WEDS 20th & THURS 21st NOVEMBER 2024 DOORS OPEN: 7:00pm SHOW COMMENCES: 7.30pm TICKETS: £15
IT’S BACK! BY POPULAR DEMAND!
Join local author Matt Wingett and friends on a joyful Victorian Music-Hall-like celebration of the life and times of Portsmouth’s world-renowned author Arthur Conan Doyle – who created Sherlock Holmes while he lived in Southsea!
Actors, musicians, writers and Doyle fans present sketches, stories, poems and songs in a night of fun and surprises.
For you in this star-studded programme:
a hilarious reading by actor Mark Wingett (The Bill, Quadrophenia, Eastenders)
fabulous music from comedy duo Hudson and LeStrade – including The Holmes Fest Anthem
a side-splitting sketch from The BBC Holmes Service
Mrs Hudson will reveal the real story of what it’s really like to live with Sherlock
an eccentric and very silly account of the Browndown duel by The Gosport Steampunk Society
in a feat previously unknown to humankind, MC AC Doyle will rap the life of the great writer
enjoy a kinematographic extravaganza celebrating Portsmouth’s connections to Sherlock
an appearance by none other than Sherlock Holmes himself
SO, HOW ABOUT JOINING IN THE FUN!?
– You are encouraged to wear Victorian / period clothing – though it’s not required there will be a PRIZE for the Best Dressed Victorian!
There will be a 20 minute interval.
Refreshments available from the bar, and books, art and other items will be available to buy.
PLEASE NOTE: THE LAST TIME WE RAN THIS SHOW IT SOLD OUT. BOOK NOW TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT!
Box Office: 02392 737370 | www.groundlings.co.uk
Groundlings Theatre, 42 Kent Street, Portsmouth, PO1 3BS
I’m delighted to say that’s exactly what we’re doing this November 20th and 21st at a new venue – The Groundlings Theatre, Portsea!
Holmes Fest 2024 is 2 hours of laughter and silliness that celebrates the wide range of Conan Doyle’s writing, with the audience joining in the fun, too.
Local Acts
From local author Christine Lawrence’s Mrs Hudson revealing the “truth” about Sherlock, through poet Jackson Davies celebrating Arthur Conan Doyle as a gentleman rapper to hilarious songs and comedy sketches, the show is a fond homage to the writer in the city where Sherlock Holmes first saw light of day.
TV and Film Star Mark Wingett
And that’s not all. Film and TV star Mark Wingett – who is my brother – will also appear as Sir Algernon Blenkinsop-Carver – and things don’t all go to plan for him, that’s for sure!
Mark thinks the city’s Doyle connection is cool, saying: “The show has been great fun and I had no idea Conan Doyle’s work was so varied – from mummy stories to dinosaur-tales and much more besides, his fingerprints are on so much of popular culture – including the detective story, of course!”
Celebrating Pompey’s Heroes
To be honest, I’m really excited about it. I created the show because I think we should celebrate Pompey’s links with Conan Doyle. The city offered great opportunies for Conan Doyle and this is our chance to inspire new writers and artists, through his example!
Holmes Fest 2024 features original creations by Portsmouth creatives – and even includes The Holmes Fest Anthem – written by comedy music hall duo Hudson and Lestrade (actually Matt Parsons and Janet Ayers).
But I won’t give the show away except to say it is going to be great fun. And if you decide to enter more fully into the spirit of the show – remember: there’s even a prize for the best-dressed Victorian.
Tickets
Tickets are £15 from The Groundlings Theatre, 42 Kent Street, Portsmouth, PO1, 3BS here https://bit.ly/HolmesFest24
Holmes Fest – a celebration of the life and times of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life in Portsmouth and his greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes is back after a six year absence.
As part of Portsmouth’s Bookfest, Holmes Fest draws together Portsmouth writers, actors, musicians and artists in a night of fun entertainment. And there will even be an appearance by Mark Wingett, star of ITV’s The Bill in which he played modern detective Jim Carver.
Mark Wingett will appear in the Holmes Fest 2024
Matt Wingett, Mark’s brother and the show’s organiser and compere, says: “Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes while he lived as a doctor in Portsmouth’s seaside resort of Southsea as a young man between 1882 and 1890. It’s true to say it all happened for him in Portsmouth. He arrived with just £10 in his pocket and left eight years later having created the world’s most famous detective, written several other novels, married and with his first daughter, Mary Louise. From being an obscure GP in a seaside town, he was on the verge of international fame and riches.”
