Stuff You Should Know - Sherlock Holmes: The Man, The Myth

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most famous fictional character in the world, and for good reason. More than a hundred years on, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 60 Holmes stories are still in print and he is the most portrayed human literary character in history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're here to sniff you off the case with our brand new episode on Sherlock Holmes. Have you ever read any Sherlock Holmes short stories for one of the four novels? You should have started that off with Josh. Josh. Yeah, I have. I've never read the novels, but I've read quite a bit of the short stories, yes.

Oh, okay. I didn't know you were a Sherlockian. I'm not. I would not call myself that because if you're a Sherlockian or in the UK, a Holmesian, you are like one of the original fans of fandom. And I'm, I mean, I'm not there. Like I don't qualify.

Oh, okay. Okay. Well, more than me. So have you read any? Not a one. Oh, you're missing out. They're really interesting and fun. Yeah.

I mean, not only that, I haven't really seen any of the stuff either. Um, there's some really good movies out there. Last night, just to brush up, I watched House of Fear, which is based on the short story The Five Orange Pips. And it's really good. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Rogers, and just the straight ahead mid-century black and white Sherlock Holmes mystery that you think of when you think of a Sherlock Holmes movie, or most people do. So they're good. They're really, the movies are generally good.

I've seen the worst version, people call the worst version, Holmes and Watson. Yeah, okay, you saw that? No, but I watched the clip and I was like, this is not that bad. This is exactly what you'd expect from Will Ferrell and John C. Riley. Like, what were you thinking? It's going to be like high art or something like that? Oh, no, I just heard it was zero funny.

Not that they were expecting something, you know, posh. Well, the clip I saw was at least one and a half percent fun. Okay. It has a half of a star on Rot tomatoes. All right, well let's get into it, because this is a lot. Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Let me just wrap this up. Okay.

Yes, you should read some of the Holmes stories. Okay. Okay, yeah, let's get into it now. All right, well we're talking about Sherlock Holmes, the infamous the famous fictional detective. I learned I was about to say a lot but basically everything about this was new to me so I learned everything brand new. I was this day years old when I learned everything but one of the things that I did I did

not know for sure is that I always thought he was an official like Scotland Yard detective. I did not know that he was an amateur sleuth and that maybe he worked alongside Scotland Yard at times, but I just figured he was part of Scotland Yard. No, he is the world's first consulting detective. That's what Arthur Conan Doyle, the author called him. Another term for that is a private eye.

So he would work with Scotland Yard sometimes, but most of the time he was several steps ahead of Scotland Yard whenever they did come in to arrest somebody. Yeah. So like I mentioned, there were four novels. There were 56 short stories over about a four decade plus period, which is a lot of writing and apparently, and this is in 2012 and he's been in quite a few more adaptations since then, but he's the most frequently

portrayed human literary character ever in film and TV. Yeah, 254 times. Well no, way more than that now, though. He's been depicted, yes, by 75 actors. Yeah, more than that now? At the time in 2012, the non-human who'd been most adapted was Dracula, and he only had Sherlock Holmes beat by a handful.

Oh, okay. So there you go, Sherlock Holmes. Everybody loves to portray him. And that's something we'll try to get to the bottom of here because what we're talking about is hundred and nearly 50 year old, like detective pulp fiction that has chapters of fans all over the world.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous characters ever written in the history of literature. And people are nuts for him still today. And some people just like don't get it. And there's, there's something to get, but not everybody can put their finger on it. And we probably won't either, but we'll try. Yeah. I mean, I think I never read it because I just don't read mysteries like that. Well, one of the things that separates him from the mysteries is that he uses deductive reasoning.

Like Agatha Christie, it's like, can you guess who it is? Maybe there's a clue or something in there. More often than not, there's really nothing in there that can tell you who did it. With Sherlock Holmes, it might not be in there either, but what he uses is deductive reasoning where the kind of logic and reasoning he's using, like anybody has that potential at faculty.

He's just particularly gifted with it. So he's, I don't know, he's like a machine as far as logic goes, but he's also a deeply flawed person in a lot of ways too. I think that makes him really interesting. Yeah, and actually I need to correct myself. I did Encyclopedia Brown, as I've mentioned before, and that's where that train ended for me. Yeah, I loved Encyclopedia.

Was in elementary school. Yeah, but I mean, what a ride it was, right? It was pretty great. Watson is his sidekick, we'll talk a lot about him as we go. And the first one was a study in Scarlet in 1887. And I mean, let's go ahead and I guess just talk The first one was a study in Scarlet in 1887. And I mean, let's go ahead and I guess just talk

a little bit about who Holmes is as a character. He's definitely portrayed as a genius. He sometimes can be very sort of flippant and arrogant. He's not very emotional. Watson says that he has no interest in women and that there's been speculation that Sherlock Holmes is a gay character. He's, I believe Watson described him

in a scandal in Bohemia from 1891 as the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position. Yeah, which you don't wanna do, especially as a gentleman, he would have placed himself in a false position. Yeah. Which you don't want to do, especially as a gentleman in Victoria in England, right? Yeah.

And a bit of an enigma, right? As far as just kind of personal life. Yeah. The reason why is because it was not a main driver of the series that Conan Doar wrote, like there were allusions to his life outside of his, his mysteries. Like he was well known to have a brother named Mycroft. He was really passionate about boxing and he played the violin.

