From The Urban Writers:

Finishing your first book leaves you feeling like you’ve finally arrived at the center stage. The excitement alone can make your world spin around as you read it once more. It’s understandable when the authors want to rush into the next step.

However, they don’t realize there’s a bunch of sharks waiting out there, waiting to snatch them. New writers must take a step back and consider Amazon’s self-publishing cost and pricing before they allow these predators to grab hold of them.

I was in your position a few years back and I was impatient to get my book out there. I needed people to read my story and listen to my advice. I emailed publishers all over the world with a manuscript, hoping to get a response. 

It was only two weeks before the first shark came at me head-first. This publisher was prepared to take my book, but they wanted me to pay for publishing costs upfront. The quotes started pouring in and I was shocked with the requests!

Suddenly, I felt like I had to sell my soul and those of my kids, spouse, and even my dog just to cover the costs. Figures ranged madly but the average was well over $2,000 from publishers that didn’t even leave a stain on the map. 

This might not seem like Mount Kilimanjaro, but I assure you that this was only the cost to get started. I still had to pay ridiculous commissions on top of this. The sacrifice of my soul wasn’t enough and they only promised me 25% of future sales. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t use the easily accessible internet to find other options like a normal person would. I ended up giving my book to a company that would give me 15% royalties and owns the first 5,000 copies in lieu of printing costs. 

I sold my book to the devil, never mind a shark. They haven’t bothered to promote the book and it became lost in the vast world of available reads. The worst of all is that my book is sitting on Amazon at a price that even I wouldn’t pay. 

My heart breaks every time I see my book without reviews, simply wallowing in the black hole of nothingness. I signed my rights away and have no power to take it back or change the price. I don’t want you to experience the same thing I did. 

Link to the rest at The Urban Writers

PG isn’t familiar with The Urban Writers, which apparently sells various editing, formatting, cover design, etc., services to indie authors. They may provide good services at a fair price.

However, PG is inclined to be a bit suspicious of services that bundle various services that may benefit self-published authors. Invariably, not all the money an author pays is going to the people who are editing, formatting, designing covers, performing social media marketing (which can mean almost anything), writing reviews for hire, etc.

Some organizations farm out the actual work to inexpensive offshore labor, which may or may not provide very good quality.

PG suggests that indie authors keep their hands on the wheel of their career and spend some time understanding what’s involved in formatting an ebook or POD books (hint: not very much, although some people do a better job than others).

KDP provides a free tool called Kindle Create which will do a credible job of formatting a clean manuscript into an ebook. Draft2Digital offers more ebooks formatting options than Kindle Create (and, to PG’s eye, better-looking options). It very generously will allow you to use the formatted ebook file to
publish through D2D or anywhere else.

You’ll want to go through the resulting ebook file to check for any errors. Still, they’re not difficult to fix, either in the ebook file or by going back to your original MS and tweaking the format in your original word processing file, then running it back through the ebook formatting tool.

As far as cover design is concerned, an excellent cover will require someone with a good eye and some design talent, but you can find those sorts of people online or, depending upon where you live, among your circle of friends and acquaintances. You’re looking for someone who knows how to use digital design
tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop or an equivalent program and creates the sort of thing you think looks polished.

If a local community college offers classes or a major in design, they’ll almost certainly require students to use current digital design tools. Talented students are usually happy to take on projects for a bit of money to help build their design portfolios.

Cruise through Amazon’s book listings, particularly in your genre, and note covers that you think look good and are examples of the type of cover you’re looking for and share this information with your cover artist.

There’s nothing wrong with working with remote professionals to access the talent you need to provide the parts of a finished book you’re not able to create yourself. Still, PG thinks you’re more likely to get better quality at a better price than you will by sending your money to a website black box and hoping you’ll receive something you’ll like in return.

But, as with all other opinions he expresses, PG could be wrong and is happy to be educated concerning his lack of knowledge about a wide range of subjects in the comments.

From The Wall Street Journal:

When Walt Whitman began conceiving his great volume of poetry, “Leaves of Grass,” in the 1850s, American democracy was in serious danger over the issue of slavery. As we celebrate National Poetry Month this month, the problems facing our democracy are different, but Whitman still has a great deal to teach us about democratic life, because he saw that we are perpetually in danger of succumbing to two antidemocratic forces. The first is hatred between Americans, which Whitman saw erupt into civil war in 1861.

