NOW ENTERTAINMENT Dec. 00 8 - 14, 2024 Month - 00, 2023
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Lucy Worsley uncovers “the parallel lives of Doyle and Holmes in the historical context of their times” in “Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle,” premiering Sunday, Dec. 8, on PBS. Lucy Worsley of “Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle”
Cover Story Stranger than fiction: Author’s complicated relationship with creation unpacked in ‘Holmes vs. Doyle’ By Dana Simpson Fictional detective Sherlock Holmes has undoubtedly had an impact on the readers of the world (and in the realms of fashion and home decor, too, it would seem), but perhaps no one has been more affected by the sleuth than his own author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the new, three-part docuseries “Lucy Worsley’s Holmes vs. Doyle,” the titular television host does some investigating of her own, uncovering how the lives of the man and his most popular creation came to echo one another in an uncanny harmony, often to the author’s detriment. The series begins Sunday, Dec. 8, on PBS, and airs hour-long episodes weekly until its Dec. 22 finale. Throughout his 137 years on the page, Sherlock Holmes has solved 60 separate cases across 56 short stories and four novels, but the biggest mystery of them all has been lying just beneath the surface of the fiction. For years, it appeared that
Doyle — a private detective in his own right — despised his most prized creation, but why he grew to dislike the fictional character was never quite clear ... until now. In the first episode of PBS’s “Holmes vs. Doyle,” Worsley travels back in time to the British author’s not-so-humble beginnings as a medical student in the lowland Scottish city of Edinburgh before diving into the cultural movements of the Victorian era in what is now the United Kingdom. “In Episode 1, ‘Doctor and Detective’ (Dec. 8), [Worsley] ... unpacks the early stories, revealing the dark underbelly of late Victorian Britain, from drug use to true crime,” the official PBS news release reads. “She explores how Doyle infused his stories with cutting-edge technological developments and traces the author’s growing disenchantment with his detective, heading to Switzerland to visit the site of one of the most famous deaths in literature.”
Moving through Doyle’s life and ever-growing oeuvre, Episode 2, titled “Fact and Fiction” (Dec. 15), is heavily based upon the writer’s decision to kill off his beloved case cracker in his 1893 work “The Final Problem,” set two years earlier, in 1891. “[Worsley] explores Doyle’s desire to distance himself from Sherlock after the detective’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls,” the description reads. “From the delights of the ski slopes to the horrors of the Boer War, she reveals how far Doyle went to make himself the hero of his own story. He even took on the role of detective himself in one of the most important legal cases of the 20th century.” By the time viewers arrive at the conclusion of the PBS docuseries, Worsley investigates the parallel timelines of both author and authored. By analyzing Doyle’s decision to bring his most iconic character back from the dead, the presenter
illustrates where Doyle’s and Holmes’ personalities, decisions and life events began to converge before dovetailing, ultimately resulting in the character eclipsing the now-aging crime novelist. According to writer and editor Ronald B. De Waal in his 1995 four-volume compilation titled “The Universal Sherlock Holmes,” the character has now been adapted into more than 25,000 forms, including works translated into 63 languages worldwide. From the written form to visual mediums such as film and television, Holmes’ reach extends far beyond that of the vast majority of living (or once living) people, something which continued to baffle Doyle long into his life and career. “The curious thing is,” Doyle mused aloud to a camera in a 1928 interview with William Fox, “how many people around the world who are perfectly convinced that he is a living human being.”
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