What if They Had Gotten to Finish?

What if they had gotten to finish the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes canon? I think it's a real pity that Brett's health, and ultimately his terribly premature death, got in the way of the series, although I still enjoy many of the later episodes where he is in ill health even though some fans do not. I'm familiar with much of the Conan Doyle and canon and if memory serves, there were two novels (including "A Study in Scarlet") and about twelve or fourteen (give or take) short stories--out of a total 56 short stories in the full canon--that were never adapted for this series.

I sometimes have visions of a perfect final series to settle this score in some alternate fantasy universe. It would have been called 'His Last Bow'--the one short story collection title they hadn't used and fittingly only for a final series. It could have started with a feature length adaptation of The Valley of Fear. Then into the short stories: The Adventure of the Yellow Face, The Reigate Squires, The Beryl Coronet, The Adventure of Black Peter, The Missing Three Quarter, The Three Students, The Engineer's Thumb, and so on. The number of episodes could be kept manageable in part by creating amalgamations of some of the thinner short stories, as The Mazarin Stone and Three Garridebs were combined in the Memoirs series. I know purists mightn't like it, but having read most of these stories, I think expansion and reshaping is the only way to make some of them adaptable as 50-minute TV episodes. For instance, two of the stories left over from Casebook, The Blanched Soldier and the Lion's Mane, might be fused, or A Case of Identity and the Stock Broker's Clerk. These are just examples of interesting stories that Granada never touched. Of course, The Garridebs wouldn't be adapted as its own episode because it had already been incorporated in The Mazarin Stone and since The Veiled Lodger, which to be honest wouldn't be much of a TV episode on its own, had already been heavily incorporated into the film The Eligible Bachelor, that one would probably be left out as well.

Then I think it would really be something to save A Study in Scarlet for the series finale. Because Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke, much as we love them, could not have played university-aged versions of the characters when they themselves were over 60 by the time the series ended, ASIS would benefit in being presented as a retrospective episode, with younger actors portraying Holmes and Watson in flashbacks and perhaps condensing the presentation of the considerable backstory present in part two of the original work. (As a side note, The Adventure of the Gloria Scott, recounted as Holmes' first case pre-Watson, could be told in similar fashion.) Surrounding the flashbacks in ASIS could be the plot of the short story His Last Bow. For anyone who doesn't know, His Last Bow is a very short story by Conan Doyle depicting Holmes and Watson fighting the Germans in World War I, which even though it's not the last published Sherlock Holmes story, makes it the last in internal chronology. His Last Bow would be difficult if not impossible to adapt as a TV episode on its own, so everyone by incorporating the story into the series in this way and the end result would be that we would have seen Holmes and Watson's first and last collaborations side-by-side. Imagine if something like this had come been broadcast around, say, 1996 or '97.

I'm sorry if I'm upsetting purists with all of this. I can imagine it would make some of them shudder. I love Doyle's stories, and I love that Brett's Holmes adaptations were devoted to bringing the original canon to screen and bringing to life the Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes, but I am not a purist. I like The Eligible Bachelor, so that probably makes me a card-carrying non-purist! I don't think it's possible for me to think that way. But does anyone else wish Brett had lived to finish the canon, or can it be argued that most of the good possibilities for adaptation had been used up? And it's certainly the case that Brett made his mark as it is.

In particular, does anyone else like my idea about A Study in Scarlet/His Last Bow? Or does it seem too "out there"? It kind of it me out of nowhere, while I was working on other things, how cool it would (Imho) be to have a Sherlock Holmes film like that.


"Sometimes it's right to feel a fool"- Cleggy