The second danger lies in the hunger for kings. The European literature and culture that preceded Whitman and surrounded him when he wrote “Leaves of Grass” was largely what he called “feudal”: It revolved around the elect, the special, the few. Whitman understood human fascination with kings and aristocrats, and he sometimes tried to debunk it. But mostly he asked his readers to shift their interest away from feudalism to the beauties of democracy and the challenge of sustaining and expanding it.

This challenge is what inspired him to find his central poetic image for democracy, the grass: “A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands.” Whitman says that he can’t and won’t offer a literal answer to the question. Instead he spins into an astonishing array of “guesses.” The grass “is the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”; it’s “the handkerchief of the Lord…Bearing the owner’s name somewhere in the corners, that we may see and remark and say Whose?”

To Whitman, “the grass is itself a child…the produced babe of the vegetation.” “Tenderly will I use you, curling grass,” he writes. “It may be that you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps / And here you are the mothers’ laps.” He offers one metaphor for the grass after another, and one feels that he could go on forever.

But mainly Whitman’s grass signifies American equality: “I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,/And it means,/Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,/Growing among black folks as among white,/Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff,/I give them the same, I receive them the same.” Whatever our race and origin, whatever our station in life, we’re all blades of grass. But by joining together we become part of a resplendent field of green, stretching gloriously on every side.

Whitman found a magnificent metaphor for democratic America and its people. Like snowflakes, no two grass blades are alike. Each one has its own being, a certain kind of chlorophyll-based individuality. Yet step back and you’ll see that the blades are all more like each other than not. Americans, too, are at least as much alike as we are different, and probably more so. America is where we can be ourselves and yet share deep kinship with our neighbors.

And who are our neighbors? Kanuck, Congressman, Tuckahoe, Cuff—Canadian, legislator, Virginia planter, Black man, all of the teeming blades of grass that we see around us. When you stand back far enough, you can’t see any of the individual blades, but look closer and there they are—vibrant and unique, no two alike. We say “e pluribus unum,” from many one. But who could have envisioned what that would look like and how it would feel before Whitman came along?

The grass is Whitman’s answer to the problem that bedeviled his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson: how to resolve the tension between the individual and the group. Emerson is sometimes hopeful that the two can cohere. When you speak your deep and true thoughts, no matter how controversial, he believed that in time the mass of men and women will come around to you. Each will say, ‘this is my music, this is myself,” Emerson says in “The American Scholar.” But mostly he is skeptical, believing that society is almost inevitably the enemy of genius and individuality.

Whitman’s image of the grass suggests that the one and the many can merge, and that discovery allows him to imagine a world without significant hierarchy. Can any one blade of grass be all that much more important than any other? When you make the grass the national flag, as it were, you get to love and appreciate all the people who surround you. You become part of a community of equals. You can feel at home.

In “Leaves of Grass,” soon after he offers his master metaphor Whitman rises up to view American democracy from overhead. The poem’s famous catalogues of people doing what they do every day are quite simple: “On the piazza walk five friendly matrons with twined arms;/ The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold,/The Missourian crosses the plains, toting his wares and his cattle,/The fare-collector goes through the train—he gives notice by the jingling of loose change.”

This is your family, these are your sisters and brothers, Whitman effectively says. In general, we walk the streets with a sense of isolation. But if we can move away from our addictions to hierarchy and exclusive individuality, and embrace Whitman’s trope of the grass, our experience of day-to-day life can be different. We can look at those we pass and say not “That is another” but “That too is me. That too I am.” Or so Whitman hopes.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG admits that it has been a very long time since he has read Leaves of Grass, but the OP stimulated a desire to reread it.

From Wikipedia:

The interrobang, also known as the interabang (often represented by ?!, !?, ?!? or !?!), is an unconventional punctuation mark used in various written languages and intended to combine the functions of the question mark, or interrogative point; and the exclamation mark, or exclamation point, known in the jargon of printers and programmers as a “bang”. The glyph is a superimposition of these two marks. The interrobang was first proposed in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter.

. . . .

A sentence ending with an interrobang asks a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question.

For example:

• You call that a hat‽
• You’re dying‽
• What are those‽

Writers using informal language may use several alternating question marks and exclamation marks for even more emphasis; however, this is regarded as poor style in formal writing

. . . .

American Martin K. Speckter (1915 – February 14, 1988) conceptualized the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if copywriters conveyed surprised rhetorical questions using a single mark. He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks. Speckter solicited possible names for the new character from readers. Contenders included exclamaquest, QuizDing, rhet, and exclarotive, but he settled on interrobang. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it: interrogatio is Latin for “rhetorical question” or “cross-examination”; bang is printers’ slang for the exclamation mark. Graphic treatments for the new mark were also submitted in response to the article.

