Hi! I am new and was wondering if there are any Sherlock fans on here. I was wondering what everyone thinks about the new movie that is coming out and what their favorite stories are.

I am a big SH fan. I have several editions of his stories and novels, which I periodically re-read.
My favourite novels are The Valley of Fear and A Study in Scarlet, but I really do not have a favourite story....perhaps The Speckled Band.
I had no idea there is a new movie coming out. Who plays SH and Dr. W.?

Also, there is a Sherlock Holmes specific group on LibraryThing (Baker Street and Beyond). I'm sure you'll find many additional Holmes fans there!

The new movie stars Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson.

And is directed by Guy Ritchie. (No, Madonna doesn't play Irene Adler.)

Selecting favorites from the canon is now officially listed in the DSM IV, but I'd plunk for novel = Sign of Four, probably my favorite mystery novel ever, and story = "The Man with the Twisted Lip."

Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes?????? Are they crazy?
I am sorry,but I really cannot see any American actor, as good as he might be, playing SH!

Yea, especially after watching Jeremy Brett... I cant get enough of him.

I haven't heard anything about the movie. I hope it's good. I'd like to see it.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Spatial NonSense

I'm glad that when, as a youngster I had to have my appendix removed, it wasn't Dr. Doyle who wielded the scalpel.

Why? Well, there is one aspect of Doyle's otherwise brilliant Sherlock Holmes series that I find disappointing and frustrating - his descriptions of the layout of the interiors of buildings, starting with how the rooms at 221B Baker Street can be made to fit within a real house.

You see, I'm one of those readers with a fairly well-developed spatial sense, who loves maps and plans, especially those having to do with one's favourite books. No doubt the fact that we're not all alike makes for a more interesting world, but I can't help being a mite exasperated when trying to visualise, even draw, the room-arrangement within buildings from Dr. Doyle's treasured Sherlock Holmes tales.

He was one of those, ahem, 'spatially creative' individuals to whom the sketching of a rough plan of a building in which the action he was describing was taking place would have been impossibly, depressingly constricting. In a word, anathema.

However little spatial sense it made in real-world terms, Doyle's characters had to be free to move in any direction with the flair of time-travellers ducking and diving through a series of oddly positioned portals.

Doubtless Dr. Doyle's awesome creative flair would have enabled him to locate a floating appendix, but an appendix positioned where it should be just might have set him quite a challenge.

Rather than list endless examples of his creative, almost surreal architectural orientation I leave it up to you to have fun proving how utterly wrong I've got it.

Brickbats and howls of derision should be hurled at ‘Aurélien Arkadiusz’, a resident of a far-distant land who is keeping secret his real name, together with the address to which explosive devices disguised as book parcels might otherwise be sent.

Message edited by its author, Jul 28, 2009, 11:38pm.

#9 Fascinating.

Message edited by its author, Jul 31, 2009, 10:41am.

I admit that I am completely UNspatially conscious. I love it when there's a map in a book. I consult it frequently. But everything else, I just skim through. Don't pay any attention at all to how the rooms are related. I always figure the writer will throw something unexpected later anyway, like a secret passageway or something, so I don't really pay close attention to where things happen.

Bad at those computer games with mazes too. I always get my kids to help me.

I am a big SHerlock Holmes fan and have been since childhood. My first exposure to Mr. Holmes was through The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I am having a difficult time picturing Robert Downey Jr as Holmes. And Jude Law as the well meaning but bumbling Watson. Goodness!!!!

Me too, nawatramani. I'm hoping that after the movie's over I'll have gotten used to their faces on the characters I love. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. Either way, I'm such a big fan of the characters that I have to try it...