More Ado About Holmes

As a combination clipping bureau and packrat, I accumulated these advertisements and articles about that ol’ Consulting Detective of Baker Street.

            A previous post about some other Holmesiana is here.

             When the public learned about the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, speculation abounded as to the topic.  Aliens?  Pot-roast recipes?  Jimmy Hoffa?

            Well, a smart aleck named Stefan Kanfer decided to corral history’s most famous detective and sic him on the case.  Kanfer does a cute job of looping in England’s 1970s socialism, the Energy Crisis, and ... read for yourself!

            Of course, just because Holmes solved the case, that doesn’t mean he will tell us...

            Later that year of 1974, Nick Meyer’s masterful pastiche The Seven-Per-Cent Solution rated this review from Time.

            A couple of years later, the film adaptation was surveyed by Newsweek.

            And similarly in a review published in the Tulsa World, the day after Christmas, 1976.

         

 Holmes and Watson were sufficiently well-known to plug cars on TV and in print ads.  Even the tracking dog Toby (from The Sign of the Four but resurrected by Meyer in Seven-Per-Cent) makes an appearance!

           When Meyer’s sequel, The West End Horror, arrived, the paperback rights were snapped up by Ballantine, who took out the above ad in Publishers Weekly to lay out their publicity campaign.

             Well, that’s it for this collection of stuff exhumed from books.  See you next time!