The Sherlock Holmes Review

Duration: 1986 to 1996, sixteen issues, ten years
Frequency: Well, the average works out to about twice a year. About.
Editor: Steven T. Doyle
Club Affiliation: None

The Sherlock Holmes Review started out like many a Sherlockian journal, eight and a half by eleven inches, folded in half, twenty-eight pages, with the type maybe a bit too small and the reproduction maybe a bit too fuzzy in a copy or two. But even in the first issue, you could see that Steve and his crew were attempting to take this journal in a visual direction that most Sherlockian publications ignore -- it even had an art director. By the third issue, this trend had grown, as had the actual top-to-bottom size of the journal. That issue also featured interviews with both Jeremy Brett and Peter Cushing, setting a precedent that would give the Review perhaps its most memorable aspect -- the ability to talk to the folks Sherlockians wanted to talk to. It covered all aspects of the Holmes entertainment world, without neglecting Conan Doyle himself. While its publication schedule may have occasionally frustrated readers, its content never did.

As The Sherlock Holmes Review went on, it got better and more beautiful with each issue. When the last issue came out in 1996, reporting the death and memorial services for Jeremy Brett, it marked the end of an era in more ways than one. Steve Doyle and Mark Gagen went on to concentrate on book publishing, which makes a lot of sense. At the last, The Sherlock Holmes Review seemed to be verging on making the leap to going pro itself. As it came to an end, David Stuart Davies was about to turn The Sherlock Holmes Gazette into Sherlock Holmes: The Detective Magazine, and continue that magazine's climb into just that same profesional arena. Given the British slant of Sherlock Holmes: The Detective Magazine, one has to wonder what the very American Sherlock Holmes Review might have been like, sitting on a rack at Barnes and Noble. It was just that good.

There's a continuing rumor that there might be one issue left to appear of The Sherlock Holmes Review. We can but hope.

-- BAK