Holmes Fest will recreate some of the Victorian music hall feel – but with a focus on Sherlock Holmes’s creator. And for those who want to join in the fun more by dressing for the occasion – there will be a special prize for the Best Dressed Victorian!
Music Hall duo Hudson and LeStrade will be played by Matt Parsons and Janet Ayers.
Local acts will perform original works, all in some way connected to Conan Doyle’s life and writing. We will meet a disgruntled Mrs Hudson played by local author Christine Lawrence, rap poet Jackson Davies performing a piece about Conan Doyle’s life in Southsea, a comedy radio play by The BBC Holmes Service (Nick Downes, David Penrose, Vin Adams), melodrama based on true events around a duel in the town performed by the Gosport Steampunk Society (Stuart Markham et al), the Holmes Fest anthem performed by musicians Hudson and LeStrade (Matt Parsons and Janet Ayers) and actors Jonathan Fost and Mark Wingett joining in the fun.
And who knows? – There may also be an appearance by Sherlock Holmes himself!
Books about Arthur Conan Doyle’s life in Portsmouth will be avaiable on the night, as well as a stall run by Portsmouth City Council’s archivist Mike Gunton, who will be free to talk about the massive Conan Doyle Archive owned by the council. There will also be Conan Doyle-related works of art for sale – including dinosaur eggs inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World.
Drinks and nibbles will also be availbe from the bar.
“It’s going to be great fun,” says Matt Wingett. “We’d love to see you there!”
Holmes Fest will take place in The Square Tower, Broad Street, Old Portsmouth, doors open at 7pm on Sunday 18th February. Tickets cost £15 and are available here from eventbrite, here: https://bit.ly/HolmesFest2024
Weird Tales From The Island City by Matt Wingett, a collection of 9 Strange Portsmouth Stories is now available to order, here.
This collection of stories includes 7 short stories plus 2 novellas, and includes works not previously collected, as well as stories from Portsmouth Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups and Day of the Dead.
A mixture of fantasy, comedy, dark writing and fable, the stories are all rooted in Portsmouth.
The cover artwork “Eclipse” is by Gerardo Silva, a Portsmouth-based artist.
Weird Tales From The Island City is available in both paperback and hardback issues.
It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog. But it’s time at last to deliver some great news. Over the last few months I’ve been beavering away at a brand new project that I actually started before lockdown, and then mothballed. Somehow it felt right a few months ago to get it back on the go. So, I’m here to announce the Kickstarter campaign for my new book, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Southsea Stories And Beyond, which will be hitting the shelves before Christmas.
What’s It About?
Okay, good question, even though I did ask it myself. So here goes the quick rundown:
Arthur Conan Doyle moved to Southsea, the seaside resort attached to the town of Portsmouth in 1882 at the age of 23, after a stint as a ship’s surgeon and a brief period working with fellow doctor George Budd in Plymouth. He had already started writing, but in Southsea he wrote a lot more. Many of those stories were published anonymously, were forgotten and were never drawn together into anthologies under Doyle’s name in his lifetime.
Reading them afresh, it becomes clear that Southsea was a formative ingredient for development of his writer’s palette. Here he first uses ideas of the lonely house on Dartmoor with a big fierce dog (The Hound of the Baskervilles), of a Cabman involved in criminal acts at night (A Study In Scarlet), of treasure in the outposts of Empire argued over by friends (The Sign of Four) and of dangerous confrontations in the Wild West (The Valley of Fear).
Conan Doyle lived at Number 1 Bush Villas, Southsea, between the hotel on the corner and the church behind it.
Is Southsea Really So Central To His Work?
I think so, yes. There are many, many more influences that surface again in his later work, but also there’s the subject of Southsea itself. In some of his tales Conan Doyle writes about Birchespool, in fact the fictionalised town of Southsea, and so we get a glimpse into what life was like in the town in the 1880s, with its bankers and colonels and debating societies (of which he was a member).
Throughout, Arthur Conan Doyle experiments with genre. Adventure, thriller, horror, romance, comedy and much more all feature in his work. What we see is Conan Doyle inching towards creating Sherlock Holmes.
But that’s not all. Some of the stories in this book were published long after he left Southsea, and what becomes apparent is that the ideas he developed here stayed with him long after the event. Portsmouth pops up from time to time in his later works, names from the town and its environs appear over and over. It’s fascinating to see just what an influence the town had on his work.
