together, they dress up, they have some dinner, and they play the grand game, which sounds like a lot of fun, quite honestly.

• 45:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I read an article, I could not find it for the life of me, where the author, the journalist was invited to one of these meetings and it just sounded so fun and so cool. But yeah, that's, I think it's interesting that the American chapter is like the founding fan chapter, fan club of Sherlock Holmes, not the British one.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:04Josh Clark?

  And they actually are so essentially powerful that they, they actually grant like official status to other chapters elsewhere. I found one called the Shaka Sherlockians of Hawaii. They were basically given official status by the Baker Street Irregulars. It's a great website. If you want to know more in a lot of detail about Sherlock Holmes, go check out Shaka Sherlockians. It's pretty fun.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Uh, well, we mentioned adaptations. There have been tons of them. I said there have been over 20 film or TV versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles specifically. The first one, and yes, you are correct, that was a stage version in 1899 from William Gillette where the line, "Elementary, my dear fellow," first came along. And, uh, I mean, you name it. How many movies have there been total? Do we even know?

• 46:57Josh Clark?

  Um, six or seven million, I think.

• 47:01Josh Clark?

  A lot. Yeah, I'm not, yes, you bet your, your sweet bippy that there's a Sherlockian out there. Who knows exactly how many movies there are?

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think depending on who you ask, taste differs, obviously, but, um, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes from 1970 from, uh, Billy Wilder is generally regarded as like one of the best adaptations. Uh, even though it was a box office failure and it had a pretty troubled production. Um, it, it just brought a little, uh, wit to it. Um, thanks to Billy Wilder, obviously, that hadn't been there before. And I think Wilder definitely hammered home the subtext that Holmes, uh, perhaps is gay.

• 47:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he later said that he regretted not coming out and actually saying it. That was definitely his intent, but it's ambiguous in the movie. And just reading about the movie in and of itself is pretty interesting. Um, but it's one of the reasons why it's so beloved by Sherlock fans is the attention to detail. And that's like true to the canon is unparalleled. Like no one I don't think has ever really done it that well. Even though the actual like plot and everything that's going on, the point is just so wildly outside of the canon. It's a, it's a weird amalgam of it.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that was, uh, Robert Stevens played Holmes in that film. Um, one of the more beloved, uh, performances was Jeremy Brett. In the 84 through 94 Granada television series. Uh, I, I don't really know how people feel about the Guy Ritchie stuff. I haven't seen those movies or read much criticism.

• 48:35Josh Clark?

  You haven't seen the movies?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  No, I've, I've literally never seen any Sherlock Holmes thing or read any Sherlock Holmes.

• 48:41Josh Clark?

  Wow. I don't know if the first one you should see is the, the Guy Ritchie versions, but they're really interesting interpretations of it. Like they're, they get in fights, like they throw, they throw fists and stuff like Sherlock Holmes beats people up. It's really interesting. But it, it also is very true to the canon too. So, uh, I think a lot of people actually like it, like even Sherlockians.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  All right. Maybe, uh, you know what? I have seen something because I forgot. I have seen both of the Anola Holmes films.

• 49:11Josh Clark?

  Okay. There you go.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Uh, in which, uh, Anola Holmes is the 20 year younger sister of Sherlock. I believe she's like 14 ish in the movies. Uh, and played by, uh, what's her name? Millie Bobby Brown, 11 from Stranger Things. And we watched those with the family and Ruby and Emily and I all quite enjoyed those movies.

• 49:30Josh Clark?

  Okay. So you like those?

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I did like those, but Sherlock is very adjacent in those films.

• 49:36Josh Clark?

  No, for sure. Um, I'm just trying to think of what the first thing you should see is. I really don't think it should be the Guy Ritchie ones.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Holmes and Watson?

• 49:44Josh Clark?

  I, I don't know. Probably not. Despite the clip that I saw, it does seem to not be very well loved.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Well, Cumberbatch, I like Cumberbatch. He, he did a modern one, right?

• 49:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And actually, um, you mentioned that Billy Wilder kind of brought like a little bit of humor comedy to it. That got carried on by Sherlock on BBC. That was Benedict Cumberbatch.

• 50:06Josh Clark?