. . . .

Link to the rest at Wikipedia

From The New York Times:

Martin K. Speckter, a retired advertising executive known to lexicographers as the creator of the interrobang, a punctuation mark used to convey disbelief, died of bone cancer Sunday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 73 years old and lived in Manhattan.

From 1956 to 1969, Mr. Speckter was president of Martin K. Speckter Associates Inc., which handled promotion for The Wall Street Journal, The National Observer, Barron’s weekly and the Dow Jones News Service. In 1962, Mr. Speckter developed the interrobang, since recognized by several dictionaries and some type and typewriter companies.

. . . .

The [interrobang] mark is said to be the typographical equivalent of a grimace or a shrug of the shoulders. It applied solely to the rhetorical, Mr. Speckter said, when a writer wished to convey incredulity.

. . . .

He was editor of TYPEtalks magazine from 1959 to 1968 and wrote many articles. He was also the author of a book, ”Disquisition on the Composing Stick” published by Typophiles Inc. in 1971.

Link to the rest at The New York Times

From Dictionary.com:

disquisition

^{[ dis-kwuh–zish–uhn ]}

a formal discourse or treatise in which a subject is examined and discussed; dissertation.

Link to the rest at Dictionary.com

From Type Talks:

“To this day, we don’t know exactly what Columbus had in mind when he shouted ‘Land, ho.’ Most historians insist that he cried, ‘Land, ho!’ but there are others who claim it was really ‘Land ho?’ Chances are the intrepid Discoverer was both excited and doubtful, but neither at that time did we, nor even yet, do we, have a point which clearly combines and melds interrogation with exclamation.”

–”Making a New Point, or How About That . . ..” Martin K. Specter, Type Talks, March-April, 1962

From CNN:

The widespread yet varying attention drawn by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “Hemingway” documentary series — which ran its course on PBS last week — proves, if nothing else, that its subject still lingers in the world’s collective consciousness almost a century after his first books were first published.

While Ernest Hemingway may no longer dominate the literary scene as he had by the middle of the 20th century, the mystique of his public and private lives resonates into the 21st.
The most mysterious question to me is: Why do we still care about him?

. . . .

If one had to name American writers from the previous century with whom younger generations of readers are most fascinated today, the list wouldn’t start with Hemingway, but (at least off the top of my head) with James Baldwin, Joan Didion and Toni Morrison. Even Flannery O’Connor, also the subject of a recently aired PBS documentary, has come under greater scrutiny in recent years, if only to assess some of the racist sentiments found in both her letters and in her vivid, acerbically comic depictions of Southern life.

If there’s anything upon which literary critics and general readers can agree when it comes to Hemingway, it is this: his use of language is what endures and influences more than any other attribute of his work. The Hemingway style — clipped, allusive, laconic and hard-boiled — helped give American writing its rhythm and tone as much as blues and jazz helped give American music its global identity. Hemingway’s style, in language and in life, reads like a metaphor for what it means to be an American, for better and for worse. Our inability to let him go speaks less to what we encounter on the page and more to what lurks behind it — about Hemingway, and about us — that we alternate between reveling in and wanting to unsee.

Hemingway’s novels, notably “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) and “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), are still taught in schools, as are his short stories — many of which, like “The Killers,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” — are considered even greater in retrospect than his novels. Yet even those two classics haven’t been as durably read and analyzed in our own time as has, for example, “The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925 by F. Scott Fitzgerald, once Hemingway’s good friend and, later, bitter rival.

. . . .

Though a best-seller in its time, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” now comes across as overly melodramatic and, somewhat surprising for a Hemingway novel, tin-eared and anachronistic in its dialogue, leaning heavily on “thee” and “thine” in its exchanges.

There is also the matter of Hemingway’s personal life, which some believe was his most audacious and eternally absorbing creation: His full engagement with what his hero Theodore Roosevelt called “the strenuous life” of hunting, fishing and physical risk enhanced the fame he’d first achieved as a writer. His public and private peccadillos were as much fodder for tabloids as any movie star of the early-to-mid-20th century as was his mercurial temperament.

The critic Wilfrid Sheed put it best when he wrote that Hemingway “was capable of kindness like several million others, and of cruelty at which he was a little special.” The PBS series is unsparing when it comes to depicting both the kindness and cruelty Hemingway directed toward his wives, lovers, children and friends.