He was also very famous for intravenously injecting cocaine in a 7% solution. And these things were just kind of referred to here or there. Early on, the cocaine was kind of a driver of his character. He was very self-obsessed. He was very melancholy. Like he would shoot cocaine to like basically get through the tedium of a day, because he was so smart.

He couldn't possibly do so otherwise. But then as he developed, he became less of a, well, a cocaine addict and more of a fully fleshed out character whose the point and purpose was to figure out how to solve these mysteries using logic and deduction. And that's what he really became more than anything else. Yeah, I mean, if you've seen, if you haven't read and you've only seen like movie and TV versions,

you've seen a lot more of a character called Irene Adler. Irene Adler exists far more in the TV and film side. I believe she was only in one story. So she's been much much more portrayed on screen as maybe a love interest, maybe a what's the word I'm looking for? Sort of like a foil at times. Not quite like a Moriarty level. Professor Moriarty is often the main foil and sort of evil criminal mastermind. But Adler definitely exists a lot more

in the film and television world. Yeah, in the world of Sherlock Holmes fans, they call her the woman. She's the woman who like- But he called her that. Oh, did he call her that? Okay. Yeah. So like, she's the one who caught his attention

by foiling his investigation. Like he figured out what happened, but he didn't catch the criminal and that really caught his attention. Yeah. I think he'd only been thwarted like four times and she was one of them, right? Yeah.

He's also been been famously diagnosed retroactively with everything from bipolar II disorder, depression, Asperger's syndrome, and he's also commonly given an INTJ personality type from the Myers-Briggs test, which is analytical, logical, and with a strong intuition. That seems to fit. It does. So going back out into the real world,

if you're gonna take the Doilian view of all this stuff, that it's actually fiction written by Arthur Conan Doyle, the whole thing started in 1886, I think, when the first one that you just mentioned, A Study in Scarlet, was published in Breiton's Christmas annual. I think it was in 87. 87.

And I'll only correct it because there are Sherlockians and Holmesians. Oh yeah. Yeah. We should have totally given a COA at the beginning of this, I think. Yeah, there are gonna be minor errors here and there, everyone.

Sure. So 1887, the first story comes out, A Study in Scarlet, I think it's actually a novel. It was published in this Christmas annual and it didn't take off like a rocket until he started publishing the shorter stories in a magazine called The Strand. And this is at the time that Strand magazine was the most widely circulated monthly magazine in all of Britain. And it just so happened that Conan Doyle was writing these stories at a time when Britain had suddenly become a lot more literate and they were hungry for new fiction.

So he really kind of came in and brought Sherlock Holmes in at just the right time. Yeah, so people are reading this thing like crazy. I think they ended up collecting those short stories in, well, a collection called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And like you said, that was where, I mean, I'm sure the novels are great, but he only did four of them, and it's really, it seems like these short stories is where he found a place to sell a lot more stuff. Or, you know, I guess sell is one way to say it, or write a lot more stuff. Because, you know, it was, they were less than 10,000 words.

They were even short for detective short stories at the time. And I think they appealed to younger people quite a bit from what I have read. Yeah, because at the time, the younger generation were the ones who had just been educated through the public education system that had just been developed. So they were more likely to be able to read than their parents, just statistically speaking.

Yeah, but they didn't want to read some long novel. They wanted to read a short story. Yeah, and also one of the other things too that Conan Doyle figured out early on that I think people appreciate because it's so comfortable and familiar is essentially the same formula for basically every single one of the stories. Yeah, which I mean, it's like Encyclopedia Brown and any kind of detective story, you're gonna have a client come in, or you know, it evokes film noir as well. A client comes in, in this case,

to the very famous office, 221B Baker Street, and the client themselves are gonna be sort of picked apart by Holmes at the beginning. And he's gonna make a lot of deductions about them and then evaluate the case. And then, you know, hit the streets maybe, maybe in disguise and start doing the investigating. Of course, solve the case. Right. Capture the bad guy and then explain it all the Watson Scooby-Doo style at the end. Which, I mean, is this,

I know Holmes wasn't the first, and we'll get into that, fictional detective, but is this how that sort of tropey formula started? Yes, yeah, 100%. So none of the first fictional detectives did things like that? No, not in any kind of formula like that, as far as I know, and there were only maybe a dozen that came before him,

but they were all just kind of throwing stuff at the fridge to see what stuck. It was Arthur Conan Doyle who's the one who really figured it all out and just ran with it. That's awesome. They were illustrated by a guy named Sidney Padgett. And as far as the look of Holmes, that was modeled on Padgett's brother Walter and you know would just interpret whatever Doyle was writing as far as what he would draw. So in

the book for instance you know there's two things even if you don't know anything about Sherlock Holmes and in fact you probably call it the Sherlock Holmes hat and the Sherlock Holmes pipe. That big curvy, huge bell pipe. And then that deer stalker cap. That's what it's, you know, what it technically is, but everyone else just calls it the Sherlock Holmes hat. But in the book, Doyle just says it's a close fitting cloth cap. He doesn't say he wore his deer stalker cap.