  Um, I don't know. I, I can't really recommend what to go into. Hopefully some of our, um, bigger Sherlockian fans can recommend where to start to you. Cause you really should, you should at least see one thing, if not read one thing and just see what you think.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  I like Johnny Lee Miller in that elementary. Sounds interesting.

• 50:23Josh Clark?

  Okay. Do you, do you like Lucy Liu too?

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, sure. She in that.

• 50:27Josh Clark?

  There you go, my friend. You're gonna love elementary, I think.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe I'll check out one of those, but I mean, there's somebody in my head that I picture from a kid. Would that have been the, the TV show, the one I mentioned is, is, uh, The most like beloved portrayal, maybe?

• 50:43Josh Clark?

  Jeremy Brett, you weren't a kid in 1984.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  I wasn't a kid in 1984?

• 50:48Josh Clark?

  No, you were nearly a grown man at age 14.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  I was 13, thank you.

• 50:53Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  That may be the one I'm thinking in my head, because I just, when I think in my mind of Sherlock Holmes as a TV portrayal or whatever, this one dude pops into my head, and I bet you that's who that is.

• 51:04Josh Clark?

  Did you watch a lot of Masterpiece Theater as a 13-year-old?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Eh, a little bit here and there.

• 51:09Josh Clark?

  Oh, and maybe that is what it was, yeah. Supposedly, he is the one who did the best out of all of them.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  All right.

• 51:16Josh Clark?

  Interestingly, though, Johnny Lee Miller was the one who's portrayed him the most with 104, 154 episodes on that show Elementary. That was a little trivia for you.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  That's modern times set, right?

• 51:30Josh Clark?

  Yes, that and Sherlock are both set in modern times. And if you go back to the actual stories, they're all set in Victorian England, even though he was writing them well outside of Victorian England by the time he wrapped them up.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Well, this all brings up the sort of ending here is that, can anyone just make this? Or do they have to pay for the rights? Or is it still in, is it in the public domain? And the answer is, it's been fairly complicated for a while now. I mean, up until recently, that is.

• 52:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so his sons, one of their widows, producer, and someone else basically got together when Conan Doyle died in 1930, and they were like, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. And they managed to gather up all the rights to all of the Sherlock Holmes writing, the character, everything, and consolidated it into Conan Doyle Estate Limited. And if you had anything that you wanted to do with Sherlock Holmes, you had to go through them and you had to pay them whatever they wanted, essentially. And they ruled Sherlock Holmes' intellectual property with an iron fist for almost a century. And they really got a bad reputation for it. But despite that, that just goes to show how popular Sherlock Holmes is.

• 52:43Josh Clark?

  People kept dealing with him to make Sherlock Holmes movies, books, fanfiction, analysis, basically everything.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Amazing. There was one pretty famous case where the movie 7% Solution from the 70s, from 1974, from director Herbert Ross, apparently they thought it was in the public domain, and it wasn't.

• 53:05Josh Clark?

  Man, what a, what a surprise that would have been.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. How do you, I don't know. Maybe, I guess things were different back then in 74, but how does this studio not know that when they greenlight it?

• 53:13Josh Clark?

  I don't know. That one was interesting, though. I looked it up. I was about to ask if you'd seen it, but I know the answer to that. Apparently Sherlock Holmes' cocaine use spirals out of control and Watson sends him to Vienna to be cured by Sigmund Freud.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's supposed to be pretty weird.

• 53:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's pretty interesting sounding though, too. But they ended up making it. I think they just had to pay retroactively for it.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's when they really got you over a barrel.

• 53:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I know. But the, um, the, the copyright ran out finally, unambiguously to all Sherlock Holmes stuff, just this past 2023, I guess, right?

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think initially it ran out in the UK in 2000 and then it was 98 in the US. But there was a family argument that like, no, he wrote these over, over a long period of time, over decades. So like, the whole thing needs to go expire by the last story he wrote was their argument.

• 54:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because, because he was so developed that like, he was a flat character and really the character of Sherlock Holmes that everybody portrays is the final ones that we own the copyright to. And I think a judge finally told them to go soak their heads, essentially. He said that what they, their strategy was a form of extortion.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:28Josh Clark?

  So they finally lost it. I don't know what they're doing nowadays. Oh, I know what they're doing. They're essentially authenticating new stuff so you can get their blessing and make it like an official Sherlock Holmes mystery that you wrote.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  But that's why something like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly's Holmes and Watson could come along, right? They could just do it all of a sudden?