Link to the rest at CNN

PG asks the question – Is the worth of an author’s books determined by how well the author fits into the contemporary standards of a critic at the time when the critic is writing a review or a story about the author?

PG contends that Hemingway’s world was a far different world than the one we inhabit in 2021. His first book was published in 1926, nearly 100 years ago. His blockbuster novels, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, were all written over 80 years ago. He died 60 years ago.

Do we judge Agatha Christie or Edith Wharton or P.G. Wodehouse or Edna Ferber or EM Forster by 21st century norms?

Forester, Ferber, Wodehouse, Wharton and Christie have each been branded a racist by today’s standards. So have John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck, Daphne du Maurier and Somerset Maugham. If you conduct a Google search with the name of prominent 20th century author with the word, racism, you’ll find a long list of accused.

PG suggests that virtually all contemporary authors will write something that seems stupid and insensitive to those reading their books 100 years from now.

Mrs. PG has released a new book, The Hollywood Murders.

“What’s that about?” you ask.

Here’s PG’s take on the book.

You start with two people who teach literature in Oxford (England, not Mississippi, with no offense intended toward alumni of The University of Mississippi) in the mid 1930’s. Their names are Miss Catherine Tregowyn and and Dr. Harry Bascombe.

Some visitors to TPV will immediately claim that there is no village called Hollywood in England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland.

Those visitors would be wrong and, most likely, living in America.

In fact, Hollywood is a large village in the Bromsgrove district of Worcestershire, England. It used to be part of Kings Norton, but, as they say in Hollywood, that’s so yesterday.

The Hollywood Golf Course ensures that Hollywood will never actually be in Birmingham (England, not Alabama, with no offense intended toward alumni of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Samford University, Birmingham-Southern College, Miles College or any of the three law schools in Birmingham).

PG has cleverly set his visitors asking, “Do Mrs. PG’s murders happen in England or in the United States? Thus residents of both England and the United States are already drawn into the mystery.

You don’t have to buy the book to get the answer (although you should buy the book for a great many other reasons).

The answer is . . . Hollywood, America!!!

Hollywood, England, will have to wait for a later book by Mrs. PG for its moment in the sun. But PG can make no promises.

Catherine and Harry are teaching summer English literature classes at The University of California, Los Angeles campus AKA UCLA.

But, wait! Did UCLA actually exist in 1935? This is the United States, after all, not England, and everything in California was built yesterday or the day before or, at most, last week!

Hah!

The Southern Branch of The University of California (the original tree was in Berkeley) was created by law in 1919. It was a sort-of successor to the California State Normal School (not an adjective that is always used by those referring to the Los Angeles area) which had existed for awhile before that.

After being scurrilously attacked as “The Twig” by its hated rival, The University of Southern California, the Southern Branch became The University of California, Los Angeles, and moved its campus to Westwood, a suburb of Los Angeles. Westwood is east of Beverley Hills which is east of Hollywood!

Alert observers will note that this location makes it easy for a student at UCLA to travel a short distance and murder someone in Hollywood. Not that it happens all the time, but it’s a possibility.

So, Catherine and Harry are in the vicinity of Hollywood in the 1930’s, which is in the heart of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Mrs. PG is writing Golden Age Mysteries, so it’s a perfect fit.

While Harry and Catherine are perfectly comfortable in Golden Age Mysteries, Golden Age Hollywood is another story. It is not at all like Oxford. A Yank at Oxford won’t appear until 1938 and, suffice to say, the Yank stands out a bit although the Brits apparently like his style.

But back to Mrs. PG’s book.

Catherine and Harry are teaching away and, wouldn’t you know it, a big shot in the movie business gets murdered.

A Parisian movie star who made the mistake of coming to the United States for her American debut is accused of murder. Evidently, Los Angeles is short on local murderers, so they decide to lock up a European.

You would think they could find somebody from Nevada to lock up, but no, Hollywood is getting fancy, so it’s only right to grab somebody with an accent and charge them. The European damsel is, of course, innocent, but try to prove that in a town full of phonies who all came from somewhere else.

The L.A. police are a bit different than the Oxford constabulary, but Catherine and Harry still manage to eventually persuade the police that they need to arrest the real murderer.

Mrs. PG includes a few Oxford/Hollywood disjunctions and drops her sleuths into deep terra incognita but the two Oxonians at UCLA manage to come back from their summer with distinction.

The PG’s would appreciate it if any who feel they might enjoy her book would give it a try.