That was an invention of Sidney Padgett. Yeah, and that pipe is called a Calabash pipe. And like you said, I mean, like you could draw, like just a minimalist profile of just those two things. And around the world, people would know exactly who that was. It's like the, when Michael Jordan had the Hitler mustache in that TV commercial. I forgot about that. And everyone's like, why do you have the Hitler mustache? Right. I totally forgot about that. And everyone's like, why do you have a Hitler mustache? Right, I totally forgot about that.

I mean, that one's, you can't have that mustache anymore. And he's, no, no, no. I feel like he should have known that. No, you really couldn't. From basically the 1930s onward, it was off the table. Yeah, I mean, not even, it's not like he was doing it as an homage. I don't think so.

But it was definitely like, what world is Michael Jordan living in where he doesn't know that just nobody does that? It's funny. So just one thing real quick for the Sherlockians and the Holmesians. I saw that it is contested that Walter, Sidney's brother, was the model.

Apparently Sidney claimed he wasn't. No. Everyone says that he was. So maybe Sidney Padgett was just a pathological liar. Maybe. I mean, I'd have to see a picture of Walter to, you know, to know for sure. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

That's a really good way to put two and two together. I think very homesy and in your approach. Oh, elementary. Uh, you want to take a break and come back? Sure. Uh, yeah. Good timing. We'll be back right after this.

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ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. By the way, we're back and I said elementary. Apparently that wasn't something Doyle wrote, that came from one of the movies, we're back and I said elementary. Apparently that wasn't something Doyle wrote. That came from one of the movies, right? The movies are the first stage play, one of the two. Yeah, maybe it's stage play, yeah. I think the closest he wrote was exactly My Dear Watson.

So close. I mean, I'm not knocking Doyle, but elementary is so much, that's way catchier. For sure. So the books themselves or the stories themselves are meant to be accounts of the cases of Sherlock Holmes that were written by his sidekick friend and roommate, John Hamish Watson.

He's a doctor. Dr. John. Yeah, that was his side gig. So was that the one who was about spending the night together? Uh, yeah. I don't know much of Dr. John. I do know that he was the inspiration

for the Muppet band, right? Oh no, okay, that's a different one. No, okay. I think that was Dr. Hooks and the medicine show I was just doing. Dr. John is awesome. I saw him open for Cyndi Lauper once. Oh wow.

That was quite a combination. It really is. No, this is a different Dr. John. This is Dr. John Watson, sidekick to Sherlock Holmes, and he supposedly is the one who's narrating and recounting all of these things. Yeah, and right away, right off the bat, he is sort of picked apart and deduced by Holmes when they first meet.

Watson was an army medic that was wounded at the Battle of Mewand in Afghanistan, and Holmes picks this up, and Watson is like, oh my God, who is this guy? Like, I can't believe this dude has nailed this facet of my life right away. Yeah, it was the first of many, many, many times Watson would be astonished by Holmes'

deductive reasoning skills. But he's kind of the heart, right? Like, apparently Holmes isn't the most likable guy, but Watson really brings this sort of heart to it? Yes, absolutely. He's warm, he's empathetic. He's just much, it's basically like you and me, right? Like you're the heart.

Oh no. You're the approachable guy. You're the folksy one. I'm the one that's got this general, please don't touch me vibe. It's a bit like that. I'm not putting myself on the same level as Sherlock Holmes, but in that sense,

I feel like we resemble the two. Yeah, but that's just because you don't want people to touch you, please, you know? Yeah. You can buy it honestly. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's not like a put on or anything. I really don't want to be touched.

Right. So we mentioned that there were fictional detectives before. We don't have to really go through, but there were like 13 that preceded him. But Holmes is really the one that came along, like you said, and used this scientific reasoning and powers of deduction. And it wasn't just some dumb, blundering criminal

that kind of gives themself away. And we'll get into sort of why, but it's because Doyle himself was medically trained and super on the just in the know about what was going on with modern policing and forensics and stuff like that. Yeah, and so because of that, he was able to like really razzle dazzle his audience. Like it's stuff that is just totally commonplace to us.

It was cutting edge of the time, like collecting blood samples, analyzing like dust and dirt and stuff like that to figure out where it came from. Looking at handwriting, using microscopes, fingerprinting. All these things were like brand spanking new. In some cases, where his audience wouldn't have even heard of or thought about this stuff, Sherlock Holmes is employing these techniques. And on the one hand, it is very razzle-dazzle, like just as cutting edge as possible at the time. But on the other hand too, he's basically,

he's using science, he's using rational science and the scientific method and applying it to solve any problem. And that was very much like part of pop culture at the time. This was prior to World War I, where we showed just how horrible science can go, where everybody was all about science. Science can solve any single problem,

and Sherlock Holmes is the embodiment of that. Yeah, for sure. We should tick through a few more of Holmes' sort of superpowers, as written by Doyle. This is a pretty fun one. That he could tell what a man did for a living by his fingernails, by his coat sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser knees, by the calluses of his forefinger

and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuff. He was a safe cracker and a lock picker. Apparently could tell the difference between 140 different types of tobacco ash and 42 different bike tire treads. Yeah, he's like, this is Virginia Slim. Yeah, that's pretty fun though. Like a pretty fun thing to write,

like someone with almost superhuman, I mean, people have made the case that he's sort of the first superhero in a way. Yeah, for sure. And, but he's the case that he's sort of the first superhero in a way. Yeah, for sure. But again, he's not. He's a human person. Right. You know what I mean? He is a genius.

