Fun little article by Babe Lyndsay for Jungle Red Writers!

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Think you know all there is to know about Sherlock Holmes? Think again. Baker Street Babe Lyndsay Faye, author of The Gods of Gotham, reveals ten things we bet you didn’t know…

1. In his earliest draft of A Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle named the detective and the doctor Sherrinford Holmes and Ormand Sacker, respectively. Thank all that is holy that Doyle refrained from experiments with psychotropic drugs thereafter.

2. One of the most beloved Sherlock Holmes adventures, The Speckled Band, features a nefarious doctor who trains a killer snake to climb a bell-pull at the sound of a whistle, rewarding the serpent with milk. Snakes are entirely deaf, “hearing” through vibrations in the belly and tongue, and they do not drink milk…but what the heck.

3. Sherlock Holmes first appeared on film, in a one-reel mutascope running less than a minute and titled Sherlock Holmes Baffled, in the year 1900. Which everyone will agree was remarkably early and gave the man a bit of a head start (he is thought to be the most prolific screen character in film history).

4. No fewer than three actors featured on various incarnations of Star Trek have played Sherlock Holmes. Leonard Nimoy (Spock in the original Trek series) in a 1970s stage tour; Matt Frewer (Berlinghoff Rasmussen in ST:TNG) in a series of low-budget Canadian TV films; and Brent Spiner (Data in ST:TNG) in several actual Next Generation episodes in which he donned cape and deerstalker.

5. Sherlock Holmes’s great-uncle was Horace Vernet, a famous French painter of war history patronized by Napoleon III. Or so Holmes informed Watson regarding his hereditary genius, remarking, “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

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