From Women Writers, Women’s Books:

What is so special about Venice?

One question writers are always asked is where we get our ideas from. Sometimes it isn’t possible to define this. A tiny germ of an idea turns into something bigger: an overheard snatch of conversation turns into a full-blown mystery. An afternoon trip to Ellis Island sparked my whole Molly Murphy series. But in the case of THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK I can tell you exactly what created the story for me.

The first thing is Venice itself. Who wouldn’t want to write about that magical city, where the marble palaces seem to float above the water, where a gondolier’s song echoes up from the canals. Spending a summer doing research in Venice was an absolute treat, rekindling all my memories of past vacations in that city.

I have a life-long love of Venice that started in my childhood. When I was a teenager my parents rented a little villa just outside the city of Venice. Every day we’d drive across the causeway, park and my parents would give us some money.

“See you at five o’clock,” they’d say and we were free to wander the city on our own. We’d explore back alleys, climb trees in the Giardini, swim at the Lido and check out every gelato stand in the city. We got to know our way around really well, in fact when I went back again for the first time, taking my daughter who had just graduated from high school, I’d stop and say, “If you go through this little tunnel, I think you’ll come out…”

“Mom,” she’d say. “That’s someone’s back yard. You can’t…:

But I went through and yes—we came out to exactly the place I was heading.

. . . .

A few years ago I was thinking about my aunt and wondered why it was always Venice at Easter, not Rome or another Italian city. And an improbable thought entered my head. What if it was not just the city and the Easter celebrations that attracted her. What if she met someone there? A sort of ‘same time, next year’. What if she had another life that none of us knew about?

Link to the rest at Women Writers, Women’s Books

Mrs. PG and PG were having a conversation at lunch the other day about some of their enjoyable vacation trips.

For the record, we are not great travelers, but have been able to take some very nice trips to various locales in past years.

If PG had to chose his most favorite city in the world, it would have to be Florence.

In part, his choice is influenced by a wonderful woman who operated an unpretentious bed and breakfast not far from the train station where PG and Mrs. PG enjoyed some wonderful visits. She was wonderfully friendly and kind and her breakfasts always tasted marvelous due in no small part to our conversations with her, her two sons and a daughter-in-law-to-be.

She was also very helpful for us when we wanted to go somewhere we hadn’t visited before, giving us detailed instructions from memory, including the bus numbers, stops for transfers (with what we should look for to know when the stop was near) and other things we might want to see in the vicinity of our destination, including restaurants. She would offer to pack us a lunch if we were traveling to a distant attraction where she couldn’t give us first-hand advice about the local restaurants.

Our hostess’s suggestions lead us to a great many Florentine destinations we would have been unlikely to discover using only a guidebook and warned us away from a couple which didn’t meet her standards.

Without going on for too long, Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance and its history includes some of the most creative and amazing people ever to populate the planet. Plus, the Florentine trading families generated lots of money to fund artists, architects and workers and they built with marble and other stone that was durable and difficult to destroy.

So, Florence is #1, but Venice is #2.

PG had a couple of pressing jobs to do yesterday and it took him a lot longer than he expected it would.

PG is not dead or ailing.

He tries to post here on a daily basis or warn visitors if he’s not going to be posting in advance. He does this, in part, because some visitors have expressed worries over the reasons for PG’s absent posts in the past.

He assures one and all that, shortly after his death, he’ll turn to a disembodied computer (He knows they’ll have Windows in Hell, but wonders if it can exist in Heaven. If not, all the Mac people will have the ultimate “I told you so” moment.) and log in to post farewell.

Yesterday’s last job was one that PG should have been able to finish in much less time than he ended up spending on it. PG will spare you the frustrating details, but, unlike the legal work PG does, some computer tasks require what (for PG) are idiotically detailed preparations that must be exactly right down to the very smallest detail.

PG can understand that. He tends to fall into detail-oriented (OCD, but functional) mode when he’s doing important tasks. That’s a good thing when he’s writing a contract or analyzing one.

However, unlike with some computer tasks, when PG makes a small change in one part of the contract, while the change may affect or be affected by one or more other provisions in the agreement, it doesn’t cause the entire document to refuse to open or to disappear or to insert smiley-face icons on every page.

For PG, the last half of yesterday was one filled with suddenly-appearing then disappearing haunted and devilish smiley-face icons (metaphorically speaking).

