Friday 10 February 2012

Sherlock Holmes

I finally saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie last week, and like the first of the modern remakes, I quite enjoyed it. I was aware in advance that one of the plot points was a game of chess between Holmes and Professor Moriarty, although I did not realise it would appear so late in the movie. Nonetheless even this was well done, as I believe that well known chess organiser Adam Raoof was an advisor for this scene, although I failed to spot his name in the credits (and I read every single one of them!). The only minor quibble was that the clocks seemed to start on the hour, rather than at 5 minutes to, if correctly set for a game of blitz.
Of course the fact that Sherlock Holmes played chess was a creation of the script writers, as he did not do so in the Conan Doyle stories. He did in fact comment on the game in The Adventure of the Retired Colourman  saying ‘Amberley excelled at chess – one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind’, but that was about it.
Since the publication of the original works, other have attempted to link Holmes with chess, including Raymond Smullyan's "The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes". If you want to investigate these later attempts then Edward Winter has a good summary here.

1 comment:

Paul Dunn said...

Of course, the Chess and Bridge Shop is at 44 Baker St, just down the road from where Sherlock Holmes was said to have lived in the stories, 221B Baker St.