Expert researcher and editor Leslie S. Klinger is best known for his Edgar-winning book “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes” and the critically acclaimed “New Annotated Dracula.” He was also a technical consultant on both of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” movies. I had the opportunity to talk to Klinger about his extensive work providing notes and commentary for these classic books.
Tell us a little more about your work on “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.” Share with us about all your knowledge and experience working on the Holmes books.
I’ve read all the Sherlock Holmes stories dozens of times. I’ve read thousands of books and articles about Sherlock Holmes, the history of crime fiction, and police techniques. Sherlockian studies are a huge field. “The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes” has 3,000 footnotes and about 5% of those represent what I would call Klinger’s original thinking. The other 95% attempt to show the breadth of scholarship by other people including the vast army of scholars who have studied the Sherlock Holmes stories over the years.
People want to ask me if I’m the world’s greatest Sherlockian and I always say [I’m] just one of them. There are all these other brilliant people who have written articles, books, etc. I just pulled them all together into footnotes. It was mostly perspiration I like to say.
Are you a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle purist?
No I am not. I should mention a book that the New York Times best-selling author Laurie R. King and I just edited. [It] came out in October. It’s an anthology of short stories called “A Study in Sherlock.” We invited 16 of the world’s best writers to pen stories for us inspired by the Sherlock Holmes canon. Not Sherlock Holmes stories. Stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes ones. A couple of them were stories about Sherlock Holmes, [but] many of them were not.
They were just what we asked for. They were responses to the stories. They were people whose lives had been changed by Sherlock Holmes or by reading his stories. One of my favorites is a story by Jacqueline Winspear about a young boy who is sick. [His] mother buys him a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. He reads them and decides he can be a detective. He fails but in the end decides he can be a writer. There’s a twist ending. I won’t spoil it for you. My point is probably 12 of the stories in the collection would offend purists because they’re not really Sherlock Holmes stories. Who cares? They’re wonderful.
So you don’t have a problem with people writing Sherlock Holmes books?
No. Well, bad ones. There are bad Sherlock Holmes books. I dislike people who have pretensions about their Sherlock Holmes books. For example I just wrote a review about this new book “The House of Silk” by Anthony Horowitz. I wrote a review for the Toronto Globe and Mail. I was really ticked off at the marketing by the publishers. They wanted to call it an “Authorized Sequel” and that really bothered me. What is an authorized sequel? They said it was the first authorized sequel when in fact there have been other books that have been written by friends of mine who had permission from the Conan Doyle Estate. There are hundreds of books that didn’t have permission that are probably better than this one.
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Eric Shirey is the founder and editor of Rondo Award nominated movie and comic book news websites MovieGeekFeed.com and TheSpectralRealm.com. His work has been featured on Yahoo!, DC Comics, StarWars.com, and other national entertainment websites. Besides his three decades long obsession with everything sci-fi, horror, and fantasy related in TV and movies, Eric has what some would call an unhealthy love for comic books. This has led him to interviewing and covering legendary writers and artists in the medium like Geoff Johns, Scott Snyder, Steve Niles, Bernie Wrightson, and Howard Chaykin.