Sherlock Holmes

"Dear Sherlock Holmes," writes a young American, "is there a ghost in my closet?" A boy in Japan asks the famous sleuth for advice on how to be a top detective. The Sherlock Holmes Museum's collection of letters addressed to the detective even includes a reminder from an optician that Holmes is due for an eye test. Scores of letters are mailed every week to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional hero. Now, however, a dispute has broken out over where they should be delivered.

Sherlock Holmes, that most famous and durable of all detectives, is kept alive not only by the passionate attentions of the Baker Street faithful; his life and casebook continue to be extended, 57 years after the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by a whole platoon of neo-Holmeses. The very first Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet," appeared in 1887, and the centenary is being marked by still more new work. Michael Hardwick's The Revenge of the Hound carries the imprimatur of the Conan Doyle estate.

After the soft debuts of two heavily touted sequels over the weekend, Hollywood is fearful there may not be much holiday cheer at the box office this Christmas. "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows" and "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" got off to disappointing starts, continuing the year's downward slide for the movie business. This past weekend receipts were off 12% compared with the same period in 2010. "Sherlock" and "Alvin" sold far fewer tickets than prerelease audience surveys had projected.

He's probably the most adapted literary character in history -- and perhaps the only nonexistent person with an honorary degree from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Upward of 70 actors have portrayed him in more than 200 films, since the early days of silent movies. But there's not been a major cinematic adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in decades.

Death Cloud A Novel Andrew Lane Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 320 pp., $16.99 It is extremely unusual for a literary character to remain popular for more than a century. But Sherlock Holmes is no ordinary character. Ever since the eccentric, pipe-smoking detective first appeared on the page in 1887, the tweedy London logician has been revered and emulated, the subject of 200-plus films and television shows and dozens of literary spinoffs. So it's only natural that Arthur Conan Doyle fans may be curious about what may have shaped the detective in his youth.

We can deduce what city we're in, and we haven't even seen a skyline. It's elementary, Watson. The fog. "The Mask of Moriarty," Hugh Leonard's Sherlock Holmes spoof, at the Old Globe Theatre, starts with a thick blanket of fog on Waterloo Bridge in London. But unlike the fog in a straight-up detective story, this one demands comment, and a couple of characters are overcome by hacking coughs in the play's opening moments.

In the strange case of the derelict house, there's no mystery surrounding the identity of its most famous occupant. Not only did Arthur Conan Doyle live at Undershaw, but he designed the place himself and produced some of his finest work under its gabled roofs, including "The Hound of the Baskervilles. " What baffles John Gibson is how the home of one of Britain's best-known authors has been all but abandoned, left to fall into disrepair and pegged for conversion into a block of apartments.

"Sherlock Holmes" is a creaky old melodrama that cries out for the swashbuckling heroics of a matinee idol like William Gillette, for whom it was created at the turn of the last century. Its current incarnation at the Newport Theatre Arts Center is a hollow parody with neither a romantic heartbeat nor a genuine comic sensibility. Director John Alexander Lee force-feeds the geriatric script with bits of stagy humor and some broad looks, but the body of the work still lies dead on the table.

When British actor Jeremy Brett was offered the part of Sherlock Holmes in 1981 he was reluctant to take it, fearing he'd be unable to do justice to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's venerable character. At the time of his death of heart disease nine months ago, however, the consensus among Holmes aficionados was that Brett's blazing characterization, hammered out in 40 episodes filmed over 14 years, will stand as the one to top for decades to come.