From Crime Reads:

We’re ranking Sherlock Holmes performances. One hundred of them. Not Sherlock Holmes adaptations, but the representations within them of Sherlock Holmes himself. Now, you might think that you know the best Sherlock Holmes, but as the man himself has said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” 

. . . .

What are the criteria we’re using to rank these portrayals? Fidelity to the source text? Creativeness of the interpretations? Resemblance to Sidney Paget’s illustrations? Quality of acting? Kind of. Simply put, portrayals are ranked in their ability to present a Holmes who makes sense as a derivation of the original character while exploring, interrogating, and expanding the character’s qualities in a thoughtful and meaningful way. And of course, yes, the quality of the performance itself matters.

. . . .

Please note that we’re ranking Sherlock Holmes portrayals (characters who are literally supposed to be Sherlock Holmes), not portrayals of characters who are based on or inspired by Sherlock Holmes. Gregory House is not on this list. Repeat. Gregory House is not on this list. Neither is Owen Wilson’s “Sherlock Holmes” in Shanghai Knights. And neither is Douglas Fairbanks’s spoofy Sherlock character “Coke Ennyday.”

. . . .

96. Hans Albers, Der Mann, Der Sherlock Holmes War (1937)

The Germans made a lot of Sherlock Holmes movies in 1937, and a bunch of them involve guys with stereotypically English names who turn out to be Sherlock Holmes in disguise. This film is no different; the German (and eventually kind of Nazi) movie star Hans Albers plays “Morris Flynn,” a guy who turns out to really be… Holmes. Albers has a very spooky, bright gaze, as if if his irises are somehow clear, and I don’t like it. The good news about the film, on the whole, is that Watson’s alter-ego is named “Macky McMacpherson” and I really enjoy that the Germans thought this would be a believable name for an Englishman. The bad news is, again, that Hans Albers was kind of a Nazi. Or, he didn’t not benefit from the rise of Nazis, let’s put it that way.

. . . .

86. Charlton Heston, The Crucifer of Blood (1991)

You know who’s a weird Sherlock Holmes? Charlton Heston. Maybe it’s just hard for me, personally, to reconcile the late NRA president with the most rational character in literary history, but Heston’s Holmes is squinty and gravely and his officious English accent makes him sound like he thinks he’s playing a Roman senator or a British general supervising a bridge construction in Colonial India in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, and I’m not having it.

. . . .

82. Joaquim de Almeida, O Xangô de Baker Street (2001)

Joaquim de Almeida plays a Holmes who suffers from lots of gastrointestinal distress while solving a string of gruesome murders in 1886 Rio de Janero in this bilingual film which is based on Jô Soares’ 1995 novel of the same name (published as A Samba for Sherlock in English). I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Holmes portrayal that is so focused on the body of the great detective, as opposed to the mind. He gets high, has sex, eats a lot, and frequently has to run to the bathroom. And he also can’t solve the current case well! He’s distracted by the weather, women, and his frequent, panicked trips to the restroom. I’m stressing the bathroom thing because it’s just so nutty. De Almeida offers an incongruously dignified detective at the start, who has to retrograde in many ways over the course of the film. The movie isn’t amazing, but I appreciate something about de Almeida’s whole deal.

. . . .

66. Alex Vanderpor/Fan Ai Li, Sherlock Holmes in China (1994)

Please allow me to present the most complicated Sherlock Holmes performance on this list! Alex Vanderpor, also known as “Fan Ai Li”, is a young, white, and very operatic (he sings a lot) Sherlock Holmes in this Chinese film directed by Wang Chi, Liu Yun-Zhou, and Ma Yi, also called Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Heroine. Holmes and Watson (the latter of whom is Chinese, unlike his partner) travel to Qing Dynasty China, and there is a mystery that eventually involves Holmes facing off in an epic Kung-Fu battle against a skilled martial artist, using his violin as a surprising but effective weapon. Although he speaks Chinese fluently (well, the actor is dubbed), Holmes is pretty out of his element in this new location, and there is a scene where he disguises himself as a Chinese man and this is kind of a disaster in many ways. There are so many things at work here that need to be teased out in a longer evaluation, especially Vanderpor’s playing a Sherlock Holmes who speaks Chinese but also literally doesn’t!

. . . .