What Else Is In The Book?
When I realised this, I asked the wonderful writer Andrew Lycett (author of the definitive biography, Conan Doyle, Teller of Tales) to write the preface, and I added a brief introduction.
Throughout the book, I add short passages to the end of each chapter, describing how the story related to parts of Conan Doyle’s life, and to the life of the town of Southsea.
It’s fun, it’s informative – and I’d love you to come on board and help me out with the Kickstarter campaign!
A year after The Petersfield Bookshop’s viral “tumbleweed” tweet, bookseller Robert Sansom reflects on how retweets from Neil Gaiman and Gyles Brandreth among many others, changed life at the shop for good
MW: Robert, tell us why you sent out your famous “tumbleweed tweet” that went viral.
RS: It was a miserable day. Storm Brendan had just cruised in from the Atlantic – the rain was relentless. A few people came into the shop during the day but not a single one bought a book. I don’t blame them, they came in wet-through, probably just looking for a bit of shelter, and had other things on their minds. It wasn’t till the very end of the day that I realised there hadn’t been a single sale.
It can be very dispiriting working in a shop with barely any customers. There are only so many times you can tidy the shelves or check the emails.
So, by the end of the day I was very ready to go home. But I wouldn’t say that I was feeling desperate about it. I checked with colleagues and no one could remember another occasion when the shop had been open and we hadn’t sold a single book.
I took a few photos of the empty aisles as I was locking up and just tweeted them likening the place to an American ghost town by using the word tumbleweed.
…Tumbleweed…
Not a single book sold today…
£0.00…
We think think this maybe the first time ever…
We know its miserable out but if you'd like to help us out please find our Abebooks offering below, all at 25% off at the moment…. pic.twitter.com/Cn5uhYWw88
We happened to be having a sale on our online site so, more in hope than expectation I pointed this out with a link at the bottom of the tweet.
MW: And what happened next?
RS: I went home. It’s a half-hour drive to home and by the time I got out of the car I thought there was something wrong with my phone. The thing wouldn’t shut up and it felt hot to the touch. There seemed to be something wrong with the twitter app, so I closed it and restarted the phone.
By the time I got into the house and the phone had restarted it just kept pinging again. Then I realised that the numbers under the tweet, the likes and retweets were going round in real time. I didn’t know that could happen.
Messages started coming in. People sympathised, of course. Then someone said, I’ve bought a book, and another and another. It was great to hear but I still didn’t properly understand what was going on. Then I noticed that Gyles Brandreth had retweeted us and I thought maybe that’s given the tweet some traction.
Then – Neil Gaiman. Now, Mr Gaiman has over 2 million followers. It’s probably true to say that most of those people like to read a book and feel affection for the very idea of bookshops. That was when it really took off.
Thousands of likes, then ten-thousand, fifteen… Messages just kept coming. I was answering as many as I could but by 2am I couldn’t keep going any more. It wasn’t till the next day when I got to work I discovered there had been over £1000 of books ordered overnight.
It wasn’t till the next day that I discovered it had been you who had put the tweet in front of Neil Gaiman that evening.
MW: And what about the following week?
RS: Honestly it still gives me chills to think about it. As the days unfolded it got bigger and bigger. The orders kept coming in. People all around the world heard the story and wanted to be involved. We had to organise volunteers on a Sunday to come and help pack books. We basically lived in the shop for two weeks.
I don’t know how it first got into the press but within a few hours we had phone calls coming in. John did all the television and I did the radio interviews. On one day alone there were 25 radio interviews. Local and national television news crews and The One Show were all falling over each other in the shop.
Every time you went to get a book from a cabinet to fulfil an order there was a camera pointing at you. Newspapers around the world and all the nationals here found a way to cover the story. It reached something of a climax in the shop on the Saturday afterwards when the customers, jammed almost shoulder to shoulder in the shop were moving around grinning madly and asking each other how far they had travelled: one couple came from Manchester.
There wasn’t a great deal of time to stop and think about it or process what was happening but every now and again during the weeks that followed you would stop and choke-up a little bit at just how amazing it was to be at the centre of such an outpouring of concern. We went from having a fairly ordinary 1,200 followers to about 22,000 in just a few days. We took 36 sacks of books to the Post Office.
Robert Sansom, bookseller, tweeting away, while shop owner John Westwood looks on.
MW: And since then? Did you keep your followers? And if so, what’s the secret to keeping them?