So is Batman. He does have... Right. Yes, it is true. And I think that kind of makes Batman more accessible than, say, Spider-Man. Well, Spider-Man was real, too. Yeah, but he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Oh, I see what you mean. Sure. Batman came across his powers through technology generally. Vast wealth. Yeah, enormous wealth for sure.

But one of the things that Holmes was famous for too, Chuck, is he was able to hone in so fully on catching somebody because he was very selective about the knowledge he took on. In some cases, he was just ignorant about stuff that anybody walking around would know about. I think there was a time where, in one of the stories, where Dr. Watson is explaining to him that the Earth travels around the sun and Sherlock Holmes is like,

not only do I not know that, I'm going to forget it now because I'm very carefully curate the information that goes into my mind because I only want the stuff in there that's going to help me solve cases. I would suggest that that actually could maybe come in handy with shadows and time changes and stuff like that, but maybe not, maybe he didn't need that.

You would have been a good Watson, actually Sherlock. If you think about it and he's like, no, no, that, but maybe not. Maybe he didn't need that. You would have been a good Watson. Actually, Sherlock. Yeah. If you think about it, and he's like, no, no, no, no, no. I feel like I really would have annoyed Sherlock Holmes if I had been a sidekick. We both would have. So he's generally trying to do the right thing.

He's trying to catch the bad guy. He's trying to aid the desperate for the most part. He protects England from corruption. He's, there was, it was a time where, and Doyle wrote this into the stories, where there were some just sort of notorious failures of the police not catching Jack the Ripper being one of them. And so he would like, he would compensate for those failures.

And, you know, even though he didn't have like, maybe the best personality, he was, he was all about those failures. And, you know, even though he didn't have like, maybe the best personality, he was all about business and all about getting it done. And he was a Victorian gentleman. So he was an upholder of the social order and social hierarchies. He knew how to navigate that stuff.

But at the same time, he was also a critic of them. Like he saw very clearly just how arbitrary and capricious the social hierarchies in Great Britain were and are, and he criticized them personally to himself. He made no effort or action to make any changes to them. He just saw them for what they were, which was fraudulent and harmful typically. Yeah, for sure.

We should probably talk a little bit more about Doyle. He was from Edinburgh, a town that we have performed live in, one of the great towns in Scotland. One of the great towns in the world. Yeah, absolutely. I should have broadened that out. It was amazing. There's only like two towns in Scotland, so.

Come on. We were on such a good path there. He trained to become a doctor, so we had medical training, and it looks like he worked as a sort of ship doctor on some, like a whaling vessel and a cargo steamer in West Africa. And he was always a good and talented writer and apparently while he was not getting his medical practice

going to the degree where he could sustain himself financially, he wrote this very first story. his medical practice going to the degree where he could sustain himself financially. He wrote this very first story. He sold it for three pounds to a periodical. And the only, well, seemingly the only reason he got his first novel, A Study in Scarlet, published was because the wife of a publisher at Ward Lock and Company was like, you got to publish this guy's novel. It's like, it's really good.

Yeah, and they're like, we'll give you 25 pounds for it. It was about, I think 200 pounds today maybe? I'm not sure. I did the conversion, but I can't read my own handwriting. Yeah. And they were the ones who published that Breeden's Christmas annual.

So that's where it first popped up. But after it started to get more and more popular when they appeared in Strand Magazine, he started to be able to command a little more money. So he sold a dozen to Strand magazine for a thousand pounds, which today would be about 110,000 pounds or 150,000 US dollars. And there's a thing that he's fairly well known for. He wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories,

eventually almost against his will, for money. He considered himself a much better writer than a writer of pulp crime fiction. Yeah. And he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories because he essentially needed money all the time, even though he was making gobs of it. Yeah, I mean, it seemed like, it's not,

I don't think he like, hated his legacy, but it definitely seemed like everything I read, he was like, you know, I'm writing these other books too, and all everyone cares about are these Sherlock Holmes books. Right. I mean, this is a little fun fact. He wrote the original book, The Lost World,

which is also a film in 1925, and Michael Crichton directly paid homage with his own novel, The Lost World, which is also a film in 1925. And Michael Crichton directly paid homage with his own novel, The Lost World. And it's basically, I mean, it's not the same plot, but it deals with people going to a place in South America where there are prehistoric animals living. Yes, and Arthur Conan Doyle was the first person who wrote Hang On to Your Butts. Well, apparently Crichton was inspired to bring back Malcolm. I think he killed off Malcolm and brought him back to life.

Oh yeah? And that was also, and I don't know if it was an homage, but more of like, well, hey, Doyle did it with Holmes, so I can do it with Malcolm. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes at one point, unsuccessfully it turned out.

And the reason why, he had a quote, he said that, I've had such an overdose of Holmes that I feel towards him as I do toward pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day. That's how, that's how I was just sick of Sherlock Holmes he was, that it was like eating too much foie gras, which I can imagine is not a very comfortable sensation. Well, I'll have none of it. Thank you.