• 54:49Josh Clark?

  I think that was, I think they would have had to have paid for it because I think it was from like 2018.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Okay, so even though, yeah, I guess the family won that argument then, huh?

• 55:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I don't think they lost too many cases. I think it was quite near the end of the copyright.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  I got you.

• 55:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so I'm sure that they had to pay for the use of that and I'm sure they lost money on it.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Well, I wonder now, I mean, I don't think so far we've seen any like abomination where they've, you know, like they make Mickey Mouse a serial killer and stuff now and

• 55:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm curious to see if someone's gonna do like a Sherlock Holmes thing where he's the baddie.

• 55:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'm sure some stuff you should know listeners went, wow, that's a good idea Chuck.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  That is a really bad idea because people would be pretty angry, I would imagine.

• 55:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you don't want to mess with something like that. He's good.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Will Ferrell's just now recovering.

• 55:43Josh Clark?

  Um, I want to give a couple of shouts out. First of all, Kyle, our writer Kyle, uh, helped us out with this one. So if we got anything wrong, blame Kyle. And then also we heard from friend of the show, Richard Falwall, who wrote in when we first talked about doing a Sherlock Holmes episode on some other episode and he's like, yes, do. And listen to Stephen Fry's audible, um, collection of all of the Sherlock Holmes canon works. He said, even if you don't do that, listen to Stephen Fry's like introductions to each of the collections. And I listened to one of them and he's right, they're amazing, just charming interpretations of what's going on in these and the way, the effect that they had in real life. Um, so you can go out and listen to that on Audible.

• 56:28Josh Clark?

  Apparently it's 72 hours long.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. Well, I mean,

• 56:32Josh Clark?

  Can you imagine?

• 56:33Speaker 02

  We can vouch and say that, uh, due to our select episodes on Saturdays, sometimes the intro is the best part.

• 56:39Josh Clark?

  For sure. Oh, and one more thing I want to shout out. Um, I guess you haven't seen this either. You have to see this. No matter what you think of whatever people tell you to watch or read, see Mr. Holmes eventually with Ian McKellen. Um, just the most art house of the Sherlock Holmes movies. It's so good. Um, but it's about him retired as a beekeeper, which is part of the canon too.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Hmm. I love Ian McKellen, so I'll check that out.

• 57:05Josh Clark?

  Okay, but just put it off to the side. Don't make that the first one you see.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:10Josh Clark?

  Um, I think that's it Chuck.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Great. Sherlock Holmes. I'm gonna, I'm gonna watch something. I promise everybody, I'm gonna watch something.

• 57:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, write in and let Chuck know what he should watch first.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Or read something, even better.

• 57:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, same thing.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  All right.

• 57:23Josh Clark?

  Okay, uh, well, since Chuck said write, that means it's time for listener mail.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Hey guys. On the anaconda episode, you tried to work out how in the heck green anacondas made it to Trinidad when the Caribbean island is separated from Venezuela by mere seven miles of ocean water. Well, guys, I'm from Trinidad, so maybe I can help. We can easily see Venezuela from certain parts of our country, and that's because Trinidad, unlike the other islands of the Caribbean, is not connected to the ocean floor. It actually rests on the submerged continental shelf that extends from the coastline of Venezuela into the Atlantic Ocean. All the other islands in the Caribbean archipelago are volcanic, reaching up from the seafloor, but not us. Ours is a continental island that was once part of the South American mainland. Essentially, there was a land bridge between Trinidad and

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Venezuela as recently as the last Ice Age. As such, our flora and fauna are pretty much identical to those found in Venezuela and even deeper into South America. And hence, anacondas, baby. They terrified my childhood because they are in our rainforest and big ones would come into town bordering the forest, like where I lived. Anyway, I stopped the podcast midstream to quickly tell Josh in real time, your hypothesis was spot on.

• 58:39Josh Clark?

  Thank you. I love emails like that.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Warmest regards, and that is from Revel.

• 58:45Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Revel. That was a great, great email, and we appreciate it. Thanks for clearing that up for us. If you want to be like Revel, you can send us an email too at [email protected].

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 59:15Josh Clark?

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