RS: Our following has stayed more or less steady on twitter ever since. It has been fascinating getting to know a group of people like that. Some very regularly interacting, others not, but one of the most interesting things about it has been that you get instant reaction. The social media paradigm of ‘likes’ means you get a very immediate sense of what people enjoy about your output and what doesn’t interest them.
I know now that our followers are big fans of natural history books, they go nuts for Folio Society books but they aren’t too moved by poetry. Pictures of books are often well-liked but people clearly respond really well to hearing the funny little goings on in the bookshop too.
Had a quick peek at one of the dollhouses as I turned all the lights out earlier…
MW: And what about the rest of what turned out to be a really tough year?
RS: It wasn’t very long after all this had finally begun to slow a little that Covid was suddenly upon us and we were told to close by the government. We had gone from Viral to Virus.
But now, we had 22,000 people to talk to. We don’t need to do a ‘hard sell’, I just wave a pretty book at people on twitter and usually within the hour someone enquires about how much it is: direct messages, paypal and email mean that they can often have bought it and the book is in the post within a couple of hours of me tweeting it.
Thinking about it, I honestly don’t know what we give our followers but I suppose I hope that they enjoy the books and feel some kind of connection to the shop, even if they are on the other side of the world. We have so very many new customers now and we know what they are after so we often contact them directly if something comes in that we think they will like, all because of an initial connection on Twitter.
I hope also they get some optimism. I think optimism is a really important quality right now. It is very easy to be pushed into reacting against things all the time and sometimes hard to turn and be ‘for’ things.
I believe passionately that books are not just an escape but a way of gaining a broader perspective and understanding that there are always things to be moving towards.
Robert Sansom, Petersfield Bookshop
MW: And how did “the Twitter Fairy” come into being?
RS: (Laughs) Oliver who runs the best bookshop twitter account in the world for Sotheran’s in London occasionally refers to himself as their Twitter Goblin, so the Twitter Fairy was a bit of a tongue in cheek homage really. We also have a Packing Troll (John) and I notice another bookshop now talks about its Social Gnome so clearly the whole thing is getting very out of control. There are some big challenges ahead still for sure. We still have just a skeleton staff and we had created a number of shop units some years ago from the huge footprint of the original shop and two of those have packed up and left this year so we have lost two significant rents. But the shop is now in a better spot financially than it has been for a long time.
And to celebrate a year on from that tweet, we had author Gyles Brandreth take over from the Twitter Fairy on Sunday 8th, giving wonderful readings from all sorts of books.
BREAKING NEWS: On Sunday, the Petersfield Bookshop Twitter Feed is being taken over by the inestimable @GylesB1
Gyles was one of the very first people to amplify THAT tweet almost a year ago (next week) and he has kindly agreed to offer some bookish wisdom a year on… pic.twitter.com/RxTEqum3dP
MW: And from what I see of your tweets, it’s not all about you?
RS: Right. We have been trying to give a little of it back or ‘pass it forward’ I think is what the young people say. Having a lot of people to talk to means it’s possible to ask them to give someone else, maybe another bookshop or a small publisher, a bit of a boost too. We are not talking to 2m people like Neil Gaiman but it seems to have made a difference sometimes when we do a ‘shout out’ to other people and ask our followers to take a look at them.
It's so good to see the support that can be generated on social media. We have obviously had a huge amount of it ourselves and it's a great feeling. https://t.co/vc1tDv1lyI
MW: Do you have any advice to other people struggling during this time, and to other traditional retailers who have struggled generally to keep their heads above water?
R.S. I wouldn’t presume to give advice. What happened to us was luck – lightning strike, one in a million kind of luck. I often reflect on how many things had to go right for it to have happened as it did. For example, you had to see the original tweet at the right time and think to yourself, in what I assume was no more than a casual moment at that point, to @ Neil Gaiman with it.
Then Neil Gaiman had to be online at the right time to both see that, and he had to decide to retweet it. I know as someone running a twitter account of tens of thousands how many messages and @s we get everyday, I can’t imagine how many he must get and so the decision to retweet or comment must have been a spur of the moment thing. Beyond that though, it didn’t have to take off. He could have retweeted it, and we could have had numerous messages of support and a few book orders and that could have been it. There was an indefinable something that made this one take off, not just online but in the real world of buying and selling books and it travelled around the world. I suppose if I was going to offer advice it can only be ‘ride your luck’, when something comes along, make the most of it you possibly can because …optimism.
And really, it was just extraordinary luck. The last time I looked, that tweet had been seen by 4.3million people!