61. David Mitchell, “Old Holmes,” That Mitchell and Webb Look (2010)

I’m only including one Sherlock performance per actor, even if that actor played Sherlock a few times in different productions, so, yes David Mitchell also played Holmes in the above sketch. But his Holmes performance that I’d rather spotlight in this ranking is a strange, heartbreaking representation of an elderly Holmes, with dementia and no longer in possession of his faculties. David Mitchell’s senile Holmes is kind of, maybe, possibly played for laughs, but this too is in service of the tragic thesis undergirding it: the sad irony of the deterioration of the greatest mind of the age. This isn’t the first “old Holmes” take I’ve seen, but it’s the one that kicks me in the tear ducts the hardest.

. . . .

47. John Barrymore, Sherlock Holmes (1922)

When we first see John Barrymore as Sherlock Holmes in this contemporary-set adaptation, he is sitting on the ground outdoors in a pastoral cobblestone alleyway, leaning up against a wall, smoking copiously and meditatively. From this vantage, he observes life around him and makes notes in his diary, writing down things such as “what is love?” Does all of this present a very surprising take on Sherlock Holmes? You bet. But it’s a fascinating concept… Sherlock Holmes’s positioned as a romantic Socrates of sorts, sitting on the ground, watching everybody, figuring them out. He’s also pretty awkward; he meets a beautiful woman and shyly follows her around until she hops in a cart and rides away. She is the sister of the woman due to marry Watson’s friend Prince Alexis (??), who has been framed for stealing money from the Athletic Club (??). And this tall, skinny, lovelorn Holmes is England’s (or some country’s, where is Prince Alexis from anyway) last hope.

. . . .

42. Valentīns Skulme, Šerloks Holms (1979-1982)

This Latvian Sherlock Holmes play (filmed, so it’s on this list) features a Sherlock performance that I can’t understand but also kind of enjoy. Valentīns Skulme’s Holmes has the affect of someone’s pissed-off but learned Eastern-European grandfather. I feel like if I saw him at a friend’s house for dinner, he’d tell me an anecdote from his career as a bookbinder or watchmaker and warn me about walking home alone at night and tell me it’s bad luck to whistle indoors.

. . . .

24. George C. Scott, They Might Be Giants (1971)

George C. Scott is powerful in this comedy? rom-com? about a psychiatrist, Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward), who becomes fascinated by a man who believes he is Sherlock Holmes (complicating this further is that he is very *good* at being Sherlock Holmes). A bit like Larry Hagman’s performance in The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, Scott’s version is something of a caricature, though in a movie in which someone thinks they are a famous fictional character, how can you really avoid this? Scott’s rendition owes much to the “harumph” conception of Britishness, but in such a way that we can tell that it is his real character, the non-actor Justin, who is interpreting Holmes in this manner.

. . . .

12. Ian Richardson, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1983) etc.

One of the shorter Holmeses on our list (at 5’9″), the great Shakespearean actor Ian Richardson is the only man to ever play Sherlock Holmes AS WELL AS Dr. Joseph Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical school professor who provided the inspiration for the great detective. He’s a first-class Holmes: gentle, analytical, and maybe the tiny bit self-satisfied, but only when he gets the better of Dr. Watson, with whom he has a very genial friendship. But I’m especially impressed with how totally relaxed he is… there’s nothing frenetic, or even too excitable there. He actually is so chill that he veritably has gags and inside jokes with Dr. Watson… such as the time when Watson pulls out his pistol to assure Holmes that he’ll be careful out in Dartmoor, and Holmes throws his hands up, and they burst out laughing. And then he dons a French accent to say goodbye to him, and they crack up again. So chummy! So cute!

. . . .

7. Yūko Takeuchi, Miss Sherlock (2018)

HBO Asia’s Miss Sherlock, which is one of the best Holmesian adaptations I’ve ever seen, is a modern, female, Japanese reboot of the famous detective partnership. But those more obvious reasons don’t solely account for why the show is so vanguard and engaging. It’s star, Yûko Takeuchi, is riveting as “Sherlock,” an elegant, if aloof and snide, young woman who uses her brilliant observational powers to solve crimes, mostly for her own amusement. She is bossy, self-directed, cranky, and whiny. But she is also glamorous! She loves designer clothes and always looks eminently cool hiking over to a crime scene in her long dusters and stilettos. It’s nice to see a Holmes who clearly loves being the center of attention, so much. Her relationship with Shihori Kanjiya’s Wato (the Watson character) is also compelling; Sherlock acts like the spoiled, rich-girl roommate archetype we’ve seen so often, a catty older sister-figure to the shy and sensitive Wato. Though a friendship does grow out of their incidental situationship, Sherlock still gives Wato an extremely hard time. The whole vibe just totally works, and you’ll be thinking about Yūko Takeuchi’s performance long after you’re done with the eight episodes.