Uh, one thing we talked about Doyle before in other podcasts, I think when we did episodes on like spiritualism and seances and things, that was kind of one of his, um, aside from writing these books, he was very well known for being into spiritualism. After his son died in 1918, he would go to seances and try to make contact with his son, which is super sad to think about. I know that we definitely talked about him

when we mentioned the photograph that supposedly showed real fairies from Elsie Wright, Girls Elsie Wright, and Francis Griffiths, and Doyle famously was like, no, this is totally real, everybody. Yeah, the Cottingham fairies. Remember we build the whole episode around the one thing that should have just been the short stuff? Yeah.

We've done that before. Yeah. So it was really surprising and shocking to Doyle's friends, his fans. Like this is the opposite of what Sherlock Holmes would do, you know, getting into spiritualism. But he was tenacious. Like, he was a true believer.

And he was friends with Harry Houdini. And they were an odd pair because Houdini was a voracious skeptic. He couldn't stand mediums. He liked to unmask mediums. And Conan Doyle would support them by going to them. And he, Conan Doyle would support them by going to them. And he, Conan Doyle thought Houdini had supernatural powers

despite Houdini saying like, no, these are all tricks. Like I'm just doing these, I'm not gonna tell you how I did it, but these are tricks, please believe me. And Doyle would be like, yeah, I read between the lines. You have supernatural powers. Did you just wink at me? Right, exactly. It's like a Costanza. Yeah, but he supernatural power. Did you just wink at me? Right, exactly.

It's like Costanza. Yeah, but he was just, he was just, yeah. That was a great one. But he was just, it was just his thing. He could not be persuaded out of believing in spiritualism. There's also been a lot of, you know, ideas over his history about who, like who he was based on was there a real

Sherlock Holmes the name itself comes from American Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes because again Doyle was a trained as a doctor so I guess that was just an homage on his part there's a historian named Angela Buckley that claims it was a Victorian police officer named Jerome Caminata that inspired him, but Doyle himself says, no, the inspiration was a guy that taught me in medical school. He was my third year instructor of clinical surgery. His name was Dr. Joseph Bell, and he had this sort of party trick that he would do in lectures and stuff where he would sort of demonstrate,

I almost said Doyle, homes like qualities of deducing things from little mundane details about somebody. Yeah, like where someone had been, whether they were a sailor, if they smoked, apparently very famously he once said, Madam, I would ask you to reveal your pipe. And everyone gasped as this old lady showed her pipe, and that was clearly the root of her problem.

And he just deduced it from a lower lip ulcer and a little scar on her cheek. He could do that with everybody. So that part of Holmes is definitely from Joseph Bell. I mean, like he said, he said as much. But Angela Buckley has a pretty good claim that Jerome Caminata inspired him too. If you look into Caminata, he would use disguises. He was doing police work that now today

is just part of police work right at the time. He was the only one on the Manchester force who was doing this stuff. So it was probably an amalgamation of a bunch of different people, all combined with Doyle's command of science, cutting-edge science at the time. Yeah, so I mean, on that note, we've talked about how he was using all of these sort of modern things to inspire the stories.

It actually happened the other way as well, which is super cool. Like there were real investigators that were doing things that they found that Holmes did in the novels. And I mean, that's super cool. It wasn't, they knew that there was sound science behind it. So there was, I think there was a French criminologist named Edmond Locard who basically was like, yeah, I do a lot of this stuff that Sherlock Holmes does

in his books because it's super smart and a good way to catch somebody. Yeah, and there's also this instance of life imitating art that showed up in the story, The Problem of Thor Bridge. And in the story, I guess the victim takes their own life by shooting themselves with a gun that's tied to a rock with a short rope, and they shoot themselves on a bridge over a waterway, so that as they fall to the ground, the gun is pulled down into the water, and it looks like it was a homicide, so their family can collect insurance.

Well, there's no less than two people out there who seem to have been directly inspired by the story, in real life, did the same thing. And it turns out that it gets even more twisted because Arthur Conan Doyle probably got his idea for the problem with Thor Bridge from a case that was written about by Austrian criminologist Hans Gross in 1893, where this thing actually happened. So you have a case of life imitating art imitating life.

Yeah, well, and Gross is another one of those who was like picking up stuff from the novels to use in everyday work. Like you mentioned dust, like gathering dust in packets. And Locard was telling like the police, the policeman on his staff, like, hey, you should read these, you guys should read these books.

Yeah, like Arthur Conan Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes, was the first to basically say, we need to not contaminate crime scenes. They need to be preserved as they are when we come upon them. This is before cops were even doing that. Like, cutting-edge cops were even doing it. Like, he was just laying down some amazing stuff.

Should we take another break? After me saying something like, he was laying down some amazing stuff. Should we take another break? After me saying something like he was laying down some amazing stuff I feel like it's, yeah, we need to. Alright, we'll be right back. Music If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy.