The creation of the brand on the mugs from Life Is Amazing has been a long time in the process, and it’s fascinating to look back over the series of permutations that artwork and strapline has been through.
I first published the strapline incorporating Sherlock’s Home on facebook on 17th March 2019. On the previous day, my facebook post announced I was going to arrange the 2019 Holmes Fest, with the following artwork:
The exquisite cover to A Study In Scarlet is one that I had reworked from the original artwork taken from the Bodleian Library edition – one of the 11 complete copies that still exist – another one of which Portsmouth City Council owns.
At this stage I was simply making a statement of intention about Holmes Fest 2019, which I posted to my facebook account.
The following day, however, I must have gone back through previous files and found these rather messy images on my system that were created a month before on 9th February 2019 in PSD format…
I was clearly on a creative swing, because it was only two days from this initial sketch to arriving at the following images, which were created on 11th February 2019. The evolution of the imagery was radical:
Here, in contrast to the rather naff-looking Victorian font, I was looking for a kind of smooth, cool look that I could use for Southsea and Portsmouth. At the time, I focused on Southsea – Sherlock’s Home rather than Portsmouth – Sherlock’s Home simply because it is more accurate. Southsea at the time Sherlock was created was not a part of Portsmouth but a separate town, so I instinctively felt that Southsea in the strapline was more accurate.
That winning strapline – Sherlock’s Home – was the perfect pun on Sherlock Holmes in relation to Portsmouth. So, the day after I published my invitation to artists, I published the following permutations on facebook:
Basically, with this, I was doing what I love best, creating and making. I realised that the strapline Sherlock’s Home was a winner, as friends commented to me at the time.
Unfortunately, I was unable to go ahead with Holmes Fest that year, with the sudden and hugely unexpected developments around The Snow Witch – an arts project that absolutely flew. But the idea would not leave me, and this year I finally came back to it.
So, look out for Holmes Fest 2021, and for more merchandise, too! 🙂
To celebrate the creation of the world famous detective Sherlock Holmes while Arthur Conan Doyle was living in Southsea, Life Is Amazing are pleased to announce the release of this special mug!
The stylish white and blue design is perfect for the dedicated Sherlockian and anyone with a love of Portsmouth and Southsea, too!
The design on the side incorporates Holmes’ trademark accoutrements – his deerstalker hat, pipe and magnifying glass.
It reads: Southsea – Sherlock’s Home in celebration of the character’s “birth” from the brain of writer Arthur Conan Doyle while he lived in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth.
Order your Southsea Sherlock Holmes mug here!
Your mug will be sent to you direct from Southsea.
In fact, Life Is Amazing is based only a few hundred metres from the site where Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes while he was working as a General Practitioner on Elm Grove, where he lived at Number 1 Bush Villas.
A man who enjoyed working his grey matter over a cup of tea brought to him by Mrs Hudson, Sherlock Holmes would surely approve of the modern sleuth meditating over a hot beverage that lubricates the thought processes!
The price is just £10 including postage in the UK!
As a publisher, we’re always interested in seeing what great work other writers and publishers are doing – especially in the realm of the strange, of the historical and of folk horror. In a recent exchange on twitter, author Matt Wingett got to find out about Willow Winsham’s excellent book England’s Witchcraft Trials. Here’s a review of this fascinating work.
Whether you’re a believer in the possibility of witchcraft, a student of history, a witch yourself or an out-and-out sceptic of all things supernatural, Willow Winsham’s fascinating account of the persecution of witches during the British period of the European Witch Mania of the late Middle Ages and early modern period has numerous lessons to teach.
The Witchcraft Act was passed in England in 1566, and over the following 100 years or so saw the execution of 450 people, mainly women. Willow takes five of the more notorious cases and examines them closely.
In many ways, the stories are distressingly similar: A member of the community is taken ill. Doctors advise that because they can’t find a cure, there must be a supernatural element to the sickness, or a member of the community suspects that is the case. Suspicions are raised against an individual who is usually an outsider or in some way disliked by the community – and suddenly witch mania catches light, numerous other women are found to be in league with the first accused, and a nefarious and apparently rather pointless plot by the devil to spread misery on earth is discovered.
From here, a trial relying on circumstantial evidence pulling suspiciously similar confessions from simple countrywomen who have either been terrified into co-operation, or promised leniency, ends in the witches being found guilty before an outraged, astonished and fearful community. After this the poor objects of community wrath are almost invariably executed.
