IT BEGAN WITH A 1950s TV SHOW

Ronald Howard as Sherlock Holmes

          The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes TV Show, starring Ronald Howard (1954-1955). I was six-years-old, my murder-mystery-loving mom and I watched on our 16” black and white TV. I was fascinated by this genial, gentleman Holmes who shared the tube with my favorite cowboys. To me, he was the Mr. Rogers of Sherlock Holmes. This mysterious place and time, 19th-Century London, England, with its danger, fog, and flickering gaslight captured my young New York imagination. The stories were not the same old plot, all shoot-‘em up’s and chasing bad guys on horseback through the dusty Los Angeles desert. But, a man who worked out each crime to its solution using only his mind and creative intuition, and with his stalwart friend, the courage to face what may. In the Nifty Fifties, out-of-necessity, girls with imagination learned to transpose gender, and we frequently imagined ourselves as male heroes.

          Yet I was young for this to springboard me to the stories. I read Conan Doyle concurrently with Poe, in High School. Not as required reading in a Catholic Girls School! But as contraband concealed beneath the dust jacket of something deemed appropriate for a young lady. Poe taught me to write. Doyle awakened my mind. The nuns taught me the necessity of red-herrings. And the traveling troupe of actors who presented Shakespeare’s plays in the sanctuary of our gym: Sans props, costumes, scenery, only their acting ability, and the Bard. Like Poe and Doyle this generated another explosion in my mind, imagination, and my love for the English language.

          When I first read Doyle’s stories I was coming home to a home I had never known but much more real than the one I had. As a writer of Sherlock Holmes, I run up those 17 steps to the sitting room at #221B, Baker Street. Where two friends, against all odds, and in their own ways, one studied and honed his abilities to a fine point and the other in his desire to assist in these quests, discovered abilities he didn't know he had. They pit their talents against a world lost in darkness, poverty, injustice, greed, ignorance, and the great elemental shifts of the centuries. And in so doing, bring justice to a world very similar to ours.