New Sherlock Holmes Series Will Fill In Major Arthur Conan Doyle Lore Gap
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Yet another new take on Sherlock Holmes is arriving next year, but this one will be tackling "The Great Hiatus."
The Death of Sherlock Holmes aims to answer long-standing questions and be a thrilling genre entry. The forthcoming Sky Television series stars Rafe Spall as a mysterious Englishman who is found in an icy river in Switzerland, where he is taken in by Alma (Deleila Piasko) and called upon to use his sleuthing abilities when her son is accused of murder. The lead actor, for one, believes this is a one-of-a-kind reimagining.
The premise includes a murder mystery to be solved, making it a whodunit in its own right, but The Death of Sherlock Holmes also uniquely takes place between Holmes' purported death in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Final Problem and his unplanned return in The Adventure of the Empty House. Spall states in a new interview with Deadline that genre fans will be "satisfied" by the typical Holmesian storyline, which also happens to be "the first attempt [he] can think of to fill in the gap."
Check out Spall's full comments below:
Fans of the genre will be satisfied by the whodunit – the question of how something happened and the mysterious nature of it. They'll also get a thrill from seeing flashes of this famous character’s powers of deduction. What's interesting is that Conan Doyle got sick of writing Sherlock Holmes. He killed him off, with Holmes and Moriarty falling off the Reichenbach Falls. Then, I think, he missed the money, so three years later he brought him back. This is the first attempt I can think of to fill in the gap of what happened, so it isn't based on a Conan Doyle novel. It's a new story that, hopefully, fulfills people's expectations of a Sherlock Holmes story. There's a lot of mystery and a classic Holmes whodunit at its heart.
Spall refers to a notorious moment in literary history: Feeling he was finished with Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle wrote the fight between Holmes and James Moriarty in The Final Problem, where they both seemingly fall to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Doyle was then faced with a massive, unprecedented backlash from readers to the beloved detective's death.
Owing to public demand and financial pressures, Doyle eventually resurrected Holmes, releasing a new story 10 years later, the plot of which follows the events at the Reichenbach Falls. Doyle provided a wild explanation for Holmes' survival, involving him scaling the cliffs of the Falls, as well as where he was for the next three years. But The Death of Sherlock Holmes will focus specifically on this gap in time.
Still, the sense of an unsolvable mystery surrounds Holmes' fake-out death in other adaptations. The two most high-profile adaptations of the 21st century don't give a clear answer. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the second of two movies starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, ends with the reveal that Holmes is alive, but little explanation after the scene depicting an inescapable fall.
And BBC's Sherlock tackled the cliffhanger of its second season finale by showing several of Sherlock's (Benedict Cumberbatch) in-world fans theorizing how he survived (a metatextual commentary on the real-world Sherlock fandom), but did not specify who is closest to being right. The Death of Sherlock Holmes' synopsis suggests that Holmes had no great plan to escape; he survived the fall by sheer luck and washed up somewhere later.
The Death of Sherlock Holmes will also feature Thomas Kaschel as John Watson and Christian Koerner as Mycroft Holmes, so at least a few tie-ins to the broader Sherlock Holmes lore are in store. But it remains to be seen if this series will prove to be a fulfilling, possible resolution to a fictional matter that has puzzled audiences for over a century.
The Death of Sherlock Holmes is slated to premiere on Sky Television sometime in 2027.
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