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I'm not just talking about Google. I'm talking anywhere. Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts. That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes. So in this one case, two of the search results that are I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, a picture of

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where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Killswitch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show, Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along

with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. So we're back, Chuck, and even Conan Doyle was surprised by how popular his character was and he couldn't quite figure out why. He just assumed it was a distraction from everyday life. Other people have said, it probably also has a lot to do

with the short story form, the fact that they pretty, like action starts taking place pretty quickly, but at the same time, a lot of the stories start out with Watson and Sherlock Holmes hanging out in their sitting room and there's like a fire burning. It's just like Conan Doyle adds just enough detail here or there to really kind of make it engrossing, but then it takes off, and like we said,

it follows that formula. So there's a comforting familiarity to the whole thing that a lot of people make point to as like, this is why it's endured for so long. Yeah, like a cozy quality? Yes, cozy mystery kind of thing, but then it branches out into the world of Victorian London. So like you said, he was surprised

because I'm not only surprised at like, hey, people are really liking this, but that just wasn't a thing there. That kind of fandom wasn't a thing. It was probably the first time that there were groups of people getting together and like talking about this stuff and forming like fan groups. Um, maybe the first fan fiction, uh, as it turns out, uh, J.M. Barrie, who was a contemporary, um, obviously the creator of Peter Pan, um, in 1891,

anonymously wrote My Evening with Sherlock Holmes, which is sort of the first fanfic perhaps. Yeah. And that was kind of a good example of how he changed fandom, or created fandom, where readers stopped just kind of passively consuming stuff and started being like, there's a pair of social exchange going on here. Like, we own you, you belong to us, give us more. You know what George R. R. Martin went through

when he hadn't finished that last book. Like that was essentially Arthur Conan Doyle's fault. Yeah, and like you said earlier, when he tried to kill, well, not tried, when he killed him off, there was a revolt. There were 20,000 strand subscribers who canceled their subscriptions they would write these you know hateful angry letters of the of the time it wouldn't be like the hateful

angry letter you would get today I think one of them started with you brute which is you know that's pretty pretty tough language for back then for sure and then so he needed money and so he was like all right I guess I need to tough language for back then. For sure. He finally resurrected him in the adventure of the empty house in 1903 and just said he faked his death. Yeah. And everybody was like, fine, we don't care. I'm glad you brought him back. He could have said it was magic and they would have been like, okay, fine. Yeah. But he came back with it, just a classic right off the cuff. The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably the most well-known Sherlock Holmes case, and it's just a really well-written book, and it's been adapted into movie after movie

after movie, apparently. More than 20 of them, I think. Oh, really? I'm surprised it's actually not more. There was one called Der Hund von Baskerville, and that was a favorite of Hitler's, who's now made two appearances in the Sherlock Holmes episode, did not expect that.

No. But part of this whole thing that we kind of, I mentioned Doyleian interpretation earlier, there's this thing that's a part of being a Sherlock Holmes fan. Again, in North America, they're called Sherlockians. In the UK, they're called Holmesians. And if you're a Sherlock Holmes fan,

there's a really good chance that you treat this whole thing as if these are real accounts of real-life historical happenings that that are the cases of a real-life detective named Sherlock Holmes and That these were written by the real-life doctor and friend to Holmes John Watson and that Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson's literary John Watson, and that Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson's literary agent, and that it just goes from there. And it's really important to remember, you don't just completely take leave of your senses when you become a Sherlock Holmes fan. This is all tongue in cheek.

It's all whimsical, but the way that they treat it is very serious, and they use like actual like literary analysis and and genealogy and all this stuff to basically tease out as much information as they can about the real life Holmes and real life Watson, and they call the whole thing the grand game, and it's definitely a cornerstone of being a Sherlock Holmes fan.

Yeah, it's super cool, and I think the sort of origins of that were in 1911 when a guy named Ronald Knox wrote a spoof textual analysis And he would you know, that's where it became he would say things like sacred writings and that's when the official canon was born and like you said that lives on the day with the grand game and Specifically the the biggest group. I mean there's there's plenty of groups. There's no shortage. I'm sure there's one in your town, unless you live in like the tiniest town imaginable.

There's probably a Sherlock Holmes group there you could get together with. But the most famous one is called the Baker Street Irregulars out of New York. It is an invitation only group. It was founded in 1934. And it seems like, you know, it's pretty hard to get in. Isaac Asimov was in, FDR was in there. I believe the one in England is called the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.

Yeah. And they just, they get together, they dress up, they have some dinner, and they play the grand game. Which sounds like a lot of fun, quite honestly. Yeah, I read an article, I could not find it for life. I mean, the author, the journalist was invited to one of these meetings and it just sounded so fun and so cool. But yeah, that's, I think it's interesting that the American chapter is like the

founding fan chapter fan club of Sherlock Holmes, not the British one. of Sherlock Holmes, not the British one. And they actually are so essentially powerful that they actually grant official status to other chapters elsewhere. I found one called the Shaka Sherlockians of Hawaii. They were basically given official status by the Baker Street Irregulars. It's a great website.

If you wanna know more in a lot of detail about Sherlock Holmes, go check out Shaka Sherlockians. It's pretty fun. Well, we mentioned adaptations. There have been tons of them. I said there have been over 20 film or TV versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles specifically. The first one, and yes, you're correct,

that was a stage version in 1899 from William Gillette where the line, Elementary, My Dear Fellow, first came along. And I mean, you name it, how many movies have there been total? Do we even know? I'm sure somebody knows. Six or seven million, I think. A lot, yeah, I'm not sure.

