Sherlock Holmes on Screen

Review: This book was originally announced for last August, but it was worth waiting for. Visually the book can’t compare with David Stuart Davies’s gorgeous Starring Sherlock Holmes but the text is much fuller, covering each film or TV play individually and giving cast details. Mr Barnes is known as a film expert rather than a Sherlockian, but he clearly knows his Canon and he knows the characters of Holmes and Watson. He has strong and often wittily expressed opinions about the films and the performances (in Granada’s Hound, ‘the scenes of Watson’s arrival at Baskerville Hall are so somnolently acted and directed they seem like some kind of underwater ballet’). The entries are alphabetical, though there is a chronology at the end of the book, but as there are brief references to minor films that don’t get individual coverage (Sherlock Jr, Der Mann der Sherlock Holmes War and others) an index would have been useful. Sherlock Holmes on Screen is likely to replace the similarly titled 1977 volume Sherlock Holmes on the Screen as my standard reference source. Highly recommended

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 218, 2002]