Mysteries with Mary: UA’s Mary Platt shares her Sherlock Holmes expertise
August 4, 2015
Sherlock Holmes panel on July 18 at the Discovery Cube with (from left) Holmes experts Jerry Kegley, Mary Platt, Bonnie MacBird and Les Klinger
Mary Platt, APR,
director of communications and media relations
, has an interesting hobby – she’s working on a book about Sherlock Holmes, the famed fictional detective created in 1887 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the reasons for his continued popularity in the 21
st
century. Last year she published a chapter in the Holmes essay book,
The One Fixed Point in a Changing Age
(Wessex Press, 2014), and found herself in sudden demand as a speaker and panelist. She has since been a featured speaker at a Sherlock Holmes conference at U.C. Berkeley and for the Sherlock Holmes Breakfast Club in Los Angeles, as well as for community groups such as the MG Club of Orange County, and various British and Scottish societies.
Mary currently co-administrates the
Sherlock Holmes Breakfast Club
(a nationally recognized “scion” organization of the Baker Street Irregulars, the U.S. Sherlock Holmes expert society) and the
“Sherlock Holmes in Brentwood”
live play series in L.A. In July she attended Comic Con in San Diego to network with a national gathering of Holmes fans. Most recently, on July 18 she was part of a panel that also included novelist and screenwriter Bonnie MacBird and Les Klinger, the man recognized as the world’s top expert on Holmes, at the Discovery Museum of Orange County (the “Cube”) as part of the museum’s current
International Exhibition of Sherlock Holmes
.
So why Sherlock Holmes? From Mary:
Mary chats with actor Robert Downey Jr. about Sherlock Holmes.
“I’ve always loved the character, since I first read the Conan Doyle stories and novels in junior high. He’s an intelligent character who celebrates his intelligence, and to me, brains are always more appealing than brawn. And it’s an intriguing question to me why some fictional characters are very much ‘of their time’ and then interest dies away, while others – like Holmes, or the characters in Jane Austen’s books – live on and on, and are repeatedly reborn in new movies, T.V. series, and stories and novels based on the originals. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is the most-adapted fictional character in history. Part of the answer is that when you read Conan Doyle’s original Holmes stories today, they still seem ‘modern’ to us – because they set the tone for almost all of our detective adventures and ‘buddy-cop’ movies. They’re full of action, adventure, and of course, in Holmes and Dr. Watson, one of the great friendships in all of literature. And Holmes himself keeps popping up in new guises: as an action hero in the Robert Downey Jr.
Sherlock Holmes
movies (my favorite current adaptation because they are done with so much love for the original material), as a modern detective in the BBC
Sherlock
series and CBS’s
Elementary,
and as an aged man losing his memory in the beautifully done new movie
Mr. Holmes
, starring Ian McKellen.”
Want to know more about Sherlock Holmes? Join the Sherlock Holmes Breakfast Club, or just
ask Mary
!