Sherlock Holmes: The Great Detective Lives On - And On

As I've noted here before, I'm not fond of continuation novels. But Anthony Horowitz does a good job of explaining why he agreed to write a new novel about the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic character Sherlock Holmes in the British newspaper the Telegraph.

Although Holmes appears in just 56 short stories and four novels, he is famously the one character most often portrayed on television and film. He has recently been modernised by the BBC and bowdlerised by Hollywood – the second film with Robert Downey Jnr comes out at Christmas. There is currently a campaign (which I support) to give Jeremy Brett (seen in the above photo) a posthumous Bafta for his brilliant depiction of the character throughout the Eighties.

My own addition to the Sherlock canon – the first to be given the imprimatur of the Doyle estate – received extraordinary attention when I announced it last January in the House of Commons at a dinner hosted by the 1,000-strong Sherlock Holmes society. I found myself on the News at Ten. The Spectator ran an editorial as did the New York Times – although neither seemed to think the book would be much good. So why Holmes has endured – and, more to the point, how did I dare to take on the mantle of the world’s most successful detective?

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8856345/Sherlock-Holmes-The-great-detective-lives-on-and-on.html