Yes, you bet your sweet pippy that there's a Sherlockian out there. Who knows exactly how many movies there are. Yeah, I mean, I think depending on who you ask, taste differs obviously, but the private life of Sherlock Holmes from 1970 from Billy Wilder is generally regarded as like one of the best adaptations. Even though it was a box office failure and it had a pretty troubled production. It just brought a little wit to it, thanks to Billy Wilder, obviously, that hadn't been there before. And I think Wilder definitely hammered home

the subtext that Holmes perhaps is gay. Yeah, he later said that he regretted not coming out and actually saying it. That was definitely his intent, but it's ambiguous in the movie. And just reading about the movie in and of itself is pretty interesting. Um, but it's one of the reasons why it's so beloved by Sherlock fans is the attention to detail and that's like true to the canon is unparalleled.

Like no one I don't think has ever really done it that well, even though the actual like plot and everything that's going on, the point is just so wildly outside of the canon. It's a weird amalgam of it. Yeah. And that was Robert Stevens played Holmes in that film. One of the more beloved performances was Jeremy Brett in the 84 through 94 Granada television series. I don't really know how people feel about the Guy Ritchie stuff.

I haven't seen those movies or read much criticism. You haven't seen the movies? No, I've literally never seen any Sherlock Holmes thing or read any Sherlock Holmes. Wow. I don't know if the first one you should see is the Guy Ritchie versions, but they're really interesting interpretations of it. Like, they get in fights. Like, they throw fists and stuff. Like, Sherlock Holmes beats people up. It's really interesting. But it also is very true to the canon, too. So, I think a lot of people actually like it.

Like, even Sherlockians. Right. Maybe. You know what? I have seen something. Because I forgot, I have seen both of people actually like it, like even Sherlockians. All right, maybe, you know what? I have seen something because I forgot. I have seen both of the Enola Holmes films. Okay, there you go. In which Enola Holmes is the 20 year younger sister of Sherlock, I believe she's like 14-ish in the movies. And played by, what's her name? Millie Bobby Brown, 11 from Stranger Things, and we watched those with the family,

and Ruby and Emily and I all quite enjoyed those movies. Okay, so you liked those. I did like those, but Sherlock is very adjacent in those films. No, for sure. I'm just trying to think of what the first thing you should see is. I really don't think it should be the Guy Ritchie ones.

Holmes and Watson? I don't know, probably not that one. Despite the clip that I saw, it does seem to not be very well loved. Oh, Cumberbatch, I like Cumberbatch. He did a modern one, right? Yeah, and actually you mentioned that Billy Wilder kind of brought like a little bit of humor comedy to it.

That got carried on by Sherlock on BBC. That was Benedict Cumberbatch. I don't know. I can't really recommend what to go into. Hopefully some of our bigger Sherlockian fans can recommend where to start to you. Because you really should, you should at least see one thing if not read one thing and just see what you think. I like Johnny Lee Miller and that elementary sounds interesting.

Okay, do you like Lucy Liu too? Yeah, sure, she in that. There you go, my friend, you're gonna love elementary, I think. Maybe I'll check out one of those, but I mean, there's somebody in my head that I picture from a kid. Would that have been the TV show, the one I mentioned, is the most beloved portrayal, maybe?

Jeremy Brett, you weren't a kid in 1984. I wasn't a kid in 1984? No, you were nearly a grown man at age 14. I was 13, thank you. That may be the one I'm thinking in my head because I just, when I think in my mind of Sherlock Holmes as a TV portrayal or whatever, this one dude pops into my head and I bet you that's who that is. Did you watch a lot of Master theater as a 13 year old?

A little bit here and there. Oh, maybe that is what it was. Yeah. Supposedly he's, he is the one who did the best out of all of them. All right. Interestingly though, Johnny Lee Miller was the one who's portrayed him the most with 104, 154 episodes on that show elementary. That was a little trivia for you.

That's Modern Times set, right? Yes, that and Sherlock are both set in Modern Times. And if you go back to the actual stories, they're all set in Victorian England, even though he was writing them well outside of Victorian England by the time he wrapped them up. Well, this all brings up the sort of ending here is that can anyone just make this

or do they have to pay for the rights or is it still in, is it in the public domain? And the answer is it's been fairly complicated for a while now, up until recently that is. Yeah, so his sons, one of their widows, producer, and someone else, basically got together when Conan Doyle died in 1930, and they were like, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. And they managed to gather up all the rights

to all of the Sherlock Holmes writing, the character, everything, and consolidated it into Conan Doyle Estate Limited. And if you had anything that you wanted to do with Sherlock Holmes, you had to go through them,, you had to go through them and you had to pay them whatever they wanted essentially. And they ruled Sherlock Holmes' intellectual property with an iron fist for almost a century. And they really got a bad reputation for it.

But despite that, that just goes to show how popular Sherlock Holmes is. People kept dealing with him to make Sherlock Holmes movies, books, fan fiction, analysis, basically everything. Amazing. There was one pretty famous case where the movie Seven Percent Solution from the 70s, from 1974,

from director Herbert Ross, apparently they thought it was in the public domain and it wasn't. Man, what a surprise that would have been. Yeah, how do you, I don't know. I guess things were different back then in 74, but how does this studio not know that when they green-light it? I don't know. That one was interesting, though.

