January 17: Sherlock Holmes and Anthony Horowitz

The Estate of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, announced on this date in 2011 the selection of British novelist Anthony Horowitz, the author of some forty books as well as numerous television scripts (including Foyle’s War), to write a new Sherlock Holmes novel. The book, called The House of Silk, was published in November of the same year and featured Holmes, Doctor Watson, and Professor Moriarty. A second Holmes novel by Horowitz, Moriarty, was published in November, 2014. “Dorothy L. Sayers understood the rules of the Holmesian game,” wrote Ian Sansom in The Guardian about The House of Silk, “when she remarked that ‘it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s: the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.’ Horowitz plays a perfectly straight bat. This is a no-shit Sherlock.” Horowitz was also recently commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write a new James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, published in September, 2015. Arthur Conan Doyle himself was a well-known supporter of Zionism, but from the perspective of the British Brothers League, a populist anti-Semitic organization in East London that viewed with alarm the mass immigration to Great Britain of Jews fleeing tsarist oppression: Doyle “wanted a territorial solution to the Jewish question (aka the ‘Alien Question’ as it was known then in Britain) and Zionism created a territory to boot the problematic jews out to,” according to Karl Radl’s blog Semitic Controversies.

“ ‘What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.” —Sherlock Holmes, “The Cardboard Box”