Howard Ostrom: However the period 1940-1959 covered by this second volume of the series Sherlock Holmes on Screens begins in that momentous year when the world held its breath as the fate of nations lay in the balance. In noting the handful of minor entries between 1939’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the first of the Universal series in 1942, that greater context surely takes precedence. Had history taken a different turn…
In 1940, Vasily Livanov was a five-year-old evacuee from Moscow, a month younger than Robert Downey Snr. Jeremy Brett was seven and Benedict Cumberbatch’s father had just been born. Two older, future Sherlocks had still to make their cinematic mark: Ronald Howard and Peter Cushing. Their future – all our futures – depended on the outcome of the war. 
Happily, the storm cleared and a cleaner, better, stronger land lay in the sunshine. This and future volumes celebrate all the future Sherlockian flowers then given freedom to grow.

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Thierry Saint-Joanis: For thirty years I gathered data for a project to create an encyclopædia addressing all adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in all forms, from the entire world, as well as an encyclopædia on the life and work of Conan Doyle. For a similar period of time my friend Howard Ostrom too was gathering information on Holmes in the media, but from the other side of the Atlantic. Fate and our love of the subject brought us together to create our cyclopædia by grouping our finds.

Cyclopædia, not encyclopædia 

In 1728, the Cyclopædia was one of the first general encyclopædias to be produced in English. It was the inspiration for the landmark Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Cyclopædia is a reference work (often in several volumes) containing articles on various topics (often arranged in alphabetical order) dealing with the entire range of human knowledge, or with some particular specialty. For our purpose, the speciality is Sherlock Holmes. Of course there are many reference books about Sherlock Holmes on paper, or articles online, but this will be the first cyclopædia because its something different. It is more complete than the previous ones, due to the methods of research, the manners for the exposition of the facts, and the criteria of selection. The first volumes are dedicated to adaptations for screens.

Screens, plural. All forms of visual media as viewed on cinema, television, and even internet. If there is something Sherlockian on a screen, it deserves an entry in our cyclopædia. Even if the link with Conan Doyle stories is tiny or none. A quote, a deerstalker or a pipe which raises any Sherlockian allusion to the spectator, and the game’s afoot! Howard and I, are on the trail of who, what, when, where and why. It is always good to know and it helps to understand the influence of the detective of Baker Street in our daily lives, our parents, and our children.

For each volume, we search, we find and we visualize. For that, we use two kinds of documents: pictures and clippings. For press clippings, they are almost all unpublished in this genre of work on cinema and Sherlock Holmes. It is rare to reproduce identically this type of document in a book. We feel it is more useful to provide the source of information for use by those who will need it for future studies. We took the time and money to find them in the press archives around the world. By bringing them together in a single publication, we want to facilitate the work of future researchers.

There are many lessons to be learned from a contemporary article about a film, about the film itself, but also the view of the audience, and most importantly, the level of Holmesian knowledge of the audience of the time. Today, quotes like “Elementary, my dear Watson” are universal. But, one discovers that in the thirties, the press used rather formulas like “Quick, Watson, the needle”, which is today totally forgotten, even prohibited by what one designates as politically correct. For the photos, we have made the choice to provide unpublished or rarely used images in the books already published on the subject and that many of our readers may already have in their library. Of course, this only concerns the few films already known. A great many of those presented in our books have never been cited in any Holmesian book. Here, everything is new. We unfortunately could not reproduce all that we found for lack of space. We then selected the images providing information on one of the specificities of the film, an artistic choice, an interpretation, an anomaly or an error. Here too, the sources are multiple. Some images were miraculously found in unexpected documents and places. From now on, Sherlockians or Scholars will only have to look at them, without wasting time looking for them. They are all in one publication, the Sherlock Holmes Cyclopædia.