I looked it up. I was about to ask if you'd seen it, but I know the answer to that. Apparently, Sherlock Holmes' cocaine use spirals out of control, and Watson sends him to Vienna to be cured by Sigmund Freud. Yeah. It's supposed to be pretty weird.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting sounding, though, too. But they ended up making it. I think they just had to pay retroactively for it. Yeah, that's when they really got you over a barrel. But yeah, I know. But the copyright ran out finally, unambiguously, to all Sherlock Holmes stuff just this past 2023, I guess, right?

Yeah, I think initially it ran out in the UK in 2000, and then it was 98 in the US, but there was a family argument that like, no, he wrote these over a long period of time, over decades. So like the whole thing needs to go, expire by the last story he wrote was their argument. Yeah, because he was so developed

that like he was a flat character and really the character of Sherlock Holmes that everybody portrays is the final ones that we own the copyright to. And I think a judge finally told them to go soak their heads essentially. He said that their strategy was a form of extortion.

So they finally lost it, I don't know what they're doing nowadays. Oh, I know what they're doing. They're essentially authenticating new stuff so you can get their blessing and make it like an official Sherlock Holmes mystery that you wrote. But that's why something like Will Ferrell

and John C. Reilly's Holmes in Watson could come along, right? They could just do it all of a sudden? I think that was, I think they would have had to have paid for it because I think it was from like 2018. Okay, so even though, yeah, I guess the family won that argument then, huh? Yeah, I don't think they lost too many cases. I think it was quite near the end of the copyright. I gotcha Yeah, so I'm sure that they had to pay for the use of that and I'm sure they lost money Well, I wonder now I mean, I don't think so far we've seen any like abomination where they've you know

Like they make Mickey Mouse a serial killer and stuff now and yeah I'm curious to see if they're someone's gonna do like a Sherlock Holmes thing where he's the baddie. Yeah, I'm sure some stuff you should know listeners went, wow, that's a good idea, Chuck. That is a really bad idea because people would be pretty angry, I would imagine. Yeah, you don't wanna mess with something like that. He's good.

Yeah, I mean, Will Ferrell's just now recovering. I wanna give a couple of shouts out. First of all, Kyle, our writer Kyle, helped us out with this one. So if we got anything wrong, blame Kyle. And then also we heard from friend of the show, Richard Falwall, who wrote in when we first talked about doing a Sherlock Holmes episode on some other episode and he's like, yes, do. And listen to Stephen Fry's audible collection of all of the Sherlock

Home canon works. He said, even if you don't do that, listen to Stephen Fry's like introductions to each of the collections. And I listened to one of them and he's right, they're amazing, just charming interpretations of what's going on in these and the way they affect that they had in real life. So you can go out and listen to that on Audible. Apparently it's 72 hours long. Oh, wow.

Well, I mean, we can vouch and say that due to our selects episodes on Saturday, sometimes the intro is the best part. For sure. Oh, and one more thing I want to shout out. I guess you haven't seen this either. You have to see this. No matter what you think of, whatever people tell you to watch or read,

see Mr. Holmes eventually with Ian McKellen. Just the most art house of the Sherlock Holmes movies. It's so good. But it's about him retired as a beekeeper, which is part of the canon too. I love Ian McKellen, so I'll check that out. Okay, but just put it off to the side. love Ian McKellen, so I'll check that out. Okay, but just put it off to the side. Don't make that the first one you see.

Okay. I think that's it, Chuck. Great, Sherlock Holmes. I'm gonna watch something. I promise everybody I'm gonna watch something. Yeah, write in and let Chuck know what he should watch first. Or read something even better. Yeah, same thing.

All right. Okay, well since Chuck said right, that means it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. On the Anaconda episode, you tried to work out how and the heck green Anaconda's made it to Trinidad when the Caribbean island is separated from Venezuela by a mere seven miles of ocean water.

Well, guys, I'm from Trinidad. So maybe I can help. We can easily see Venezuela from certain parts of our country. And that's because Trinidad, so maybe I can help. We can easily see Venezuela from certain parts of our country. And that's because Trinidad, unlike the other islands of the Caribbean, is not connected to the ocean floor. It actually rests on the submerged continental shelf that extends from the coastline of Venezuela into the Atlantic Ocean. All the other islands in the Caribbean archipelago are volcanic, reaching up from the seafloor, but not us. Ours is a continental island that was once part of the South American mainland. Essentially

there was a land bridge between Trinidad and Venezuela as recently as the last Ice Age. As such, our flora and fauna are pretty much identical to those found in Venezuela and even deeper into South America. And hence, Anacondas, baby. They terrified my childhood because they are in a rain forest and big ones would come into town bordering the forest like where I lived. Anyway, I stopped the podcast midstream to quickly tell Josh in real time

your hypothesis was spot on. Thank you. I love emails like that. Warmest regards and that is from Ravel. Thanks Ravel. That was a great, and that is from Ravel. Thanks, Ravel. That was a great, great email, and we appreciate it. Thanks for clearing that up for us. If you want to be like Ravel,

you can send us an email too. It's stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.

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