Reading this book is in many ways an object lesson in how a set of pre-existing beliefs will shape the outcome of an investigation. Even with the distance of 400 years, it is both frustrating and distressing to see the benighted attitudes of those dispensing justice, and the apparent willingness of women and men to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.
With careful attention to court documents, pamphlets, parish registers and other resources, Willow Winsham has recreated those times with extraordinary power. There were moments when reading this book that I felt I couldn’t go on, I was so frustrated with the testimony being shaped by the interrogators as they sought to bring their supposed witches to the gallows.
At times, the motives of some accusers stand out as utterly baffling. The daughters of women accused of witchcraft level lurid accusations against their own mothers. Children supposedly cursed by a witch clearly derive sadistic pleasure from their deadly game of feigning illness in the accused’s presence, despite the accused pleading otherwise and utterly baffled by the disaster engulfing her.
At other times, the behaviour of the accused witches is equally puzzling to the modern mind. Why would a woman admit to having sex with the devil, to suckling demons through unnatural teats, of making “pictures” (poppets or models) of their victims into which they drive pins, of keeping demon familiars and attending a coven? Thus, while the stories unfold with fascinating detail, one is left wondering at the psychological state of all involved, and at the sense of fatalism that must have overcome the accused witches, who thus resigned themselves to being the projection board for all the fears and prejudices of a court that was anything but unbiased.
It is true that some of the witches had already built themselves reputations for having powers that brought locals to them in times of need. But what really comes through is these poor women’s ignorance of the bigger picture and precedence in other parts of the country, as they enter into a deadly game of firstly denial and then confession – perhaps hoping to bring the ordeal to a close and protect other members of their family.
This last invariably proves a forlorn hope. Since witchcraft was viewed as akin to a disease or hereditary illness that must infect other family members and friends, the accusations spread wider and wider still, rippling out across the community. Clearly, the whole phenomenon was used by those seeking to scapegoat others, settle old scores or in the misguided belief they were doing the work of God. Whatever the motives, the gallows awaited at the end of these true-life calamities.
The five well documented accounts here told include two of the most famous names in the history of English witchcraft. Those are, firstly, the village of Pendle in which a genuine witch-hysteria appears to break out, abetted by rivalries between two families of traditional healers; and secondly, the name of the infamous witchfinder Matthew Hopkins.
The real attraction in all these accounts is the way Willow doesn’t sensationalise them. She pushes past later retellings and dramatisations of the events to relate as accurately as she can the true stories of the (mostly) women accused, the behaviour of their tormentors and accusers, the accused’s own sinking sense of losing control of events and at times a fatalist acceptance of what is going to happen to them.
Because of the long gap in time between then and now, there are countless questions left unanswered. The psychological motives of the accusers and the accused, the set of cultural circumstances that could even lead to this persecution arising, the acceptance by many of what the modern mind knows does not even meet the most basic tests for evidence, what actually went on between witchfinders and their victims, the secret deals the witches thought they might be making, the lack of good faith on the part of the courts… There is much drama in this book, and it is well worth a delve.
England’s Witchcraft Trials by Willow Winsham is available from Pen And Sword Books www.pen-and-sword.co.uk for £12.99, and from all good retailers, including Amazon. ISBN 9781473870949.
Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes while he was working as a doctor in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth. Now, Southsea-based author Matt Wingett has faithfully redrawn the cover to enable fans of Holmes to enjoy the image in a brand new, sharply produced image to go on your wall.
“The original image was embossed in gilt on cloth,” says Matt. “This means getting a high quality image was difficult, since the grain of the cloth interfered with the shapes in the design. That’s why I decided to completely redraw it, staying totally faithful to the original.”
Matt says reproducing it in this way has given him a fresh appreciation of the design’s subtlety.
“The image of the great hound with the moon behind him is striking, but more puzzling to me was the interlacing gilt beneath the image. When I paid more attention to its organic shapes hidden beneath the ground, with with one shoot striking upwards out of the black earth, I realised how the design symbolised the hidden tangle of deceit that really lies beneath the legend of the Black Hound of Dartmoor, that in the novel haunts the Baskervilles. I really came to love this image, with its question marks in circles on either side.”
Matt took several weeks to get the image right. “I’m proud of the new image,” says Matt. “And of course, it will be sent from Southsea, from my home, which is just half a mile from where Conan Doyle created Holmes. It’s a great honour to be associated with the author, even in such a small way.”