Link to the rest at Crime Reads

The following is about a month old, but evidently PG was asleep at the wheel when it first appeared.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Amazon. com Inc. said it recently removed a three-year-old book about transgender issues from its platforms because it decided not to sell books that frame transgender and other sexual identities as mental illnesses.

The company explained its decision in a letter Thursday to Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah, Mike Braun of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The senators had written last month to Chief Executive Jeff Bezos requesting an explanation of why “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” was no longer available on Amazon nor on its Kindle and Audible platforms.

“As to your specific question about When Harry Became Sally, we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness,” Amazon said in the letter, which was signed by Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, referring to sexual identities that include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, among others.

“When Harry Became Sally,” written by the conservative scholar Ryan T. Anderson, was published in February 2018. The book focuses on a variety of issues including gender identity.

“Everyone agrees that gender dysphoria is a serious condition that causes great suffering,” said Mr. Anderson and Roger Kimball, the publisher of Encounter Books, the New York-based nonprofit that published the book, in a statement Thursday in response to Amazon’s letter.

“There is a debate, however, which Amazon is seeking to shut down, about how best to treat patients who experience gender dysphoria,” they added, calling their book “an important contribution” to that conversation. “Amazon is using its massive power to distort the marketplace of ideas and is deceiving its own customers in the process,” they said.

Amazon’s decision comes as the nation’s largest tech platforms are under increased scrutiny regarding the decisions they make over which content is acceptable. The senators, in their letter dated Feb. 24, characterized Amazon’s decision to remove the book as a signal “to conservative Americans that their views are not welcome on its platforms.”

. . . .

The senators in their letter had also asked Mr. Bezos whether Amazon had changed its content guidelines since 2018. In Thursday’s response, the company said it had indeed changed its guidelines since that year, without providing further details.

Amazon said it provides its customers “with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable.”

“That said, we reserve the right not to sell certain content,” Amazon’s Mr. Huseman wrote. “All retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer, as do we.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG doesn’t usually post items relating to current politics (Few other than historians and those who read history (like PG) cares much about past politics).

However, Amazon is such a dominant force in the book business that its decisions to remove a book or a class of books from the world’s largest bookstore due to what is, at least in the US, an author’s opinion concerning a political issue which is under continuing discussion and debate between reasonable people will certainly attract attention.

Again, for visitors from outside the US, the senators who sent Amazon the letter are Republicans, generally regarded as conservative. The state of Washington, where Amazon is headquartered, is presumably where those who made the decision concerning the book reside.

Washington is generally regarded as a relatively safe state for the Democratic party. The state has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1984. Both senators have been Democrats for the last twenty years.

Politically, the state is divided by what some call “The Cascade Curtain” referring to the Cascade Mountain range, located east of Seattle and the most populated portions of the state. The Cascades divides largely Democratic western Washington from largely Republican and rural eastern Washington.

Prevailing social attitudes tend to mirror political attitudes in Washington as well.

The technology boom in the Seattle area, lead by Microsoft and Amazon, has generated some very large fortunes while eastern Washington is a lot less prosperous. Average levels of education vary between the two regions as well. The Seattle tech boom also tends to attract a lot of employees who formerly lived much farther east in the US and, as would be expected, the newcomers brought their political opinions with them.

The thing that bothered PG the most about the reported action by Amazon is that it reminded PG of a very disturbing trend, at least in the United States, to “deplatform” those with different political beliefs than those who seek to apply this tactic. Basically, for a college professor, deplatforming may mean being fired. For an author, it may mean being deprived of any way to sell books and, in some cases, earn a living. Another term for the same thing is canceling an individual, essentially making them a societal non-person and the environment that makes this possible is cancel culture.

PG has discussed this phenomenon/strategy here and here.

For PG, deplatforming by those who hold some degree of political, societal or business power is disturbingly similar to the concept of making someone an unperson as first described in George Orwell’s 1984. In that book, an unperson is someone who has been expunged by the state, someone of whom all trace has been erased.

While Amazon is not the state, it is much richer and, some would argue, more powerful than more than a few nation-states.

For example, in 2019, government revenue in The Netherlands totaled 355.96 billion euros, equal to about 423.66 billion US dollars. In 2020, Amazon’s total revenue was 386 billion dollars.

And Amazon doesn’t have to pay for an army, navy or air force.

PG cautions visitors to TPV that this is not a political blog and PG appreciates it when those who disagree with others who have commented do so with courtesy and respect.